Mailvox: The Origins of the Alt-Retard

A Generation X reader sent me this analysis of the Fake Right Clown Posse, which somehow manages to be both sympathetic of the plight being faced by the young men of today and contemptuous of what some of them have become in response. I think he is largely correct, and explains why their attempts to defend their race and their nations so often go awry.

We have no choice but to help them. The challenge is that the only answer to ignorance is information, and as we know, as we have witnessed, there are some who cannot be instructed by information.

The Origins of the AltRetard

I’ve been pondering the origins of the AltRetard. Who are they, and why are they? They are, by and large, young white men, probably middle to lower class, who are the products of the environment and culture that they have been raised in. They know that this environment and culture is broken, is pozzed, and they are seeking an alternative. They are seeking health and well-being in a sick world, and this is good. But they haven’t found it yet.

I have some sympathy for these young men. Their condition is largely not their fault. As a GenXer, my own working class childhood situation was far from ideal, and things have only gotten worse for this demographic since then. We all stumble around in search of knowledge and wisdom that we don’t have, because they have not been passed down to us as they should have been.

“Tradition” means “that which is passed down.” The Western tradition – Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy – teaches us how to be in the world, teaches us what we are and what to do with what we are. But this tradition has been systematically removed from the education system for the vast majority of Americans and Europeans. Only those whose parents have the foresight and the money to send their children to private schools that still teach the Classics and the Bible have learned much about it. And those men, because they have financial privilege, have mostly sold out for the sake of their own comfort. They have not handed down the tradition.

When my boomer parents and GI grandparents were young, they had to take Latin in high school. They had prayer in school. They learned about the history of Western civilization, its principles, its heroes, its triumphs and tragedies. The average public high school graduate from 1960 knew more about Western civilization than most graduate students today.

As for me and my GenX classmates, not so much. We had the beginning of today’s anti-Western education, not quite as bad as now, but bad enough. As for Millennials and Gen Z (or whatever they’re called), what have they got? Those that are “woke” are only awakened to just how bad things have gotten. But because they have been cut off from their native tradition, they do not have the intellectual tools with which to think things through and find solutions. They are not grounded in anything real.

So they become extremists. Partly because the problems are extreme, and the times themselves are extreme, but also because they lack the wisdom, gleaned from a knowledge of history, that extremes seldom produce good results. Extreme reactions to extreme problems often just become a new problem.

The German National Socialists of the 1930s could only have emerged from the Weimar era – in other words, from a thoroughly pozzed and degenerate environment. That’s why they had so much degeneracy within their ranks, in spite of their public opposition to much of it. The Nazis were not a traditionalist movement, and they were not a Western movement. They were not pro-European, but were German chauvinists, at the expense of many other European ethnic groups. They were not pro-Christian, but were either outright pagans or embraced heretical versions of Christianity such as Alfred Rosenberg’s gnostic-Catharist ideas. Lastly, they were not truly based upon the Greco-Roman tradition and Western history, but upon a dubious, revisionist version of European history that was cooked up by the Ahnenerbe in order to be used as propaganda, a kind of Tacitus-inspired We Wuz Kangz pseudohistory which even Hitler found embarrassing, and wished that Himmler would knock it off already.

You can see the continuation of this sort of non-thinking in much of today’s Alt-Reich, which embraces all kinds of strange conspiracy theories, up to and including the Flat Earth theory of Eric Dubay.

Similarly, the extreme elements within the Alt Right, who openly espouse Nazism and Fascism and any other extremism that they think will get a rise out of people, are the result of a thoroughly pozzed and decadent society not unlike Weimar (hence the oft-used Weimerica theme). They are a reaction to it – an understandable reaction, but not a healthy one. Since they have no moral or philosophical grounding (which, again, is not their fault) the only thing they can think to do is the opposite of whatever the culture is doing. So the solution to anti-fascism is necessarily Fascism. The solution to Jewish influence and power is blanket anti-Semitism. The solution to anti-white racism is white chauvinism. The solution to feminism is “white sharia” misogyny. And since Nazism is held by the dominant culture to be the supreme evil, it must, ipso facto, be the supreme good.

But it isn’t. It wasn’t the supreme evil either, and to that extent it’s the (((media’s))) fault for creating such a powerful taboo in the first place. But while it may feel good for hopeless young men to meme out images of Schutzstaffel Pepes gassing hooknose rabbis, at the end of the day it’s just reactionary child’s play that produces nothing and leads to nothing – nothing for the young men themselves, and nothing for the Western civilization which needs to be not only defended, but first rediscovered by generations of miseducated young men that have been denied their birthright and their spiritual home.