Tag: #AltWest

False fears, fake refugees

It is increasingly clear that the sob stories about the desperate refugees fleeing war have been nothing but pro-migrant propaganda from the start:

Migrants with recognised refugee status are holidaying in the countries they supposedly “fled”, with their vacations funded by German taxpayers, a newspaper has found. Newspaper Welt am Sonntag learnt that migrants are returning to countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Lebanon for holiday purposes, then travelling back to Germany where they continue to receive comfortable welfare payments.

The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) has been aware for some time that some recognised refugees are taking leisure trips to the very spots they claim their lives are in danger.

The government body sent a written request to Berlin’s employment agencies in June, asking that they report the travel arrangements of migrants granted asylum holidaying in their countries of origin.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Employment Agency confirmed that “there are such cases” but reports that there is “no analysis or statistics on this subject and therefore we do not have information”.

It’s time to repatriate every single “refugee” and migrant that has claimed asylum in Europe or the United States. They are invaders and economic parasites, they are not “new Americans” or “new Germans” and they will never be.

And the churches and charity organizations who aided and abetted this treasonous, criminal activity should be investigated, fined, and if they knowingly helped the migrants defraud the public, have their licenses to operate removed.

As for those foolish enough to claim that the West has to help them, keep in mind that Nigeria is on track to have a population of 509 million by 2050 thanks to Western assistance. The West needs to stop helping the global South now or it is going to have to choose between a) mass slaughter and b) being completely overrun.

It will choose (a) of course. And all the blame for the bloodshed should be placed directly on the heads and hands of the Churchians and do-gooders and aid workers who made it possible. They fed the world. They let them know it was Christmastime. And they guaranteed that considerably more people will eventually starve or be slaughtered than would have died in the first place.

How on Earth do you think a bankrupt, invaded, infuriated West is going to be in any position to help a global South that is more than 10 times worse off than before anyway? Do any of you idiot do-gooders even think beyond later this afternoon?

I’m not talking about being cruel to be kind. I’m talking about letting events take their course in order to avoid our children and grandchildren wading knee-deep in blood in the future. And that’s the rosy scenario.

Curiosity and cognitive paradigms

As time has passed, I have realized that my ability to easily defeat other intelligent, educated people in debate has considerably less to do with my intelligence and more to do with what appears to be a higher degree of curiosity, which doesn’t actually have much, if anything, to do with intelligence or formal education.

As has often been noted here, Man is a rationalizing animal. And what I have increasingly noted of late is that most people devote most of their intelligence to rationalizing what they already think to be true than they do to figuring out what they think is not true. This desire to rationalize rather than learn is, quite possibly, the intelligent individual’s biggest intellectual weakness.

Now, we all do it to varying degrees. But the more we do it, the more absurd and indefensible and self-contradictory positions we will take. Thus we see the monetarists seriously discussing the outlawing of paper money, evolutionists denying the existence of species, anthropologists presenting literal fiction in the place of history or archeological science, and Christians arguing the virgin birth of a non-divine individual.

But this is only one form of the rationalization process. The other one is to base one’s opinion on conclusions drawn from incomplete information, to argue on the basis of knowing about something rather than genuinely knowing it. Those of us who have graduated from good colleges are particularly susceptible to this, as we have been introduced to a broad range of classics, we have listened to lectures from professors deeply steeped in them so that we recognize them and know a little bit about them, but the truth is that we don’t really know much of anything concerning their details.

Which is why we will so often see someone saying that Marx is wrong without have the least conception of what he might be wrong about, declaring that Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history is stupid on its face without understanding what Fukuyama meant by “history” – and any would-be intellectual should be humiliated upon the realization that his level of knowledge doesn’t rise to the level of a pop song by Jesus Jones from 26 years ago – and appealing to all things “quantum” without even being able to define “quantum mechanics”.

Complicating this is the common preference for binary thinking, or if you want to sound more philosophical, Abelardian philosophy. “It is so or it is not so” is the binary thinker’s mantra; the concept of necessary, but not sufficient eludes him. Consider two contrary examples from the comments on Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations, yesterday.

“I suspect that it might be easier to start with worship of blood, soil and nature and work up from there.  The popularity of paganism should be no mystery.”

“I would go further, and say not only that Christianity is needed for Western Civilization, I say Christianity IS Western Civilization. You can see from that why the appeal of the Alt-Right, claiming that my racial identity trumps my Church, is an idea not even worth discussing.”

Despite being directly opposed, both statements are equally silly, and both are similarly ignorant. Anyone who has read even part of Huntington’s book will instantly recognize that neither commenter has read it. The first comment violates the recounting of the history of the various civilizations in general and Western civilization in particular. Given that even a sophisticated religion such as Buddhism has proven insufficient to support the development of a major civilization, and even the highest, most noble forms of virtuous Roman paganism failed to compete successfully with Christianity, it is obvious that working up from the sort of pre-civilized animism that the commenter recommends would not be easier than metaphorically taking whips to the temple and reforming the Christian churches. In fact, it is improbable to the point of being a virtual impossibility.

As for the idea that Christianity IS Western Civilization, this is a historical and definitional absurdity. While religion is much more important in defining civilizations than the secular students of liberal democracy would like to admit, a civilization is considerably more than its definitive religion. Thus, both the following statements by Huntington are both true:

  1. People of the same race can be deeply divided by civilization; people of different races may be united by civilization….The crucial distinctions among human groups concern their values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures, not their physical size, head shapes, and skin colors.
  2. A civilization is the broadest cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he strongly identifies.

First, an individual’s values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures are heavily influenced by his race; race and culture are deeply intertwined. Second, Christianity is not Western civilization, it is merely one of the most important aspects of Western civilization; as the Alt-Right sees it, Christianity is one of the three necessary components. The idea that one’s racial identity trumps one’s religion is not worth discussing because it is irrelevant, both to the Alt-Right and to the civilizational paradigm. Both religion and race are necessary components of a civilization, but are insufficient in themselves. This should be entirely obvious from the start, given that neither religion nor race are recognized synonyms for civilization.

Third, the fact that there are three other major Christian civilizations besides Western civilization, Byzantine, Orthodox, and Latin American, (to say nothing of minor Christian civilizations such as Ethiopean) means that Western civilization cannot be Christianity and Christianity cannot be Western civilization. That is an idea that is not worth discussing, because it is as obviously and mathematically untrue as the statement that 1+3.5=1.

Now, we can argue whether a society of Chinese Christians will be more Sinic than Western or more Western than Sinic. I strongly incline towards the former view myself, though I would not view the matter as completely unworthy of discussion. But regardless, we should all be able to concur that it will not be Japanese or Muslim, or, for that matter, neoliberal.

And furthermore, the civilizational paradigm tends to highlight why Alt-West and Alt-White are not necessarily in competition with each other. Alt-White is less an alternative to Alt-West than a subset of it, as Alt-West is focused on the civilizational level, while Alt-White is focused on the national level. However, it also indicates that the Alt-White is going to have to come to terms with the necessity of Christianity to its own objectives if it is going to find any success going forward.

It can, of course, reject the civilizational paradigm, but that is a suboptimal response given the way it is increasingly clear that the civilizational paradigm is vastly superior in explanatory and predictive terms to either the bipolar superpower paradigm that preceded it or the universalist neoliberal paradigm that was supposed to succeed the superpower model.

Why he was wrong about Christianity

Although I am familiar with the concept expressed by Sam Huntington’s civilizational paradigm and have actually read the famous essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations”, I am a little embarrassed to say that I made the typical college mistake of assuming that knowledge about the concept was an adequate substitute for detailed knowledge of the concept. Which is to say that I’d never read the book that is the expansion of the esssay, which mistake I am presently correcting now.

It’s a brilliant, brilliant book that goes well beyond the refutation of Fukuyama’s silly “History is Over and We’re All Liberal Democrats Now” paradigm and already it has me thinking about how the civilizational paradigm affects the reality of the Alt-Right. And it occurs to me that one of the keys to the success of the Alt-West is going to be a) Christians realizing that Churchianity is not Christianity and driving it out of their institutions and places of worship combined with b) non-Christians realizing that Christianity is, far from being a societal negative, a societal necessity for any Western civilization.

Tom Howard’s journey away from Christianity into antiquity, then back again, is one that I expect will be repeated by many an apostate, agnostic, and even atheist.

When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being weathered by the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were dinosaurs. I vividly remember my shock when, at Sunday school one day, I opened a children’s Bible and found an illustration on its first page of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. Six years old I may have been, but of one thing – to my regret – I was rock-solid certain: no human being had ever seen a sauropod. That the teacher seemed not to care about this error only compounded my sense of outrage and bewilderment. A faint shadow of doubt, for the first time, had been brought to darken my Christian faith.

With time, it darkened further still. My obsession with dinosaurs – glamorous, ­ferocious, extinct – evolved seamlessly into an obsession with ancient empires. When I read the Bible, the focus of my fascination was less the children of Israel or Jesus and his disciples than their adversaries: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Romans. In a similar manner, although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I found Him infinitely less charismatic than my favourite Olympians: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. Rather than lay down laws and condemn other deities as demons, they preferred to enjoy themselves. And if they were vain, selfish and cruel, that only served to endow them with the allure of rock stars.

By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers of the Enlightenment, I was more than ready to accept their interpretation of history: that the triumph of Christianity had ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”, and that modernity was founded on the dusting down of long-forgotten classical values. My childhood instinct to think of the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the crusaders, inquisitors and black-hatted puritans who had served as his acolytes. Colour and excitement had been drained from the world. “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,” Swinburne wrote, echoing the apocryphal lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. “The world has grown grey from thy breath.” Instinctively, I agreed.

So, perhaps it was no surprise that I should have continued to cherish classical antiquity as the period that most stirred and inspired me. When I came to write my first work of history, Rubicon, I chose a subject that had been particularly close to the hearts of the philosophes: the age of Cicero. The theme of my second, Persian Fire, was one that even in the 21st century was serving Hollywood, as it had served Montaigne and Byron, as an archetype of the triumph of liberty over despotism: the Persian invasions of Greece.

The years I spent writing these studies of the classical world – living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who had triumphed at Alesia – only confirmed me in my fascination: for Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical inquiry, did not cease to seem possessed of the qualities of an apex predator. They continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always done – like a tyrannosaur.

Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature terrifying. The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.

What Howard learned is something I pointed out in a controverial WND column called “The Morality of Rape“, in which I noted that the very idea that rape is wrong, let alone a crime against the state, is an intrinsically Christian concept. The inescapable conclusion is that one simply cannot separate religion from culture, much less from civilization; indeed, Huntington observes that the strongest identifying element of the eight competing major civilizations is, in fact, religion.

Blood, language, religion, way of life, were what the Greeks had in common and what distinguished them from the Persians and other non-Greeks. Of all the objective elements which define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion, as the Athenians emphasized. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions; and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter each other, as happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the Subcontinent.

Brainstorm: Alt-Right or Alt-White?

I’m pleased to announce that tomorrow night, Greg Johnson, the Alt-Right editor of Counter-Currents, will be joining me to engage in a battle to the death for the exclusive ownership of the soul of the Alt-Right discuss the current state of the Alt-Right, whether there is a meaningful distinction to be made between Alt-White and Alt-West, and if there is any meaning to the term Alt-Right beyond that of white nationalism.

It promises to be an interesting discussion. This Brainstorm session will be held at 7 PM Eastern tomorrow night, September 28th, and it is open, so anyone is welcome to attend although there is only room for 1,000 participants.

You can sign up for it here.

Setting the record straight

Michael Knowles writes an unfortunately inaccurate and misleading Actual Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right:

The white nationalist blogger better known by his pen name Vox Day, who counts as a central tenet of the Alt-Right that “we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children,” which represents one half of the white nationalist, neo-Nazi numerical symbol 1488. (That phrase contains 14 words, while 8 refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which doubled represents “Heil Hitler.”)

First, while I support white nationalism and see it as a necessary aspect of preserving Western Civilization, I am neither a white nationalist nor am I entirely white. I am an American Indian and I am a red reservationist who sees no reason to believe that whites deserve sovereign nations any less than we Indians do.

Second, why would Mr. Knowles, or anyone else of any race who is not a monster, oppose securing a future for white children? There is a massive difference between the 14 words, which I fully support, and the 88 precepts, most of which I do not.

As for Hitler, he was a cretin, a lunatic, a fool, and almost certainly the worst German leader in history, with the possible exception of Angela Merkel. I am not a 1488er in any sense of the word.

The Alt-Right loves Christendom but rejects Christianity. The Alt-Right admires Christendom primarily for uniting the continent and forging white European identity. As such it also reveres European paganism, much like the Nazis did, and its synthesis within certain aspects of Christianity. But when it comes to faith, many Alt-Right thinkers describe themselves as atheists, agnostics, and lapsed Christians. AlternativeRight.com published a feature on the movement and paganism in which Alt-Right writer Stephen McNallen explains, “I am a pagan because it is the only way I can be true to who, and what, I am. I am a pagan because the best things in our civilization come from pre-Christian Europe.” He goes on to describe his aversion to Christianity because it “lacks any roots in blood or soil” and consequently can “claim the allegiance of all the human race.”

Dark imagery runs rampant, from Yarvin’s philosophy to Vox Day’s preferred title “supreme dark lord.” All reject Christian egalitarianism and universalism. Ironically one of the few Alt-Right thinkers to proclaim his Christian faith, Vox Day, explicitly rejects spiritual equality among the races as a central tenet of Alt-Right philosophy, explaining, “Human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.” [Italics added] But despite rejecting the substance of Christianity, the movement has spawned its own satirical religion around the meme culture that has come to typify the Alt-Right online.

This is simply an exaggeration, presumably meant to appeal to Churchians. While there is a strong pagan strain to the white nationalist elements of the Alt-Right, most of the Alt-Right, even within the Alt-White strain, respect Christianity and cherish Christendom. What the writer fails to grasp is that Christian doctrine rejects egalitarianism and universalism outside of the Church, and rejects egalitarianism even within the Church. Remember, no one ever cites the “all are equal in Christ Jesus verse to claim that there are no differences between men and women or support same-sex parody-marriage.

The Alt-Right wants to burn American politics to the ground. The Alt-Right most immediately opposes conservatism, as Youth for Western Civilization founder Kevin Deanna explained in his Taki’s Magazine and AlternativeRight.com piece titled “The Impossibility of Conservatism.” The Alt-Right contains a who’s-who of right-wing voices that have been “purged” from the conservative movement by William F. Buckley and National Review, like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire, and Alt-Right leaders like Vox Day described the movement in an interview as “the heirs to those like the John Birch Society who were read out of the conservative movement.” Steve Bannon, who refashioned the website of conservative icon Andrew Breitbart into “the platform for the Alt-Right,” has encouraged activists to “turn on the hate” and “burn this bitch down.” But while conservatism is its most immediate target, the Alt-Right seeks to destroy a far older, more central American idea referenced frequently by Ronald Reagan and dating back beyond Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America to John Winthrop’s “City On A Hill” sermon: America as a proposition nation.

Well, that’s pretty much correct. American politics merit being burned to the ground, and in fact, are in the process of being radically transformed by the changing societal demographics. However, we are reliably informed by Ben Sanderson that I am “not a thought leader in the alt right”, and I’m sure we all recognize that Ben Sanderson is the definitive voice with regards to this matter. I mean, we’re talking about BEN SANDERSON!

But regardless of who is, or is not, a leader, the relevant point is that we are all very well aware that “America as a proposition nation”, a “melting pot”, and “a nation of immigrants” are 19th century myths pushed  on the public by 20th century immigrants.

And it has to be said that the Knowles article is considerably better than the attempted rebuttal of Jared Taylor by (((Ben Cohen))) in American Thinker, entitled “Mainstream Conservatives and the Alt-Right”, which declares that because Hawaii hasn’t devolved into Haiti yet, whites are unnecessary to American civilization:

Where Taylor goes wrong – very wrong, in fact – is in his unhealthy fixation on race. Taylor is correct that most of what we love about America was created by white people; he is wrong to believe that only white people can sustain American civilization.

Interestingly, Taylor’s hypothesis has already been tested. In 1959, Congress admitted to the union a state that was overwhelmingly non-white. Has that state transformed into a third-world hell hole? A dictatorship? No.

By all measures Hawaii is doing pretty well. Hawaii’s residents enjoy the eighth-highest median income of any state in the Union, according to 2014 figures. Meanwhile, West Virginia which is almost exclusively white has the second lowest median house hold income in the United States. If you believe the key to keeping America great is keeping America white, it’s hard to explain why Hawaii is thriving and West Virginia is not.

Non-Hispanic whites compose roughly 40% of New Mexico’s population, with the rest being a mixture of Hispanics and American Indians. New Mexico isn’t rich, (43rd in median income), but it isn’t a “third-world hell hole.”

A similar argument could be made for California, which has the third-highest median income.

How very conservative. Notice that mainstream conservatism now not only denies America is a specific historical nation, but denies that the very nation who created a state for themselves are necessary for the state or their posterity! Because the “nation” is not a nation, but an idea and only an idea.

If these literally anti-American, anti-Constitution, and anti-white arguments are the best ones that mainstream conservatism can muster against the Alt-Right, conservatism is going to die out faster than I’d ever imagined.

Taxonomy vs marketing

I’m not sure that many in the Alt-White understand the concept of branding very well despite their concerns on that score. More importantly, they’re either projecting or confusing me with others when they express concerns about my interest in subverting anything, let alone their activities. There is a division of opinion in the Alt-White over everything that is not Alt-White but could, reasonably, be described as Alt-Right. I tend to agree with Michael Bell’s opinion, as he wrote:

While we pursue our goal of fully occupying the helm of the Alt Right, we must recognize that those who are not fully on board with all of our principles can nonetheless be considered a part of the Alt Right provided they aid us in our efforts and do not work to contradict us. Many of these types can eventually be turned into full White Nationalists anyway, as their views are only a few inches away from ours. To quote Lawrence Murray, “The big tent is worth preserving to persevere against our common enemies, for our struggle is revolutionary.”

Notice that key phrase: “our goal of fully occupying the helm of the Alt Right”. It’s just a goal. It’s not a reality, an identity, or anything material, it’s an objective. It’s not an unreasonable objective, especially since their efforts are necessary, though not sufficient, to preserve Western civilization. Greg Johnson himself has freely admitted that most of what the Alt Right actually means predates the NPI sense, he is merely attempting to fill what he calls “a vacuum”, but it cannot be a vacuum because there is a long history of the Alternative Right that has been read out of the conservative movement for generations.

Fashy McQueen represents the view opposed to Michael Bell, and the weakness of his position can be readily seen in the way he presents his case:

“Alt-Right” has become an internationally-recognized brand that only fools would carelessly dilute or abandon. Nazi Shitlords™ know the importance of branding, terminology, and propaganda. They use these weapons every day. And the term “Alt-Right” has become their most powerful weapon in attacking the enemy, and recruiting the masses into White Nationalism at an exponential rate….  The name “Alt-Right” has become the most powerful brand of White Nationalism in over 70 years. And it happened almost by accident. The stars aligned. It may never happen again.

This is the same magical thinking that is used to justify calling crippled people “handicapable” and negroes “blacks”, then “Afro-Americans”, then “African-Americans”.  It is the belief that an object or a concept is intrinsically altered by the label. But if Greg Johnson is correct and Alt Right means literally nothing more than “White Nationalist”, then it will soon be as effective and appealing a brand as “White Nationalist” presently is. The underlying essence is not changed one iota by calling X something else, such as Y, so long as it remains fundamentally X.

This small-tent Alt-White is not only caught in the trap of magical thinking, it genuinely can’t distinguish between friend, ally, and enemy. Also from Fashy’s extended comment:

Vox Day is currently attempting his own subversive version of redefining the Alt-Right to include himself, and to purge the Alt-Right’s staunchly White Nationalist core. These hostile attempts to redefine the term “Alt-Right” must be fought mercilessly — not invited.

First, I will again point out that I am not redefining anything. The Alt-White is, by their own admission, attempting to redefine Alt-Right in order to claim it for themselves and themselves alone. Are they really the only Alternative Right? Are they the only genuine alternative to mainstream conservatism? No, obviously not.

So, how are all those alternative right people, who subscribe many or even most of the 16 Points I have laid out, but are not a full-blown “White Nationalist”, or as I would put it, Alt-White, to be described? What do they call themselves? Even Fashy admits they considerably outnumber his “Alt-Right”, after all. It accomplishes nothing to simply pretend that they don’t exist, as much as the Left would like to do so.

Second, the reality is that whatever those people call themselves WILL become the dominant alternative to the mainstream right, because they ARE the strongest alternative to it. The Alt-White is only a subset of that, a vital subset, to be sure, but a subset nonetheless. Is it better for the Alt-White to be part of the Alt-Right, or is it better for the Alt-Right to be part of this nameless alternative to the mainstream Right? But whether we call it the Alt-Right or the Nameless Broad-Spectrum Alternative, that is the primary alternative.

I suspect the Alt-White has a hard time accepting the observable limits to their subset because they are mostly Americans, and are therefore blind to the fact that the vast majority of white European nationalists are not, and will never be, generic white nationalists. I have repeatedly tried to explain this, on both TRS and the Counter-Currents podcast as well as here on VP, and their only response to date has been that they think they can sense a generic white consciousness beginning to come into being.

And it’s true, they surely can… in the USA where generic whites are under attack for being white and where the Republican Party is in the process of being transformed into the White American Party. That is not the case in Europe, and it will not be the case, because the generic aspect is working in precisely the opposite direction here, as Muslims of many diverse nations are lumped together as generic Muslims and are thereby beginning to form a generic “Euro-Muslim” identity. Moreover, Europeans are hostile to pan-Europeanism in a way that most Americans don’t understand due to the egregious, anti-democratic excesses of the European Union. The British people just voted to get out of the European Union, so it should be readily apparent that they’re not even remotely inclined to sign up for generic white pan-nationalism.

In any event, it should be obvious that I am not even remotely hostile to white nationalism nor do I have any intention of subverting it for any purpose, let alone a nefarious one. I am not at all concerned about being excluded from anything; as longtime readers here know, I really don’t go in for joining things as a general rule but prefer to do my own thing. Fortunately, the big-tent branch seems to more or less grasp this, as Bell writes of his Fourth Tier of the Alt-Right

Beneath this caste I would place the people who work to combat the professional and intellectual thuggery of the Social Justice Warriors and very particular Leftist narratives, but who don’t have any kind of overarching pro-White, pro-Western, or anti-Semitic ideology driving it. Author and video-game designer Vox Day goes here. In fact, I would elect him the leader of this caste if such a thing existed. He was an outspoken supporter of Gamergate and organized the Rabid Puppies movement, which at its core sought to diminish the influence of Left-minded authors like George R. R. Martin over the science-fiction Hugo Awards. Rather than giving awards to books about transexual vampires fighting against homophobic dragons, Day and his followers felt that the science fiction community should once again seek to emulate luminaries like J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert, who were essentially pro-Western and Right-wing in their thought. His book SJWs Always Lie is a must read for every member of the Alt Right. Of course, he is only part-white and does not explicitly push a pro-white or pro-Western agenda (though he comes close.)

Regardless of whether one’s interest is taxonomic or marketing, it is worthwhile to discuss these matters with those who don’t share one’s opinion, which is why I have invited Greg Johnson to appear on a public Brainstorm to discuss Alt-Right, Alt-White, and Alt-Lite, and to present his own perspective on the subject.

Of Alt-West and Alt-White

The question is not whether there are at least two distinct branches of the Alt-Right already or not, but whether the Alt-White branch can get its swastika panties sufficiently unbunched to cooperate with the Alt-West and the Alt-Lite in the pursuit of its stated objectives, or if it is more interested in competitive navel-gazing and purity-spiraling.

After a few run-ins with true-believing Stormfronters who have been Alt-Right since the distant dawn of primordial identity politics in 2010, both here and on Twitter, it has become abundantly clear that the combination of a legitimate fear of entryism and an understandable case of spotlight envy, the Alt-White is having some serious trouble dealing with the inevitable problems of success and popularity.

It’s rather like a company that has sales that are rapidly growing. The increase in demand for your products is great, but it is still a real problem. How are you going to get the additional products made? How are you going to pay for them? Are these new customers going to stick around or will they disappear before you can even expand your manufacturing capacity? These are good problems to have, but they are definitely problems that will need to be addressed.

First, is a distinction really necessary? Yes, without question. This should be obvious, since Alt-White, Alt-West, and Alt-Light are all different strains of identity-based thought that are all also observably distinct from mainstream conservatism or libertarianism. In this sense, all three are ALTernatives to the traditional RIGHT. Hence the Spencer-coined term.

Second, should all three be considered Alt-Right? Here I would argue no, that while it is reasonable to describe both Alt-White and Alt-West as Alt-Right, the Alt-Lite should not be. The reason is that while both Alt-White and Alt-West sign on to the greater part of the 16 Points of the Alt-Right I’ve laid out, and which most Alt-Rightists have generally endorsed, the various people who make up the Alt-Lite are all over the place with regards to most of them.

The Alt-Lite, in other words, is the larval form of the Alt-Right, which means that they are not, practically speaking, Alt-Right in any meaningful or functional sense. They are merely those still undergoing the intellectual transition that most Alt-Rightists have made, at one point or another. Alt-Lite is a transitional stage, not an end point.

By contrast, the Alt-White and Alt-West are both destinations. Once one gravitates towards one branch or the other, or as may be the case, is directed there by virtue of one’s identity, one is simply not going to eventually move towards the other one. This leads us to the third question, what are the key differences between the Alt-White and the Alt-West. The following are my observations; I am quite willing to be corrected by someone who can speak more credibly for the Alt-White.

  1. Alt-White is for whites only. Alt-West is pan-racial and pan-national, which should not be confused with being multicultural or equalitarian or pro-diversity in the egalitarian sense.
  2. Alt-White is primarily concerned with white nationalism, and secondarily concerned with European nationalisms. Within the Alt-White, there is already a discussion concerning what the difference between a generic white nationalism and the specific European nationalisms are; I suspect there will eventually be a further distinction between American and European branches of the Alt-White. While the Alt-West supports white nationalism, that is not its sole concern, as it supports all nationalism, European or otherwise.
  3. Alt-White is neutral to hostile on Christianity. Alt-West is strongly pro-Christian, as it believes Christianity to be one of the three pillars of Western Civilization aka the historical Christendom. Pro-Christian includes, but does not require, actually being a Christian.
  4. Alt-White is neutral to hostile on Israel. Alt-West is pro-Israel, as it supports all nationalist homelands.
  5. Alt-White is hostile to very hostile to all Jews everywhere. Alt-West is friendly to Israeli Jews while hostile to globalist Jews and anti-nationalist Jews.
  6. Alt-White has a romantic view of National Socialism. Alt-West regards it as a suicidally stupid but semiotically useful form of German nationalism.
  7. Alt-White is neutral to pro-white imperialism. Alt-West is anti-imperialism, as it regards imperalism as being societally enervating and self-destructive.

As you can see, within the context of both the 16 Points and the grand political spectrum, Alt-White and Alt-West are largely in accord. They generally share a philosophy and a direction, but their priorities and perspectives are different. More importantly, with the possible exception of Christianity in the long term, there is very little reason for conflict between Alt-White and Alt-West, indeed, the distinction between the two eliminates the Alt-White’s primary objection to the Alt-West, which is the possibility of  being sidelined by the media and by the larger potential appeal of the Alt-West.

Some have accused me, and Milo, and several others, of wanting to assume the mantle of leading the Alt-Right. That is the exact opposite of the truth. In fact, one personal benefit of articulating the distinction between the two primary branches of the Alt-Right is that it makes it clear that a) there can be no unitary leader, and b) even if there could be, that unitary leader could not possibly be me due to my identity as an American Indian and member of La Raza.

The more significant benefit is to quell the fears of the Alt-White that they will be sidelined by their more numerous allies. But the Alt-West needs nothing from the Alt-White, and by establishing a separate identity, a much broader spectrum of members are made possible while respecting the rigid borders of the Alt-White. Regardless, the simple fact of the matter is that the Alt-White is not the only alternative to mainstream conservatism.

There are much bigger battles ahead than settling the question of whether Christianity is a necessary component of Western Civilization or not. Because we know the white race is absolutely a necessary component of it, and that is why, whether one is inclined towards the Alt-White or the Alt-West, every member of the Alt-Right who values both whites and the West has immediate and mid-range objectives remain exactly the same.

As before, this is not intended to be a definitive delineation of the differences between the two branches of the Alt-Right, but the starting point for an intelligent discussion. Keep it civil and substantive as those more interested in posturing will be spammed. As for those who will claim that Alt-West, Alt-White, and Alt-Lite are not genuine “things”, keep in mind that as a political taxonomist, I am creating nothing. I am merely describing what observably already exists.