There’s a guy on X who goes by the name European Revolution. He’s an oldhead who has been around since the Alt Right days and won’t let you forget about it. A recurring theme of his posts is how much better things were back in the good old days of 2016-2019 or thereabouts.

I have some sympathy for Alt Right nostalgia. There are a few things I miss about those days. I miss the “merry band of misfits” vibe of the time. You have to be sort of eccentric to join something fringe, so the Alt Right had a really interesting cast of characters. Whatever you might think of people like Andrew Anglin, Emily Youcis, or Ryan Faulk, they are not the kind of people you meet every day. We’ve never seen anyone quite like Mr. Bond. Nowadays, right-wing influencers seem kind of cookie cutter. The are a million different interchangeable e-girls whose names and faces I recognize, but I couldn’t match the two together. They are all a blur. Occasionally, I miss the romance of fighting a battle against seemingly impossible odds. The movement is in a different phase. We’ve won the debate and our ideas have conquered the internet. In a way, the fun part is over. The road ahead to the next level is going to involve some mundane normie politicking that requires engaging with the system and a long march through the GOP.

That said, I also remember the bad times of the Alt Right. The sociopaths and constantly having to run cover for the latest self-inflicted PR disaster. After having been in the game as long as I have, I’ll take the boring but stable normiefied Dissident Right of today over interesting yet volatile counter-culture era Alt Right. Being edgy was fun but I’m ready to be a normie now. The whole mission was to get the ideas to this point.

But to be honest, yes, something has been lost in the mainstreaming process. In many ways, the level of intellectual discourse has dropped since back in the good old days. There have been rumblings about “low-IQ antisemitism.” That might mean different things to different people. Sometimes the term is used disingenuously and sometimes it’s referring to a real phenomenon that might or might not be a serious issue. It’s normal to accuse your factional rivals of being a dumb version of what your faction believes. Still, it is deniable that the level of discourse in the right-wing ecosphere has dropped a grade or two. Going from Kevin McDonald to Lucas Gage is a step down intellectually. Science-heavy Human Biodiversity stuff has become less fashionable, and the leading influencers are less dynamic thinkers than back in the day. I don’t think it is an unreasonable critique to say that the scene has gotten dumber.

Some of the dumbing down may be an unavoidable part of the mainstreaming process. Some of it is not. Some of it we might be able to remedy and some of it we simply cannot. Here are a few things I think are causes of the dumbing down of the discourse amongst the Online Right.

Decline of a Culture of Writing

All the major thought leaders of the Alt Right were writers. Even the TRS guys started out as bloggers. The Daily Stormer, the most popular Alt Right website, was a blog. Ideas were debated in multi-paragraph back-and-forth volleys across message boards, comments sections, and Facebook groups. It’s hard to believe now, but Facebook was once a major hub of Alt Right activity. TRS began as a Facebook group and grew into the famed podcast network it is today. Who remembers My Posting Career?

With the start of the Internet Bloodsports craze of 2018, YouTube (an afterthought in the Alt Right era) became the center of the movement and remained so until the Summer of Floyd when the last holdouts were finally banished. Livestreamers started to replace writers and podcasters as the stars of the movement. At the time, a shift to audio-visual content was what was needed to take the message to the next level. It’s a lot easier for a video clip to go viral than an article. However, in the process, the Dissident Right went from being a movement of writers to a movement of talkers.

You can buy The Alternative Right, ed. Greg Johnson, here

I think the closing of Takimag’s comments section and the several of the popular White Nationalist message boards were bad for the broader movement’s culture. Yes, we have X now which is great and yes it is technically written word, but the interface makes lengthy back-and-forth Socratic dialogue with point-by-point rebuttals unwieldy. Yeah, you can do it on X but it’s a chore for the reader to follow along. X is good if you want to make one point and then let other people respond to your point. Also, social media platforms like X are for engaging with the broader world and activists should be wearing a different hat when doing so. People might tailor their message for a more general audience or for virality. There is value in having online spaces just for us where we can “talk shop” and hold court on the latest news. We sharpen our elbows and then take our views out into the wider world. The Alt Right was not just a propaganda machine but also a thinktank and the movement has lost some of it’s thinktank quality.

The decline of message board culture is bad and group chats are no substitute. On the plus side, YouTube has hinted that they will be loosening up on censorship and that some accounts banned for political speech will be allowed back on. It would be great if Facebook would follow suit because it is a better website for long-form discussion. I’m cautiously optimistic. We’ve had our hearts broken before, but liberals do seem genuinely spooked by the current Trump administration. Whether Trump is bluffing or not, they seem to be taking seriously his threats to bring the FCC or the IRS down on this or that media outlet.

All great men of history wrote and if I had it my way, people would have to prove themselves as writers before being allowed to make other content.

Streamlining Process

This Dissident Right, or whatever we shall have to call ourselves now, was founded by political theory nerds who arrived at White Nationalism after a long ideological journey. “I started out as a normie conservative, then read Atlas Shrugged and was a libertarian for a few years. I was into Moldbug for a little while and then got redpilled on race after watching some Molyneux videos. Then I found Jared Taylor and here I am.”

This process took many years and some people did not end up fully redpilled until their 30s or 40s. After having redpilled the political theory nerds on the right and the libertarian-to-Alt Right pipeline dried up, the next challenge for the Dissident Right was learning how to streamline the process. How do you redpill the normies? How do you take a normie and turn him into a White Nationalist without setting him off on a multi-year journey?

Whatever you may think about him, Nick Fuentes was the first to crack the code on how to sell White Nationalism to a general audience. Advances have been made in messaging and veteran activists have also acquired more skill with experience. As a result, the average age of people in the pro-white scene has been steadily dropping and now teenage White Nationalists are fairly common. But again, there has been a trade-off. As a result of the streamlining process, newer activists tend to be less well-rounded than the ones that arrived at White Nationalism after an arduous journey; and while having more young activists around can be invigorating, they bring less life experience to the table.

Hitler said that people should not enter politics before age 30 because they are still figuring things out and are likely to change their minds on things. This puts them in a position of either having to continue with a position they no longer believe in or change their position and look like a flip-flopper. I personally think people should spend some time living as a normie before getting involved in this scene, but that’s just me.

The Movement Grew too Fast

When the number of new people greatly outnumbers the veteran activists, it’s harder to mentor the new generation and hand down hard-learned experience. It used to be that you came into the scene and everyone else had been there for years. You lurked for a while until you got the hang of the basics and felt like participating in the discussion. These days, people are coming into a scene where everyone is new.

That the movement growing too fast is a good problem to have, but there are undeniable drawbacks.

Swimming Against the Tide

It is said that swimming against the tide builds muscle. Being a White Nationalist during the height of woke took brains. Taking a pro-racism position was so heretical and so socially risky, you needed to know all your arguments backwards and forwards as well as the counter-arguments to you arguments and counter-arguments to those counter-arguments. Being able to beat the censorship algorithm to took brains. Being racist in those years was like playing a video game on “hard” mode.

Then the vibe shift happened. That’s good. I wanted that to happen. I’m as glad to see the death of woke as anyone, but again, there are trade-offs. Many of our ideas have gone mainstream but the need to get really, really good at debating them is not there anymore, thus, there is a dullness in the intellectual “edge” of some newer activists.

In total, yes something has been lost. There are several ways in which things were better in the old days, but let us not wear rose-tinted glasses. There were fun times and interesting discussions but there was a lot of pain and embarrassment too. Do you really want to go back to the days of Eli Moseley?