Over the previous weekend at the annual National Policy Institute “Become Who We Are” gathering, Richard Spencer (pictured above, the man who runs Radix Journal, a website that I regularly read and have linked to many times on this website) gave a speech titled “Long Live the Emperor” about the political ascendance of Donald Trump, the full text of which can be found here.
The text of the speech is not truly the issue here, and for the most part is not at all hateful or controversial: It discusses how a massive cultural and political shift has occurred, with ourselves as the nimble and able rebels who “get it” more so than the past-their-prime arbiters of public opinion. It goes on to describe how Trump’s election is basically the first step of “living in the world we imagine” (NPI being what it is, I would assume that world is one where white people don’t have large organizations calling for their extinction).
Thus, the speech describes Trump’s election as the beginnings of a rejection of the dismal Current Year culture that all of us in the reactosphere are…reacting…to. And while that thesis is hardly objectionable, Spencer ends his speech with “Hail our people. Hail Trump. Hail victory!” This ridiculous outburst, which even at face value is rather “LARPy” and cartoonish and makes Radix Journal look dumber than it truly is—to say nothing of how it puts way too much faith in Donald Trump—was made even worse by the fact that several members of the audience (NOT Richard Spencer himself as is commonly reported) decided to give the Nazi salute in response to this.
While it was only a small percentage of the 300 or so people in the conference, two of whom have been confirmed to be morons trying to be funny, and I don’t think Spencer meant for this to occur, I will come out and say two things: 1) The Alt-Right should, in the future, avoid any links to the Nazis if we’re going to be taken seriously, and 2) Richard and those openly disavowing him, such as Mike Cernovich (a man that I am also a fan of) should all admit that they “done goofed” and realize that we share a common enemy and thus should get along for the time being.
Before I’m accused of being a “cuck”—I feel that white people have every right to lobby for their collective racial interests, I believe in human biodiversity, eschew feel-good concepts that progressives cling to such as multiculturalism and the “noble savage”, and believe that “good borders make for good neighbors”, to paraphrase an old saying. While I am not explicitly a member of the alt-right, I feel that there is a high amount of common ground between them and neo-masculinists like myself.
But with all that being said, I am vehemently against the “bootboy” neo-Nazi aesthetic for two main reasons: The first is that doing it means you’re playing directly into the hands of the left. It is a well known truism that a leftist’s primary argument is to call a rightist’s arguments “racist”, “sexist”, and various other “-ists”, if they’re not directly invoking Godwin’s Law and explicitly calling you a Nazi. So why are you painting a target on yourself?! That would be like if you, in a fistfight, put your fists down and said “Hit me on the button!”
An argument I often see is along the lines of “They’re going to call us Nazis anyway, so might as well go ‘all-in’ on Nazism”. That is fucking retarded. “They’ll call us Nazis so we might as well display every stereotype they have for us” is idiocy. Even if they will call us that, isn’t it better to fight for the CHANCE that some normies might say “Hmmm, those seem like nice gentleman who just happen to be proud of their white heritage”, rather than using outdated symbolism that (like it or not) is off-putting to 90% of the white race? Or in other words, if they are going to “call us Nazis anyway”, I’d rather fight that futile battle than surrender to the enemy’s wishes. Y’know, like the ACTUAL Nazis did in 1945, if you insist on referring to them.
However, unlike the NSDAP, we actually can win this battle—by using hate facts, and there are many sites that provide hate facts—my own being the least of them.
The second reason I’m against the whole Nazi aesthetic is: they’re not people we want to hitch ourselves to, and the fact that at least some of those raising the Roman salute at NPI were doing so in earnest is (to borrow a term from our SJW friends) problematic.
Again to avoid the “cuck” allegations, I have to ask you a rhetorical question: How did any of their idiocy benefit white people? They were totes defending the white race when they invaded those European countries (ie: countries full of white people) and allied with non-whites, right? And let’s not forget how they’ve forever tarred the very concept of white people being proud of their heritage. Even if I was a 14 Words spouting white nationalist who solely cared about the white race (which I don’t consider myself), the obvious conclusion would have to be that the NSDAP was a spectacular failure.
Frankly, isn’t it kind of offensive to look at white people, the people that invented modern democracy and indeed, most nuanced political forms, and say that the pinnacle of our political evolution was a tinpot dictatorship founded on an idiotic ideology?
(Some of you might be confused as to how I can praise them fighting to the last while also denouncing everything else they did. As a man, a history buff, and a martial artist, I feel I can show respect to a tough and valiant opponent, regardless of how retarded his ideology is)
And now take everything I said about the OG Nazis above, and quintuple it when dealing with neo-Nazis, such as everyone’s favorite Down’s Syndrome afflictee and/or ethnically ambiguous mystery meat Andrew Anglin.
(Why yes, I do find it funny that I, a man who’s openly half Chinese, and quite obviously looks it, still manage to look more like the ideal ‘tall, aquiline featured’ white man than Andrew Anglin does…and also I’ve probably slept with more white women than he has.)
Anglin and his audience have all the flaws of the fascist without any of their virtues: Malice without bravery, arrogance without intelligence, and cohesion without any attempt at reaching “normies”. Smarter men then I have taken the Daily Stormer and its audience to task in detailed articles, so I won’t retread those paths. Instead, I will just point out that I’m not the only one who has disdain for outright Roman saluting, Holocaust denying neo-Nazis: The acknowledged figureheads of the alt-right like Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Colin Lidell/Greg Johnson, et al, absolutely refuse to associate with them. And I feel that this proves Richard’s much smarter than the idiots throwing up Hitler salutes.
So, with all that being said, why did Mr. Spencer give the…Frank Miller-esque declaration at the end of his speech? A few days ago, Roosh wrote an article saying that he stood by Spencer due to not wanting to “punch to the right” and give the left a weapon against us. This is a defensible idea if nothing else, although I would argue that there’s a very big difference between “not immediately recoiling at being called a Nazi” and “openly embracing the symbols of Nazism”.
In that article he posited a theory that this was basically Richard getting “caught up in the moment”, not knowing how to manage his newfound fame, and making a mistake thinking that it would provide short term publicity and become a “maymay”. Roosh then refers to how he himself fucked up his first few public appearances for similar reasons. And while I’m not by any means “famous”, some of the books I’ve reviewed discuss brilliant men who allow fame to go to their heads and, in some cases, ruin what they’ve built, so it is a theme I’m familiar with.
Ultimately, while I don’t think Mr. Spencer is a federal plant contra what Mike Cernovich says (curiously, full-on 1488ers have accused Spencer of being one as well), I do think he ought to take a step back and take a look at what he’s doing, and who NPI associates with. I know I personally was attracted to Radix Journal because of how it asked the hard questions about race, gender, and politics, without the need for playing dress-up and LARPing as Nazis. I know that last year Richard shunned Matthew Heimbach for going full Nazi. And I know that all of us in the ‘sphere realize that we have a common enemy (several of them in fact).
If we’re going to unite and maybe change the Poz that is modernity for the better, we’re going to have to bring in the masses. And we’re not going to do that with jackboots and brown shirts-we’re going to do that by “speaking truth to power”, to borrow another SJW-ism. The problems with the world (racial, sexual, cultural, and political) and yes, the need for white people to advocate for themselves, should be self-evident, and we shouldn’t have to wed ourselves to outdated, failed ideologies to point this out.
Or as my Return of Kings colleague Davis Aurini pointed out in his podcast, you can adopt an immature “fuck you dad!” mentality and go “full fash” for your 15 seconds of fame and dank maymays. The choice is yours.