Of the things I get self-conscious about, my lack of enthusiasm for most political discussion, and my instinctive dismissal of 90% of the right’s activities, has been one on my mind recently.
I work with, and spend most of my time around, the Orthodox Christian community, and the people I am around who are not Orthodox are mainly my friends from swing dance. The former, it goes without saying, are predominately conservative, and are to the right on many issues than your average Republican. If you enjoy swing dance (or salsa, cha cha, hustle, etc.), then you care about physical health, a community built around the arts, and you have an appreciation for historical American, or Latin, culture. Put together, the demographic participating in swing dance on a weekly basis will have more conservative tendencies than the average bear. This is not to say everyone who dances is conservative, which would be false, but simply that there are tendencies that lean in that direction. Finally, I do spend time, either in-person or online, with people who are formally on the right, meaning they consume or produce podcasts, articles, or are involved in activism, and identify with the right-wing. Simply, I swim in a right-leaning environment, but, rather than be excited by this (as many of you might be), when politics comes up, often times I come across as disinterested, or even a grumpy guy who poo poos noble efforts and enthusiasm. At least twice a day I hear something that you would only expect on telegram or “Frog Twitter”, but instead of being stoked at this, I simply shrug it off, or even get annoyed. For this, I feel self-conscious, and even some guilt. Asking myself “why?” has led to a reflection on my political history, which will explain my disinterest and occasional grumpiness, though not excuse it.
I got into politics by accident, by way of Christian apologetics. In 2014 I was very interested in the Christian versus atheist debates of the late 2000s, read many books on the philosophy of religion, and watched countless hours of William Lane Craig debating atheists on the existence of God. Through this, I ran into Christopher Hitchens after a short time, and then Youtube recommended his brother, Peter Hitchens to me. Peter, for those that do not know, is a devout Anglican, and incredibly pessimistic Tory. Despite having the opposite religious and political views of his brother, Peter shared the family gift-of-gab, getting me interesting in social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage, and drug legalization) for the first time. After a few months of Christian/atheist debates, I moved onto Christian versus Muslim debates, which inevitably landed me in the anti-Sharia sphere. After a bit of these debates, I found a video of a Muslim bragging, that no matter how well Christians argued, immigration alone would turn Europe Muslim by 2060, regardless how many converted to Christianity. Needless to say, this radicalized me on immigration, and I quickly became an advocate for an immigration moratorium.
Parallel to this, I had a classmate who was a raging communist. He had books on labor economics that he carried around, would tell anyone that would listen that the collapse of the USSR set humanity back hundreds of years, and that the Church needed to be systematically eliminated. Scandalized, I wanted to know what the opposite of communism was, because that is what I must be. First search result was “fascism”, which I knew to be the greater evil, but the next result was “reactionary”, so I then looked up “top ten reactionary thinkers”, and stumbled into Nick Land’s The Dark Enlightenment. From being a-political, to touching the waters with Peter Hitchens, I jumped straight into neo-reaction. At this point I went crazy, as a shark does when it smells blood. Being only in high school, I found a world of radicals who were more persuasive than the leftists in my high school, sexier than what I ever imagined the right-wing capable of, yet non-offensive to my faith. From being an apologetics junky, I became a rightist junky, moving onto Mencius Moldbug, 4Chan, and lurked around Iron March. 4Chan used to be close knit, Trump was not yet in focus, and it was still plausible that the Pepe memes were just jokes. Iron March, which many of you are likely unfamiliar with, was the forum responsible for birthing the Atomwaffen Division (only look up on Tor, or Brave), the main rival to The Right Stuff’s forum), and made Julius Evola the canonical figure he is today. One thread that stands out to me was about how Evola was “the Adorno of the right”, and the site’s owner, one Slavros, was in the process of writing a book fusing Evola with accelerationism, the notes of which you can find on Archive. From these sites I found Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, and Christopher Cantwell. I was not limited to the harder edges, however, but was an early subscriber to Steven Crowder, one of the first Mug Club members, and watched a good deal of Gavin McInnis (I remember the streams where he first played around with what would become the Proud Boys, and then when he announced its creation).
When the 2016 election came around, I was about to graduate high school, and was experiencing “red pill rage.” I had trouble with not being overly political with friends, and nuked the Overton Window abysmally. To my defense, a teenager with radical politics at his hands, mixed with all sorts of hormones and social drama, would naturally have a hard time. Things came to a head when I had to delete my Facebook after a post I made criticizing Black Lives Matter, and soon discovering that I cannot voice certain opinion under my own name and hope to be employed.
College saw my anarcho-capitalist phase, inspired by my reading of Hoppe (who I found in Moldbug’s footnotes), which was mixed with identitarian concerns, against a Christian backdrop. Sophomore year I began to doubt the compatibility of Christianity with anarchism, and looked to Moldbug’s footnotes again. He mentioned Carlyle a lot, so I went to the university library and took out A. J. Carlyle’s A History of Medieval Political Theory. Yes, I know it was the wrong Carlyle, but in my moment of genius I thought it impossible for there to be another Carlyle. This turned out to be a moment of Providence, as I read quotes from the Church Fathers, and passages of Saint Augustine, telling how the power of the sword is a result of the Fall. Before the introduction of sin, no man held the power of life and death over the other, but due to Adam’s transgression, it became necessary to allow this unnatural state to prevent sin from running rampant. All of the moral objections I found in Hoppe and Lew Rockwell were granted, yet the existence of the state remained justified. Soon after I began to question the economics tied up with libertarianism, and after reading E.F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, and Hillaire Belloc’s The Servile State, I became an ardent distributist.
Parallel to my way out of libertarianism was my involvement with many Alt-Right Discord rooms, including some related to Charlottesville. When the Unicorn Riot leaks came out, I scanned almost every page of the leak to make sure nothing I said gave away any personal information. Unlike my lurking of Iron March and 4Chan, I interacted with the online community, although cautiously, and occasionally. Soon after getting my feet wet, I applied to be a member of Identity Europa, did a Skype interview, and was all set to be a member after they received my membership dues. Fortunately, my school had a reputation for losing mail, and by the grace of God I never became a full member, which means I never appeared at Charlottesville. Being frustrated at the mail situation, and not yet realizing the blessing, I attempted to start my own activist organization, made recruitment flyers, and even a Wordpress website. No one signed up other than two friends, and we had one moment of glory: tearing down white guilt flyers at my university. Soon I gave up the project, in dismay at my limited outreach, and closed shop.
After Charlottesville happened, I was shaken. Unlike those who participated, I did not suffer any consequences, although I was concerned about being “Charlottesville adjacent”, and became more reserved about speaking about my radical politics. A moment of panic occurred when the small Minds channel I ran under my own name was followed by two headliners at the event, and in a fit of panic I deleted everything I could lest I fall prey to “linkage.”1
Laying low, sticking to studies, and getting entangled in messy romantic relationships, I did not touch politics again until I studied abroad in Oxford. There I read almost every word Edmund Burke wrote, and attended weekly “Port and Policy” meetings, where I, along with two hundred tories, drank unlimited port, and debated three policy positions a night, before raiding a pub called The Kings Arms, whose staff hated our roaming drunk band. I learned to speak in front of hundreds of people, with no microphone, while I was drunk, and they were drunker than I. Good speeches were met with cries of “sound!”, and bad speeches with “shame!” Not being British, I was unaccustomed to Orwellian political correctness, which led to many drinks being bought for me at The Kings Arms for speeches I made in defense of educational discrimination (should there exist different schools for different talent, both in terms of type and degree), and for advocating the censorship of trans-rights activists, abortionists, and those who commit cultural violence (I had the winds of the Covington debacle behind me).
Getting back from Oxford, I began to read some of the best conservative thinkers, with the highlights being Russel Kirk, Roger Scruton, and Henry Adams. My involvement with the Alt-Right made me think all conservatives were flakes who only cared about corporate interests, but reading these three, Scruton in particular, I realized there is an intellectually respectable conservatism, despite what the name has since come to mean.
We will now fast forward to graduate school, because nothing of note happened between Oxford, and then. I read some books, consumed podcasts, and videos, wrote some papers on Jospeh de Maistre, but this period was more about personal development, working through family struggles, and going deeper into my first love, philosophy.
Grad school is when I began to seriously get involved in the right. Spending years reading the canon of right-wing and conservative thought, seeing a dozen of activist organizations come and go, podcasters come in and out of fashion, and learning how to argue my positions in public, and academically, I decided to do something. I joined Telegram, and quickly got involved in activism. Lest I dox myself I will not give any names, but I was involved in two activist organizations proper (which I mean banner drops, putting up flyers and stickers, and doing different team building activities like MMA), one organization that was primarily article, and podcast driven, one survivalist group, and started my own activist/survivalist organization, that ended up having fifty or so members at one point. Highlights from this period were doing a banner drop off of America’s largest shopping mall on Black Friday, being the ideologue for an Evolian orientated group (composing answers to interviews, and producing concise defenses of Evola’s main theses), getting stalked by Antifa, and waking up at 7am to a belligerent person trying to blackmail me, which then escalated to a threat of being subpoenaed in a case that I had zero involvement in.2 I interacted with most of the leading activists of that period, and the remnants of Cville era activist leaders, who were now cracked up and shot out. This was also the time I appeared on different podcasts. I was going to class during the day, reading hundreds of pages in the evening, and at night I was either out with one of the many groups, or on air. Much coffee was drunk, and cigarettes smoked.
2014-2021 was a blur of political radicalization, antagonization, and so much happened that I do not remember all of it. What you see above are the highlights that I remember, or can write about. I have seen many personalities come and go, positions staked, negated, and then re-staked, and what looks like a cyclical pattern of rightist thought. Almost everything I see posted on Telegram, Twitter, or in an article is something I’ve heard two generation of rightists debate (our generations are the length of flies, it seems), or is something I have tried out. Even my own content, which is now relegated to this blog, The American Sun, and The Sunflower Society, will drift into rightist repetition on occasion.
The Cycle
Before talking about today, I am sure some of you are interested in the “cyclical pattern of rightist thought.” Why this these cycles occur, I am not sure, nor are they “set in stone”, but nine years of being in this thing has led me to notice the following patterns:
Ideology
First appears a coalition of common concerns. Those on the right are about immigration, and a less interventionist foreign policy, let’s say. Then, an ideology crops up to explain why these concerns occur (we have mass immigration and Warhawks because of X). After a period of time, the ideology becomes an ideology proper, meaning that it is no longer a heuristic to view the world through, nor a tradition capable of adapting to change3, but becomes more real than situation it was meant to explain. Defending the ideology, and winning converts to it, becomes the central focus. After this ideologizing is seen for what it is, treating images of the world as more real than the world, then there is a reaction in the form of pragmatism, which can tend towards anti-idea or anti-philosophy militancy. After tempers cool, there exists a field of common concerns the right is trying to find solutions to, and this restarts the process.
Politics
A charismatic leader rallies the segmented right together, and excitement builds around someone like Trump, Eric Zemmour, or Bolsanaro. Either this leader wins, and does not live up to his promises (as no politician does, because their job is to compromise, and make deals), or he loses. Both lead to a loss of faith in politics, which can manifest itself as a) survivalism, to the extreme of Atomwaffen, or the watered down Benedict Option, b) the belief that a new aristocracy needs to be cultivated, an aristocracy who, unlike the present generation, can successfully transform society, c) some form of strategically joining the left, if only to secure stability. Those who still pursue political change will be mocked as ignorant, feds, or having short memory. At some point legislative victories, or a new charismatic leader, will restore faith in the ballot box, and the cycle will repeat.
Optics
First, the right will try hard to appear sensible to the public at large, or even to the left. Once they are labeled some epithet enough times, then ironic embrace of extreme rhetoric or symbolism will become popular. Imitation quickly becomes reality, as all play inaugurates us into social roles, and you go from the reasonable request to limit immigration to people going around praising Adolf Hitler in earnest. This either lands a scandal (as it should), or it repels the competent folks needed for political success, and we are back at the beginning.
Ethics
Unlike the revolutionary left, the right is mostly reactive. Conservatives like the status quo by definition, meaning when they get politically mobilized, it is in reaction to some transgression or crime. This reaction is provoked by the right’s strong moral sense. When faced with strategic set backs, the right will, at some point, begin to advocate the use of force, and/or censorship of the left. At first this is consistent with the right’s morality, and relies upon some variant of Just War Theory, but as the left advances more and more, rage, combined with the left’s absence of principles, yet their immediate success, the right starts to abandon ethics all together. So long as an action advances the cause, it is permissible. We get back to bad optics here, with dictators being praised for their abandonment of ethics, and their failures are attributed to them holding onto some degree of ethics (James Mason in Siege, once a book of infamy to some, a Bible to others, but now a forgotten memory, argued Hitler lost the war because he was too nice).
Today
There is always a danger when talking about “the right”, for the one speaking to be speaking about himself. It should be noted that even this article fits nicely in a sub-genre of rightist literature. This article is about me, and I ask you not to read this as a condemnation of the right, nor saying much about the right at all other than its repetition. Repetition can indicate truth, as is the case when saying “I love you”, or when we say in the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom “Lord have mercy” countless times, so even this is not a condemnation. Yet, with so much repetition, and having seen so many personalities, movements, organizations, and ideologies comes and go, I do get tired. I have heard it all before, and politics is not my main interest. Yes, I am involved, more today than ever before (though in a very different fashion), but that does not mean I like talking about it a whole lot. Chances are I have had a conversation about X before on a podcast, in a chat, with members of some activist organization, and wrote an article about it. So, I might agree with every word you say, but I am tired of the endless repetition, even though it might be true repetition. What I care about now, although it is incredibly dull, consistently mostly of paperwork, Excel, and finance, is getting things done. As that is happening, I will music and food post.
Similar to entrapment, linkage is a quasi-legal take on guilt by association, and is the practice of incriminating associates of a problematic individual, no matter how loose this “association” is.
It is a great story, but not one that should be published publicly.