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| Seven months later Spencer shut down AlternativeRight.com |
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Over the past, six months, I’ve reached a point of professional crisis. NPI, Radix, AltRight, Washington Summit Publishers, Vanguard, additional writings… Unfinished projects pile up. Emails go unanswered. More funds need to be raised. My desire to do all of these projects is preventing me from completing any of them.
Something’s got to give.
I’ve decided it must be AltRight. And today, I am resigning from being the editor and main blogger AlternativeRight.com.
Don’t worry—AlternativeRight.com won’t go anywhere. I’ll keep it “live” so long as the Internet still flickers. The articles, even the shorter blogs, won’t curdle anytime soon, and I’m confident that new readers will continue to discover AltRight as the years go by.
In the coming days, we will be moving towards an editorial collective; that is, the site will operate more like a group blog (and less like a webzine.) I’m also considering streamlining the structure of the site in order to better serve AltRight’s new identity.
And don’t worry—I am not burned out. Indeed, I care about our issues more passionately than I did two years ago. However, I simply need a break from the incessant grind of running webzines, which I’ve been doing for the past four years.
And, finally, don’t worry—Radix will be produced. Indeed, Alex and I will now be better able to dedicate our energies towards this project. Around 200 people have pre-ordered the first two issues. With my usual naive optimism, I hoped to complete the first one by March 2012...which I’ve had to delay until June. I need to lighten my work load in order to fulfill my promise.
A cultural journal that is beautifully typeset and produced will play an important role in our movement. And the more relaxed pace of two issues per year (at the beginning, at least) will afford Alex and I the time to make it a work of art.
Looking back over the past two years, I feel that I have accomplished most of the goals I set for myself in founding AltRight, which was never meant to become an institution. It was more like an experiment, in fact.
I wanted to see if I could help create an alternative to “conservatism” as we knew it. AltRight was never to be “to the right” of, say, National Review on an imaginary sliding scale. It was to emerge from a different universe—to have a different starting point and vision of society. Much of this work was aesthetic in nature. And I worked closely with AltRight’s web-developer in order to capture the kind Gothic and Romantic aura I had in mind. (The billowing-flag-and-apple-pie aesthetic of American conservatives has never attracted me.) It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Alex’s “Equality As Evil” represents a culmination of the kind of intellectual world I sought to foster.
Since March of 2010, the alt-right blogosphere has grown into something like a collective brain. Our website did not create this movement, of course. But it was inspired by it and sought to contribute to it.
It’s also worth noting the degree to which AltRight functioned successfully as a “Big Tent.”
Looking back over his career in the Beltway, Sam Francis noted that the non-mainstream Right (such as it was...) amounted to a collection of colorful personalities and their devoted followings—each of which distrusted, if not positively loathed, one another. (Little has changed.)
AltRight, on the other hand, along with friendly sites and bloggers, offered a model of a non-aligned Right that could actually get along.
I often got chided for my putative attempt to align traditional Catholics, atheistic Darwinists, Nietzscheans, National Anarchists, White Nationalists et al. But this critique never touched me, and not because I imagined AltRight as an effort in team-building (à la “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” or “We’ll resolve internal disputes after the Revolution.”)
To think that we all must agree on dogma is to adopt the very American notion of politics as a substitute religion: that to be a citizen, you must “believe” in some cocktail of dumbed-down Enlightenment precepts, consumer capitalism and welfare socialism, love of all mankind, free speech (expect for bad, anti-American speech), democratic representation, und so weiter…
But politics isn’t ultimately about “believing” in anything; politics is, to be frank, the (often brutal) use of state power to achieve the aims of the governing class. What’s most interesting about the world is not politics, really, but the human flourishing that occurs outside it, or rather in the shadow of state sovereignty: from the mother and father to the warrior to the monk to the businessman to the aristocrat to the artist.
AltRight was never supposed to be a new “more conservative than thou” political doctrine; it was instead intended as a conversation within an extended family—what social, cultural, and political discourse could be like in a society when egalitarianism is expunged and European identity is taken as a given.
My central goal moving forward is to develop The National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishers into a successful thank-tank and book-making firm, both of which can harness the energies of our movement, speak forthrightly and publicly, and begin articulating an alternative social and political vision for traditional Americans, and Europeans around the world.
I have no illusions regarding the difficulty of building institutions that expresses views that are considered out-of-bounds, if not positively evil, in our current climate. Beltway “Conservatism” can subsist as a multi-million-dollar racket, staffed by sub-mediocrities at best, because it is connected to Republican legislators (that is, money and power). NPI can’t and won’t offer such “access.”
That said, I’m convinced that we stand at a historical turning point at which a growing number of European-Americans grasp the utter bankruptcy of the current political paradigm, not to mention the current Right. At no other point in recent history has there been a better chance for a new movement to arise.
Moreover, the fact, reported in the 2011 U.S. census, that the majority of births in the United States are non-White gives our movement a new urgency and requires us to move beyond conventional conservative politics: e.g. “just leave us alone,” “follow the Constitution,” “let’s grow the economy” etc. If all immigration, legal and illegal, were miraculously halted tomorrow morning, White Americans’ demographic destiny—that is, as a hated minority in a country their ancestors settled—would merely be delayed by a decade or two. Put another way, we could win the immigration battle and nevertheless loose the future for Western people in North America.
NPI can help set a new course—and offer Americans not just a discussion of the biological reality of race but a vision of an alternative foreign policy, economic system, and governing order.
There are so many contributors and supporters who are deserving of thanks and recognition. I would first like to acknowledge those, like Peter Brimelow, Paul Gottfried, Mark Hackard, Alex Kurtagic, Keith Preston, Derek Turner, and others, who came on board when the website was in its infancy. Thank go out as well those, like Colin Liddell and Andy Nowicki, whom I had never met when AltRight first began but who became indispensable contributors. I’m immensely proud of our archive, which is a true model of diversity!
Thanks go out, as well, to those who have financially sustained my wife and me these past two years—the major supporters as well as the hundreds who anonymously threw $20 into the hat. Subsequent donations will be put towards maintaining the website and producing a journal of the highest quality.
And this really isn’t good-bye…
Sincerely yours,
Richard Spencer
Connected content:
Looking Back, Forging Forward
Walking Away from a Broken Brand
Something’s got to give.
I’ve decided it must be AltRight. And today, I am resigning from being the editor and main blogger AlternativeRight.com.
Don’t worry—AlternativeRight.com won’t go anywhere. I’ll keep it “live” so long as the Internet still flickers. The articles, even the shorter blogs, won’t curdle anytime soon, and I’m confident that new readers will continue to discover AltRight as the years go by.
In the coming days, we will be moving towards an editorial collective; that is, the site will operate more like a group blog (and less like a webzine.) I’m also considering streamlining the structure of the site in order to better serve AltRight’s new identity.
And don’t worry—I am not burned out. Indeed, I care about our issues more passionately than I did two years ago. However, I simply need a break from the incessant grind of running webzines, which I’ve been doing for the past four years.
And, finally, don’t worry—Radix will be produced. Indeed, Alex and I will now be better able to dedicate our energies towards this project. Around 200 people have pre-ordered the first two issues. With my usual naive optimism, I hoped to complete the first one by March 2012...which I’ve had to delay until June. I need to lighten my work load in order to fulfill my promise.
A cultural journal that is beautifully typeset and produced will play an important role in our movement. And the more relaxed pace of two issues per year (at the beginning, at least) will afford Alex and I the time to make it a work of art.
*************
I wanted to see if I could help create an alternative to “conservatism” as we knew it. AltRight was never to be “to the right” of, say, National Review on an imaginary sliding scale. It was to emerge from a different universe—to have a different starting point and vision of society. Much of this work was aesthetic in nature. And I worked closely with AltRight’s web-developer in order to capture the kind Gothic and Romantic aura I had in mind. (The billowing-flag-and-apple-pie aesthetic of American conservatives has never attracted me.) It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Alex’s “Equality As Evil” represents a culmination of the kind of intellectual world I sought to foster.
Since March of 2010, the alt-right blogosphere has grown into something like a collective brain. Our website did not create this movement, of course. But it was inspired by it and sought to contribute to it.
It’s also worth noting the degree to which AltRight functioned successfully as a “Big Tent.”
Looking back over his career in the Beltway, Sam Francis noted that the non-mainstream Right (such as it was...) amounted to a collection of colorful personalities and their devoted followings—each of which distrusted, if not positively loathed, one another. (Little has changed.)
AltRight, on the other hand, along with friendly sites and bloggers, offered a model of a non-aligned Right that could actually get along.
I often got chided for my putative attempt to align traditional Catholics, atheistic Darwinists, Nietzscheans, National Anarchists, White Nationalists et al. But this critique never touched me, and not because I imagined AltRight as an effort in team-building (à la “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” or “We’ll resolve internal disputes after the Revolution.”)
To think that we all must agree on dogma is to adopt the very American notion of politics as a substitute religion: that to be a citizen, you must “believe” in some cocktail of dumbed-down Enlightenment precepts, consumer capitalism and welfare socialism, love of all mankind, free speech (expect for bad, anti-American speech), democratic representation, und so weiter…
But politics isn’t ultimately about “believing” in anything; politics is, to be frank, the (often brutal) use of state power to achieve the aims of the governing class. What’s most interesting about the world is not politics, really, but the human flourishing that occurs outside it, or rather in the shadow of state sovereignty: from the mother and father to the warrior to the monk to the businessman to the aristocrat to the artist.
AltRight was never supposed to be a new “more conservative than thou” political doctrine; it was instead intended as a conversation within an extended family—what social, cultural, and political discourse could be like in a society when egalitarianism is expunged and European identity is taken as a given.
*************
I have no illusions regarding the difficulty of building institutions that expresses views that are considered out-of-bounds, if not positively evil, in our current climate. Beltway “Conservatism” can subsist as a multi-million-dollar racket, staffed by sub-mediocrities at best, because it is connected to Republican legislators (that is, money and power). NPI can’t and won’t offer such “access.”
That said, I’m convinced that we stand at a historical turning point at which a growing number of European-Americans grasp the utter bankruptcy of the current political paradigm, not to mention the current Right. At no other point in recent history has there been a better chance for a new movement to arise.
Moreover, the fact, reported in the 2011 U.S. census, that the majority of births in the United States are non-White gives our movement a new urgency and requires us to move beyond conventional conservative politics: e.g. “just leave us alone,” “follow the Constitution,” “let’s grow the economy” etc. If all immigration, legal and illegal, were miraculously halted tomorrow morning, White Americans’ demographic destiny—that is, as a hated minority in a country their ancestors settled—would merely be delayed by a decade or two. Put another way, we could win the immigration battle and nevertheless loose the future for Western people in North America.
NPI can help set a new course—and offer Americans not just a discussion of the biological reality of race but a vision of an alternative foreign policy, economic system, and governing order.
*************
Thanks go out, as well, to those who have financially sustained my wife and me these past two years—the major supporters as well as the hundreds who anonymously threw $20 into the hat. Subsequent donations will be put towards maintaining the website and producing a journal of the highest quality.
And this really isn’t good-bye…
Sincerely yours,
Richard Spencer
Connected content:
Looking Back, Forging Forward
Walking Away from a Broken Brand
