WALKING AWAY FROM A BROKEN BRAND

by Colin Liddell

When the Alt-Right was founded in 2010—in as much as a loose umbrella term can be 'founded'—it was meant to serve as a "big tent" area of intellectual freedom. At least that's how those who gravitated towards it in those early days saw it. I know I did.

Under the slogan "Paper is overrated," Richard Spencer's original alternativeright-dot-com site used the potentialities of the internet age to give space once again to the various intellectual currents that had been laboriously purged from the "official" right and its paper journals over the previous five decades. The site also served as a platform to several new currents of thought. This rich intellectual diversity was the reason why the site caught on.

The same need that existed then—back in the dark days of the Obama era—remains as strong today. In fact, it is even stronger, as new forms of censorship and deplatforming have begun to bite, despite the victory of Trump, from whom so much was hoped. More than this, the problems and ominous mega-trends that the Alt-Right grew up to address, have only accelerated and intensified. 

But can the Alt-Right still effectively address these problems? The answer is yes and no. 

On the one hand, a large number of people have been prepped and red-pilled by all that has happened in recent years—the rise of the Alt-Right, the Brexit vote, Trump's election, and the disappointment of his administration, etc. But on the other hand the actual term "Alt-Right" has increasingly become a handicap. 

While the living movement—or more correctly the movements—of which the term "Alt Right" was merely the banner, show every sign of continued growth and vitality, the banner itself has become tattered, tainted, and even shit-smeared.

Worse than this, it has become an unfortunate marker designed to draw down long-range, deplatforming artillery from our enemies, while also warning them to avoid the more close quarters intellectual fighting at which we always beat them.

Why has this happened? 

There are several reasons, but these are all connected to leadership mistakes by those whose prominence in our movement was bolstered by a hostile media. It is unnecessary to name names here, or even go into possible narratives of infiltration and sabotage, as the essence of the thing is more illustrative than the personalities, feuds, and vendettas that constitute its substance. As always, the detached macro-empirical view always reveals more than the emotionally-embedded micro-empirical one.

So what have been the main errors of the Alt-Right? 

This is a massive subject, but, to attempt to break it down, we could mention the following bullet points:

• ideological errors
• a culture of anonymity
• moral weaknesses—both personal and ideological
• tactical naivety
• poor movement hygiene
• self-ghettoisation

All of these factors—or areas—are interlinked in complex ways. We see how the movement's ideological errors have fueled some of its moral weaknesses, which in turn have led to poor tactics. For example, its crude and over-simplistic critique on the JQ, only served to unify and empower Jews, partial-Jews, Jewish sympathisers, and plain, simple humanists, while furthering the Alt-Right's self-ghettoisation. The same can be said for its culture of anonymity and its other trollish excesses.

In more general terms, the movement's ideological message became not only too fixed and simplistic, but following the movement's watershed moment—the November 2016 NPI Conference—it greatly narrowed into a form of negative identitarianism, i.e. not being this or that group. This was sometimes referred to as "purity spiraling."

Mike Enoch waving through the Overton window.

This made it difficult to exist within a wider moral and social context, while also intensifying the drift towards a monomanical obessesion with (((Jews))) by many in the Alt-Right. 

Then, while biting off more than it could chew in terms of the JQ, the movement also unnecessarily multiplied its enemies in other directions, usually for cheap laughs—all the while shedding decent people who had initially been drawn to the movement for good reasons.

A quick note on morality, which is the essential element for the Dissident Right and the reason for the Alt-Right's failure: This is a potent weapon that many in the Alt-Right have foolishly neglected. At its most basic level, morality is simply the ability to reassure those who are not your immediate target or enemy that they won't be attacked, so that they don't attack you. However, since November 2016, the Alt-Right has excelled at picking new battles it couldn't win, while failing to finish those it has started, and then, to top it all off, picking several fights with itself. 

Rather than being a movement defined by morality and a positive identity, it has allowed itself to become a forum for Nazi-esque trolling and pointless Jew-baiting (as opposed to developing a deeper and more palatable understanding of the JQ), all seasoned with a constant drip-drip of racial slurs, aimed at everybody, including members of its own audience. 

Such tactical naivety divided its supporters, rallied its enemies against it, and drove away possible allies. In short, the "brand name" Alt-Right was driven into the ground, and has effectively become a device to ghettoize and exclude those who identify with it. 

Back in 2014, I saw the first signs of this trend and realised how this would play out. So did a few other far-sighted individuals, like RamZPaul and even Greg Johnson to some degree, before kow-towing to the Anglinites. This is why we all attacked Andrew Anglin  and his Jewish associate Weev for attaching their ludicrous Hollywood Naziism to the Alt-Right.

What one thinks of Anglin and Weev is irrelevant. They may be sincere idiots or insincere operatives working to bring down the movement, but either way the negative effect has been the same.

Some creepy frogs in uniforms > survival of Western civilisation.

This toxification of the Alt-Right happened thanks to extremely poor movement hygiene, admittedly something hard to impose on a lose umbrella term that the founder himself had literally disavowed in December 2013 when he shut down the original site. TRS also played an important part here, serving as a bridge between the Hollywood Naziisim of the Stormer types and the saner and more intellectual elements of the Alt-Right, including our site, Richard Spencer's low-energy ventures (Radix, etc.) and, generally speaking, Greg Johnson's Counter-Currents. 

Because of their success and popularity, as well as their greater ambivalence, moderation, and comic framing in their early days, it was pretty hard to isolate TRS and prevent its poison spreading through the movement. Through their adoption of genuinely funny humour, TRS became the ascendant force in the Alt-Right, while, along with Richard Spencer, the movement's media-anointed figurehead, they played footsie with Anglin and Weev's Hollywood Naziism.

Trolling, clickbaiting, and building a paying audience pushed aside any concerns for the potential long-term damage of this increasingly extreme rhetoric on the wider perception of the movement. 

The online platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google, PayPal, and even Soundcloud, that were essential to the Alt-Right originally had a loose, somewhat naive commitment to "free speech." This was partly because it was something that the Left had traditionally made use of, so it was considered cool.

Luciana Berger, Anglin's target to set a
precedent for Twitter deplatforming users.

It was not easy for any of these corporations to directly backtrack on this. But the likes of Anglin and Weev and their florid content, which directly invoked mass murder on every page and used K-words or N-words in every sentence—along with their Twitter mob attacks on people—pushed a shocked and horrified corporate tech to backtrack on their small-L liberal principles.

As all these Big Tech corporations were exposed by these tactics to Europe's much more severe "hate speech" laws, this also became a business necessity, which explains why Anglin and Weev made it a priority to attack an obscure British MP with their Twitter mob tactics.

In this way Big Tech lost its "free speech" virginity, and started throwing people off its platforms, starting with Anglin himself. Once the precedent had been set, it became increasingly easy to deplatform others merely for the "wrong opinions," citing "hate facts," or mentioning "sensitive topics" at the wrong time.

The Alt-Right, as a brand, became perceived as a moral cesspit that could be cordoned off without too many questions being asked.  

A more graphic analogy that occurred to me recently is that of the human centipede, from the Dutch horror movie series of the same name, with Anglin and Weev chewing on a Swastika, crapping into Enoch's mouth, who in turn is shitting into Spencer's mouth, all under the slogan of "Don't punch right, dude." 

Human centipede nationalism

This, in one gruesome but illustrative image, is what I mean by "poor movement hygiene," which leads us to yet another major own goal by brand Alt-Right, namely to view itself as a mirror image of the Left. 

Yes, it could be argued that the Left doesn't generally punch left—not true, but, yes, Centre Leftists don't go out of their way to criticise commies or even violent antifa. But, based on this, the theory goes, the saner and more moderate elements of the Alt-Right should likewise turn a blind eye to the 1488ers and their Stormerist shenanigans. To do otherwise would be to "countersignal," a special term introduced by TRS to prevent just that. In fact, just to not countersignal isn't good enough. You've also got to breathe the same air as them (and eat their shit).

The majority—or at least a plurality—of those who have worked under the banner of the Alt-Right in the years of its existence have been mainly motivated by the desire to restore common sense, decency, and natural order to a world being put through the blender of debt-fueled globalism and mass demographic churn. The things they want are an end to mass immigration, healthy and stable demographics, long-term security, and an economic system based on balanced trade and finances. What they want is the same as what any sane man wants. 

In short, the Alt-Right should have been the natural majority and the ascendant force in our sickened societies. But, instead, the banner of the Alt-Right has become a punching bag, a stitched-on Star of David to mark the ghetto dweller, whose social and professional life has been blighted. "Being Alt-Right" has become for many a state identical to that of a scapegoat, blamed for the sins of the world and driven out into the desert to its uncertain fate, while the sins continue.

For these reasons, therefore, I have made the decision to drop the brand from this site. Back in 2013, when Spencer discarded the term "Alt-Right," my colleague Andy Nowicki and myself picked up the wounded brand, still seeing much good in it. We kept it alive until it started to develop an uncontrolled life of its own. In retrospect that may have been a mistake. But giving in early is not in either of our natures.

As I have said above, the movement that has grown up under this banner is a real thing. What has been seen by millions of people cannot be unseen. While the bluepilled can always be redpilled, the redpilled can never be blue pilled again. As the World worsens and the West withers under its many problems—demographic, racial, spiritual, social, economic, cultural, and moral—the impetus that drove the Alt-Right will remain and strengthen. 

But just because this movement isn't going away, doesn't mean that it isn't going to change. It definitely is. It will continue to evolve, and a great part of that will be doing things very differently from the way they have been done—almost certainly under different leaders and different banners, as it takes on new, polymorphous forms, and operates under a variety of names.

As for the original banner itself—loaded with all the mistakes and bad karma of the movement, and an easy target for our enemies—it is now more of hindrance than a help. 

It has entered Normiespace and the offices of Big Tech merely as a reason to avoid us and not listen to our invincible arguments or engage with our unbeatable ideas. It has become nothing more than a ticket to deplatforming. I therefore choose to toss it aside and to adhere to the true spiritual banner of the movement—the quest for truth, honour, morality, and life.

For this purpose, I have chosen to rename this site Affirmative Right and to redefine what we do here with a set of principles designed to avoid the mistakes of the past (more on that later). 

But even when it was fresh and new, before it had picked up its negative connotations, "Alternative Right" was a fragile, half-formed, and essentially negative concept. It was a mere relative term, referencing something else—namely Spencer's pet hate, the official Right or the Conservative movement—of which it was merely an inverted shadow. This relativistic aspect may partly account for the many weaknesses that revealed themselves in the movement under the stresses of battle

Etymologically "Alternative Right" is weak:

Alternative (adj.)1580s, "offering one or the other of two," from Medieval Latin alternativus, from Latin alternatus, past participle of alternare "do one thing and then another, do by turns," from alternus "one after the other, alternate, in turns, reciprocal," from alter "the other" (see alter). Meaning "purporting to be a superior choice to what is in general use" was current by 1970 (earliest reference is to the media); in popular music, by 1984 in reference to pirate radio. Alternative energy is from 1975. Related: Alternatively.

By contrast, Affirmative Right is strong. Indeed, strength (firmus) is at the very heart of the word along with positivity, both of which we need in order to address our movement's many weaknesses:

Affirmative (adj.)"answering 'yes,' " mid-15c., from use in logic; from Old French affirmatif, earlier afirmatif (13c.), from Latin affirmativus, from affirmat-, past participle stem of affirmare "to make steady; strengthen; confirm," from ad "to" (see ad-) + firmare "strengthen, make firm," from firmus "strong" (see firm (adj.)).

Having finished this announcement, I won't heil victory like a famous idiot once did, but I will salute tenaciousness and a willingness to learn from our mistakes. We are still here and we are only going to get stronger...if we play our cards right.

 None of this is new, snowflake.

This article is cited in the academic book Christianity and the Alt-Right: Exploring the Relationship by Damon T. Berry

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.