THE END OF THE ALT-RIGHT: COLIN LIDDELL INTERVIEWED BY QUEBEC NATIONALIST MAGAZINE "HARFANG"

Liddell who has always been right about everything.

This is the English version of an interview with Affirmative Right chief editor Colin Liddell that took place in April and was recently published in the Quebec nationalist magazine Harfang. Due to the questions asked much of  the discussion centers on the rise and fall of the Alt-Right.

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Harfang: Many things have been said about the genesis of the Alt-Right. As an insider and not as an external observer with an agenda of your own, could you tell us how that movement came to life?

Liddell: Literally a book-sized answer would be required, but I'll try to give you a short answer.

Essentially, since at least the 1960s, there had been a purging of legitimate right-wing intellectual enquiry from the culture. By the time Obama was elected President, this repression had built up a head of steam, while at the same time access to the internet and social media had reached a critical mass. As a personal example, I had started a blog for my old music articles, called Revenge of Riff Raff in 2009. Around that time a lot of people were starting to see how they could get content across with almost zero costs. The problem was to grab attention and a growing audience.

Richard Spencer was obviously a key figure, but not in the way everybody thinks. Luckily for your interview, Spencer defriended me recently over my tongue-in-cheek article "Two Exciting 'Visions' Battle for the Heart of the Alt-Right" so I am able to be more frank and honest about my old comrade than I otherwise would.

The famous "Spencer with traps" photo taken
 by Liddell in August 2016 in Japan.

Spencer in 2010 was a suitably "dialectical" and “de-centered” figure, who had not yet crystalised into the rather drab and boring White Nationalist that he has since become. Spencer 2010 was much more willing to allow diverse viewpoints and to take his hand off the tiller. For example, contributing editors at AlternativeRight.com, of whom there were many, were quickly granted access to the back pages and could thus publish on their own without any oversight.

This was how my controversial anti-Boer-genocide article “Is Black Genocide Right?” was published. Although this merely reversed the questions being asked at the time about genociding Whites, by the likes of Susan Sontag and Noel Ignatiev, it was written in what I would now consider an unnecessarily triggering style. Although it was subsequently taken down, it is an example of the degree of freedom that contributing editors had.

Spencer’s back seat approach to editing, along with his coining of the term "Alternative Right," and of course his "internet-genic" charm, created enough creative critical mass to spark off the Alt-Right as a "big tent" counter-cultural movement and attract a group of great minds together. Meanwhile, other people, like Greg Johnson, were more laboriously doing something similar.

Harfang: In its first years, what were the main beliefs of the Alt-Right and who were its major advocates?

Liddell: In those early years, the movement’s main belief was essentially freedom of expression, freedom to say all the things that had been purged from political and even philosophical discourse for years. In addition to this, most of us were attracted to “vertical” values -- hierarchy, meritocracy, aspiration to the sacred, etc., in contrast to the the “horizontal” values of hegemonic liberalism, like equality.

The latest edition of Harfang

My article "Alternative Vertical" and Alex Kurtagic’s much more thorough "Equality as an Evil" were typical of this mindset. "Muh White race" wasn’t absent -- nor should it have been -- but it was just one element. Also, obsessive anti-Semitism was not part of our beliefs, although interest in Jewish power and scepticism about Jewish interests were clearly and quite rightly there.

In addition to myself, Andy Nowicki, Richard Spencer, Alex Kurtagic, and Greg Johnson, other important voices in the early days were Jack Donovan, Matt Forney, and Gwendolyn Taunton, not to mention the older generation of Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald, Derek Turner, Jonathan Bowden, Tom Sunic, Kerry Bolton, and Peter Brimelow, all of whom lent close support to the movement.

Harfang: Reno was a changing point in the history of the Alt-Right. Would you say that it was a mistake by Clinton?

Liddell: That's a bit of a gap in the narrative, as we haven’t discussed the period of around 18 months when Andy Nowicki and myself were Chief Editors of AlternativeRight.com, with sharply decreasing participation from Spencer, the shutting down of the site, our attempt to reestablish it, the rise of TRS from the Libertarian side, the co-option of the term "Alt-Right" by highly suspicious (((Hollywood Nazis))) like Andrew Anglin and Weev, and much, much more.

By the time Clinton made her Reno speech "alerting" normie Amerca to the "danger" of the Alt-Right, the movement had grown in all directions. On the one hand, you had the Stormerists and TRS, which by that time had moved to Jew-obsession, while on the other hand you had people like Milo, Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux, Ricky Vaughn, and even Steve Bannon fleetingly. In short, there was a full scale socio-cultural rebellion against "politics as usual." The Alt-Right became the banner and Trump became our candidate. Spencer had tossed the term "Alt-Right" in the gutter in December 2013, but by 2015 was proclaiming that he had always loved it.

When Hillary called out the "Alt Right" she was really just calling out this wide-ranging socio-cultural rebellion that was clearly bolstering her opponent. In short, she didn’t know what she was doing, and calling out the Alt-Right only strengthened this counter-cultural and ideologically diverse upsurge as they delighted in the attention.

Harfang: What did Reno change for the Alt-Right?

Liddell: Ultimately Reno was bad for the Alt-Right, as it made it into a "property," and we started to see more purity spiralling, especially, I noticed, from the TRS group. I was in their secret Facebook group and have plenty of information on all of them, and basically they were doing one purity spiral after another, attacking people like Davis Aurini, then Matt Forney, then Roosh, then Alt-Lighters, while also having squabbles with "Nazi-tard" elements like Renegade Radio and Iron March. I certainly consumed a lot of popcorn in those days! When they started to get into bed with obvious disruption agents like Anglin and Weev, I started to have serious doubts about their wisdom and sincerity, although I can't help liking Enoch as he is genuinely funny. Sven not so much.

Harfang: How would you describe the current Alt-Right movement?

Liddell: Fucked!

Harfang: And in the same vein, how does the 2018 Alt-Right differ from the original one?

Liddell: It is much more fucked than Alt-Right 2010!

Sorry to be glib. At our site we have just published an excellent article by James Lawrence called "Thoughts on the State of the Right." This really sets out the contrast between the healthy, virile, expansive, antifragile Alt-Right of the early years and the cracked, stale, petty, and perpetually infighting Alt-Right of 2018. Everyone should read it. Basically it shows that the person who understood the Alt-Right the least was actually Richard Spencer, which is too ironic to ever be funny.

Harfang: In a recent post you have advocated the use of the term Affirmative Right rather than Alt Right? Where does that term come from and why is such a change important?

Liddell: The change of the name of our site from Alternative Right (founded the same day that Richard Spencer shut down the original AlternativeRight.com site on Xmas Day 2013) to Affirmative Right (founded on Easter Monday 2018) was because I regard the tag Alt-Right as a hindrance in reaching the people we need to reach.

Also, I believe there there are fundamental weaknesses in the concept "Alt-Right." The Affirmative Right is an attempt to identify those weaknesses and deal with them. The main problem was that the Alt-Right had almost zero defences against being associated with past, failed movements like the Neo-Nazis and White Nationalism 1.0, as it is now called (a clear implication that the present Alt-Right has just degraded into White Nationalism 2.0, with Spencer, Heimbach, and Anglin, instead of Rockwell, as the focal figures).

Human Centipede Nationalism

Seeing the very obvious dangers as far back as 2014, nobody fought harder than me to address this weakness at the time, as I went head-to-head with Anglin in a series of articles, starting with "Andrew Anglin's Inverted Ghetto." RamZPaul also called out Anglin, and briefly Greg Johnson was on our side before doing a U-turn and cosying up to Anglin, even doing a sycophantic interview with Weev.

Sadly, too many in the Alt-Right didn’t take the threat of (((Stormerism))) seriously, while TRS came up with the moronic concept of “Don’t punch right, bro.” Anglin was essentially the lube that groups like the ADL and SPLC used to fuck America's First Amendment culture, which we saw culminating in the big deplatforming after Charlottesville. That had been prepared for years!

Spencer with a T-shirt advertising one
of his zombie websites.

Based on this, it is clear that the Alt-Right has serious blind spots. In particular it fails to understand moral power, which, in its essence, is a device for lessening opponents and opposition to any positive message you have. Also, the Alt-Right is skewed by the social dynamics of NEETs and "fundies" (by which I mean people on trust funds, or who own cotton plantations). The dominance of the movement by people in what are essentially economically juvenile states, means that the movement tends to be limited to those groups.

Since Reno and especially since Spencer’s crowning folly of Heilgate, the professional and social costs of being part of the Alt-Right have soared, and few in the movement have really taken this seriously, while some of the responses are risible. For example I heard some of the TRSers suggesting they should club together and employ anyone who got doxxed and fired. I would love to see them try that. Groups like TRS look like they are developing into little, isolated cults. Will they go the same way of TWP, where we recently saw an example of the kind of cult dynamics that take over such groups, and, if they do, who will be standing on the box, looking through the trailer window that time?

Optics just died

Harfang: Why not drop the term "Right"?

Liddell: I tried that when I wrote my article “Alternative Vertical.” I even went into explaining the origin of the term in the French Rvolution, etc., but "Alternative Vertical" would just confuse people. For better or worse, the term “Right” is connected with the political and philosophical ideas that I tend to favour, although on some matters I am a "leftie."

Harfang: Do you think the Alt-Right and the Affirmative Right still have the power to become a major power and influence in American politics,

Liddell: Let me rephrase the question in order to answer it: "Do you think those who favour eternal truths connected to the betterment of the individual and the health and strength of the group still have the power to become a major power and influence in American politics?”

I certainly hope so. But if we don’t, our ideas will still win even when America dies.

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