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.

THE CULTURE OF MANIPULATION

by James Lawrence

@JWLawrence85

The magnum opus of the late Sam Francis, Leviathan And Its Enemies, significantly expanded and improved upon James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution. One way in which Francis built upon the original framework of Burnham was to make a distinction between soft managerialism, the consent-manufacturing type practiced in Western ‘liberal democracies’, and hard managerialism, the coercive type practiced in the authoritarian states of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. This aspect of Francis’s theory deserves attention, I think, because it makes an important correction to Burnham that itself requires fuller clarification.

THOUGHTS ON THE STATE OF THE RIGHT

by James Lawrence

There’s no sense in mincing words anymore: the Alt-Right has hit a wall, and is faced with the hard task of pulling back and searching for a new course. The enemy media are (prematurely) claiming victory. Many progressives are hastening to vindicate the ‘antifa’ domestic terrorist movement, discarding the pretence that liberal misgivings about organised political violence hinge on anything more than crass utilitarianism.

My purpose here is to offer some thoughts on what has happened and how our side can hope to recover its ground. I do not wish to exaggerate the present difficulties, nor blame people in the Alt-Right for suffering a form of outsourced government repression. However, repression by those in power is a constant for us; what has changed is the effectiveness of this repression, which used to meet with a fluid, agile and durable target, and now increasingly enjoys a sluggish, clumsy and brittle one. One major reason for this is that prominent figures in the Alt-Right, protected by a widespread culture of hooting down internal dissent, took strategic and aesthetic decisions that have ended up transforming an antifragile movement into a destructible one.

AGAINST THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

by James Lawrence

@JWLawrence85

It is a good and necessary thing to take the red pill: to start seeing things as they really are, not as the delusional ruling ideology of a corrupted civilisation tells you they must be. But the red pill, in itself, is not a sufficient condition for true understanding.

Perhaps we can grasp this point by taking a second look at the iconic scene from The Matrix that inspired the ‘red pill’ metaphor. In this scene, Neo takes a red pill and wakes up from his simulated reality, to find himself in the real world: an ugly and dystopian future, ruled by intelligent machines, in which he has been serving all his life as one of countless human batteries in a huge electrical system called the Matrix. Weak from muscular atrophy, he is flushed out of the Matrix into an underground sewer, in which he flounders helplessly until a flying craft winches him out and takes him to safety. From this point, he is brought into the community of free humans, who teach him both the nature of the real world and how to act and fight within it. 

AMERICANS DREAM OF DEPORTING 'SLEEPERS'

 by James Lawrence

@JWLawrence85

As Vox Day so rightly says, Trump’s remark on DACA during his State of the Union address – “Americans are dreamers too” – was a masterstroke of rhetoric. On the minus side, I have to say I’m not as sanguine as Vox about Trump’s capacity to resist giving amnesty to 1.8 million illegal immigrants in exchange for a border wall – which, given that the job of guarding it would end up in the hands of a ruling elite determined to look the other way, would serve America about as well as the Great Wall served China when it was opened to the invading Manchus. Deporting the so-called DREAMers is vastly more important than building a border wall – and this, for all its importance, is only a single battle in the long metapolitical war against their patrons in the ruling elite.

HOW POWER INVENTED INDIVIDUALISM

by James Lawrence

The recent online debates between Alt-Righters and various classical liberal dissidents have resulted in a a string of victories for our side. In fact, the opposition has at times appeared too flimsy to be taken seriously. Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) has been ridiculed for nitpicking his way through his debate with Richard Spencer, then responding to criticism by placing the paper crown of the ‘liberalists’ upon his head; and even the more erudite Tarl Warwick (Styxhexenhammer666) could do little more than throw ‘what ifs’ at Greg Johnson’s case for an ethnostate.

But the question underlying these verbal catfights could not be of greater importance. We and our debating opponents both know that the Left has worked itself into a toxic cultural revolution from which it can no longer back down, and that this is generating a massive public backlash against it. The question, then, is whether this backlash will give rise to a truly viable reaction against the forces destroying the West – or whether it will end up in a miserable and futile Ghost Dance of liberalism, the very ideology that brought us to this point in the first place. Sargon/Benjamin deserves serious attention not because he is a serious thinker, but because he is an archetype of the seriously deluded Westerner, who sees how the Left wields and justifies its tyranny and still concludes that the only remedy is a double dose of liberalism.

IN PRAISE OF DECONSTRUCTING RACE AND GENDER

by James Lawrence

The year 2018 has only just started, and it’s already shaping up to be a very bad year for the proponents of the “horseshoe theory”. Last week, classical liberal and horseshoe enthusiast ‘Sargon of Akkad’ took on Richard Spencer in a three-hour Youtube debate – and not only made a fool of himself from the beginning, but had to be helped later on by SJW and male cat lady Kevin Logan, who according to Sargon’s theory should have sided instinctively with Spencer. The peddlers of watered-down red pills on the periphery of the Alt-Right must be wondering how long they can stay in business, taking money for blowing hot air at the Left while dismissing as “collectivist” and “immoral” the only sociopolitical movement that can actually fight it.

So let’s be magnanimous in victory, and throw the poor beleagured gatekeepers a vaguely horseshoe-shaped bone for them to crow over. Here it is: what if the Alt-Right stopped directly resisting progressivist efforts to “deconstruct” race, nation and gender, and instead started turning these critiques to its own advantage?

ARE WE RIGHT? (PART III)

 This is the concluding part of a three-part article. Go to Part I. Go to Part II.

by James Lawrence

It is time to deliver on the promise of this essay – which is, of course, an answer to the great question contained in its title. Can our movement honestly lay claim to the Rightist tradition of the West, which in turn leads back to the roots of our civilisation? Or do we represent a shallow, transitory and chimerical reaction of older Leftist ideas, like nationalism, against newer ones like multiculturalism?

In short, can the Alt-Right really call itself the True Right?

BREAKING THE LIBERAL SHELL

Previously published at our back-up site on September 17th.

by James Lawrence

Contrary to popular belief, the natural world provides several parallels for the behaviour of decadent humans. One of the most dramatic of these is found in the behaviour of a caterpillar after being stung by a parasitoid wasp, which injects its larvae directly into the caterpillar’s body. As the wasp larvae feed on its insides and grow to maturity, the parasitised caterpillar goes on munching away on vegetation as if nothing had happened — until the larvae finally chew their way out of its body. Whereupon the caterpillar spins a protective coccoon around them and ferociously defends them from predators as if they were its own young, until the wasps are ready to fly away and the exhausted caterpillar helpfully starves to death.

ARE WE RIGHT? (PART II)

by James Lawrence

This is the second part of a three-part article. Go to Part I.

We have explored the question of how to clearly define ‘the Right’, and found that the macro-historical pattern identified by Bertrand de Jouvenel provides us with the best rule of thumb. In de Jouvenel’s narrative, Power (the governing authority) is shown to expand itself by allying with the lowest classes of people so as to subvert the social order, which is defended by traditional authorities such as the aristocracy. If the governing authority wins this struggle, the outcome is a levelled or inverted social landscape dominated by an unconstrained Power; if the aristocrats win it, they establish a strong social order overseen by a constrained Power, whose legitimacy depends on its role as a guardian and symbol of this order.

ARE WE RIGHT? (PART I)

by James Lawrence

Long before choosing to involve myself in the Alt-Right in 2012, I used to lurk around the fragmentary dissident Rightist scene as a passive observer, red-pilling myself on various topics. From that time back in the early 2000s up to the present day, as the range of official thought has narrowed and dissent has expanded, I have watched one truth go from a pessimistic suspicion to an article of faith among the awakened. It is this: the so-called “mainstream Right” is not a secret sympathiser or potential ally, but a deadly enemy that loathes us just as much as the Left.

The “free competition of Left and Right” in the “democratic public sphere” is a sham. “Conservative” politicians – those who are not outright imposters – are essentially client rulers, allotted some political power in return for pacifying and misdirecting our people, true advocacy for that people’s interests being forbidden. Disturbing as this may be, accepting it meant that dissidents no longer had to cut themselves loose from all ideological tradition by framing themselves as “beyond Left and Right”. The modern Left was indeed the same force that had bathed humanity in blood under the guise of Communism; the Right, properly understood, was the antithesis to this force; but the “mainstream Right” known to the general public was a kept eunuch of the enemy.

OF NAZI PUGS AND SOVIET PIGS

by James Lawrence

In Scotland, a hate crime trial is currently being held over a “grossly offensive” incident last year, in which a local yob persuaded his ugly and defective pet beast to pay homage to a murderous 20th century regime. The defendant is the Chief Constable in command of Police Scotland, a notoriously defective police force, which has previously been known to arrest people for internet comments but leave young women to die in mortal emergencies. He has been accused of a hate crime for his sick impersonation of an NKVD commissar, in which he not only disrespected the memory of millions of victims of the Soviet regime, but actually sent thugs in uniforms to harass and imprison a man for saying something he didn’t like. The defence pleads the case for treating the event and the police force in question as a bad joke, but local people continue to express disgust at the lack of taste, especially as the offending behaviour was made at the defendant’s workplace.

…Whoops! Sorry, that doesn’t quite sound like the wonderful free democratic society of modern Britain, does it? Let’s try again.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH "INCLUSIVENESS"?

by James Lawrence

One of Britain’s state-owned Fake News outlets, Channel 4, is screening a new “documentary” at 10pm today entitled Angry, White and American. By way of a preview – and, presumably, in order to set our expectations for honest journalism at an appropriately low level – we have been treated to a clip of an angry black man haranguing a perfectly calm and polite white man. With a forbearance that surely evokes the fiery halo of ‘Saint Mandela of Tyre’, Gary Younge manages to verbally spar with Richard Spencer for a few jump-cut-ridden minutes, before furiously storming off in the sudden conviction that his interviewee “is not even worth challenging”.

WHY LIBERALS ARE THE REAL FAUSTIANS

by James Lawrence

In the discourse of the True Right, one does not have to look hard for the influence of the German philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and his two-volume tome Decline of the West. Even where we do not hear the name, this influence betrays itself in the use of terms like ‘Faustian Man’ and ‘Caesarism’, as well as in the general tendency to contrast a lost organic ‘Culture’ with a soulless and materialistic ‘Civilisation’. But while these conceptual rays of enlightenment are widely appreciated, few of us muster the determination to squint for long at the darker core of Spengler’s theory, because its notorious pessimism and fatalism might annihilate our entire project for European resurgence.

EUROPE’S THIRD STATE

by James Lawrence

Among those who seek the defence and resurgence of Europe, one common point of controversy is the issue of national independence versus European unification. Perhaps one reason for heightened controversy at present is that Richard Spencer has long been a champion of unification and a devil’s advocate for the EU, while Greg Johnson favours sovereign nation-states for all viable ethnic groups in Europe. So I should start this piece by stating that my own position on this question, which is in favour of unification, has nothing to do with the dispute between these two figures.

STRAIGHTENING OUT THE HORSESHOE THEORY

by James Lawrence 

@JWLawrence85

As I have argued in a recent article, there is no going back to classical liberalism, and the illusion that we can do so is a major factor preventing our people from defending themselves. Liberalism has opened the door to culture-destroying progressivism, masked its takeover of our countries by presenting a show of formal continuity, and lacks the means of purging it. Those who would save the West are thus forced to search outside liberalism for a political framework that can do the job.

THE COSMOPOLITAN CLASS

by James Lawrence

Thanks to the corporate purge of Alt-Right outlets after Charlottesville, my old articles on ‘Cosmopolitans’ and ‘Cosmopolitanism’ have vanished into the dankest dungeons of the Goolag. At the same time, the word Cosmopolitan has gained public notoriety after having been used by Stephen Miller to slap down the Fake News, sending them into a tizzy over the supposed “anti-Semitic roots” of this word (although I am not suggesting that Miller acquired the word from me or anyone else on the Alt-Right). The longer article on the theory of the Cosmopolitan elite probably deserves to be reposted in full, but I would like to first recap its basic ideas in a briefer and more accessible way.

IN DEFENCE OF COUNTERSIGNALLING

by James Lawrence

According to Wikipedia, countersignalling is "the behavior where agents with the highest level of a given property invest less into proving it than individuals with a medium level of the same property". In other words, it means "showing off by refusing to show off" - and thereby differentiating yourself from those who have to show off, in order to distinguish themselves from those who have nothing to show off. A good example is seen in the behaviour of old-money aristocrats who downplay their wealth and disdain to spend money on frivolities, distinguishing themselves from parvenus who have to buy all sorts of status symbols in order to distinguish themselves from the working class.

GETTING MEDIAEVAL

by James Lawrence 

It is a good thing that mediaevalists know all about doing homage, going to Canossa, and suchlike. Given the direct descent of progressivism from the early-modern Protestantism, humanism and classicism that overthrew the mediaeval era, it is not surprising that most people today still view that era as a period of barbarism. But the fort of anti-mediaevalism has long lain undefended in the progressivist rear, and mediaevalists (like Regine Pernoud) are generally free to walk up and demolish whole sections of it. Claims that mediaeval Europeans did not bathe or have table manners, that the Spanish Inquisition was a terrible holocaust, or that the scholars opposing Columbus in the 1490s thought that the Earth was flat, have all gone into the urban myths dustbin.

But now along comes the Alt-Right with a few 'Deus Vult' memes, and suddenly mediaevalism is controversial again. An achingly politically-correct article notes the Alt-Right's habitual use of mediaeval themes, and casts a suspicious eye on scholars who may be using the history of mediaeval Europe as a "safe space to be white" while "resisting critical theory". Expect a rush by mediaevalists to signal their political correctness by approving a non-white job grab in their field, rehashing old canards about benign Muslim influence and Andalusian paradise, and pretending to give a respectful hearing to "we-wuz-kangz" Afrocentric gibberish about European historical figures.

RACIAL PRESTIGE WARRIORS

by James Lawrence

The recent scenes of campus insurrection, violent intimidation and property damage at Evergreen State College in Washington were strikingly reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which a comparably self-righteous horde of students was exempted from the rule of law to unleash their savagery on a cowering society. They should also provide the last nail in the coffin of this "racial reconciliation" bullshit that Americans are always droning on about - albeit for very different reasons, with conservatives wringing their hands and looking to heaven, and progressives aggressively holding out their own hands while looking to the conservatives' wallets.