The Essence Of Dissident Politics

This is a long post and more philosophical than topical so if you have some time to waste, you can read the whole thing after the jump.

This post is something I started working on prior to the 2020 election which seems like an eternity ago, back when the outcome of that “election” was still theoretically in doubt. As we approached the “election” I could see the handwriting was on the wall and that Trump was going to “lose”, one way or the other. Gone would be even the pretense of a two-party system and I still believe that. The Afghanistan debacle, raging inflation, executive overreach, all of that stuff that is getting /ourguys/ into a frenzy right now? It will be forgotten by the 2022 election. My prediction right now is for some modest gains for the Dems in the House and likely a seat or two flipping in the Senate. The GOP has 20 Senate seats to protect in 2022 and the Dems only have 14. If the Left does grab enough to make a more solid majority, you can kiss the filibuster goodbye and that will mean the overreach and expansion we are seeing now will be recalled as the days of small government. 

With Trump gone, flawed and generally useless as he was, there is basically no one at the national or even state level who will represent heritage Americans. Perhaps we will receive the occasional platitudes but real representation? Not anymore. What passes for “conservative” politics in the future will be people like Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio and Richard Grennell. A far cry from the days of Goldwater and Buchanan. What will that look like and what will that mean for people like me and other White working and middle class Americans, the people who still make up the backbone of America but who are also resisting the push toward a new, comprehensive globalism? Already we are seeing the Republican establishment declaring that what is needed is more pandering to minorities, especially mestizos, once again leaving White voters taken for granted. We have no home and we have no friends.

What this means simply is that we will be political dissidents, opposed by and oppressed by the ruling class and without representation or even a voice on the national political stage. That might suck for a while but it isn’t all bad as there is a long and honorable tradition of political dissent throughout human history.

Or if you are a little younger you might remember this image:

A lone Chinese man in standing in front of tanks to block their path during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 . Allegedly no one knows who he was or what happened after the picture was taken. It is a safe bet he was arrested and shot in short order. I am sure he never knew how iconic that photo would become.

That brings me to the world of dissident politics in America today. Most of my life there have been very few real dissidents in politics. Maybe the odd John Birch Society guy or the leftover true believer hippie Marxist with his long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, but for the most part we lined up on either side of the fake and gay officially approved political spectrum and we did our thing. Some of us had Reagan-Bush or Dole-Kemp signs in our yard and others had Clinton-Gore or even Dukakis-Bentsen signs. We believed in the system for the most part. It was still a relatively homogeneous society and the political fights seemed like intra-family squabbles rather than existential threats, in spite of some of the doomsday rhetoric employed.

That started to change with the George W. Bush presidency but it really took off with the Obama era. Rather than being the one who would bring “healing” to America, Obama exacerbated the divisions as the first President who openly hated the country he was elected to lead and hated the people who made that country. This corresponded with white America’s decreasing percentage of the population, dropping below 65% for the first time in American history.

What this ushered in was a world where the once assumed political dichotomy of “Left vs Right”, indistinguishable from “Democrats vs Republicans”, was shattered although most Americans did not and still do not realize it. There are a lot of White working class voters who think that the Democrats still are the party of the working man and unions, when the reality is that most Democrats despise the White working class and would gladly see them dead. Likewise most rank and file Republicans think that the GOP is looking out for White, middle class, evangelical/Catholic Americans when the GOP is mostly concerned with cheap labor and tax cuts for big business and doing whatever it takes to “support” Israel.

On the dissident Left you see groups like antifa and the “Democratic Socialists” who are constantly pushing the liberal Overton Window to the extremes. Not that many years ago it would have been unthinkable to have an open socialist running for the Democrat party nomination but in 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders was a semi-serious contender and most of the other candidates running espoused similar positions. Many mainstream liberal commentators either refuse to condemn antifa’s political violence or even actively support it. At both the national party level, represented by Democrats, and the intellectual vanguard, the Left in America has charged far to the extreme compared to where they were as recently as the 2008 Presidential campaign. This is most clearly seen in the open and uniform anti-White animus proclaimed by every significant Democrat but also in acceptance of radical “environmentalism”, support for open borders, sweeping proposals by the Biden team to undermine the 2nd Amendment, adding every sexual deviancy under the sun to abortion as articles of faith and a wholesale embrace of identity politics.

On the political right (and as a side note, I still use terms like left and right, liberal and conservative, to represent the polar opposites of our political world even though they don’t apply anymore), conservative discourse is managed with an iron-fist by a phalanx of gatekeepers who set the boundaries and police those boundaries ruthlessly. While the Left is terrified to rein in the more radical elements, the Right has no problem doing so. People like Jonah Goldberg, David French and Ben Shapiro are at least as concerned with keeping more “extreme” elements out of their little club as they are in “owning the liberals”. People who color outside of the allowable lines on the Right are shunned by conservative gatekeepers as vigorously as they are attacked by the far left. The Trump candidacy and administration has revealed that the Quisling Conservatives such as Bill Kristol have always been a greater threat than the Left. While degenerate trannies are welcomed at CPAC, people who advocate for the bulk of conservative voters are shunned. This has been going on for decades, ever since the neocons won the conservative civil war and banished the paleocons to Outer Darkness.

In general, the Democrats are playing a completely different game with different rules while the Republicans are still trying to re-elect Ronald Reagan and pretending they live in an 80% White nation. The Left is energized by revolution, the Right is engaged by nostalgia. Even “Make America Great Again” plays to the power of nostalgia by appealing to White voters who long for the days of the high trust society that landed men on the moon and won the Cold War. That America is long gone and won’t come back without a lot of very hard times.

Out in the political wilderness where Pat Buchanan still writes and is proven to have been correct all along like a John The Baptist in a tailored suit instead of a camel hair loincloth, there are a merry band of people who dissent from the fake and gay Uni-Party political scene. We don’t have any power but we do have some influence. We also don’t have any sort of unifying philosophy, instead consisting mostly of a slew of online voices all saying similar stuff. This is my attempt to distill down the basics, the essence of being a political dissident, getting past the trolling and the memes to what it really means to dissent in the 2020s. 

While I call myself part of the Dissident Right, that term is in danger of growing as stale and cringe as “Alt-Right”. The same cast of egomaniacs, grifters, controlled opposition and social misfits still dominates the scene although the DR umbrella includes many people and organizations who were never really part of the Alt-Right, like VDARE, Jared Taylor and American Renaissance, The Zman, John Derbyshire (the originator of the term Dissident Right) and many others who are linked on my blogroll. Some of the goofier/creepier members of the Alt-Right like Richard Spencer and Matt Heimbach have apparently turned into neo-Marxists and are completely irrelevant today after their shilling for China during the early days of the coronavirus.

Many of us on the dissident Right have walked a similar path. We were generic Republicans that listened to Rush Limbaugh and read National Review who perhaps supported the Tea Party movement before growing disenchanted with the Republican party and dallying with libertarianism. 2016 proved the folly of that with the nomination of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld by the Libertarian Party and the sudden emergence of Donald Trump. Trump seemed to be something completely new and a lot of people voted for him in the secrecy of the voting booth, never thinking he would win. But he did and almost 63 million Americans suddenly realized they were not alone. Trump winning was great but the response from the Left was even better and spawned a million memes. The people who make up the silent core of America seemingly rose up and kicked the powers-that-be right in the junk and it was glorious.

The honeymoon was short lived. It seemed that no sooner had the words “America first” passed Trump’s lips that he jettisoned that for the same old stuff. The wall on the southern border, his signature promise, was set aside for tax cuts for the same corporations that oppose him in lockstep. A less interventionist foreign policy was hijacked by the Israel lobby and after four years we were still monkeying around in conflicts around the world and threatening to expand our involvement with a war against Iran. Gone was Steve Bannon and in his place oozed Trump’s loathsome son-in-law Jared Kushner. The wall was essentially forgotten, Trump’s supporters were systematically censored and silence, deplatformed and cut-off from the financial system and all he did was threaten to monitor the situation. He seemed more interested in buying Greenland than stemming the flow of illegals and even worse was all-in for bringing millions of low cost “skilled” workers into the country to replace Americans. While American cities burned all summer in 2020, “law and order” Trump was tweeting impotently.

Millions of us now find ourselves in the political wilderness. The mainstream Republican party hates us and wishes we would just off ourselves with opioids. The MAGA cultists flip out over anything other than obsequious affection for Trump no matter what he is doing or saying. The Left considers us no better than Nazis and speaks in ominous tones about re-education camps, show trials and even killing us. That makes those millions of people the contemporary political dissidents, without a home in either party and with essentially no representation at any level of government.

It is easy to point out that none of the power players want us but the much harder question is to ask what do we want? A lot of people have tried to answer that question and many have tried to harness this dissent and mold it into their own image. The most notable attempt at creating a new political movement went by the moniker “Alt-Right”. As the dust settled from the 2016 election, it looked briefly as if the Alt-Right would be a significant political force but that illusion was quickly shattered, starting with the cartoonish made-for-TV villain Richard Spencer being filmed shouting “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory!” which was responded to by several people in the audience tossing up Nazi salutes for the conveniently present cameras, including journalists for The Atlantic who put the now infamous event on a Youtube video. Spencer, a man I have dubbed the Snidely Whiplash of the Right, had to have chosen these words intentionally and as he knew that there would be hostile journalists in attendance, shouting the words Hail Victory which is the English version of a well-known German phrase “Sieg Heil“, was intended to send a message that few outside of that room supported. Even without the clowns throwing up the Nazi salute, the media was going to pick up on his use of that phrase. Spencer might be a bored rich kid LARPing as a political dissident but he isn’t stupid. The Alt-Right might have survived Hailgate but it wasn’t going to survive Charlottesville and the Unite The Right rally. Unite the Right (UTR) was intended as a protest against the removal of Confederate statues and as a line in the sand. What happened was a coordinated effort by the government and antifa to cause violent conflict. The events were bad enough but when James Field ran into a crowd of antifa and Heather Heyer died as a result, it was like a dream come true for the Left. Suddenly the Alt-Right were violent killers. People who attacked UTR demonstrators got away scot-free and people who defended themselves were imprisoned. James Fields became a poster-boy for this supposedly violent White supremacist menace and is now in prison for life, a modern day political prisoner in the land of the free and home of the brave.

The Alt-Right died in Charlottesville. Richard Spencer did a few more public appearances at colleges doing his shtick but he has quit doing that and is now reduced to random mutterings on Twitter. The label Alt-Right is so toxic that no one serious still uses it. Even the insufferable Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, who styles himself a super-genius and intellectual, and the One True Alt-Right leader, seems to have stopped using the term, the link on his blog that leads to the 16 points of the Alt-Right now reads “NATIONALIST RIGHT: THE 16 POINTS” although the actual points are still called Alt-Right when you go to the link. He actually occasionally posts interesting stuff, if you can wade through his public masturbatory self-congratulations, his one-sided feuds with random people and the grotesque sycophants in the comment section.

Anyway, the Alt-Right “brand” is pretty much shot and almost no one uses it anymore. A new, broader consensus has coalesced around the term “Dissident Right”. The term was coined by John Derbyshire, one time National Review writer and current VDARE contributor, in a 2012 post titled: John Derbyshire: Who Are We?—The “Dissident Right”?. He writes in part:

So what do we call ourselves? I’m going to make a pitch for “Dissident Right.”

The word “dissident” has its roots in Latin dis-, meaning “apart,” and sedere, “to sit.” Dissidents sit apart from the main crowd, don’t join in the community singing, and refuse to applaud the Emperor’s new clothes.

Dissidence is a very honorable estate, made so by the brave dissidents of the great totalitarian empires.

I like that and I have always liked John, even when he was writing for National Review before being unceremoniously expelled for WrongThink and now he is forever banned from the hallowed halls of collaborationist Conservatism Inc…..

…the hushed, oak-paneled, Chambers-of-Commerce-financed precincts of Conservatism Inc., whose entrance is now barred against me by an angel with a flaming sword.

He has always had a way with words that I find delightful. Being Dissident Right covers a lot of territory. I would put many of the people on the “Gun-Right”, the 2nd Amendment absolutists, in this camp. Most of the former Alt-Right types like Greg Johnson at Counter-Currents should be included as well. VDARE would be in this category although ostensibly they are very specific on the question of “immigration patriotism” but even as such they are well outside of the mainstream and thus find themselves as dissidents on the Right. The Zman is of course Dissident Right. A lot of people on the “prepper/survivalist” side of the culture, like Western Rifle Shooters, would meet my classification of Dissident Right even if they don’t call themselves that but they also commonly link to Zman. The thing about the Dissident Right is that most people don’t consciously call themselves DR, they just kind of are and that is also nice because you don’t get into the arguments over who is or is not real Dissident Right as you often did with the Alt-Right. I think this is mostly positive because trying to define such a disparate group can be perilous. Some on the DR are into Julius Evola and Spengler and talk about very esoteric political theories, from propertarianism to neoreaction. Others just want to prevent their country from turning into the sort of places people flee from. A lot of dissidents don’t have a complex political theory they are advocating, they just want to be left alone but have come to realize that the endlessly intrusive busybodies in some corners of America can’t stand to see people happy and content without permission. But there has to be something that unites us all to stand against the prevailing orthodoxy of the mostly indistinguishable endless war, corporate-owned two party duopoly. So here is my attempt to define and distinguish what that means.

The essence of being a political dissident in 2021 and beyond is this:

We are a movement based in realism, and we respond to the world as it really is rather than reacting to the world as we wish it was.

Being a dissident means being a realist. It would be nice if the flowery rhetoric of “all men are created equal” really meant that all men were equal in every respect, rather than all men have certain rights, but my inability to dunk a basketball or do math is evidence this is not true, never has been true and furthermore never will be true.

You can’t change human nature by passing laws or tinkering with the tax code. It has been illegal to kill someone else in cold blood for most of Western history. The Hebrew scriptures contain both prohibitions against murder in the Ten Commandments and command the death penalty for murder, long before what we know as Western civilization came into existence. We have always imposed the harshest punishment on those who intentionally take the life of another. In spite of this, we still see murder committed every single day in America. There isn’t a law that will change human nature.

Part of operating in reality is biological realism and this is perhaps the most forbidden topic of all.

The most basic building block of human biology is reproduction and therefore the most defining characteristic of humans is our gender which is synonymous with sex. Despite what people with rainbow flags in their profiles think, a man putting on panties is not a woman, no matter how loudly they screech that they are women. It simply doesn’t matter and no amount of pretend will change it. Saying that out loud in 2021 is dissenting from the accepted narrative and can get you fired and banned from social media. Likewise, two guys sodomizing each other are not “married”, even if they both wore wedding dresses and registered at Neiman Marcus. Homosexuality is an aberration, not a lifestyle choice equivalent to a normal heterosexual couple. Sex and gender are immutable because they are encoded in who each of us is at the most basic level, right in our chromosomes. 

The next foundation of human biology is race. In a time when we are told simultaneously that race is a “social construct” and also that White people are all inherently tainted with “racism” and “White privilege”, the simple truth remains as true today: after gender, the most distinguishing, predictive characteristic of human beings is their race. Race is not “skin color” but is a deeply coded biological classification and people who try to use “skin color” as a substitute for race are cucks and idiots.

Back in the dark ages of a decade ago, when police released a description of a wanted subject, it was always gender and race “A White female” or a “black male”, followed by their height. If police are looking for a black man, then they don’t really need to pay attention to me for that crime. They also don’t need to consider female suspects. 

When you examine people based on their basic immutable characteristics of gender and race, you start to see patterns emerging. Those patterns demonstrate the futility of thinking that a society founded on a European model can succeed in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society. 

This is the most bright and clear line that divides NormieCons from Dissidents. Most NormieCons are nice people and don’t want other people to think poorly of them so they will toe the statist line when it comes to race and human sexuality, even though that line is constantly moving. Even after decades of the shifting window, the average NormieCon will still be thwarted by the simple threat of being called a “racist”. For the dissident, slurs like “racist” are meaningless because what matters is what is, not what others think ought to be.

Another part of a realism based polity is a realistic pragmatism. Libertarians will talk endlessly about how they would reduce the size of government or how they would be fine with open borders if we got rid of the social welfare system. That all sounds great while sipping some craft beer with a group of buddies all wearing ironic t-shirts but in the real world today there is absolutely no appetite for eliminating the social welfare system? Maybe some people support getting rid of some parts but do you think a hypothetical general referendum on eliminating Medicare would get 10% of the vote? 1%?

In a lot of ways, libertarians suffer from the same Utopian optimism that liberals are infected with.

It isn’t just cringe libertarians being unrealistic. Too many people in the Dissident Right harbor some these ridiculous fantasies where they are going to red-pill so many normies on twitter that a mighty army of modern day crusaders is going to rise up and sweep the infidel mestizos from our land. The real situation is that for every American red-pilled, 1000 mestizos successfully cross the southern border. Most White Americans are too caught up in sportsball and who some celebrity twit is sleeping with this week to worry about what is going on. Add in jobs and family and the task of waking up a critical mass of our people is daunting. Or 2A absolutists who are seem to believe that if they hurf and blurf on social media enough, the ATF will be disbanded and the NFA repealed. It isn’t going to happen, not through the political means we traditionally relied upon. 

I liked this quote from the recent Charles Murray book, Facing Reality. 

Realism is the central feature of a political dissident. 

What else does it mean to be a dissident?

Being A Dissident Means A Willingness To Be Unpopular

If you are looking to have lots of adoring fans on social media, being a dissident is the wrong way to go. People like comfortable, familiar notions and this is especially true of BoomerCons. They want to rant and rave about them stinkin’ lib’rals ruining the big cities and never ask why liberal run places like Vermont are still quite pleasant while inner cities are hellholes of violent crime. Go to twitter and see how many idiots with random leftie accounts have tens of thousands of followers and then see how many followers the average dissident has. It is a stark difference. Saying what is popular is easy.

Back when I first started blogging, in the very earliest days of the medium, the formula for getting a lot of views was pretty obvious: don’t post anything too controversial, post a lot of stuff and form connections with other bloggers who will create a circular referral system. Someone like Christian blogger Tim Challies is a great example. Most of his stuff was pretty mild but he was an early adopter of blogging, he put out new stuff every day and almost everyone linked to him. I rarely read anything from Tim that was noteworthy but people did read him in enormous numbers. The same is true on Youtube. Put out content, don’t say anything naughty and you can build a following.

If you write things that make people uncomfortable, it is hard to build an audience. People don’t like to be challenged.

You also risk losing a lot of “friends”. A big reason I axed my original Facebook account was that I found myself self-censoring a lot of things because I was “friends” with so many family members and people I knew a long time ago. Honestly who cares what someone I knew from high school in the 1980s and haven’t spoken to since thinks or is doing? The few people I did interact with regularly turned out to be people that I didn’t hang out with in school. You can’t be a political dissident and also keep everyone happy because most people are happiest when they aren’t being challenged. 

Having friends and being popular in the gulag isn’t a winning strategy.

Being A Dissident Means Operating Apart From And Around The Power Centers Rather Than Trying To Co-Opt Those Centers

Dissidents don’t expect to win the next election. Or the one after that. In general voting itself is pretty much fake and gay unless you are writing in Pat Buchanan or voting in Dem primaries for Bernie just to cause trouble. 

Every single institution in the West is aligned against us. There is nowhere to turn. Any attempt to use those institutions to your advantage is counter-productive and likely dangerous as they are full of people who will happily turn you in.

That means that for the dissident, our model is upside down compared to what we usually assume. We are local –> regional –> national. Our organizing efforts start next door and across the street, with neighbors we know and can somewhat trust. The people trying to form new national movements? Either they are dumb or they are controlled opposition. We are nowhere near the place to impact national events. You couldn’t get a real dissident on the ballot for any position higher than a very localized board of some sort. Look at Steve King from Iowa, his own party forced him out because what he said upset people who weren’t going to vote Republican anyway.

To the dissident, centralized power is an obstacle to work around, not a means to an end. Our tactics must seek to sidestep and avoid the power centers, not co-opt them. Our thinking must change and shift radically away from working within the system and toward working around the system (while perhaps throwing some sand in the gears).

It is quite likely that many of us won’t live to see the end of our struggle. I will be 50 soon and even though my physical condition is better than it has been in a long time, my window of effectiveness will start to close over the next decade. What I am trying to do I am doing for my kids and eventually my grandkids. The time horizon is measured in decades, not in months or years.

The dissident must not get discouraged by a lack of perceived progress day to day. Our strategy must be for the long term. Our enemies have been slowly working through the institutions and systems for longer than anyone reading this has been alive, being discouraged because change doesn’t come overnight is poison for our movement. The people on the far Left who started their march through the institutions are mostly dead but they died knowing the path was set in motion for the future. We need to be content to die secure in the knowledge that we did all we could to pave the way for our posterity to succeed. 

The dissident must not chase the short term gain at the expense of the long term goal. 

There isn’t much of a chance of seeing a major uprising from heritage Americans. It just isn’t in the cards, especially when so many of our people still have or at least perceive having so much still to lose. “Sure the country is going down the toilet but I still live comfortably day to day” is the mindset of most of us. This is to be expected and has historical precedence. 

At best we will see a single digit percentage of like minded people who will be even peripherally engaged in the fight. It is well documented that only around 3% of colonists fought against the British empire to wrest control of what is now the United States from the crown. While most sat on the sidelines, a noble few took up arms and often lost their lives to cast off British rule. 

Not only should we not expect to see most of our people actively aiding us but many will not even passively help behind the scenes while many more will actively seek to undermine us. Not only will we be fighting against the ruling powers, the hostile cosmopolitan alien elite and the hordes of people from foreign lands but often we will be engaged with our own people who are willing to rat us out in order to gain some advantage from their oppressors. This is true whether you are talking about political speech or more active, “kinetic” engagement. 

A struggle where you have none of the institutional or numerical advantages requires thinking like an insurgent. Being an insurgent means being sneaky and devious, using your brain instead of brawn. It also means abandoning the rules of engagement, whether those are rhetorical or physical. 

Insurgents understand that the rules imposed by the ruling class are designed to prevent the ruling class from being deposed. 

That is just the simple fact of the matter and being pissed or upset about it doesn’t change it. You can beat your head against the wall of rules or you can find ways to operate around the rules. The Viet Cong didn’t line up in a neat formation and exchange rifle fire with the Americans. The IRA didn’t get into pitched battle with the British occupying forces. The Taliban didn’t march out of the mountains to take on American troops supported by gunships. Insurgents don’t fight on the terms of their opponents and they don’t allow themselves to get engaged where and how their enemy is the strongest. 

So yeah, they are going to be hypocrites and change their deeply held beliefs on a dime, and they don’t care. The rules are not about fair play, they are about keeping the enemies of the elites from rising up.

—–

Those are a few of the basics I have identified. It isn’t intended to be an all inclusive list and also not to be a line in the sand, something you must agree with in total. 

What is not on the list is as important as what did make the list.

There isn’t a specific economic system listed. Nor a particular religious affiliation. Nor any pet peeve special interests, no “Southern nationalism” or “move to the Pacific Northwest”. 

One of the biggest issues in the Dissident Right is a holdover from the Alt-Right, and it is the tendency to purity spiral. Many of us are fighting over the hypothetical eventual outcome of a victorious dissident right before the have even started to fight in earnest.

There are radical ancaps, paleocons, race realists, non-loony libertarians, 2nd Amendment absolutists, monarchists, neo-reactionaries, nazbol/NatSoc types and everything in-between in the movement. While we share a general sense of the things that are wrong, we have very different ideas for how to move forward.

The most important thing to remember right now is that whatever eventual form it takes, a new society formed after the fall of the current society will almost certainly be better than what we have right now. For my part, I would rather we hash these things out afterwards instead of fighting over the outcome right now. 

Along those lines I would suggest that people who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time picking fights with ideologically similar individuals or who are constantly squabbling online with others on /ourside/ are either immature idiots or controlled opposition. I have no problem with mocking people like Charlie Kirk but most of us know who is on /ourside/ and who isn’t. Stay clear of people who exist only to cause trouble and drama. If your ego is so fragile that you need to constantly inflate your own self-worth, you aren’t really of any use to us.

Being a political dissident above all requires a radical change to how we think. Confining our minds to the paradigms that have been created by people who hate us has led us to the brink of calamity and only by refusing to think, speak and act within the boundaries they try to force us into will see us safely through to the other side.