The Hard Right

October 31, 2017 Hunter Wallace Alt-Right, Alternative Right, Neo-Nazis, White Advocacy, White Nationalism 98

I’ve tried to avoid these public debates.

When I have seen something that other people in our movement are doing that I disagree with, I have kept my mouth shut. There have been many such occasions over the last two years. As a rule, I have erred on the side of solidarity because of my belief that public infighting on the internet crippled the White Nationalist movement in the 2000s. It is wiser sometimes to remain silent.

I’ve joked in the past that the first rule of White Nationalism 1.0 was that everyone hated everyone else and wasted those years jockeying for the top position. From my perspective, this inability to work with others was the defining feature of White Nationalism 1.0. More than anything else, it was extreme individualism and the anonymous nature of shitposting on online forums which created the low-trust environment which prevented us from moving forward. I finally got so tired of the backbiting that I stopped identifying altogether as a White Nationalist around 2011.

White Nationalism since 2008 has been defined by the rise of the Alt-Right which has been described as White Nationalism 2.0. This contrast between “White Nationalism 1.0” and “White Nationalism 2.0” was discussed in months before the Unite the Right rally. In everything I wrote about the subject, I emphasized that the key difference was a desire to get along and work with others. It was the “1.0s” who spent all their time tearing each other down and the “2.0s” had moved beyond that.

In hindsight, I will admit that many of the “1.0s” were right to be skeptical of the Unite the Right rally. It was predicted at the time that the unity we hoped to achieve in Charlottesville wouldn’t last two weeks. There had been countless attempts to hold these unity events in the past. Every previous attempt to foster unity in the White Nationalist movement had been defeated by personalities jockeying for position. The “1.0s” were also extremely skeptical of inviting the Alt-Lite to participate. They were right on that score as well as the fallout showed the Alt-Lite was solely about promoting brands.

To be completely candid, I am writing this as an observer. I identify as a Southern Nationalist. I’ve written volumes about the differences between White Nationalism and Southern Nationalism. I won’t go into that here except to note that there is some overlap between the two. We both believe that race exists and race matters. We both believe that Whites are in decline in the United States. We have similar views on political correctness, multiculturalism, immigration, refugee resettlement, etc. Generally, the way I see it is that I am focused on my own people, but I am supportive of Whites elsewhere.

Unlike some people, I don’t get too worked up about labels. I can tell you all the flaws of White Nationalism and the Alt-Right. I’m even skeptical of Southern Nationalism. These labels have different meanings to different people which haven’t been fully fleshed out. The difference we are going to talk about here today is the Alt-Right and its relationship with White Nationalism. This seems to be at the core of the present controversy over Unite the Right and the White Lives Matter rally.

Is the Alt-Right a euphemism for White Nationalism? Does the Alt-Right include National Socialism? I don’t think these questions have been adequately answered.

My view is that the Alt-Right was always conceived as a broader space than White Nationalism. It was defined negatively against mainstream conservatism. Originally, the Alt-Right was an umbrella term for rightwing tendencies which were considered fringe rightwing movements like White Nationalism, paleoconservatism and libertarianism. I’ve written in the past that the hallmarks of the Alt-Right are a focus on truth, identity and iconoclasm. This is not the same thing as White Nationalism which is focused exclusively on race and the welfare and interests of White people. The Alt-Right has lots of ideas which are drawn from troll culture, paleoconservatism and libertarianism.

Seen in this way, the Alt-Right is the big space on the Right outside of mainstream conservatism. It includes, but isn’t synonymous with, White Nationalism, Southern Nationalism, National Socialism as well as some forms of paleoconservatism, libertarianism and the troll culture of messageboards. Because the Alt-Right is defined negatively against mainstream conservatism, its various tribes of castaways lack internal cohesion, many of which mutually despise each other. The Alt-Lite is an attempt by various edgy brands to ride the fence between mainstream conservatism and the Alt-Right.

The Unite the Right rally was conceived by Jason Kessler as a way to bring together all of these factions to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville. He brought together a very broad mix of people on August 12th that included Southern heritage activists, Alt-Lite brands, Patriot groups, Southern Nationalists, White Nationalists, Identitarians and National Socialists. As we all remember, the Charlottesville Police stood down and allowed chaos to break out in the streets. We can all agree on what happened. We disagree on our relationship to each other.

Alt-Right and Hard Right

Generally speaking, there were two broad groups which came together at the Unite the Right rally in Lee Park. There was the Alt-Right which carried out the torchlight march at the University of Virginia on August 11th. There was also the Hard Right which marched into Lee Park in one big column from the Market Street Parking garage in Charlottesville.

This contrast between the Alt-Right and Hard Right was brought up at the meetup location prior to the Unite the Right rally. The latter has been congealing as a block of Southern Nationalists, White Nationalists and National Socialists and roughly consists of all the hardcore elements in the movement.

The Hard Right and Alt-Right have different optics:

Here are my Periscope videos from this weekend in Shelbyville:

Pikeville also had an intense feeling:

There is a different aesthetic, energy level and feel at Hard Right events. These people are hardened White Nationalists, Southern Nationalists and National Socialists. They are not gamers, meme makers, identitarians, Kekistanis, Trumpists, civic nationalist LARPers and Patriots, irony bros or other people barely removed from conservatism.

The Hard Right has been gestating for over a year now and has evolved from Pikeville to New Orleans to Charlottesville to Shelbyville parallel to the Alt-Right. In the aftermath of Unite the Right, different groups began to move in different directions. The Alt-Lite retreated into mainstream conservatism. The MAGApedes either shuttered their rallies or held events for they could be beat up in order to play the victim on FOX News. Some in the Alt-Right decided to rebrand as “American Nationalism” whereas others decided to focus on controlled flash rallies and college tours. Meanwhile, the Hard Right wasn’t swayed by Charlottesville and decided to move forward with public rallies.

White Lives Matter was two months in the making. The purpose of this rally was to demonstrate that the Hard Right wasn’t responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, draw attention to the Emanuel Samson church shooting and foster cohesion within our own movement. It succeeded on all three fronts. This was the first big post-Charlottesville public rally and it drew around 300 people. Indeed, it was far larger than we had expected it would be for what we considered a rebound event. It proved that Charlottesville had changed very little and rumors of our demise had been greatly exaggerated.

The tension with the Alt-Right that has emerged since last weekend is unexpected, but it isn’t really surprising. We invited both Identity Evropa and The Daily Stormer to participate in the White Lives Matter rallies in Tennessee. They chose not to do so and preferred to hold their own events. We didn’t care or think much about it until we were forced to respond to all the criticism. It has laid bare a bunch of different points within the movement on which we are not in alignment.

Nathan Damigo

This one is rich coming from Nathan Damigo.

As many of you might remember, Nathan Damigo is famous for participating in two major rallies. There was the Berkeley rally in April and Unite the Right in Charlottesville in August. Both of these rallies ended in violence and were the two biggest clashes with Antifa of the year. In Berkeley, Nathan Damigo punched Moldylocks the female Antifa pornstar, and in Charlottesville he was arrested for civil disobedience. Elsewhere, he was the one bullied at rallies by the Oathcucks.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, Nathan Damigo resigned as the leader of Identity Evropa. He was one of the many people from California who folded under the pressure. Baked Alaska reverted to being a normie Trump supporter. Kyle Chapman disavowed Augustus Invictus, Irma Hinojosa and Johnny Benitez. Ever since Charlottesville, Joey Gibson has dominated the scene out there and his goal is to bait Antifa into beating him up with his American flag in order to get normies watching on FOX News to feel sorry for him. Nothing much is happening in California these days.


California was ground zero for LARPing civic nationalist faggots. The biggest one of them all was “Based Spartan” who was with Nathan Damigo at Berkeley. Virtually all the rallies he participated in this year out in California included Based Tranny (seen right) and Oathcucks and MAGApedes in Trojan armor and conservatives running around with cringe KEK flags that we laughed at here in the South.




Back in May, Van the Cuck Knight came to New Orleans from Los Angeles and got dropped by the Hard Right after starting shit with us about our Confederate flags:

We weren’t very impressed with them. They didn’t endure six months. LARPers are attention seekers like the Cuck Knight, not hardened White Nationalists.

James Allsup and Nicholas Fuentes

These two are college Republicans who are the hosts of a new conservative talk show called Nationalist Review. Fuentes is a conservative who was fired by Right Side Broadcasting Network in August. Now he is an expert on the Alt-Right and an oracle of where the movement needs to be going.

The Fuentes view of rightwing rhetoric and optics is that everything we do should be targeted at pandering to the sensibilities of Paul Ryan voters in Janesville, Wisconsin. Basically, it is the idea that we are going to take over the GOP, purge the cucks in the midterm elections and Take Back America through voting. If you don’t believe in this delusion, you are “bad optics” and a Nazi LARPer.

Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” was borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. This conservative idea of “Taking Back America” from the Democrats and Republican establishment has been around since the 1980s. Please note that Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, the George W. Bush presidency, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump have all failed to do this with huge electoral mandates.

How will it be any different this time? Conservatives have been fighting the GOP establishment for a decade now. They have elected a whole new crop of politicians in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. Charlie Christ was the establishment and Marco Rubio was Tea Party. It changed nothing to replace one with the other. Some of the worst cucks in Congress like Ben Sasse have only been there for one or two terms. Even President Donald Trump hasn’t put a dent in the conservative policy agenda.

Conservatism is a sink of our time, money and energy. The ultimate proof of this was the Charlottesville resolution which was passed unanimously by the Republican Congress and signed by President Trump. It blamed us exclusively for Charlottesville and failed to mention Antifa. Instead of “Making America Great Again,” Trump has presided over rapid erosion of our First Amendment rights and we have absorbed all the costs of his presidency both online and in the streets without reaping any of the oversold benefits.

Ricky Vaughn

Ricky Vaughn has essentially the same view as Allsup and Fuentes.

In 2018, we should allow ourselves to be coopted by conservatism again, and line up behind General Bannon who has said we are all ethnonationalist losers who need to be crushed. If only we elect Joy Villa and Josh Mandel to Congress, we will “Take Back America” or something.

Again, this is laughable. What is in this for us? The question doesn’t even occur to Ricky Vaughn who sees no daylight between our movement and Republican electoral prospects even though the latter have been using us to get elected for over thirty years now. Ricky Vaughn condemned the White Lives Matter rally, but endorses Josh Mandel for Congress, which tells you everything you need to know about him.

Ricky Vaughn wants to sublimate our movement into conservatism. He believes in invigorating conservatives with memes which will only divert more people into wasting their time on that sinkhole. What does conservatism have to do to finally be discredited? Pass a massive amnesty for illegal aliens? Pass an enormous tax cut for the wealthy? Fail to defend the First Amendment? Fail to preserve the definition of marriage, the unborn, gender roles or women’s restrooms?

If we really wanted to influence the mainstream Right, the easiest way to do so would be to stop voting for them in the midterm elections. Let them fall flat on their faces with their civic nationalist appeals to based black guys and based Jews who are never going to vote for the Republican Party anyway. In the long run, Whites are becoming more racially conscious, and the number of True Conservatives is shrinking in every election which makes the status quo unsustainable on race relations.

Donald Trump had nothing to say about the Antioch church shooting. If we can’t even draw attention to something that horrible, what is the point in even having a social movement?

Andrew Anglin

Andrew Anglin has done a better job of articulating a premise what many other people believe in the Alt-Right, but have refrained from saying publicly. He believes the Alt-Right should be a class movement that appeals to upper middle class normies in the suburbs. This is the reason why it is so important to have the right optics. We don’t want to be associated with all those White Nationalist losers.

In recent months, Andrew Anglin has become an expert on real world activism. We found this strange since as far as we know he has never organized a political rally or even attended a conference in the United States. Anglin’s only experience in this area was orchestrating the Neo-Nazi invasion of Whitefish, MT which succeeded in making life more difficult for Richard Spencer’s parents and saddling him with an SPLC lawsuit that has cost the movement over $150,000. We invited Anglin to come to Unite the Right, but he couldn’t risk showing up and being served with the lawsuit over Whitefish.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, Anglin decided that he was rebranding the movement as “American Nationalism.” He was genuinely surprised when no one else got on board with this idea. He expected Southern Nationalists (who want an independent South), White Nationalists (who want a White ethnostate), Identitarians (pan-European racial nationalists) and National Socialists (who loathe liberal democracy) to climb on board with this “Take Back America” platform.

It didn’t happen because so few of our people believe “Taking Back America” is possible. No one believed in deracinated American civic nationalism or has any confidence that one blog on the internet can redefine Americanism as white supremacy. This is why so few people show up with the federal flag at rallies. Activists don’t want to use it and forcing them to do so would only discourage them from showing up at events. There isn’t a constituency for American Nationalism outside of the familiar Patriot groups and Alt-Lite civic nationalist groups like the Proud Boys.

There’s no reason to believe pretending to be something we are not is a more effective activist strategy. The Hard Right turned out 125 people in Pikeville and 300 people in Shelbyville and Murfreesboro. The turnout at Unite the Right, which was an explicitly pro-White event, dwarfed the turnout at virtually all of the American flag rallies organized by the Alt-Lite, MAGApedes and Patriot groups.

As I have said for months, we weren’t as damaged by Charlottesville as some people have assumed. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, three separate public opinion polls have shown that anywhere from 6% to 10% of the public supports the Alt-Right. There is no meaningful difference in the constituency since the same stratum of the public also supports White Nationalism and Neo-Nazism.

It is true there is a much bigger constituency that is implicitly pro-White. We aren’t anywhere close to our ceiling when nearly half of White Americans believe White people are under attack or that European heritage ought to preserved. The point on which they divide from us, however, has nothing to do with optics or labels. Rather, it is being an explicitly pro-White movement that doesn’t subscribe to the doctrine of racial equality. These people share our grievances, but are afraid of being called “racists.”

Anglin wants to recruit upper middle class suburban normies to become “American Nationalists.” He ignores the fact that this stratum of the Right is the least alienated, the least disaffected, and the most resistant to his messaging. These people live in a bubble and are sheltered from racial and cultural breakdown. They have the most to lose by becoming “American Nationalist” activists at our events. Normies are individualists and materialists. The constituency that Anglin is targeting are super normies. That’s why whenever we have a public event you can hear them shrieking in terror on the internet about optics and ruining their lives because aren’t up to challenging the status quo.

The reasoning here is that if only we look good and have the right optics, which is to say look like a bunch of Mormon missionaries or Jehovah’s Witnesses, then we will be accepted by mainstream society who will see our American flags and forget we are “racists.” This is retarded because we are stigmatized because we are not in power and for moral reasons, not aesthetic ones. No one cares what you are wearing. It doesn’t make you any less of a “racist” in their eyes. What’s more, it’s not like the media hasn’t noticed that white polo shirts and khakis with tiki torches are the “new uniform of white supremacy.” It is a subject which has generated a lot of discussion in the media.

After all this talk about optics and aesthetics, no one has objected to this look which so many people assume is “superior optics.” That’s because many of us haven’t share our opinions for the sake of avoiding internet drama. We reject the notion that the effeminate conservative dork look, the Winn Dixie checkout line look, the Best Buy Geek Squad look, The Office look, or the Backstreet Boys look is superior optics. Seriously, it would be nice if these people could stop congratulating themselves.

It is actually quite bland. It is no wonder that these people need to consult the Pickup Artist Community (PUAs) in order to be coached into getting laid or rage spiral about MGTOW or how all women are Thots who need to be beat into submission. Combine it with a lack of passion and it comes across as low energy. The impression that one gets is that these guys are frustrated IT workers who are racists.

We’re already stigmatized as dangerous and immoral. In the real world, Anglin strangely advises us NOT to be edgy and to pretend to be something we aren’t to “appeal to the normies” who will never leave their couch. Instead of doing that, we should use it to our advantage and play it up to strike a contrast. If we are the bad guys, why not look like well known romantic bad guys?

It is a waste of time to appeal to normal people who are individualists and materialists. We should be appealing to angry, alienated, disaffected people who are persuadable with optics that work on that audience. Heimbach’s Traditionalist Worker Party which is disaffected, populist, rural and Christian has a real constituency in the South and Midwest.

This isn’t a joke. We need serious leaders. We are in a war for our racial and cultural survival on this continent. Are people who are afraid of guns going to “Take Back America” with fucking cringe KEK flags, conservative talk radio shows and by panicking and policing their “associations”?

Conservatism has failed. We’re not going to “Make America Great Again.” This country is only going to become more polarized as liberal democracy continues to destroy our common culture. In the streets, there is more tension that ever before and we can only find security in numbers. Far from winning over upper middle class normies with really impressive optics, it is the ongoing unraveling of America which is going to push those normies into our camp. At the end of the day, it is going to be either us or those people on the other side and they will line up behind our warriors, not Nick Fuentes or Spooky Ricky.

We need people who are tough and who have courage. We need people who aren’t going to back down and who are strong and have confidence in their own opinions. It might be a good idea to actually have people around who know how to fight and use firearms. There is a strong possibility that one day this could get very ugly. In such a situation, no one is going to turn to social media brands or helpless upper middle class normies when anarchists are communists are expropriating their country club.

In the final analysis, this comes down to a bet. Are we going to reform this system through participating in mainstream conservative politics? Is this whole damn system going to become so polarized and dysfunctional that it is going to collapse on our heads and unwind in the streets? Based on what I have seen in the streets and the failure of Trump’s campaign and all the previous “Take Back America” movements, I think it is going to be the latter. Donald Trump was the last chance for something like that to succeed. He was the last gasp of conservatism.

I fully expect things to get much uglier in the future. So I have ceased to care about all the things that have given conservatives the shakes in the past. Ultimately, it isn’t going to matter.

Note: I want to emphasize that I don’t have any problem with the people who I have criticized above. All I have done here is explain why we disagree. They were the ones who chose to have this discussion in public view which isn’t a choice I would have made.

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