FT: Even Richard Spencer Thinks The Right Has Gone Too Far

I can already hear it now.

This is Richard Spencer being a “contrarian.” It is just another “hot take.” He is a libtard or racist liberal who voted for Joe Biden. That’s how it will be dismissed and waved away.

FT:

“I take Soufan’s view seriously. But I wanted to hear from someone on the far-right on how the event was perceived. So I called Richard Spencer, America’s best-known alt-righter, who has yet to be banned from Twitter. It turns out there is a reason for that. Spencer, who infamously gave a Nazi salute at a Washington event shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, has revised much of his former philosophy.

Although Spencer still describes himself as an “identitarian”, he voted for Joe Biden on November 3 — a disclosure that astonished me. “Trump brought out the worst aspects in me — that’s not what I want to be remembered for,” Spencer said. “I recognised the toxicity of rightwing populism and didn’t want America to go further down that road.” His view of the January 6 protesters is very different to Soufan’s. He said there was a hard core of genuinely violent types. But the majority were juvenile poseurs. “A lot of them see politics as a kind of video game — like shooting Nazi zombies in some kind of world war two gaming scenario,” he said. “You can see how unrealistic they are by the fact that they are still openly boasting on social media about what they did. They don’t seem to realise that the law is coming for them, which it is.”

WSJ:

“Which doesn’t mean that the legitimate concerns that produced Mr. Trump’s rise are going away or that his substantive achievements will evaporate. He has helped to turn the GOP into more of a working-class party, helped to alter views of China’s economic policies and responded to a kind of national war-weariness. Many of his core supporters remain wedded to him, and he still has strong support across the GOP. As the House was preparing to impeach him for a second time this week, an Axios poll found that six in 10 Republicans approve of his recent behavior and more than 90% of self-identified Trump supporters think he should be the party’s 2024 presidential candidate.

But moving forward may require a different approach, especially with the wider electorate. “He touched a nerve,” says Mr. Kasich. “There is a challenge here that needs to be addressed. But you don’t do it by creating scapegoats and blaming somebody else.”

FOX News:

“The GOP should be America’s blue-collar, populist, outsider party, dedicated to individual and religious freedom. It should be the party that stands up to China. And it should do all this without saying or doing crazy things that scare college-educated voters, especially women …”

The Federalist:

“For better or worse, the Republicans are now a bottom-up rather than a top-down party. Working-class voters, who felt powerless for decades as both parties sent their jobs and children overseas with little benefit to their own conditions, aren’t going back to the farm. The challenge for the Republicans is to appeal to that base and see it continue to grow into new broader demographics.

In some sense, Trump did stage a coup — not last week, but five years ago as he launched his bid for the White House. In 2000, he nearly ran as the Reform Party candidate. That would likely have been a mistake. What he eventually did 15 years later was much smarter; he effectively turned the GOP into the Reform Party. That isn’t going to change no matter how much the establishment hopes for it. …”

In reality, we have discussed this at length for two years now.

I started criticizing Donald Trump for backing away from his populist and nationalist campaign over four years ago in December 2016. I broke with him completely in April 2017 after the Syria Strike. I also covered the whole sorry Trump administration from the Inauguration to the Capitol Siege.

By the time of Charlottesville, I was already done with Donald Trump. We started holding those rallies after the Syria Strike in 2017 because we were frustrated with Trump and wanted to move on from him. It was already clear to us in the first six months of the Trump administration that he had no intention of pushing a populist agenda or keeping his promises. He had embraced Paul Ryan’s agenda.

As time went on in 2018, 2019 and 2020, we became more and more critical of rightwing populism. The Alt-Right splintered into the “American Nationalist movement” – people who wanted to bear hug MAGA and blend in to “appeal to the normies,” who believed in “trusting Trump,” who became apologists for Trump and the GOP and whose plan was to “Trust the Plan” – and the “wignats” (their term for us which we ironically embraced because we thought they were idiots) who fiercely criticized Trump for his betrayals of populism, who continued to reject mainstream conservatism and who were deeply skeptical of the grifters and conspiratards who had hijacked and taken over his movement.

Originally, we had been attracted to MAGA and rightwing populism because it had seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time. The Donald Trump that we supported in 2015 and 2016 was the man on the stump who was going to build the wall and deport illegal aliens, who was going to get rid of our terrible trade deals, who thought the Iraq War was a huge mistake, who was running on a trillion dollar infrastructure program, who said things that were true but politically incorrect and who was self financing his campaign in order to be free of the corrupting influence of the Republican donor class. More than anything else, we backed Trump though because we hated mainstream conservatism and we saw him as a bulldozer who could demolish those people and open up our politics. He could “move the Overton Window.”

We saw Donald Trump only as a vehicle for what came to be called “Trumpism” which are policy preferences that a variety of insurgent candidates – most famously, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot and Ron Paul – had championed over the course of the previous thirty years:

  • Change our trade policies to end globalization and foster investment and job creation in America to develop our economy for American workers.
  • Rollback the American Empire and put an end to these endless wars in the Middle East that have cost us so much and which we don’t understand anymore.
  • Tighten up and enforce our immigration laws because we have had too much immigration for too long and because it is too destabilizing.
  • End the yoke of political correctness which is a tyranny bitterly resented by the vast majority of Americans who are forced to walk on eggshells.
  • Rebuild the infrastructure of this country which is falling apart.
  • Stop being the body servant or water boy of billionaires who have been buying our elections and corrupting our politics.

This was the mandate.

None of these things are particularly controversial. The idea that this agenda amounts to “fascism” is ludicrous. Over half the things on this list have been supported by Bernie Sanders. If Trump had governed on the basis of his populist mandate, he would have been reelected in a landslide.

The toxic side of rightwing populism is largely what we got instead:

  • MIGA.
  • Performance art politics/Political theater.
  • Donald Trump’s nepotism which empowered Jared Kushner and Ivanka which we had not anticipated in 2016.
  • Donald Trump’s personality cult which ultimately overwhelmed and overshadowed his policy agenda. MAGA became all about him rather than pushing an agenda.
  • Trump the plutocrat and Wall Street cheerleader.
  • QAnon, “Trust the Plan” and conspiratards.
  • Cynical race baiting and fear mongering to wind up and manipulate voters.
  • The rejection of expertise above all else with COVID-19.
  • Laziness and incompetence.
  • Legions of grifters who became Trump influencers.
  • A policy agenda that was sold to the donor class.
  • Blowback which swelled the legions of our enemies, destroyed our online platforms and real world monuments.
  • The absolute utter narcissism and disloyalty of Trump.
  • A man who endorsed all his enemies and destroyed all his allies. He destroyed Jeff Sessions and wiped out the immigration hawks. Charlie Kirk became the public face of Trumpism.
  • A man who lifted up almost no one in American politics who shares his views or at least what he said in 2016 but who surrounded himself with mediocrities skilled at flattery.

Who imagined in 2016 that we were voting for a guy who was going to bring the neocons back to power and have Mike Pompeo as his Secretary of State? Who was going to run on the Platinum Plan?

The final denouement of the Trump era – Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and Rudy Giuliani hawking conspiracy theories, the “Stop the Steal” grift and the fraud narrative, “Unleash the Kraken,” the “Storm Is Coming” and the Capitol Siege and impeachment – revealed the con it had been all along. Trumpism had moved away from populism and devolved into a personality cult for grifters, chumps and conspiratards led by an incompetent narcissist who used them as pawns only to disavow and discard them.

Imagine where Donald Trump and MAGA would be today if he had actually gone down the Alt-Right road in 2017. Suppose he had done some of the things that we wanted from him instead of wooing Mitch McConnell, passing the Paul Ryan agenda and nurturing the QAnon grift. Withdrawing troops from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Passing a major infrastructure bill. Deporting illegal aliens. Busting up political correctness. Pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the $2,000 stimulus checks. Would the Democrats now control the White House and Congress? Would rightwing populism be in this bad of shape? There were worse things in this world than catering to the mostly reasonable Alt-Right agenda.

In The Long MAGA, we reflected on the recent history of rightwing populism, which in many ways foreshadowed what we got in the final year of the Trump presidency. Years ago, Trump began building his conspiratard base and making a name for himself by questioning Obama’s birth certificate, which was an issue that never interested us. We remembered Glenn Beck’s chalkboard and the Restoring Honor rally in the Tea Party era. We recalled all the nuttiness of the Obama years whether it was the Sandy Hook hoax or Operation Jade Helm and FEMA camps or how Obama created Hurricane Sandy and flung it into New York City to defeat Mitt Romney in the 2012 election. QAnon is a natural outgrowth of these circles and makes more sense when you think of it in that context. Andrew Anglin ran conspiratard websites like Outlaw Journalism and Reality Situation for almost ten years before rebranding as a Neo-Nazi.

The fact that we recognized and recoiled from the toxicity of Stage 4 MAGA and broke with Trump is why we were not at the Capitol Siege and why Andrew Anglin told his readers to go and why Nick Fuentes was there. They were there to display their optics and hold Trump’s beer and to “appeal to the normies” … the normies being the Alex Jones audience and the thousands of Qtards who read the tea leaves, trusted the plan and stampeded into the Capitol. Rudy Giuliani now has a scapegoat who can be easily blamed to take the fall for Trump. They should have known better than to associate with him given the fact that it was the corrupt scum in Rudy’s orbit who got Trump impeached the first time.

If there is any hope for rightwing populism, it will have to find a way to separate the good (the popular ideas and policies) from the bad (the cranks, grifters, demagogues and conspiratards) in the future. This will require identifying and promoting people who are ideological and ethical.

Note: Nick and the Groypers had no objection to blending in with the optics of these people.

About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

30 Comments

  1. The incoming Boss is going to be sworn in surrounded by 25,000 soldiers and heaven only knows how many more police. That’s not far off the current establishment strength of several individual European armies. Something has gone badly wrong here. A battalion of soldiers and a discrete police force and not much more should be all a popular leader needs.

    • It’s extremely hyper-deflationary and prima fascia martial law… which was always the end game of the uniparty beholding to the usury oligarchy to retain power and loot control of the rest of Americas assets/property… ie they are communists…

    • Fuentes seems very confident for a man who is going to prison for 20 years, so it occured to me that huge army in DC is not there to defend against protestors, it is there because they fear possible attack from another part of the armed forces. Imagine if next week, we see two parts of the U.S. military going at it. One side fighting for an open Zionist dictatorship over America and the West. The other side, what we have now, but more oppressive.

      The twitter civ-nats supporting Trump are very shady. They support Trump 100%, even though he has shown little interest in keeping his promises to White America, he only cares about Israel. The twitter civ-nats criticize Jewry, but promote people that are married to Jews. Also, these civ-nats are very hostile to Whites that want to live in 100% White ethnostates. I believe they would actually go to war, to prevent a 100% White ethnostate from forming anywhere on the planet.

      What would sincere WN get out of backing either of these groups? I saw the lesser of two evils argument used to get us to ignore our cause and back someone elses cause in 2016. It gave us the Donald Trump shit sandwich and we got kicked off social media.

      • I don’t think it’s two parts of the American military; I think it will be the American military versus Antifa who has gotten very cocky and arrogant after being allowed to literally get away with murder all these months.

        I believe any intel they are getting is of BLM and Antifa attacking. I would bet dollars to donuts that those involved in the Capitol Siege breaking stuff to get in were, in fact, Antifa infiltrators. There were several entrances which the guards not only did NOT defend, but actually waved Trump supporters in. Those supporters thought marching through the halls of Congress to confront the legislators was legal, because all these womyn in an uproar over Kavanaugh being confirmed got away with it.

        So, my guess, is that Washington is an armed camp, because they are expecting Antifa en force. Of course if any MAGAtards get swept up in it, they will be very publicly prosecuted, make no mistake about it. The lap dog media won’t be allowed to cover how many Antifa are captured or killed.

    • @Captain John,

      There are more armed troops in Washington D.C. than is all of America’s endless wars in the Middle East on behalf of Israel.

      As the construction worker said in his video that went viral, “If you need all this to protect you from the people, maybe the people didn’t f*cking elect you.”

  2. Spencer voted for Biden. Biden plans to give amnesty to 11 million illegal aliens.

    Biden-Harris offer more details on immigration plan, including a ‘priority’ amnesty for more than 11 million illegal aliens

    Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States next Wednesday, and with it comes the start of the biggest push since 2013 for a massive expansion of legal immigration and an amnesty for more than 11 million illegal aliens.

    Pres.-elect Biden and Vice Pres.-elect Kamala Harris spent the last several days meeting with special interest groups and talking to the media about their plans for immigration reform. Most significantly, Harris told Univision on Tuesday that an amnesty for nearly all illegal aliens will be the top priority.

    According to last month’s unemployment report, 9 million fewer Americans were working in December than in January of last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither Biden nor Harris have explained how adding tens of millions of new, permanent workers would help the millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans get back to work.

    The Biden-Harris Plan

    • I’m not too worried about it. They would need 10 Republican votes to get it through the Senate. The GOP has no reason to give them anything much less amnesty which would finally shatter an already bitterly divided party.

    • I’m not worried either. Methinks Schumer will allow Manchin and some other Democrats facing election in 2022 to wander off the reservation and vote against it. I also think the Republicans know they are skating on thin ice with their base, so I think they will vote against it as well. It will be very close, but not close enough for Kamala to be any tie-breaker.

      On other fronts, Pueblos Sin Fronteras has quietly been told by a Biden administration representative that they should stay where they are … for now (indefinitely) “for their own safety. Would not surprise me one iota that, instead of getting rid of the border guard, Biden sends more out and, instead of tearing down any border enforcement structures, Biden “is forced” to honor the contracts already in place.

      I suspect there is every chance that Trump’s Wall will get built and even finished, but it will be by Biden and the lapdog press will cover that up more tightly than even Hunter Biden’s escapades.

      It looks to me like the Democrats, under Biden’s guidance, will use the carrot and stick approach to any Trump supporters who haven’t totally been detoured into Q-Ville and become complete MAGAtards. The Covid checks are being hustled out and even the most draconian shut-down enforcers are yammering about opening up the economy again, because the current policy is unsustainable.

      There will be a big enough show of hustling out enough vaccines with enough takers vaccinated for them to Declare Victory and announce that this crisis is over.

      Biden has effectively conned everyone with his reputation for being an absent-minded gaffe-o-meter and even with the senile old handsy-feelsy guy suffering from dementia routine he put on while he hid out in the basement.

      He reminds me of Emperor Claudius, the last of the Ceasarian line left standing, because even the nobles who drafted him onto the throne underestimated him. Not only, because he was lame and spoke with a stutter, but they genuinely thought he was stupid and malleable. They got a big surprise.

      Biden isn’t a liberal, but he’s an old hand at the race game. If anyone appears to be the Man for the Moment, it looks like Biden is the one.

  3. “Who imagined in 2016 that we were voting for a guy who was going to bring the neocons back to power”

    I did. In 2016 I saw him grovel before AIPAC and brag about having a Jewish daughter. I saw him make belligerent threats against Iran. I saw ultra Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson give him 100 million dollars. None of this could possibly occur if Trump was really against the system.

    The truth was there for those of us willing to see it, but the fantasy of a strong man coming in and saving us from neo-liberalism was so seductive that many on the dissident right chose to ignore their better instincts and embrace comforting delusions. Of course there were also many Trump supporters ostensibly on our side who supported him precisely because they understood he was a neocon deep down.

      • @Hunter,
        I just rented and watched the film “White Noise” and although it was a “hit piece” of muckraking media (The Atlantic) it did raise some questions in my mind.

        Did Richard Spencer or Lauren Southern have any real convictions about race and White European Ethno-Nationalism? Or was it all a grift and performance art?

        Even the producer was stunned by the shallow convictions (if any) on the part of Lauren Southern when he said, “Well, your husband (and new baby) are not White.”

        Lauren Southern says, “What difference does that make? How is that relevant?”

        By the way, are you in the film? Like in any crowd shots?

    • The argument Against that is observable with the Beer Belly Putsch. Something has really blown the doors off the post war consensus. I’m not convinced it was Trump. He’s just a symtom or an attempt by zionists to stop it.

  4. They key thing you have totally correct here is that at the end of the day this was a “Trump Personality Cult” with zero political substance behind it.

    If Trump were really interested in America First, and he had staffed his administration with MAGA first people – then the Personality Cult could have been useful.

    Personnel is policy. Trump filled his cabinet with Israel First Zionists, Wall Street oligarchs, and Republican hacks.

    So Trump’s Personality Cult could do nothing but help to get him reelected – and it failed at that, because while Trump is rather entertaining, people were just sick of his bullshit during the mass Black Lives Matter riots, the economic crash, and the Covid Coup.

    Now he is throwing all of his “goyim” fans under the bus, as expected.

    Remember when Steve Bannon was fired and the Huffington Post gleefully posted the headling, “Goy, Bye!” Then they changed it to something attacking “White” people?

    That should have been a tell – the Jews in Trump’s administration were working with the Jews in the media and the Democrats to isolate any non-Jews and staff both sides with loyal Zionists.

    This is Politics 101, but so far Whitey hasn’t caught on. But Whitey will because it has become far too obvious to too many people.

  5. It is interesting to see many how guys (myself included) in the Ron Paul orbit a decade ago morphed into the Alt-Right. Some of us (like Spencer) went a bit left, others a bit right. And as this all played out, we watched some of our Boomer relatives embrace the Trump cult -and even QAnon, though they were never Ron Paul supporters. Ron Paul, with all his flaws, talked intelligently and seemed to be an alternative to the corrupt Rep/Dem system. I do not even try to define my political position with a word anymore, though on social issues I am definitely far right.

  6. The Racialist Right or whatever you want to call it varies by groups. But I always thought it was lack as regards quality control. They need to start doing background checks on people. If a person is a failure in their personal life they will be a failure in your organization to. Follow this rule of law: next time you are at a gathering look around and ask yourself if you were an employer would you hire these people? Would you trust them to watch your house, wife, or children, if you had to go out of town for extended periods? If the answer is no that why let them into you organization?

  7. You would never hear the left saying we went too far. The right always loses because they always concede to optics.

  8. Supporting Dump in ’16 was the only choice for Whites: he said necessary things that none of the pearl-clutching cuck pukes would ever have dared to say in a million years. I knew from the jump that he might be just another liar – that before his Obama birth certificate fluff he’d been a jew Yawk shitlib who’d spat on “anti-semite” Buchanan, for example – and said so. My support was entirely contingent on his fidelity to his word, which of course proved itself to be totally non-existent, so I ditched him within the first year.

    But the average MAGAtard clung to their superhero with desperation right to the bitter end, long after he’d proven his lack of loyalty in so many cases. And now many of them will pay the price.

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