2017: Annus Horribilis

I had a conversation about this yesterday morning.

I was asked why I thought 2017 had gone so horribly wrong for the Alt-Right. My answer was unequivocally that 2017 had turned out this way because of Donald Trump. He was the prime mover behind everything that happened in 2017. This was also the fruit of our actions in 2015 and 2016.

In November, I constructed a timeline of the Trump presidency (Part I, Part II, Part III). In my analysis, I identified four long term trends that stemmed from Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election: social media censorship, leftwing political violence, Trump’s conservative agenda and Alt-Right alienation. I also forecasted that these trends were likely to continue.

I firmly believe that internal Alt-Right drama had very little to do with this. The social media censorship began the week after the 2016 election when Twitter purged a bunch of Alt-Right accounts. The leftwing political violence began during the Trump campaign long before the Alt-Right entered the fray in March 2017. Trump’s conservative agenda was outlined behind the scenes to large donors and the RNC during the campaign. Finally, the Alt-Right and White Nationalists simply ignored the evidence of how Trump didn’t want their support during the campaign.

He was never /ourguy/. We convinced ourselves that Donald Trump was the “God Emperor.” We went out of our way to identify ourselves with the Trump campaign. We believed all the bullshit that MILO and others were blowing up our ass about our future influence. We ignored all the criticism of Donald Trump and dismissed all the attacks on his record during the campaign. More than anything else, we created this association between Donald Trump and the Alt-Right.

It existed in our minds. It existed in the minds of Trump’s enemies. Critically, it never existed in Trump’s mind though. He never felt any obligation whatsoever to us.

We set ourselves up to absorb all the costs of the anti-Trump backlash while reaping none of the benefits of the Trump presidency. This is our own fault because we decided to plunge into partisan politics and choose one side over the other, thereby making us a big fat target, while never expecting to get anything in return from the victor. There was never an understanding that we would gain political representation or that the prevailing taboos would change as the price of our support.

Hailgate was not the cause of what happened in 2017. Trump’s reaction to Hailgate was consistent with every other occasion he had “disavowed” and brushed off White Nationalist support during the campaign. It happened repeatedly when he was asked about David Duke. It happened repeatedly with Jared Taylor and William Johnson’s robocalls in the Republican primaries. After Trump won the 2016 election, he no longer needed our votes. As Steve Bannon explained in his 60 Minutes interview, the decision to embrace the establishment was made within 48 hours of winning the presidential election, which means it had occurred BEFORE the 2016 NPI conference. Let’s not forget that a handful of Roman salutes was nowhere near the scale or viciousness of the trolling that had occurred during the campaign.

The only reason that Charlottesville happened in the first place is because we were already so disappointed with Trump. The shift to activism was caused by the Syria strike, the healthcare quagmire and Berkeley. It was caused by the rise to power of Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner within the White House in April. We were searching for something else to do and made the mistake of embroiling ourselves in the anti-Trump street backlash BECAUSE that was what the Alt-Lite was doing.

There had been four Berkeleys by May. Occidental Dissent had been purged from PayPal by May. We were embroiled in the Ryan agenda by May. The ADL was building a “Silicon Valley Center to Monitor and Fight Hate” by May. The Alt-Lite was wailing about being demonetized on YouTube and purged from Patreon on the eve of Charlottesville. Paul Joseph Watson was quitting YouTube. Heading into Charlottesville, we already knew that the ADL was going to be taking over Twitter and all of us would have ended up being purged anyway if we had never set foot in that city.

This all circles back to President Donald Trump:

1.) It was Trump’s decision to create the terrible Cabinet. He surrounded himself with family, cronies and people he perceived to be useful or “winners.” At every turn, The Snake has told him: preserve the status quo. It will make you more popular and get things done. Spoiler: it hasn’t.

2.) It was Trump’s decision to let Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell take him for a ride and use his administration to pass their wildly unpopular True Cons agenda.

3.) It was Trump’s decision to do the Syria strike and blackpill everyone.

4.) It was Trump’s decision to empower Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn and push Steve Bannon out of the administration.

5.) It was Trump’s decision to kick the can down the road on building the wall.

6.) It was Trump’s decision to let Antifa violence spiral out of control.

7.) It was Trump’s decision to sell his foreign policy to Sheldon Adelson.

8.) It was Trump’s decision to go through the motions and celebrate the entire multicultural calendar.

9.) It was Trump’s decision to shelve his trade reform agenda to persuade China to rein in North Korea.

10.) It was Trump’s decision to not deport too many illegal aliens.

11.) It was Trump’s decision to fire James Comey.

I could continue with another dozen or so examples that spring to mind. The bottom line here is that it was our decision to get so invested in the Trump presidency. It was his decision to have nothing to do with us. Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped our enemies from making us pay a price for it. The original error was our delusional, uncritical, punch drunk estimation of Donald Trump.

Arguably, the leftwing political violence, the social media censorship and the defunding we have endured in 2017 could have been worth it. Conceivably, the sacrifice would have paid off if, say, a big, beautiful border wall had been built, a million illegal aliens had been deported, or the American Empire had been dismantled. Unfortunately, the result was the Charlottesville resolution, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and a massive corporate tax cut for the very people who have purged us from social media whose investments have become so much more lucrative over the past year.

Anyway, I’ve sobered up now. I drank a lot less of the Trump koolaid than most people in the Alt-Right. In hindsight, I was wildly optimistic in my analysis, but I still anticipated failure. My case for Trump during the campaign was instrumental and many of those points remain valid.

Note: nb4 people blame this all on Richard Spencer or “LARPers.” There were dozens of rallies before the 2016 election season. There is nothing new about rallies at Confederate monuments. The NSM has been doing rallies for over 15 years and used far more swastikas in the past than were ever in Charlottesville. There was free speech on social media when Obama was president. Finally, we all know that Richard Spencer has been saying the same shit in 2017 that he has for a decade now.

The false assumption was that this time conservatism was going to work. This time it was going to be different. Unlike the Reagan Revolution, the Contract with America, the George W. Bush presidency, and the Tea Party, this time we had succeeded “Taking Back America” with Donald Trump … until Richard Spencer and the LARPers caused it to play out like it has every single other time. In reality, the agenda that Trump has pursued has only illustrated how irrelevant we are to his decision making.