The Wignats Were Right About Donald Trump

Did the Dissident Right help get Trump elected? Or did we cause cucks to stay home & cat ladies to come out for Hillary? We can’t answer that question, so we are not a voting bloc that matters. Trump might think he is stronger without us. He might be right.

— Counter-Currents (@NewRightAmerica) February 1, 2020

This is the right reply. Leftists are hysterics who box with shadows all the time. Maybe we are one of them. We may not have put Trump in office, but we convinced some people who can’t tell Trump from Hitler that we did.

— Counter-Currents (@NewRightAmerica) February 1, 2020

Fuentes and Wallace are both LARPing as spokesmen of a voting bloc, which we are not. I dispose of this assumption here: https://t.co/PLK5eqoyPn

— Counter-Currents (@NewRightAmerica) February 1, 2020

Some of the trends Wallace decries are actually signs of success: The deplatforming push is a sign that we are causing panic. The rise in antifa violence is as well.

Trump should have done more to push back against these, but he could barely make progress on immigration.

— Counter-Currents (@NewRightAmerica) February 1, 2020

Other trends that Wallace blames on Trump aren’t really his fault, eg more oligarchy & decadence. They are just further manifestations of America’s cultural decline. Trump couldn’t have prevented them even if he promised to.

— Counter-Currents (@NewRightAmerica) February 1, 2020

Censorship & antifa are our number one problems. They were never Trump’s top issues, & he has been stymied on his top issues — immigration, trade, & foreign policy — since getting into office. It isn’t reasonable to expect relief on these fronts.

— Counter-Currents (@NewRightAmerica) February 1, 2020

It is no secret that I have long disagreed with Nick Fuentes and Greg Johnson about Donald Trump and the wisdom of voting for the GOP in the 2020 election.

As longtime readers of Occidental Dissent know, I was fully on board the Trump Train in the 2016 election. Unlike Johnson and Fuentes, I was far more skeptical of Donald Trump, the GOP and conservatism though due to their history. We had seen these anti-establishment populist movements come and go over many times – the Reagan Revolution, Buchanan Brigades, the Contract with America, the Tea Party – over the past fifty years in which the GOP and mainstream conservatism have been politically dominant in the United States. In each case, the Republican Party hijacked, neutered and ultimately tamed these populist movements. There was always a better than average chance that it would happen again with the MAGA movement.

In the 2016 election, my attitude toward Donald Trump was essentially trust, but verify. I voted for him and encouraged others to do so. I was willing to give him a chance. He seemed to represent the arrival of populism and nationalism in the United States. I thought he representated a positive trend. I was overly excited by Trump’s rhetorical assault on mainstream conservatism in the 2016 primaries. I took him at his word. I even went to Washington, DC to attend his inauguration. While I had trusted Donald Trump enough to vote for him in both the Republican primary and the 2016 election, I immediately shifted into verify mode after he won the presidency.

It took less than six months for us to learn the truth about Donald Trump. Those of us who pointed this out at the time were dismissed as “wignats” and “blackpillers.”

• In the first six months, the nepotism of the Trump administration was already on full display. Jared Kushner and Ivanka were given enormous power which they have wielded ever since solely because Donald Trump is Ivanka’s daddy. Trump famously attacked Syria in April 2017. Jared Kushner was already pushing out Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon who were his rivals in the White House. From the earliest days, Trump has run the White House like he ran the Trump Organization, not as “nationalist” or “populist” ideologue.
• In the first six months, we were plunged into the Russia conspiracy scandal and Robert Mueller was appointed as special prosecutor. The Ukraine conspiracy will culminate in Trump’s acquittal by the Senate next week. This is the second scandal that has consumed the Trump administration. It will be followed by a third and a fourth.
• In the first six months, Trump staffed his administration from top to bottom with conservatives and his political enemies. He surrounded himself with people like “Mad Dog” Mattis and Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn who were there to undermine him to defend the status quo. He approached governing the United States like managing the Trump Organization and his reality television show The Apprentice. He saw himself as the “leading man” of the administration. He is the face of the administration on Twitter. This is why he told Mike Pence during the campaign that he would be the most powerful Vice President in history. He delegated the work of actually governing to conservatives.
• In the first six months, Trump shelved his populist and nationalist agenda and embraced Paul Ryan’s Better Way agenda. He spent his political capital on delivering Paul Ryan’s agenda. Because of the filibuster in the Senate, the only way anything significant like Obamacare or the Trump tax cuts gets done in Washington is through budget reconciliation and that trick can only be used once a year. He used it on tax cuts because it was the only thing that Senate Republicans could agree on other than their project of dismantling Obamacare. The Trump administration has been defined since the beginning by the steady advance of mainstream conservative policies. That’s because when you elect a “National Populist” president like Donald Trump you are really electing an incoming government and the thousands of people who will comprise the government and do the work are all conservatives.
• In the first six months, the Alt-Lite dumped the Alt-Right and began trashing it because the 2016 election was over. The Alt-Right had served its purpose in the 2016 election and was kicked to the curb. It was clear before Trump was even sworn in as president when Mike Cernovich hosted the Deploraball and the Trump era would just be a perpetuation of the status quo and what moving the “Overton Window” really meant. As we saw at the 2016 RNC Convention, it had always meant normalizing homosexuality. That’s how the Overton Window shifted. White Nationalism didn’t become more acceptable. In fact, it has been condemned by the Republican Congress at least two or three times and Steve King has been frozen out of committee assignments. National Populism didn’t become more acceptable either. Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon were both fired by Donald Trump. Needless to say, this is all proof that Donald Trump never had a real ideology. He is just a marketing executive, a con artist, an opportunist and the archetype of the American demagogue.
• In the first six months, it was already clear that the Trump era would be dominated by lackeys and grifters like Charlie Kirk who spoke at the 2016 RNC Convention. These are the people who have truly flourished in the Trump era. There hasn’t been any ideological “realignment” of the GOP. Ann Coulter is ideological. She was marginalized. So was Jeff Sessions and Steve King. Sheldon Adelson has been Trump’s real horse whisperer as we can see with the pardon of Sholom Rubashkin and the assassination of Qasem Soleimani.
• In the first six months, we already knew that Antifa violence was soaring under Donald Trump and that nothing would be done about it. We also knew that social media censorship was becoming a problem and that nothing would be done about it. Neither Big Tech censorship or Antifa had been major issues in the 2016 election.
• In the first six months, our fate had already been determined. It was actually determined BEFORE the 2016 election. We were pumped and dumped and baited and switched by Republican operatives. Everyone who voted for highly misleading ideas like “conservatism” or “nationalism” or “populism” which resonate with the instincts of people who are rightwing GOT the same old liberalism. We never GET the substance of what we vote for in elections. We only get words, tweets, token gestures and political theater which after election season are systematically walked back while unpopular policies are pushed through Congress.

This was all clear before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Greg Johnson is a man of ideas. Donald Trump is not a man of ideas though. He is just a demagogue. He isn’t motivated by ideas. He is motivated by more earthly things like money, power and social status. He believes in WINNING. The substance of those victories aren’t really that important. Donald Trump could declare victory over Neptune like Caligula and bring seashells back to his followers and he would still be celebrated by his cult of personality.

If you want to find out what ideas Trump is running on in the 2020 election, check out Charlie Kirk’s upcoming book The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win The Future or Don Jr.’s Triggered: How The Left Thrives On Hate and Wants To Silence Us. It is the more of the same vacuous movement conservative garbage that anyone could find on display at a Barnes and Noble over the past twenty years. Far from representing any breakthrough for “nationalism,” we are operating under the same old conservative formula of preying on and exploiting grievance politics.

Isn’t Donald Trump a “nationalist” though? Isn’t he advancing the idea of “nationalism” just by being the president? Conservatism has been the organizing ideology of the Republican Party since the Reagan era. It has forty years of political victories under its belt. Everything really turns on what you mean by “conservative” though. The devil is in the details. American conservatism is “conservative” in the sense that what it wants to “conserve” is liberalism. The “conservative” brand is more popular than “liberalism” which is why it is used by the Republican Party.

George W. Bush was a conservative liberal. Donald Trump is a nationalist liberal. By nationalism, he means that our nation is great because the substance of it is liberalism. Rich Lowry attended the National Conservatism conference and recently wrote a whole book called The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free. By “nationalism” and “conservatism,” Rich Lowry means liberalism in the sense of being dressed up in the Stars and Stripes and celebrating the Constitution. This is just window dressing though because while the word “conservative” has been traded for “nationalism” it means EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

Greg Johnson has been reading Yoram Hazony’s book The Virtue of Nationalism likely in the hope of reassuring himself that the ideology of the GOP is changing in some substantial way. Hazony made it crystal clear that this isn’t the case when he banned Peter Brimelow and Patrick Casey from the first “National Conservatism” conference and invited John Bolton to speak and had David Brog invite any White Nationalists in the crowd to GTFO of the building. Nick Fuentes was blacklisted and banned from CPAC and the Turning Point USA conference last year. When Barack Obama was president, White Nationalists like Jamie Kelso were allowed to attend the conference. Such has been the shift in the Overton Window under the Trump presidency. Michelle Malkin was deplatformed from speaking at Mar-a-Lago and is now hanging out with Nick Fuentes.

It is too kind to say that White Nationalists have become the niggers of the Republican Party. In the Jim Crow South, it was considered lower class to toss around slurs like “nigger.” The word “negro” was typically used and also in the sense of being a term of endearment. The Old South was a paternalistic culture. The blacks were “our negroes.” They had a place in our society under segregation albeit a lower social status. In contrast, White Nationalists have no place in the GOP. They have no place in the conservative movement. They have no representation. They have no place in America. They are actually lower than “niggers” in the conservative stack.

Greg Johnson wants to focus on the question on whether the Dissident Right can swing the 2020 election against Donald Trump. This is irrelevant. Regardless of the size of our political clout, we all have a decision to make and that decision is whether or not to vote to reelect Donald Trump and to support the GOP in the 2020 election. We all have to determine for ourselves whether the last four years of having Donald Trump as president is worth renewing for a second season. Is it better or worse than the alternative of Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders being president?

In the 2016 election, we approached that election like we were all on the same team. We were Donald Trump supporters. We identified with him and voted for him. We created and spread memes. We made the case for him as ardently as any of his other supporters. We supported him more ardently than most of the people who were hired to work for his administration. Donald Trump’s enemies became our enemies, but after the 2016 election was over we were all cut from the team. We were dumped and left to fend for ourselves. No one came to our defense when the Left went after us. We were thrown to the wolves.

Are we stupid enough to repeat the same mistake in 2020? Have we learned nothing from that experience? If Donald Trump wins the 2020 election and we go to bat for him like in 2016, the result is that conservatives will win, we will lose and we will catch all the flak for the effort. We will continue to fight wars for conservatives. Why should we be fighting their wars? What have these people done for us? What have they done to deserve our loyalty?

The answer is nothing. They have done nothing for us. We can expect nothing from them. We get nothing in exchange for fighting their battles. It has gotten to the point where they can’t even be photographed in the same room with one of us. These bold defenders of free speech. These enemies of Antifa. These people are “National Conservatives” now. Give me a break! It is now the same old Jewish racket that it ever was and it is more Jewish than ever before with Israelis defining “American Nationalism.” Have you heard that Trump might even let Jonathan Pollard return to Israel before the 2020 election?

Perhaps I am just a high-time preference wignat. I can’t see what 50 years of the conservative movement did for the ideal of conservatism. I don’t think that Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk are helping the cause of nationalism or populism. I see a bunch of liberals who are avowed political enemies trying to associate themselves with “nationalism” and “populism.” If we give these people another four years in office, the result will be worse than George W. Bush’s second term. Since Donald Trump has been president, our analysis and forecast hasn’t been pessimistic enough. We should have been chastened by the 2016 election which we got completely wrong. Some of us got the 2018 election completely wrong too, but not this website.

Bernie Sanders is actually the lesser of two evils. At least the damage that Bernie will do as president will be laid at the doorstep of socialism. At least it will be recognized as damage rather than as victory. At least no one on the Right will be “trusting the plan.” At least Trump’s supporters will be alert and mobilized to oppose the damage rather than suffering from the complacent delusion that they are “winning” and “Making America Great Again.” At least that will be the end of Jared Kushner and Bibi Netanyahu and MIGA controlling the White House.

None of this is to say that we should support Bernie Sanders. It is just better for us to have an open enemy in office than a demagogue and a fake nationalist. The Trump presidency is mostly history now and with the benefit of hindsight we can look back on it all and say that those people who were called “wignats” and “blackpillers” were right. Those who didn’t trust the plan in the Dissident Right were right and the Trump fan boys were wrong. Why would they be wrong about 2020 when Charlie Kirk is the face of the Trump campaign and after Trump and the GOP have taken over $200 million in donations from Sheldon Adelson?

The 2016 election feels like it was twenty years ago. Donald Trump was drained by the swamp. He is running a standard conservative campaign. He cut taxes. He rebuilt the military. The black unemployment rate is lower than ever. The U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem. He tore up the Iran Deal. He appointed conservative judges to the Supreme Court. He used nationalism and populism as his booster rocket to carry him through the 2016 primaries. The man is openly running as a conservative now though. He is saying mostly the same things that Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz would have said had they seized control of the Republican Party. He has even implemented Jack Kemp-style opportunity zones in Detroit.

Are we better off than we were four years ago? It’s true that our web traffic has increased under Trump, but wasn’t that also true of Obama’s second term? Wouldn’t that have occurred anyway under Hillary? When Barack Obama was president, Counter-Currents was selling books on Amazon and PayPal. The “Alt-Right” label hadn’t been completely trashed and identified with Donald Trump. If Donald Trump has been so great for us, why have we ditched the label? It still means Trump supporting Republican on social media, NOT Heilgate or Charlottesville.

The best course of action is to remain neutral in the 2020 election. In our hyperpolarized partisan environment and with our political isolation and lack of representation in the GOP and small relative size, the Dissident Right has nothing to gain from entering the fray. We shouldn’t choose between two evils. To quote an old African proverb, when the elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled. The Alt-Right got trampled and never recovered.

I’m sure that Greg Johnson and Nick Fuentes will disagree. I look forward to hearing the case for Trump in 2020. I’m guessing that is somewhat weaker than the case for Trump in 2016. I’d like to know how reelecting Sheldon Adelson’s man will somehow advance our cause.

Note: It is unnecessary to make the case against Bernie. I don’t plan to support or vote for Bernie Sanders. Why shouldn’t we remain indifferent to this shitshow?