Am I Milquetoast Now?

After he showed up here yesterday in the comment section, I reread Michael Edison Hayden’s “Extremist File” on me at the SPLC. It got me thinking about my ideological journey over the last 23 years. I have tried on all sorts of ideas and tactics and discarded them over the past quarter century. Everyone changes and learns through experience. I don’t think that I have changed much over the years.

1. White Nationalism 1.0 – I have been criticizing White Nationalism 1.0 since I launched this blog in 2008. I started to explicitly back away from it in 2011. In my view, it is reduces White people to race and flattens the cultural differences between them. I became much more interested in regional cultures in 2011 and 2012 and spent most of the 2010s identifying as a Southern Nationalist. I still believe that race is real and important, but I think the cultural and political divide between White people is more intense. Nearly all the violence that I saw at street demonstrations was between White people.

2. Eugenics – In the 2000s, I was interested in eugenics and argued in support of it on online forums, but I eventually lost interest in it and turned against it. It first struck me as silly to focus on eugenics in the midst of a global demographic collapse. We have much bigger problems. After I was blessed with children of my own, I grew more opposed to abortion. I have rejected eugenics for years now.

3. Violent Accelerationism – I have never supported violent accelerationists. I have been arguing with people like Alex Linder about this for nearly twenty years now. I was doing it on online forums even before I started this blog. I have always criticized them including William Pierce on this blog.

4. New Atheism – Undoubtedly, this biggest shift that has ever occurred in terms of my ideology and political views and has been away from Nietzscheanism and atheism in the early 2000s to Christianity and Lutheranism in the early 2010s. I began to back away from atheism around 17 years ago when I realized how much I disliked other atheists on the Richard Dawkins forum. I was married in a Lutheran church in 2013. I have been a practicing Lutheran for years now.

5. Alt-Right – Since I wrote My Alt-Right Biography in 2016, I have lost interest in the Alt-Right. Specifically, my problem with the Alt-Right is that it defined itself against mainstream conservatism and that toxic space became a grab bag of incompatible ideologies, which was revealed by the Nationalist Front fiasco when we found ourselves marching shoulder to shoulder with the NSM.

As a happily married, church going White Southern Protestant with two kids, I gradually realized that I have little in common with people like Andrew Anglin or Weev. I’m not an American Nationalist. I’m not an incel who hates women. I’m not one of these people raging against Christianity on Twitter like Adam Green. I’m not a Nietzschean neoliberal like Richard Spencer. I’m not trying to pump air into the tires of the Third Reich like TRS and NJP. I’m too old, Southern and Protestant to be a Groyper.

6. Street Demonstrations – As recent years have shown, we don’t need to engage in pitched street battles with Antifa to erode taboos or “move the Overton Window,” which is why I no longer believe in The Logic of Street Demonstrations. We are better off sitting at home and doing nothing. The old taboos have been eroded by permeating the online Right with memes and a culture of criticism.

7. Trump – I have changed my mind about Donald Trump. I have circled back around to my original view in 2015/2016 which is that Trump is a useful blunt instrument for crushing old school conservatism. You could say that he has already completely buried these people in the 2024 primary. We are also strapped in and stuck with Trump anyway until 2028.

8. Conservatism – I spent most of the last 23 years in the White Nationalist 1.0, Alt-Right and Dissident Right eras raging against conservatism. I was still extremely alienated from mainstream conservatism when Trump was president. I organized a Hard Right rally in Shelbyville in October 2017.

In recent years though, conservatism has radically changed under Joe Biden. I began to pick up on this in the first weeks of the Biden presidency. Conservatives were suddenly radicalizing after COVID, the George Floyd riots and January 6. It was showing up in polls. The shift was evident in the SPLC’s own poll. The rhetoric of the online mainstream Right and the Dissident Right began to blur.

We’re at the point now where Charlie Kirk is attacking MLK and even criticism of Israel is becoming mainstream. If Trump wins the presidency, I think the Alt-Right and Dissident Right eras will be in the rearview mirror. The constituency is evolving into just the Right.

9. White Ethnostate – I don’t give much thought to it these days. 

In this sense, I am the opposite of Walt Bismarck who no longer identifies as a White Nationalist. I’m also from the Sun Belt. I am turning 44 years old and have spent my entire life in Alabama. I believe racial differences exist, but I am accustomed to racial diversity. Walt Bismarck acted on his White Nationalist ideology and moved to his Hyperborean utopia in the Midwest only to find out that he had little in common with the more settled German Midwesterners who lived there.

In contrast, I have never wanted to live anywhere else. I don’t have any plans to either. I like my home. I like my neighbors. I have deep roots in my area. Hell on earth for me would be uprooting my family to move across the country to live in a suburb among a bunch of White libtards. Now, I can see myself happily living in a place like near the beach in Baldwin County, AL or perhaps in Huntsville – a whiter, nicer area with the same Deep South culture – but never in a place like Portland, OR or Massachusetts.

I’m pro-White. I’m a race realist. I am a proud Southerner. I am a Lutheran. I am more optimistic about engaging in mainstream politics than in the past. I associate with the same people, but I don’t define my politics in terms of living or wanting to live in an abstract place.

10. The Internet – I am not nearly as active online as I used to be.

Online communities are not real communities. I have a larger family now. I have more responsibilities. For years, we agitated to push our ideas into the mainstream, but that has mostly been accomplished now. It doesn’t feel as urgent in light of the way our politics is trending.

Am I milquetoast now?

Am I moderate and wholesome now?

No, I think it is more like I am about average. Virtually everything that I believe or have defended on this blog is either mainstream and has a lot of traction on the Populist Right now: White identity politics, immigration restriction, secession, isolationism, anti-globalism, Christian nationalism, even criticism of Israel. There is nothing remarkable about what I am saying anymore in my demo. Maybe it was 20 years ago when it was taboo. I am only remarkable for saying it back then.

In 2024, the “Radical Right” would be explicitly NS, hardcore atheist or pagan and supportive of violence. Paleoconservatism is ascendant. Trumpism is ascendant. Softcore WN like VDARE is ascendant. Labeling people like Trump or Tucker Carlson as “extremists” implies that people like Liz Cheney and Mike Pence are still normal and mainstream. This is an exercise in liberal self deception.