Matt Parrott vs. Joachim Hoch: The Morality of Violence

The video has since been removed.

Unfortunately, it is gone now so I can no longer embed the video to illustrate why the 1.0 and 2.0 movements failed. I vowed last night that I was going to respond to it though since the whole debate was sparked by an exchange of words over the morality of violence.

In the aftermath of the Michigan State debacle, I quit the 2.0 movement. At the time, I said that I wanted to take some time off from the internet to clear my head, rethink everything and come back for “whatever the hell comes after this incarnation” of the the movement. The Alt-Right had imploded and I was sick and tired of relying of the failed paradigms, discourse and strategies of other people. I spent roughly the next year after I posted that article doing research and working on a book.

In the course of writing the book, it dawned on me that one of the biggest failings of the 1.0 and 2.0 movements was the lack of a solid moral foundation. It occurred to me that White Nationalism 1.0 and the Alt-Right were like lolbertarianism in this respect. Both movements spend virtually 100% of their time talking about three things – the existence of race, the importance of White identity and Jewish power and influence – and almost nothing else. This is the glue that holds them together and this absence simultaneously provides a space for the inclusion of morally broken people.

As someone who was involved in both the 1.0 and 2.0 movements, I began to see how this is highly problematic. Like many people, I have been convinced that racial differences exist, Jewish power and influence is a massive social problem and that White identity is legitimate. I do not, however, share the moral beliefs of people like Joachim Hoch who are involved in those movements and the coalition of people who are united by those three points in the 1.0 and 2.0 movements is repeatedly trashed in public by violent fantasists who go out and murder people in the name of the cause.

From time to time, I have written about these sad people for over a decade now on this website. From James von Brunn to John Earnest, I have watched in horror as they have flamed out over the years and associated the rest of us with their toxic actions. I see the whole phenomena as being one facet of the larger trend of mentally disturbed, attention seeking mass shooters who are drunk on fantasy ideology. Personally, I’m repulsed by both their carnage as well as the carnage of war.

What is a fantasy ideology?

“His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason – because it was, in his words, “good for his soul.” What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.”

“And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy – a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent antiwar demonstration he was in no sense aiming at coercing others to conform with his view, for that would have still been a political objective. Instead he took part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of being among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical materialism.”

“It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge; it is our fantasy world that allows us to fill this gap. Normally, for most of us at least, this fantasy world of our stays relatively hidden, and indeed a common criterion of our mental health is the extent to which we are able to keep our fantasies firmly under our watchful control.

Yet clearly there are individuals for whom this control is, at best, intermittent; its failure results in behavior that ranges from there merely obnoxious to the clinically psychotic. The man who insists on being taken more seriously than his advantages warrant fall into the former category; the maniac who murders an utter stranger because God – or his neighbor’s dog – commanded him to do so belongs to the latter.

“What is common in such interactions is that the fantasist inevitably treats other people merely as props: there is absolutely no interest in, or even awareness of, others as having wills and minds of their own. The man who bores us with stories designed to impress us with his importance or his intellect or his bank account cares nothing for us as individuals, for he has already cast us in the role in which he wishes us to play: we are there to be impressed by him. Indeed, it is an error to suggest that he is even trying to impress us, for this would assume that he is willing to learn enough about us to discover how best we might be impressed. Nothing of the kinds occurs.”

“And why should it? After all, the fantasist has already projected onto us the role we are to play in his fantasy. And no matter what we may be thinking of his recital, it never crosses his mind that we may be utterly failing to play the part expected of us; indeed, it is sometimes astonishing to see how much exertion is required of us to bring our own profound lack of interest to the fantasist’s attention.”

“I have therefore elected to call the phenomenon in question, if only for lack of a better term, fantasy ideology – political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal fantasy. It is, to be frank, something like Dungeons & Dragons carried out not with the trappings of medieval romance – old castles and maidens in distress – but entirely in terms of ideological symbols and emblems. The only important difference between them is that one is an innocent pasttime while the other has proven to be one of the most terrible scourges to afflict the human race.”

The violent fantasist is a familiar figure in our circles.

When Glenn Miller gunned down a 14-year-old Methodist Eagle Scout and his grandfather at a synagogue in Overland Park, KS, he was acting out a fantasy ideology. Glenn was there stop the genocide of the White race and opened fire and gunned down Reat Griffin Underwood. In his own mind, Glenn Miller was a hero who was nobly sacrificing his own life for the sake of stopping a genocidal monster hellbent on the destruction of the White race … Reat Griffin Underwood.

Reat Griffin Underwood and his grandfather were at that community center so that he could try out for KC SuperStar which was a singing competition for high school students. Glenn Miller had no interest whatsoever though in the lives of his victims because he had already cast them into the role he wanted them to play in a narrative which existed purely in his own mind.

Glenn Miller had run for Congress in Missouri, but that experience convinced him that there was no viable political path forward because the people had not rallied behind his brilliant campaign:

Joachim Hoch’s response to the implosion of the 2.0 movement is one potential path forward. It is a failed strategy from the 1.0 movement – violent accelerationism – which we all know from experience leads straight to federal prison for anyone who is foolish enough to go down that road.

In contrast, the path forward that we are charting here is essentially heading to the locker room, hiring a new coach, learning from past mistakes and innovating a new paradigm, discourse, strategy and tactics. If one of the biggest flaws of the 1.0 and 2.0 movements was the lack of a solid moral foundation, it follows that the 3.0 movement must start with one before proceeding to other topics.

The fact that this whole debate was triggered by a guy in a skull mask on YouTube chortling about Helter Skelter on a livestream reflects the intellectual poverty of the 1.0 and 2.0 movements more than anything else. We’re supposed to be Europeans and many of us boast about our high intelligence, but something as pitiful as that is our best effort? John Earnest was a talented pianist, but a piss poor mass shooter. The kid threw his life away because of his misplaced confidence in the gun that jammed on him.

In his debate with Matt Parrott, Joachim argued that Dylann Roof, Brendon Tarrant and John Earnest had succeeded in “getting their message out,” which was many times more effective than reason and calm persuasion. That’s not what I saw from my perspective. I didn’t bother to read Tarrant’s manifesto because all of these mass shootings just blur together and horrify me. I don’t think most people cared what motivated Stephen Paddock the Las Vegas shooter or Devin Patrick Kelley the Sutherland Springs church shooter. I think most people are just repulsed by it and are left wondering what the hell is wrong with this country that it is producing so many sick and twisted people. I would say whatever message that Paddock or Kelley may have wanted to send was discredited by the messenger.

There is nothing new about mass shooters. It has become so routine that the country is numb to the violence. Even some of the worst mass shootings only last for a few news cycles before they are quickly forgotten or barely remembered. There are so many self detonating nuts these days with so many competing manifestos of their grievances that the novelty of it has long since worn off. Within the next month or two, there will be another mass shooting with another manifesto and it will be shrugged off like clockwork except for the shooter who will either lose his own life or go to prison.

If we are going to turn this team around, we are going to need a new coach who can go out and recruit new talent so that we can start winning again and making progress toward our goals. We’re going to need a new defense and a new offense, not any of this shit which only marginalized us.