Brett's "Outbreak of LARPing" essay sucks.
The Alt Right has outlived every prediction by a credible source and continues to gain momentum. Essentially an updated European New Right that incorporates social conservatism and ejects the reliance on socialist-style government, the Alt Right forms a cultural wave that has successfully upended politics in the late stages of liberal democracy.
This is a convenient definition of the AltRight contrived to cram this movement into Brett's intellectual framework. The AltRight doesn't "eject reliance on socialist-style government" and one of its key traits is rejecting "small government" conservatism in favor of demanding that big government solve big social problems.
A lifecycle approach to defining the AltRight demands that we follow it back to its origin: 4chan. Alienated young white males on the Internet who were originally organized around common hobbies and degeneracies slowly coalesced into a political force with only one unifying goal: resolving young white male alienation. The first major tremor was Gamergate, and the first political front was feminism. Its relationship with nationalist and racial issues is exclusively and entirely on account of White Nationalism's promise to deliver solutions to the crisis of young white male alienation.
However, right now the Alt Right suffers for its success, because in becoming a voice of authority, it has attracted a wide range of people to that voice, including the type of angry losers who were in actual hate groups back in the day and the type of resentful and pointless internet fedora-toffing neckbeard basement dweller NEET that we all know from Reddit, which apparently infiltrated 4chan some time ago and took over large portions of it.
This is the exact opposite of the way it's going down. The AltRight's success is on account of an uneasy and unstable marriage between ideological White Nationalists (angry losers in actual hate groups) and imageboard aficionados (basement-dwelling neckbeards). To insult and defame the two halves of the AltRight and claim it belongs to a third group of New Right intellectuals is a transparent attempt to hijack the movement from its rightful owners by some scheming ideologues.
The AltRight's success lies in an effective synthesis where both White Nationalists and Imageboard Nationalists borrow from and compromise with the other into a movement capable of delivering on the goals of both. White Nationalism must shed its reflexive feminism and white knighting habits, Imageboard Nationalists must reject the Asian waifu fixation. Most importantly, White Nationalists must focus primarily on directly and comprehensively solving the specific problems of young white male alienation. If they don't, they'll be discarded unceremoniously, just as the Manosphere was rejected by them circa 2015 for failing to offer practical and comprehensive scratching of their itch.
White nationalism 1.0 never went anywhere for a number of reasons. It denied caste and ethnicity, and had no plan beyond race war now, for starters. But worse, it attracted a lot of antisocial and dysfunctional people who then hijacked it to become a social movement for them, instead of a political movement with actual goals.
WN 1.0 is whatever the author wishes it to mean, and it often means entirely different things to different polemicists. It's always "bad" and "not the way forward." For Brett, it didn't succeed because it "denied caste." You, too, can write an essay where you claim that WN 1.0 failed because it didn't go the direction you want, and explain that success requires going in the direction you want. In Brett's case, that means a bizarre fusion of RadTrad and plaeolibertarian bullshit.
Like any other fringe movement, White Nationalism 1.0 bulked up on antisocials and then, because these people wrote checks and bought products, they took over from the five percent or so of the movement who had all the brains, guts, and vision.
Editorial Note: Brett belongs to that 5% with brains, guts, and vision.
This meant that your average white nationalist gathering was nineteen tables of beer, violence, and crass racism, while one group sat in the corner talking sense, mostly ignored.
This is a Hollywood stereotype of WN 1.0. While there may have been some truth to this stereotype in the nineties skinhead scene, for an entire generation before the AltRight showed up, White Nationalism was an intensely elitist, academic circle jerk focused on human biodiversity, European New Right intellectuals, and esoteric RadTrad mysticism. This is the faction Brett firmly belongs to, and he's desperately trying to drive the Imageboard Nationalists out and bring 2008's White Nationalism back.
It was good that white nationalism failed, because if it had succeeded, it would have left behind a population of three-quarters European and one-quarter mystery meat like those in so many failed civilizations around the world.
The triangulation Brett's trying to achieve here is to first impugn white nationalism for being crude supremacists and then propose that we be fancy supremacists, supremacists who bring back all the stupid shit about Nordicism, intraracial hierarchies, and absolute racial purity. The path forward is in establishing a pragmatic definition of "White" and then to be ruthlessly meritocratic from within that defined circle. Let the most gifted and courageous White man lead, ...not the one with the most dolicocephalic cranium or aristocratic surname prefix.
I will share only one story to show what WN 1.0 was like. On a certain large white nationalist forum, there was a very popular user named CelticMaiden88. Basically, most of the guys white knighted her on a regular basis, and she always got in the last word on any topic because she was strong on the holy trinity of WN 1.0: hate Negroes, blame Jews, and support government welfare and entitlements because half of the forum was on those anyway.
We get it. Everybody's gross, disfigured, brutish, and crippled but your faction, which is comprised exclusively of handsome, beautiful, and successful National Merit Scholar Finalists. The real point he's trying to make here is that being a "small government" paleocon is aristocratic and favoring help and support for our frail, weak, young, poor, and old is trashy and gross. A political vanguard which promises the exact opposite of helping its people isn't going to go anywhere, because ideologues which actively reject a base of support and demonstrably lack manpower and resources will continue doing what Brett prefers to do: bloviate about abstractions among other "enlightened" friends.
If you said that maybe we should drink less, fight less, and commit fewer crimes so that we could instead have a clearer and more appealing message, they just pointed out that unlike you, they were real-world activists who put 106 flyers just last weekend.
Everybody's street activism is pointless bullshit, a predictable staple among folks who have put no effort or energy into devising successful street activism. I don't drink, the only fights I've ever been with were against antifa, and my only crime on my record is refusing to disperse in Charlottesville. Where are these drunken stupid brawlers at that Brett keeps referencing? Which organization? The conceit here is that he's refusing to name the parties because he's a gentleman. The truth is that those virtually all drifted into apolitical motorcycle clubs at some point back in the nineties.
As the old saying goes, the movement had too many chiefs and not enough Indians, or maybe that is too many Fuehrers and not enough Speers or Goebbelses.
Look for the "too many chiefs" line to appear in absolutely all screeds insisting that everybody follow them.
Add to that group of antisocials another band of misfits, the neckbeards. As open-minded people, none of us fear or dislike misfits generally; most of them are simply eccentrics or socially inept, but neither of those signal bad guys. The new type of misfit however is the internet hikkikomori who essentially gave up on the world early on and is possessed by a fervent impulse to destroy because to him, everything is broken (well… this is true) and hopeless, so the only solution is a final bath of fire for all that is.
This is a true manifesto for a return WN 1.0 disguised as the opposite, complete with a rousing condemnation of the Imageboard Nationalists to whom White Nationalism almost entirely earns its recent wellspring of talent and energy. I was there, and I remember Brett being right at home among the soi distant "intellectuals" who dominated the scene before the anti-intellectual and brutally pragmatic meme artists made asses of the intellectuals by proving themselves smarter than the self-reverent essayists.
These groups share something in common: they are LARPing.
"Inactivists" impugn just about all real world action as Live Action Role Playing, pretending that actually fighting the enemy and injecting our message into the national discourse is ruining everything. It is ruining everything for the essayists, who are no longer part of the conversation. Immobile movements, like still waters, become toxic swamps. Lurking among the putrid and slimy growths and amphibious critters is that most putrid and slimy of all: the pseudointellectual wanker. They cry out the loudest when the waters begin moving, because they're congenitally incapable of thriving in a habitat where action and authentic risk are introduced.
Government agents and their paid employees, informants, capitalized on the power of hitLARPing early on.
Accusing everybody except for you of being a fed is perhaps the most trashy WN 1.0 thing you'll see. The swamp creatures fling this slime because there's no way to rinse it off. You can't prove you're not a fed, after all. The fact that the AltRight has virtually no terrorist entrapments or calls for mass violence suggests the parsimonious conclusion: this movement is really difficult for the feds to effectively infiltrate and manipulate. It's hip to the basic things to watch for, and the only bloodshed an AltRight collective is likely to inflict is from a member jumping through the nearest window and scraping himself to escape if anybody in the group were to propose organized violence.
It is no surprise that many of us estimate that half of the public white nationalism 1.0 was either informants or agents.
It's no surprise that these disgruntled paranoiacs actually believe the federal government is capable of not only hijacking most of the leadership positions but even comprising half of the membership. What a waste of federal tax dollars that would have been, with virtually no convictions or thwarted terrorist shenanigans to show for their investment.
The Alt Right faces a maturity crisis. As part of its adaptation of Evolan Traditionalism, European New Right, and American anti-socialist paleoconservative leanings to a new political movement, it adopted the “big tent” approach that says that those who can agree on a few basics work together even if their viewpoints diverge after that. This was obviously the right approach, but now we are dealing with the fallout from being inclusive, which means that there is no clear internal hierarchy or class structure within the Alt Right, so like anything else in an inverted society, the loudmouths rule the day.
There is a natural hierarchy of men from the superior to the inferior, with Brett at the top and organizers of projects engaged in real world street organizing at the bottom. Until the natural order of things is restored and Brett is empowered to manifest his nobless oblige, you're all going to remain in the Kali Yuga.
He concludes the essay with an incoherent mash-up of RadTrad for Dummies and White Nationalist white knighting apologetics on the woman question, concluding with an exhortation for us all to "man up" and blame ourselves for the systemic crisis of Western womandom. The Woman Question is truly the dividing line between White Nationalism and Imageboard Nationalism, with both sides exhibiting extreme positions incompatible with true forward motion. I've been routinely accused by the Imageboard Nationalists of being a white knight for my rejection of their extreme positions which are antithetical to family formation and I've been routinely accused by the White Nationalists of being a misogynist for integrating the majority of the insights of the Manosphere into my position.
The answer can't be found in mass society, but in subculture. The Imageboard Nationalists are correct that women in our mass society are toxic, but they typically fail to appreciate that a confident and successful subculture can be created with its own pro-feminine, anti-feminist social mores. There never has been and never will be a tribe of men who've set themselves apart socially and succeeded who were then effectively boycotted by women.
The focus for our movement must rest on crafting a functional and healthy subculture within which our men can reach their full potential as fighters, tradesmen, patriarchs, and providers. All of the theory and political strategery is utterly pointless if we as leadership don't deliver on our promise: resolve young white male alienation. Arid abstractions are a part of that, as some of their problems are abstract and global in nature. But much of it can be resolved with more direct mentorship, support, and investment in the lost boys of the modern world who've been cast out with no hope or direction for becoming successful men.