My New Alt-Dissident Fantasy Fiction

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 (conclusion)

I have previously opined that the alt-dissidents ought to establish culture and aesthetics rather than just making formal arguments.
I decided to try to practice what I preach and for the last few weeks I’ve been working on a mini-novella instead of my regular blog posts. I’ve chosen to write in a fantasy setting because I’ve always wanted to, but also because establishing mythological tales is a natural place to start for an emerging culture. And much of modern mythology comes from fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero stories.
Narratives about gods and heroes are popular in every culture because humans seem to universally process the world around them in terms of archetypes. Greek Gods, Norse Gods, and modern superheroes all embody essential principles and the interactions of these characters mirror the relationships between those principles in real life. It is my guess that myth-making is a primal human activity because it can communicate abstractions even to people who are illiterate and/or low IQ on a visceral and intuitive level.

I have often used the concepts of Heaven and Hell on this blog to contrast the established social order with those who thrive outside of it and against it. Now, I have applied this analogy to a narrative.
I didn’t feel this blog was the right medium for longer pieces of fiction. I have always believed in sticking to essays here between 600-1500 words that readers can easily scroll through.
So I approached Kaiter Enless of Logos Club with a query and after reviewing it, he expressed his interest in publishing my story on his site divided into 4-5 parts. Part 1 was just put up today and I will have the rest forthcoming soon.

Special thanks to Garr who personally volunteered his time to edit and critique the story and to Ulric Kerensky who also read through the rough draft and gave me excellent feedback.

Dissident Success Requires Cities

I too get a certain sense of delight seeing a map of the “Hillary archipelago” a few blue counties drowning in an immense sea of red.  Yet I still remember that LA, NYC, or Chicago areas, each easily outnumber all the population of the mountains, northern Great Plains, and the Great Basin combined.  The vast stretch in between Reno, Salt Lake City and Omaha up to the Canadian border has possibly less than 10 million in it out of a country of 330 million.  If not for provisions protecting small states built into the constitution, these outlying provinces would be politically irrelevant.

Even aside from overwhelming quantity, cities have been the natural generators of culture, art, and ideas since the beginning of civilization.  It is a common sentiment in the dissident right to be disdainful of the city, and having lived in cities, I vehemently agree with most of their points.  I only disagree with the conclusion that the city ought to be written off and surrendered.  On the contrary, the goal should be to take the city back.

When you have millions of people who can hop on a subway for a few bucks and see each other within the hour at any time, you can have groups of even highly unusual types of people that can meet up regularly.  Nobody reaches their full potential alone.  Throughout history look at any group of contemperaneous authors, artists, or thinkers and usually they all knew each other or at least corresponded.  These social circles generally had to form in cities.
The internet made the fluid real-time formation and exchange of ideas possible outside of urban areas for the first time, but this interaction remains abstract and ghostly until it is consolidated by regular interaction in person between people.  In the countryside a nascent high IQ counterculture is usually too diffusely distributed.  The city allows for the concentration of a critical mass of neo-tribalists in close proximity where they can interact and their energies can be amplified.

We will know the internet dissidents have fully transitioned into the real world not just when they have rallies, but when there are urban neighborhoods people associate with their identity that have their own public events and meeting places.  There are, however, the circumstances we have now that make cities ridiculously overpriced, unsafe, and dirty.  The dissidents might begin as a rough urban enclave bringing improvement to a small area but with long term goals in mind of how cities ought to be managed to maximize civilizational creativity.

Firstly, we should reflect on the problem of unproductive underclasses flooding into urban areas.  A properly run system wouldn’t allow this.  The poorest will always be crushingly poor no matter where you put them.  Productive people produce far more wealth if they have easy access to urban areas.  It does not make sense to even allow underclasses near the cities.  By simply occupying space, they drive up prices for scarce real estate.  This is compounded by the fact that any place they congregate becomes uninhabitable for law-abiding cooperators.  Even worse, crime spreads outward from these dead zones and further contributes to making cities into violent undesirable sinkholes people work a job in and then flee from at 4 PM.

In a righteous empire, the city should be seen as a desirable privileged place that non-rich cooperators are rewarded with access to, not a third world hellhole.  Obviously every city has many lower IQ jobs that need to be done, but that just requires an orderly, properly vetted working class preferably with higher IQ and conscientiousness than their work strictly requires.  Every person who lives in an urban area incurs a significant opportunity cost for society if they do not need to be there or are not the best choice to fill their scarce spot with.

When skilled professionals making six figures start living in their employer’s parking lot, we already know society has seriously mismanaged its resources and infrastructure.  Just think of all the wealth that gets wasted in a huge bonfire as people compete for scarce access to the economy’s machinery!  When poor planning and a dysfunctional undercaste prevent wealth producers from reaching the means of production, it’s kind of like cells getting blocked from processing oxygen by exposure to cyanide.

Of course, the main structural problem of cities in all times and places is they are “gene shredders” as Spandrell calls it.  Civilizations rise as the brightest and most capable congregate in cities and declines as they fail to breed or are massively outbred by the peasantry and underclass.  The automobile and with it the modern suburb allow people to participate in the urban economy while still reproducing at near-replacement levels.  Real light rail systems would be a lot better still.  Thus admission into the suburbs also must also be carefully controlled to have a sustainable high agency urban society.

In the longer run, I hope new technologies might even make cities less important and allow people to live outside of nodes on a narrow grid that are natural chokepoints for rent-seekers.  The obvious strategic problem with modern mega-cities is their huge vulnerability to attack.  Having all the best and brightest in one spot of course means it’s not that hard to decapitate an entire civilization with a single strike.
So long as the city remains the center of modern human power and organization, any dissidents require at least a foothold there.

The Augustus Principle

A dry history text book lulls us into the complacent idea that one time always splits neatly into the next on a precise date.  This way of thinking leads us to misinterpret our own time.
There is nothing quite like the look on someone’s face when I explain that Julius Caesar wasn’t an emperor and didn’t intend to end the Roman Republic forever.  It moves into an even stranger dimension when I explain that Augustus, who came after Caesar, had to pretend for a long time that he was not the real, autocratic power and the senate was still there for hundreds of years after it became a ceremonial institution within an empire.  There never was a precise moment Augustus(played by Brian Blessed) came out on stage and said “Ho, ho I’m the emperor of the Roman Empire!”

But surely, people back then had some idea when Julius Caesar took over that some new and drastic change was taking place even if they didn’t know what it was?  Then I mention Caesar wasn’t even the first guy to march on Rome.  A guy called Sulla had already been the first to do that.  He used it as a way to destroy his political opponents and reshuffle the deck of the senate in his favor.  People expected more of the same from Caesar and for the republican system to go on as it had for hundreds of years.

If I want to keep shaking up the prim and tidy version of history I can mention that the military reforms of a guy called Marius re-aligned incentives so that troops first owed their pay and pensions to their general, not to the government, making the emergence of miltary strongmen like Sulla and Caesar possible and inevitable.  At the time he did it, Marius was just trying to increase his own power and prestige in Rome and the senate went along with it so he could deal with the immediate crises presented by armies of Germanic barbarians.

As the republican system proved too inflexible to deal with crises, precedents and rules were worn down one at a time until the old system gradually became something else we now call an empire.

This fluid version of history makes people uncomfortable because it makes them start to think about their own time in a new way.  When history is a mesh of gradualisms rather than clean breaks on memorized dates a smug sense of security evaporates.  Anyone might reflect “The ancient Romans thought the Roman empire would never end in its heyday.”  This feels comfortable enough because it fits well with the tidy history of discrete periods.  The Romans had their time in the sun.  So did the dinosaurs.
It feels far less safe to think: “The ancient Romans did not even realize their government had ended as it was happening!  Nobody even really intended for it to end up that way!”

In reality, once Marius smashed term limits for consulship and made his military reforms, the Roman Republic was effectively over in a practical sense.  The control of the government over the military had been compromised and all government requires monopoly over the legitimate use of force.  Once one learns to think in terms of the fluid version of history, it becomes possible to see where crucial pivot points lay that went without recognition or fanfare when they happened.  Furthermore, there is an interplay of multiple pivot points.

The rogue generals unleashed by Marius’ personal ambition might not have been able to overturn the republic had the popular opinion been overwhelmingly in favor of the system.

The Roman Republic had a long tradition going back to its origins as a small city state of cooperation and compromise between the classes.  Periodically, the proles had revolted and gotten concessions giving them limited representation in government and some safety nets.  Perhaps the greatest concession the plebs ever got was a special political office created just for them, the tribune of the plebs.  To compensate for their votes being counted less, they got two tribunes who had veto powers.

As Rome grew richer and more powerful, this last obstacle to the elites became intolerable.  As Roman territory became concentrated in the hands of just a few wealthy families, pleb revolt in favor of land reform was taken up by a tribune named Gracchus.  Gracchus came from a wealthy family and was viewed as a class traitor(kind of how Trump is now.)  This threat to the mega-estates of the ultra-rich resulted in Gracchus actually getting beaten to death by the senate.  

As if this wasn’t enough, Gracchus’ brother tried to step in and carry on the cause.  He ended up committing to suicide to avoid also being beaten to death by the senators.  For some reason reform attempts were never quite the same after that and the social tensions rather than being resolved just simmered as the elite tried to sit on the pot lid.  With this tension and disenchantment already well established, it’s unsurprising in retrospect that rogue generals could count on considerable popular support. 

It seems a rule across time and place that any elite class tries to eliminate all obstacles to the exercise of power and cut any bothersome obligations or responsibilities to a larger society.  In a smaller-scale society like a city state, there is a limit to how far the elite can separate from the obligations of societal leadership.  However, when there is a huge increase in wealth and territory, the elites try to use this rocket fuel to break free of the gravitational pull of the lower classes so they can rule the world below as they will from their untouchable elysium in outer space.

If we apply the more fluid way of history to our own time, we realize the neo-liberal cultural revolution that took hold in the 1960s effectively ended forever in 2016 and we have entered a new historical period.  Even those who desperately want to restore the old social order do so with a tribal sort of viciousness in stark contrast to the harmonious star trek utopia they had envisioned for mankind barely one year ago.  Even as they yearn to go back, they are unable to appreciate the irony of how their fanaticism only fuels the formation of faultlines that will define a new age. 

Once we learn to ignore the dull farting tuba noise that is textbook history, we can see how Trump is a transitional figure and a pivot point.  Those who believe in the system of periodic shoeboxes might say “He is trying to be a Caesar!” of course without understanding what that really means. 

Trump is more like a Gracchus, a Marius, or even a Clodius Pulcher that aligns forces in a new direction.  Like transitional figures in the Roman republic, he will know not what he does as he helps begin the 21st century in earnest.

The Class Divide in the Alt Right

As the alt-right matures it can now be divided into working class and middle class wings.  Most of the arguments about strategy, methods, and optics since Charlottesville have at their root been different parts of society talking past each other.  The alt-right likes to talk about race, but too many of them seem to neglect class, which in some circumstances is even more important than race in a highly stratified America.  

The pre-existing White Nationalism 1.0 was a working class movement by its nature.  They were notorious for being abrasive purity-spirallers who don’t work well with others but those who made the transition to 2.0 have brought with them established organizational structures and are willing to show up in the real world.
At this point, when people are taking huge risks just stepping out into public, just showing up is the decisive factor, not wardrobe choice.  As a mercantile culture, we are still grappling with the new reality that action, revealed preference, and loyalty means more than words, presentation, or “brands.” 

From what I have seen, the most aggressively anti-social purity spirallers are already getting pushed out.  Over time I am seeing progressively fewer Nazi costumes.  As far as I can tell from pictures of Shelbyville, a few last people wearing nazi helmets are all that remains to be dealt with.  Counter-intuitively, complaints from the middle class wing of the alt-right actually grew louder after this event.  They were just as upset by a procession of people who looked like bikers and hunters dressed in black.  The reality is that working class groups won’t look nice and fuzzy, especially since the people who will actually show up tend to be the most angry and disaffected.  People who look determined and intimidating are not necessarily a bad thing.

The white polo shirt strategy has proven to be a stroke of genius that has created an image of the alt-right in the public consciousness.  More specifically, this has become the uniform of the middle class and SWPL alt-rightists.  They are trying to reach an audience where it pays best to be approachable, clean-cut, and well spoken.  While the black-clad bikers are gathering in rural white America, the polo preppy alt-right are targeting universities and urban areas.  

Rather than one conquering the other, these factions will end up pursuing their strategies in parallel.

I have seen a lot of criticism over the people showing up being “defective” but I think a lot of the armchair generals forget these are bands of dissidents.  The people who are comfortable and happy with their lives stay home, have other stuff to do, and have way too much to lose.  

The critics expect that the leaders of these groups can micromanage everyone like they are playing a real time strategy game and freak out about every negative thing the press seizes on.  In real life, these leaders are pirate captains elected into their roles by a motley crew of mutineers.

It takes a lot of guts and a disagreeable nature for anyone to actively go against what the rest of society is telling them to do, to reject false received wisdom, and seek out truth.  When you get a bunch of people like this in a room, you can’t expect any organization they form to run like a corporate department.  It’s only natural that it’s a bumpy ride and knees will get scraped. 

There has been a lot of public arguments between the leaders of these groups as they jockey for position and influence.  These are not crises but part of the natural process through which every organization is formed.  The clash of personalities has been a positive thing as the most able rise to the top and the worst narcissists, anti-social types, and the outright insane get weeded out.  

Every time there is a setback, loyalty gets tested and those who counter-signal too hard in the wrong way or against the wrong people fall by the wayside.  In these struggles, the class divide has been especially obvious. 

One leader screams at another about being a nazi larper only to be derided as an effete metrosexual in return.  One thing I have noticed though is over time certain rules of engagement have solidified and there are lines the leaders left standing no longer cross.  Now, even when disagreeing on tactics, there is almost always a disclaimer, of “I am glad this guy’s on our side but…”  

With pirate brawls now staying within this etiquette, the hierarchy steadily figures itself out.  Since the alt-right is the executive wing of the dissident sphere, those who come out on top will be those who can most effectively lead people to accomplish strategic goals in the field.

One of the biggest misunderstandings I see about the alt-right is from those who want it to become a mainstream political movement.  For some time yet, the niche of the alt-right is to be a minority of radicals who push the envelope and goad their enemies into over-extending.  By challenging the boundaries a few hundred alt-rightists can clear cultural space for millions more to drift slightly further towards them.

The alt-right is succeeding not by persuading everyone at once to their views but by changing the collective mood enough that alt-lite marketers are being forced to adapt or perish. 

Barely a year ago, a group with mostly gay men and women rose to become the alt-lite because their diversity points helped them get away with pushing ideas that no white straight guy could have presented to a large audience.  Someone like Milo was necessary and even his presence was enough to trigger a riot at Berkeley that was a huge turning point in exposing the establishment’s willingness to shut down free speech with violent thugs.

This excess lead directly to Antifa defeats at the battles of Huntington Beach and Berkeley forcing them to change their tactics ever since.  Few seem to reflect on the strategic significance of the fact that antifa has never again been able to attack independently, relying completely on sympathetic authorities to take their side. 

Now, it’s no longer necessary to be flamingly gay to popularize edgy political ideas.  Alt-lite figures like Milo are failing to make the transition and ex campus conservative types like James Allsup and Nick Fuentes are taking their place with far more discussion of ideas and less mindless sensationalism.  As the alt-right continues to keep on the pressure, it will change the culture—and the conventional politics lies downstream of culture.  

The Alt-Sphere Should Embrace Culture and Aesthetics

“STEM! Trades! Moar STEM!” sums up most of what I see in dissident sphere discussions about what endeavors are worthwhile. This bias reflects the practical sensibilities of the upper working class core with its skilled tradesmen and small business owners.
The engineers and computer programmers of the dark enlightenment suffer from the same conceit, heartily recommending more of what they already do as the highest virtue.
Then in the same breath I see ranting and raging about how Jews make all the movies.  They recognize a weakness in themselves but they willfully get their priorities wrong. So long as they do that, nothing changes.

To be fair, I see commendable support for revival of the classics of the Greco-Roman world but this is part of a larger conservative trend to focus on the old without making anything new.
I also wholeheartedly agree with the reaction to degenerate modern art but a return to monolithic marble columns, sterile white statues, stuffy baroque decor, the 10^19th painting of St. Sebastian looking rather bored as he gets shot full of arrows, or heroic St. George spearing a pitiful, dog-sized dragon just brings us back to the origins of modern problems.

One of the obvious growth areas for alt-dissidents is culture and aesthetics, which are too often dismissed contemptuously as the province of soy-addled literature majors.  In reality, conceding this battlefield to the enemy is a grave strategic error that stems from wounded pride and class resentment.  

 No one is inspired by the artistic output of no-frills proles with greasy hands.  Even positive portrayals of the white working class such as biscuit and gravy Terran marines flying Confederate flags are created by SWPLs and Jews in the gaming industry.  Look at any actual worker’s revolution and we see the art is always grandiosely uninspired.  At their best, the common people can sustain a steady folk-culture.

Good aesthetics come from creative, high IQ people with high openness to novelty.  We can take a quick look at something as mundane as beer.  Proles drink watery lager and tend to stick to the same brand.  Meanwhile craft beer comes in dozens of different varieties and there’s always new ones to try.  IPAs in particular have distinct aromas from different blends of hops.  
As infuriating as the SWPL culture can be, it blows the combined might of the red states out of the water.  That’s part of the deceptively great power of culture—a small number of creative people easily overpowers and reprograms masses who are lesser in beauty and ideas.

In the current order, many creative people end up as hardcore social justice warriors.  The rulers only need to inundate those of heightened sensitivity with injustice porn and beautiful rainforests getting cut down from an early age to command their allegiance for life.  The creative people won’t listen to the arguments of the other side because the other side is ugly.  Until the emergence of internet countercultures, this kneejerk assumption was rarely challenged.

The rigid right-wing personality type, on the other hand, tends to unimaginatively double down on the enlightenment error of ignoring culture. Rightist rulers such as Franco, Salazar, or Pinochet successfully crushed open opposition as they blissfully let their opponents take over the universities.  Sepsis eventually spread to the officer corps and once that happens a right-wing ruler’s days are numbered.  

Even in the best case with Franco dying of old age after being in power for decades, the cultural and aesthetic reality of Spain had already aligned with the rest of the “international community.”  Now it’s just another Euro country with massive youth unemployment, waves of migrants, and abysmal fertility rates.

Fortunately, the mainstream culture now grows weaker and more insipid by the day as censorship and conformity stifles even the best creative types.  It’s become a meme to point out how even educated adults draw heavily on Harry Potter, a series of books written for kids, to make cultural references and analogies.
Hollywood movies have sunk into embarassing mediocrity with a lineup dominated by remakes of remakes and x superhero of the week.  Musically, there hasn’t been much memorable or distinct since the 1980s.
Strangely, television shows, which were largely mid-tier schlock as recently as the 90s are the last medium with any sort of vitality, and much of that is borrowed from dissident ideologies which as of yet can only be hinted at.  

There’s nothing to stop a burst of real creativity from challenging and displacing the established aesthetic.
Dissident dominance over the generation of memes and the realm of uncensored ideas already demonstrates just how sickly the mass culture really is.
A next step might be as simple as an alt-sphere literary magazine like many ordinary high schools have—or even a neighborhood band with an alt-right theme.  The important thing is ridicule and destruction only goes so far.  It should be clearly understood the birth of a new dominant aesthetic and culture is the larger strategic goal.

See Also:  The Aesthetics of Dominance

High School And Status in America

Conventional wisdom tells us that we leave behind high school for adult life, a moral impressed on us with the bittersweet ending of every teen movie.  If we observe the real-life American culture it’s obvious that high school informs our attitudes about status for the rest of our lives.

After Charlottesville, one mainstream news article I read surmised “angry white boys…had no prom queen waiting at home.”  On the dissident side we see the meme of the Chad nationalist contrasted with the hapless virgin or the general idea of the teacher’s pet “shitlib” getting shoved into lockers by cool bullies and still being bitter about it as a hot-chocolate-sipping, pajama-wearing adult.  No matter what people believe, we always see references to the jailhouse hierarchy of high school.

There is a reason high school ridicule is as reliable a default as “small penis,” “can’t get a gf,” “lives in mother’s basement” is for angry women.  These insults endure because they are intended to hit people where it hurts most.  There are millions of men to whom the feminist stock insults at least partially apply in the most humiliating way.  High school is the same.  It speaks for itself that the most tender possible spot for many people is to even suggest that they were bottom-tier punks in kid prison.

Coming of age in high school teaches us at a critical formative time that the most athletic and outgoing people are the natural aristocracy of humanity, literally crowned as monarchs in school assemblies held in their honor.  The whole point is the elites are not particularly useful, specializing in showmanship and sales.  The golden people perform on the field while the subordinate bug people line up to adore them in a synchronized marching band.
Status competition in a royal court is all about currying favor while those merely useful are but tools in the games of those who matter.

This sets up the narrative that defines the rest of our lives.  We must accept our places as cogs in a machine to uplift widely smiling “personalities” secure in their status while we must push hard against the gears around us to stay where we’re at.

The football players get to enjoy sultry virgins as callow teens while those who go sexless spend the rest of their lives striving for the left-overs as cubicle-farm underlings.  While the golden ones start out with society’s highest rewards, the rest must prove themselves worthy of diminished value through a years-long slog.

Resentment of the jocks plays no small role in kneejerk upper middle class resentment of Donald Trump.  He reminds them of crass school bullies who scored with their first crushes—a source of panic and pain their cultural enemies love rubbing their faces in to pay them back richly for their airs of studied contempt.

We should understand though, SWPL posturing is so persistent and insufferable because of status anxiety.  As the urban upper middle class, they far outrank the working classes yet they still stew in rankling jealousy.  Rather than take up the mantle of noblesse oblige as a secure lesser aristocracy might, they never miss a chance to dump their chamber pots on their low-ranked brethren.

High school inflicts Americans with a bizarre status schizophrenia.  On one hand, the culture feeds us a silly myth that the quarterback ends up bagging groceries while the unpopular kids become Silicon Valley billionaires.  Of course, this is an attempt to assuage the losers, much like religions telling the poor they’ll finally win after they’re dead.  In real life even highly paid STEM professionals can end up getting ordered around by Biff Tannen who got into the right fraternity and got connected with type A alums.  While SWPL America is relatively high status, they are smug and callous about it because they sense somewhere deep in their marrow that all is not as it appears.

Another status conflict can be seen in hostile alt-lite reactions to alt-right activism.  The most popular elements of the counter-culture see popularity itself as proof of their worthiness just as they would have back in high school.  We will never fail to see grand boasts of how many copies of x book have been sold or how many views they get or what publications they’ve been mentioned in.  The culture of high school is akin to culture of marketing and this is no mistake.

High school reflects the values of the merchant and managerial classes who have ruled since they beheaded, deposed, and out-earned the hereditary aristocracy.
This makes it hard for most to even grasp the concept of groups founded on principle and loyalty.  After all, standing on principle against popular sentiment in prison only gets met with a beatdown in the shower room.  It’s not much different at school or on the job.

This mindset is now being challenged by an incipient warrior class supported by an aspiring priesthood.  Dissident merchants are doing their part but they don’t yet understand they can no longer lead the hierarchy.  This is causing them cognitive dissonance every step of the way as the nature of the movement grows more clear.  Marketers who can attract millions of views have great strategic strength but their weakness is that of all those millions, hardly any would risk their lives or reputations.  At some point, meaningful action requires serious personal risk and sacrifice.

It is past time to abandon the dysfunctional zero sum non-culture high school initiates us into for a real society capable of giving the best rewards to the best and able to recognize virtues besides marketplace self-interest.  If Euro-descended peoples ultimately fail to face this challenge, they will have justly earned a cozy spot on the trash heap of history.

See Also:
Vincent Law: Chad Nationalism Is A Bad Idea
Robert Stark Interviews Vincent Law
Ulric Kerensky: The Judgment of High School
Abolishing Compulsory Schooling
Referred to National Review Story, Angry White Boys, don’t want to link to them.

 

On Alt-Sphere Reactions to Charlottesville

I previously wrote about the elements of the alt-sphere and their natural roles.  In the aftermath of Charlottesville the reactions I’ve seen are somewhat unsurprising.  Fish in a coral reef do not understand how they fill a niche in a larger ecosystem.

Most prominently the alt-lite and much of the manosphere went into complete freakout mode as soon as the news emerged.  The airwaves were full of screeching about how “bad optics” and “naivety” have forever tarnished a new conservative civic-nationalist movement.

It made me smile when I found largely supportive reactions on sites like Breitbart and the_donald where lots of red-state normies hang out.  Fox news was blaring on about “white supremacists” but from what I was hearing, the commentariat wasn’t buying it.  The alt-lite was far less supportive than plenty of people who would never associate with alt-anything.

The alt-lite meltdown makes sense when we remember they are the dissident marketing and PR department.  Their mentality is all about building a brand and getting as large an audience as possible.  Their way of thinking is consistent with commercially-oriented American culture so they do not easily understand the mindset or objectives of the other dissidents.

Because alt-lightists have by far the largest mainstream exposure they see themselves as the true alt-movement and any other factions as lesser hangers-on.  The impact of Charlottesville infuriates them because it challenges their notion of being CEOs and shoves the truth in their face that they are in fact the far less glorious marketing department.  In truth, it is the soldier class of the alt-right that have the power of executive action and this is too much for them to bear right now.

The marketers will always be upset when there is a major change.  They like a predictable steady environment to build their followings and sell supplement pills.  Whenever the gravy train hits a bumpy section of track, they will be very unhappy about it.  But there’s nothing they can do either because their role is inherently passive.  The way to deal with the alt-lite is not to get mad or try to disavow them.  Just let them blow off their steam for a few days as they adjust their brands to market changes.

A civic nationalist on twitter with hundreds of thousands of followers might scream about how nazis have killed the movement in all caps but it’s the nature of who they are to walk back their heated statements just hours later as they sense a sea change rolling in.  3 days and 300 tweets later, nobody even remembers their initial rage.  They are best left on their own to do their job.  The alt-right soldiers through their actions have shown they effectively control the terms of engagement for the alt-lite.

The NRx reaction to Charlottesville has been a bit more complex.  I’ve gotten an overall sense of disapproval from them.  I think the class divide is very important here.  The stereotypical neo-reactionary in my mind’s eye is a gen-x computer programmer, IT guy, or engineer with a hint of baldness and 1-2 kids at home.  They are patient and cautious types who are reluctant to take bold risks.  They also have a tendency to look down on and counter-signal anything that seems remotely working class which many of the alt-right soldiers certainly are.  NRxers are typically comfortable financially and socially so they tend not to understand the urgency and anger felt by the other dissidents—or at least they don’t share it on a gut level.

A common NRx criticism I’ve seen of Charlottesville is that it has distracted from Damore’s firing from google over his politically incorrect memo.  They are correct to identify this event as being hugely important.  The first cracks are showing at the top tiers of the upper middle classes.  The NRx critics betray their SWPL affinities when they insist Damore “did it the right way” by being mild-mannered and going through the right channels to get his message out.

Faux-polite office politics only applies to the middle classes and above.  I see the google memo as one prong of a double-sided attack in the last week, one for each half of the social spectrum.  Therefore, I think it is to misunderstand the social situation to insist that Charlottesville and Googlememo compete with each other when they are in fact synergistic forces.

Even NRxers sometimes mock each other over “passivism” the idea that a group can come to power by becoming worthy to rule.  I think it’s a very legitimate concept in the right context.  History is full of revolutions that just made things even worse.  It’s hard to build something worthwhile and easy to complain and wreck things.  The neoreactionaries are on the right track in thinking about how to build a new social order as the present society crumbles.  They have their own important role—there’s no need for them to compete with the front line soldiers.

As for red-pilled progressives, I am not sure if we can continue to call them alt-leftists.  That namespace seems to have been appropriated by President Trump to refer to antifa gangsters.  Whatever we may call alt-leftists, the forces unleashed by Charlottesville and googlememo ensure that more SWPL men will be disillusioned and forced to choose sides as they realize the politically correct society will have no mercy on them no matter how they signal even as they continue to struggle with college debt and see their wages driven down by endless waves of H-1B Indians and Chinese.

Charlottesville Will Help Alt-Dissidents

Right now the dust is still settling and people are still wrought up and that is a good thing. There are lots of objections and black pills.  I will address some:

They had bad optics!
Nothing they could have done would have assuaged their opponents in the least.  This has been proven ad nauseum.  Internally discourage the worst excesses like Nazi flags, Wehrmacht helmets, or anything KKK, but otherwise let it go.  Charlottesville should be enough to bury thoughts of appeasement for good.

But they did x thing wrong!
In making a move from the internet into meatspace lots of stuff is going to go wrong.  Real life is sloppy.  Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.  Remember how many panicked said it was the end of the world when Spencer said “Hail victory, hail Trump?”  That was a mistake, but everyone learned from it quickly and used the real-life feedback to adjust their strategy.
The important fact of Charlottesville is we saw an internet-based movement make a major transition into physical space.  That’s all that will matter.  Armchair generals gonna armchair.  They will always handwring over what could have been better while others go out and do things.

Trump Didn’t Help!
Mainstream political figures can’t overtly sympathize with those on extreme ends of the spectrum.  Do we ever see someone like Hillary Clinton praising the antifas?  Of course not!
Politicians deal with extremists in their coalition by pretending they don’t exist.  Trump refused to explicitly condemn the alt-rightists and that’s all that is needed, or can be reasonably expected from him.  Just imagine what the situation would be if Hillary Clinton were in power instead?  I don’t think the public emergence of the alt-right would have been politically possible.  Had it even been attempted, the leaders would have ended up in jail.  We’d have been busy fighting to prevent Chinese-style internet censorship and thereby losing even the ethereal platform we have.
A favorable leader gives the extremists a tacit nod that they will be unopposed as long as they don’t cross certain lines.   Then it’s up to the fringe political operators to achieve their objectives with the slack they’re given.

They Were Naive! What did they think would happen!
The whole point has been to play by the letter of the rules, one rule at a time so eventually an approach of moderation and appeasement becomes totally indefensible.  In this respect, Charlottesville is a brilliant success.  No one can ever again seriously argue that being more conciliatory is a reasonable approach.  This will ultimately force many fence-sitters squarely into the radical camp.

Now the Normies Hate Us! 
The vast majority of people go along to get along so long as their bread and butter isn’t immediately threatened.  They’d rather watch netflix, have a normal social life, and feed their families.  They can be thought of as neutrons.  Maybe they collectively have a weak gravitational pull but are otherwise inert.  The interaction of the charged particles is what matters.  As the course of the mainstream changes, those who go with the flow change with it.  So long as there is at least one significant demographic that is somewhat sympathetic towards the radicals, they’ll be fine.  Comments on Breitbart and the_donald suggest to me the necessary support is there.

This Proves the Institutions Are All Against Us!
This only disillusions people even more. Charlottesville even redpills people regarding the cops.  Until now it’s been a common sentiment on the right that law-enforcement will be on their side.  This expectation has now been proven horribly wrong.  At first, many may react with despair as each established institution lets its mask slip when pressured.  In the long run, it helps destroy the legitimacy of the system as its true nature is methodically exposed in all its facets.  The vast majority will just keep going to their day jobs no matter what happens but there is a proper audience that sees what’s happening and cares.  Even if they do nothing, it is essential to have a base of sympathizers. Even making ordinary, contented people feel the system is no longer infallible or the best possible way of life is enough.

The Deaths Will Drown Out The Message!
The people who got ran over make sure the story is on the front page of every publication and everyone’s heard of it.  Hillary Clinton’s alt-right speech made normal middle class people aware of an alt-right consisting of civic-nationalist infowars and breitbart.  Now the public has been introduced to the ethnic-identitarian alt-right as a movement.  Simply entering into the mainstream consciousness is a major milestone and implicitly expands the window of political views.  Breitbart is not longer the farthest, scariest edge before you reach the KKK.
That the accident took place as someone panicked while under attack means the alt-right can’t really be blamed for it.  A deliberate attack by an alt-rightist would have been a genuine disaster and of course that’s what they were hoping for, but they didn’t get it.
They can spin it so many people, who are implacably unfavorable anyway, think nazis are out to run people over, but they can’t actually do anything to perpetuate it more than a couple news cycles or get the leverage to force Trump to denounce the alt-rightists.

Overall:
Charlottesville was a significant strategic victory for the dissidents even if some might see it as a tactical defeat.
They conclusively proved for anyone who was receptive that the established order cannot be reasoned with.  At the same time, the core groups are energized by the official beginning of white civil rights.
For everyone else, they only need to be known.  Being a household name will be all that matters in getting them future international attention and recognition.

Update 8/16/2017: Every time before the antifas have engaged in a strategic action and then immediately melted away.  This kept it so most Americans hadn’t really heard of them.   The C’ville protest has triggered them into staying out in plain sight where they are massively overextending by lashing out with no long term strategy.  This has against my wildest expectations allowed the president to publicly denounce them.  This is  a huge victory for alt-dissidents!  The establishment has either lost control of their thugs or they have been baited into revealing their true nature in front of millions.  Humiliated in 2016, they are further exposed as both weak and incompetent.

Interview With Rob Stark About the Alt-Center

http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=5109

This time Rob, his cohosts, and I discussed the emergence of an alt-center that departs from established political traditions and in general what sort of social re-organization will prove necessary to deal constructively with the unprecedented challenges of the information age.
Correction:  I somehow referred to the T-1000 as the T-2000.  How could I do such a thing?

The Factions of Alt-Dissidents

There has been a sudden burst of interest in defining the quarrelsome factions of the alt-sphere, often with an emphasis on bashing rivals.
Alf of AlfaNL blog wrote one of the most level-headed pieces yet on the subject. He sticks to analyzing the groups by their size, demographics, and motivations.

I will add my own thoughts after seeing the umpteenth article about how the alt-lite is doomed because they are just selling a brand, how the alt-right is bound to become an irrelevant fringe like White Nationalism 1.0, or how the “passivism” of neo-reactionaries is an excuse to do nothing.  Doom and gloom all the time. 

From my perspective, things have been going great and it has been a delight to watch the alt-sphere begin to mature.  Now it reaches a point of self-awareness where it begins to introspect.   Even the constant squabbling serves a natural function of figuring out each faction’s jurisdiction and specialty.

The alt-lite civic nationalists are often brawling with alt-right groups on social media or even confronting them physically in meatspace.  These guys get a lot of hate from ethnic nationalist alt-rightists, but I don’t see the need.  They inhabit different niches in the dissident ecosystem.

The alt-lite are by far the largest faction since they stick to positions that can be made acceptable for millions of ordinary, disillusioned republican voters.  They are accused of just going along with what’s popular to sell a brand, but over time more will realize, that is precisely their job.  

They are the marketing and advertising department that engages in public outreach.  Because they have the largest audience, they also have the greatest influence when it comes to running psy-ops that disrupt the establishment “narrative” and to sap their morale through relentless agitation.

Their large numbers make it impossible to ban them all from social media and by saturating the filters of censorship, they make it harder to crack down on more extreme factions.  The alt-lite is also a valuable farm system for new recruits.  Of the millions who get drawn in by the advertising campaign, once nudged down that path some percentage decide to keep going of their own accord and become alt-right.  

The alt-right are gradually showing themselves to be the front-line soldiers and true believers who risk physical injury and destruction of their reputations. While the alt-lite’s strength is crowd tactics, the alt-right is forming cohesive units capable of pursuing strategic objectives such as shutting down the antifa dominion of Berkeley.
Their beliefs are still considered too extreme for them to take part in the normal political discourse.  They hungrily wait as the alt-lite helps to gradually ease the Overton window in their direction, each grudging millimeter giving them more space to operate in.

The core alt-rightists rely on many ideological shibboleths to solidify in-group cohesion and loyalty.  Counter-signal them on the Jews, white women, or Vladimir Putin and they are not likely to be patient about it.  It is not their role to be discerning about shades of gray since they are increasingly oriented towards action.  They have no shortage of discussion but within clear boundaries.  Leaders such as Richard Spencer may have intellectual interests and more nuanced views, but he does not have the luxury to focus on this in his daily activism and speeches.

For most citizens, the alt-lite are the extremists and the alt-right are simply “nazis.”  Ask the average person on the street about neo-reactionaries, the dark enlightenment, or even the alt-left and they’ll probably just stare at you wondering what the hell you’re talking about.

There’s the PR reps and the soldiers, but the dissidents also have an R and D department where participants are free to mix and match ideas and see what happens without political constraints.  These outliers are kind of like priests who try to construct an over-arching theology. Working on the level of ideas, they are mostly invisible amidst the turmoil.  They are not trying to move a crowd.  Their mission is to corrode the secular state religion and replace it with their own vision.  Rather than direct the course of schools of fish, they hope to change the water all fish swim in.

These evil acolytes recognize that much of their discussion is theoretical and intangible.  They even point and accuse among themselves that they are debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin with no plan to realize their aims in the real world.

They will come to understand they are pursuing their natural role just fine.  Their discussions are not viable in the popular discourse but their ideas gradually filter through more relatable interpreters until the populace unwittingly embraces concepts that came from black scriptural exegesis.  The end game for the apostate priests is not so much to become emperors as to establish a new academy on the ruins of the Enlightenment.

There are those who despair at the in-fighting of the rebels but I would point out that they begin to know who they are and what they need to do within a larger synergistic organism.  Even mainstream sources have begun to officially distinguish between the alt-lite and alt-right, a sure sign that an organized structure is emerging despite the decentralized nature of 4th generation politics.

Alt-Right Drift Towards “Leftist” Policies

I’ve recently discussed the combination of Alt-Right and Alt-Left into an Alt-Center synthesis but it has been increasingly brought to my attention that elements of the alt-right already show support for issues such as single-payer healthcare.  I was skeptical when commenter Nulle Terre Sans Seigneur told me that Spencer’s group and Counter-currents embraced “leftist” policies.  I figured it might just be a few outliers.  Then Robert Stark of Stark Truth Radio brought it up as well, pointing me to certain links.  It appears that actual leaders such as Richard Spencer endorse these issues.

That this is new to me suggests they may downplay their position on this issue relative to others, knowing well it is still unacceptable and equated with evil “socialism” on much of the right.  Or, it could be I tend to exclude individual personalities as noise from much of my analysis, preferring to look at trends and incentives.  I took a closer look and found Spencer wrote a piece on the issue back in March when Ryancare was the topic of discussion and sure enough, a good proportion of his commenters were skeptical at best about his proposal with libertarian types as usual insisting on a return to “the free market.”

I can’t honestly say how much influence Spencer or writers for Counter-Currents actually have over the larger dissident right but they have already understood in which direction the natural synthesis of ideas lies.  It comes as no surprise to me that Spencer seems to come from an upper middle class or higher background, a demographic that more typically produces alt-leftists or neo-reactionaries.  As a fashion-conscious, city-dwelling socialite, who speaks with a faint lisp it seems in retrospect less surprising that his political views might be hybridized in some ways very similar to what I have anticipated.

The alt-nationalists will ultimately go in this direction as a whole.  As whites steadily slip from being an overwhelming majority, their politics will increasingly resemble minority politics.  In other words, leaders will be expected to bring back pork barrel rewards for their people at the expense of the other tribes.  Little do triumphalists or defeatists watching demographic trends realize that a 40% white country where all whites are forced to bloc vote to survive will be paradoxically more formidable in politics than a 65% white population that’s deeply divided.   As this shift occurs, single-payer healthcare will be tacitly understood as healthcare for whites first.

Just today, it has been decided a dismantling of Obamacare is finally to be discussed on the senate floor.  Mainstream leftists are recoiling in horror that the party of rich corporate warhawks is taking away healthcare from ordinary people.  It cannot even be explained to them within their egalitarian world view where the popular support for these measures derives.  First universal systems of redistribution that are bleeding the remnants of the middle class dry have to be done away with so that wealth can be run through more protected channels.  In countries where groups with 100 IQ or greater are in the minority,  we see the emergence of parallel societies and institutions for emergent castes in the 3rd world style.  The USA, unexceptional as ever, is in no way immune to the forces that affect everywhere else.

Abortion too is backed by Spencer and friends.  This implacable rock on which culture warriors shattered themselves will be reinforced by the dissidents as tribes form, with the tacit understanding that its purpose is to restrict the fecundity of ethnic rivals and keep the dysgenic underclasses in check.  The practical necessity of such measures as the struggle grows desperate will gradually discredit those misguided conservatives who still object.

The more intellectual alt-rightists are already thinking some years ahead.  They are aware that a constituency with many ex-mainstream conservatives and libertarians isn’t ready to accept alt-centrist views just yet and may be gradually testing the popular mood until the time is right to push the discourse of their blogs into popular rhetoric.

How We Get to an Alt-Center

Both the alt-left and alt-right are populist but attack the elements of the establishment most pertinent to their interests.  I have repeatedly noted, that if their platforms were combined into a single agenda, we would have an alt-center that comprehensively rejects the establishment.

As astute commenters have pointed out, a major culture and class divide separates these dissidents.
The working class alt-right and the upper-middle class alt-left progressives revile and distrust each other but my calculation is that they will be forced to work together.

The alt-right has scored some major victories but finds itself stalled in need of some kind of push to go further.  They need one more group to make a coalition that can put politicians directly loyal to them into office.

The alt-left meanwhile languishes at the bottom of the heap after Bernie was shot down and their attempt to install Keith Ellison as a compromise party leader was soundly rejected by the establishment core.

The progressive white males who are the heart of the alt-left have been humiliated at every turn and are asked to sit at the back of the bus by brown people and single women with no hopes of realizing their agenda of punishing wall street and the military industrial complex, or relieving the stranglehold of student loans. This state of stasis getting none of their demands met can’t last.

These scorned progressives may vote for third parties trying to start an independent movement.  This already happened to some degree in the 2016 presidential election.  Bernie voters defecting to Stein and Johnson certainly played a role in Hillary Clinton’s historic defeat. 

Of course, if they did not even have the power to get leverage within a coalition, they certainly can’t accomplish much on their own.  Alt-leftists simply by being higher class are relatively few in number.  Voting for third parties, they would hate to admit, is a tacit confession that your votes are on the table, inviting a bigger coalition to throw you a bone and take you in.

My prediction has been that necessity will force all white males into the same coalition.  When you have poor alt-left millennials with useless degrees looking for jobs in urban areas they end up competing with other ethnic groups for scarce low-skill jobs where the cost of living is highest.

Even a lifetime of indoctrination is irreparably damaged once you realize everyone stops acting nice and abruptly drops the platitudes when bread and butter are on the line and they all play favorites with their own kind.  Progressive whites find themselves trapped in the same hell at their coffee shop or adjunct teaching jobs as they do in the democrat party.

They are assigned lowest status even when working part time at minimum wage.  This insult is finally too great a hit for the egos of the sons of engineers or lawyers to bear.  They are living along the faultline, getting ground in between clashing tectonic plates with nowhere else to go.  Eventually they must snap and sure enough, we have seen a disproportionate amount of political violence from exactly these disgruntled progressives.

So far, they’ve just lashed out in a panic, unable to really grasp the contradictions that have condemned them to suffer.  Any kind of widespread movement, though, lasts because it has some promise to increase the status of its followers and achieve their objectives.  If the left-progressive movement does not benefit, or actually hurts its believers, they must migrate or else leave behind a failed ideology.

As they start to explore the wilderness, they’ll find the alt-right and dark enlightenment waiting for them.  Some have already begun to experiment with being “edgy” and “fashy” to suddenly realize that there’s a way to status and influence outside the infernal volcanic rift they now live in.  As the way out of their predicament becomes clear they’ll be steadily squeezed into another camp.

The fundamentals of self-interest are stronger than class or ideologicial animosity in the long run.
Once these groups are stuck together they’ll find they belong together.  Both factions are dominated by white males who have been designated the collective Satan of the national religion.

The alt-rightists were also white men who were no longer getting enough status and access to desirable women or prospects of family formation.  Instead of trying to petition for a piece of the action in a mainstream political coalition they went out into the wilderness and began to clear a pasture for themselves hoping as all rebels do that some female groupies might follow them. 

Perhaps because the alt-rightists rejected the shibboleths of the conventional discourse from the start, they could not delude themselves, as alt-leftists have that they have a place at the table of the orthodoxy.  The clear path to success always was to ply the cool rebel angle to get mates and status.  Now that the alt-right is meeting with some success despite the best efforts of the establishment they suddenly find themselves defining the new cool of the 21st century.

The alt-leftists can already perceive that the coolness of the rebels has paid off better than trying to be “good” white men in exchange for getting their issues addressed.  Coolness is what they lack most.  Even many of those who have good tech jobs or are in academia still struggle to get laid and even what little they have left is being taken away.  

The few politicians who align with them aren’t cool either.  Bernie Sanders is likable but not cool. Elizabeth Warren is shrill and only slightly cooler than Hillary Clinton.  The only remotely cool alt-left-leaning politician is Tulsi Gabbard and she is a part-Indian, part-Polynesian female from one of the least white states.  Progressive hipsters would find themselves sorely disappointed even if Gabbard somehow got real power.  She, like rabid black muslim Keith Ellison, does not represent them.  

By 2020, it will be clear to even those in deep in denial that their attempt at a mainstream movement is dead.  There will be no Sanders, Warren, or Gabbard running for president except as a third party spoiler.  They’ll get to take a back seat yet again as an establishment matriarch like Kamala Harris easily captures the democrat nomination.

The massed in-group nepotism of every minority tribe packed into one coalition is finally too much.  The more the European-American population shrinks the more strongly it will be pushed through the process of ethnogenesis as the weight of the earth transforms loose sand into rock.

Those who doubt this should consider that African-Americans regard themselves as a single people despite descending from hundreds of different tribes scattered across thousands miles of coastline, desert, and jungle.  White-Americans will be no different as they are placed under siege.  Instead of slavery, being attacked from every side will be the crucible in which they are forged into a single people. 

As these pressures mount, the alt-rightists will be forced to jettison their own cargo of cognitive dissonance.  Many of them look to the Reagonian 80s with worshipful nostalgia just like corporate-backed republican puppets.  Somehow, even as rebels, they still sing hymns in praise of the “free market” and trickle down economics after 30 disastrous years of plunder and kleptocracy.

Those that come from a more sophisticated libertarian background, gulp from the same poisoned chalice.  No matter how the free-for-all is justified right wingers are easily cucked out of their birthright as multi-national corporations thrive.

As with the alt-leftists, I count not on a mass epiphany arrived at through reason to change their minds, but the relentless lashings we all receive from harsh reality that grow ever worse until we finally change our ways.

The issue that will finally force the alt-right to abandon their old assumptions is free association for white Americans.  They’ve been against affirmative action and illegal immigration since the beginning but they don’t yet understand where this will lead them.  

As their platform congeals, a neo-tribalist alt-center begins to take form.  From the necessity of in-group preference they will learn that unfettered competition is not society’s highest goal.  In the present year, the mere mention of social safety nets or mutual aid on the right begets a frenzy of primal rage.

Like Pavlov’s dogs they have been well-conditioned.  Every time the bell of redistribution rings, some of their food is taken from them and given to other dogs as they receive a nasty electric shock.  So naturally, they snap viciously at the cage bars whenever they are triggered.  It will take some time and a sense of security for them to begin to overcome their trauma.

As an unchallenged cultural territory is established a new tribe can begin to discuss what role the financial sector or the weapons industry should play.  They will finally be able to talk about job training and apprenticeship in a way that makes more sense than credential-hunting that destroys the savings of the middle class and makes even the lucky graduates indentured debt servants of their employers.

The alt-left is actually ahead of the curve and more imaginative than the alt-rightists but they still don’t quite get the urgency, that alt-rightists understand deep in their guts.  We’re faced with a fight to survive right now and until existence is secure, struggling white college grads will never get any help with their loans and the “too big to fail” banks will never get properly punished.  Only when all the white male populists are forced to fight back to back in battle will we see all their issues addressed within an alt-center that leaves behind the fake dichotomy of left and right.

Defining the Alt-Center: Neo-Tribalism

An alt-center is not moderate—it is alternate—that is, opposed to the discredited establishment.  It doesn’t try to be exactly in between, grey, or neutral.  It is a synthesis taking the best of different mindsets and ideas to put together the pieces in a way that makes sense.  

The alt-right understands that people are not equal and can be categorized quite accurately by race, ethnicity, sex, status, and intelligence.  It is hamstrung though by favoring the continuation of a Hobbesian nightmare and tragedy of the commons.  Many vanilla republican politicians would readily agree with this stance when it comes to economics and social policy.  In this respect, the alt-right is not alternate.

The alt-left understands that you can’t have a real society unless people have a sense of belonging and investment.  People cooperate much better if they know there are safety nets if they stumble.  It is hamstrung though by failing to understand people vary widely in character and capability.  An indiscriminate system of aid quickly degenerates into a tragedy of the commons.  The alt left is not alternate in this sense because plenty of the the entrenched technocratic elite share their egalitarian views.

Both alt-right and alt-left retain ideological ties to the conventional platforms they’ve departed from, so in a way of thinking, alt-center, can be thought of as a true-alternate point of view that reaches on both sides and snips the last ties to prevailing political traditions.

On the right, the propaganda of rugged individualism and not taking “handouts” is used to manipulate atomized consumers into letting corporations and wall-street run rampant.  The left shrewdly critiqued this view by coining the term “corporate welfare.”
On the left, the shrill politics of victimhood combined with socialist attitudes is a cynical ploy to drain resources from the republican middle and working classes to buy the votes of a teeming underclass that depends on their largesse.  The right astutely points out that the leftist elites are trying to “elect a new people” through mass immigration and welfare babies to keep them in power forever.

An alt-center rejects poisonous propaganda positions from both fake sides.  It is a complete rejection of the authority of rulers who have long since lost the mandate of heaven through their incompetence and greed, whatever irrelevant side of a made-up spectrum they claim they’re on.
The alt-center recognizes these ideas are just deception used to herd political opinion by parasite-kings and prevent any dangerous(to them) mixtures of ideas from taking place.  

Is free healthcare a “left-wing” position when we’re just giving it to members of the tribe we identify with and jealously witholding our wealth from openly-declared blood enemies?  What made this stance left-wing is that it was charity without judgment.
Is it “right-wing” to adopt protectionist trade policies when doing away with “free competition” to make sure the newly created jobs go first to people in good standing with the tribe?  What made this stance right wing was competition without context. 
When we no longer assume an atomized society, to even ask these questions is meaningless.  We find ourselves with something different.

Alt-centrism then might be called neo-tribalism, an authoritarian system that maximizes liberties and benefits for cooperators with basic safety nets for all members, generous formal privileges for the best, but treats outgroups as other countries, or within the context of empire as auxiliary associates who are explicitly 2nd class.  More important than individuals becoming billionaires would be the ability of society itself to preserve wealth and build assets.

The neo-tribal alt-center understands there is no more nation-state in an age of instant mass communication where hardly anyone farms the land and where we live as semi-nomads drifting from job to job.  People, not lines on a map are the territorial borders.  Wherever the people set up camp their nation resides in them.

Combining The Alt-Right and the Alt-Left

The populist rebellion against the establishment presently comes in two main flavors, the alt-right and the alt-left. 

Of these the alt-right has met with much greater real world success so far for it is heir to years of internet dissident thought, which while considered right wing cares little for conventional political parties.  The alt-right discourse has tapped into the anger of the working classes while guided by a priesthood of savvy students of human nature.  Alt-lite civic nationalists market a less threatening entry-level brand to normie republican voters who then are given tacit permission to radicalize until some of them progress to the alt-right where the ideas are formed and taken to their logical conclusions.

The alt-left is still being formed from increasingly disillusioned white middle class progressives who have typically affiliated with the democrat party or third parties.  Some of this cohort freak out and go off the deep end into nutty socialist utopianism and impotent activism as a coping mechanism but others realize there’s something incomplete in how they understand the world.  They begin by reading a bit about the dark arts and soon find themselves falling as Lucifer fell.  One day it hits them: the nepotistic minority groups who pushed them out of their own party are a major reason why we can’t have nice things.

As things stand, the alt-lite and alt-right often see themselves as rivals and the to the extent they know about an alt-left, they’re just more enemies in the direction they’re told to always punch.
I’ve observed, though, since I was watching Bernie Sanders’ efforts in the primaries last year that populists on both sides of an obsolete political spectrum possess pieces of the puzzle.

For all their sudden and dizzying victories, the alt-right has little idea what to do next.  By decoding the obfuscation of political correctness, they established a superior understanding of the political situation, applied their knowledge, and spent long years gnawing on the roots of the world tree, Ygdrasil. 

The weakness of the alt-right is it lacks any compelling or coherent vision, or even any motivation to establish a functional society.  They indulge in warmed over libertarian theories every bit as fanciful as progressive dreams of US universal socialism, telling themselves they’re going Galt any day now.  Attitudes of personal responsibility, taking initiative, and every-man-for-himself served them well in the days when they just wanted to get laid more but now the question is how to have a society that doesn’t suck to begin with.

To be fair, there are those who grapple with these problems and their prevailing impulse is to try to go back in time to a more traditional society.  We see pickup artists getting grey hair, losing their youthful horniness, and suddenly wondering what to do with the rest of their lives.  They end up advocating for traditional family and marriage they never had any interest in—making them eerie parallels to feminist relationship and marriage advice columnists who always seem to be divorced and single in their 30s.

Bizarrely, they look to a historically backward Russia with deep social problems, low fertility rates, and millions of Muslims and Central Asians as an example of the ideal white nation.  There are indeed good reasons to admire Putin’s strong leadership and the staunchly nationalist direction he is taking his country, but mayor of a city-on-a-hill he is not.

The alt-right types including red pillers and neo-reactionaries are undisputed masters of understanding the darker corners of human nature but so far they have failed to apply their cynical worldly wisdom to create a viable new culture.  This is where they can benefit from fallen progressives.

The alt-leftists started out believing in all the feelgood ideas about human nature taught by school and well-meaning boomer parents but they went down a path to heresy as the world view they were taught was torn apart by cold and pitiless reality.  As they absorb some of the hard lessons of race, sex, and general human scumminess it dawns on them they’ll never have a nice society until they are selective and give the smart, responsible people most of the power and resources.

The fallen leftists understood even under egalitarian tutelage that hostile elites exert great control by rigging the economic system itself and especially the financial system.  They tried to make sense of their situation, like the alt-right did, by studying history.  I have actually come to think of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years as one of their founding works.  For many middle class progressive kids their first big red pill was graduating from college and finding there weren’t any jobs and everything the schools and their parents had told them was a lie.  So as manospherians studied Ancient Rome to gain insights into feminist cultural decay, unemployed hipsters who took out big loans to get useless degrees read about debt forgiveness in Ancient Mesopotamia.

The key insight the alt-left arrived at was that people need actual incentives to care about society whether we’re looking at hunter gatherers or the inhabitants of the first cities.  An endless war between the butcher and the baker isn’t the basis of the social contract, mutual obligation is.  There was no primitive system of barter engaged in by atomized Smithian savages—instead, credit predates coinage by tens of thousands of years.

Thus, these inquiries led alt-leftists to challenge a core assumption of Marxism—that the market is the central concern of human affairs and religion, tradition, and aesthetics mere distractions compared.
Alt-rightists, including the dark enlightenment, actually double down on flawed enlightenment theories of human motivation when they advocate for ultra individualism and atomization where everyone has to prove themselves from scratch and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps in the market economy.
The way successful human groups really work is by helping each other out, giving the most help to the best but always remembering no one can get far alone.

The alt-rightists though, can teach the fallen leftists the underclasses are the way they are for a reason and most resources given them disappear without a trace.  The most you can accomplish is prevent riots caused by empty stomachs.  Their unapologetic Randian ubermensch self-interest is unsuitable for a society, but it is just the medicine ex-leftists need to get past sentimental egalitarian attitudes, take responsibility, and be willing accept harsh truths.  With some tough lessons, the alt-left can acquire the will-to-power and pragmatism they need to rise above wishful thinking.

When we combine a matter-of-fact understanding of the harsh competitiveness of cruel nature with the principle that societies are made successful by reciprocity and shared purpose we end up with a new synthesis.  We have arrived at the alt-center.

Syrian Strike, North Korea: A Formative Moment For the Alt-Sphere

For months factions have quarelled about what the alt-right is, who are its leaders, if anybody, and what it believes with only wavering ground of agreement. Then President Trump fired missiles on Syria and the reaction from these disparate groups was overwhelming.

The anti-establishment internet has come out in force against the attack, and especially against any further moves towards intervention.  For the first time, red pill PUAs, white nationalists, alt-lite civic nationalists, neo-reactionaries, alt-left former Bernie supporters find themselves all on the same page.

Meanwhile, a faction of optimate neocons begins to solidify with warhawk republicans and SJW libs alike coming out in favor of new Middle Eastern wars.  Even progressive-leaning politicians like Elizabeth Warren were agreeing something must be done about Syria.

We need a plan to hold Assad accountable. But so far I’ve seen no compelling strategic justification for Trump's missile strike.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) April 8, 2017

What to think when even the president’s sworn political enemies want to “hold accountable” the leaders of far-away lands over their own domestic policy—and for no clear US gain?  Actually, the clear US gain is to simply allow Assad to finish crushing ISIS!

Even Rand Paul, a republican known for some anti-establishment leanings, seems to disapprove but draws things out and chooses his words very carefully.

While many Trump supporters are disappointed or even disillusioned by the attack, it becomes increasingly clear that no one, whatever their professed beliefs, would have brought significant change to American foreign policy.

The flimsy excuse of “chemical attacks” that’s been recycled for decades now only hammers in the point.  We have established beyond a doubt that the problem is systemic.

The best move is not to panic and run, but to stay firmly in the Trump camp for now making our presence felt.  The Syria attack may have been one of Trump’s trial balloons which may well have just been shot down with all the firepower the anti-establishment can bring to bear.

The alt-right is actually pretty small, but it’s so easy to overestimate its size because that’s where the new growth and the energy is at.  Audacious Epigone aptly describes them as the “trench warriors” who got Trump into office.
https://twitter.com/AudaciousEpigon/status/850536782580117505

Dissidents have made unimaginable progress since the beginning of the 2016 election entering into mainstream visibility as a political force for the first time.  But now the limits of that influence become clear.

The next obvious step is the rise of politicians who don’t just smile and wink at the dissidents from time to time while “disavowing” but profess their beliefs outright.

We’ll know we’re on the right track when there are leaders who unequivocally and unreservedly denounce pointless foreign interventions, sappy globalist claptrap, and traitorous open-border cuckery while saving the majority of their energy for domestic policy.

It’s time to figure out how to make neo-populists a force in their own right if it turns out the present order is impermeable and unchangeable.

At this moment, we are seeing a new standoff over North Korea, this time possibly with Chinese cooperation.  If that’s so, Trump’s maneuvering may actually have paid off impressively.

However cleverly done, though, nuclear brinksmanship isn’t the reason people put Trump in office.  It would be a big accomplishment if North Korea comes out of this confrontation chastened, but America’s real problems right now are internal.

I understand arguments that Trump wants to reassure his allies after Obama showed weakness and that North Korea is trying to develop missiles that can reach the USA.

The problem with this policy is eventually, most nations will have their house atomics.  North Korea’s boss, China, already is a major nuclear power.  What’s next, unilaterally blowing up Iranian reactors?
It’s 1940s technology and most nations that want to will be able to eventually find the materials and expertise.  
If that’s not something humanity can cope with, perhaps we have the answer to Fermi’s paradox(not yet finding signs of other sentient life).

The alt-sphere finds itself facing its first big challenges as a visible political influence. Like all politics there is a delicate line to walk.  Too strident, you lose your place at the bargaining table.  Too docile, you get nothing anyway.  From now on it will be about finding that sweet spot.

A lot of objectives are already meeting with success:
-The TPP was killed almost immediately.
-Illegal immigration is plummeting.
-ICE has been far more active within US borders.
-Originalist Supreme Court Justice confirmed.
-Some encouraging initial reports that corporations may be returning operations to the US.

However, the re-emergence of neocon foreign policy is profoundly worrying and the rustlings and shufflings of power struggles within the administration are ominous to say the least.  

Critics like Hunter Wallace pointed out all along that a cabinet full of establishment generals, Wall Street bankers, corporate open-borders apologists, big party donors was bound to cause problems.

https://twitter.com/occdissent/status/806941978642575361

I guess many of us supposed Trump would somehow bend them all to his will but it seems the simple fact is, people are who they associate with the most.  So special attention must be paid to the last alt-right and nationalist figures in the cabinet.

Like elite classes throughout history, the present elite are unwilling to accept their decline.  If they back off, they will still have social status and their mansions in Potomac and Arlington for awhile living an easy life in an Edwardian twilight.  If they put all their chips down on keeping all the power they’ve got, it will start to get interesting.

Though vilified as a Nazi, Trump ran, for the most part, as a center-right moderate as he has been for most of his life.  I’ve said before:  Obama was the establishment’s last chance to fix the system.  Trump is the system’s last chance.  If this round fails to produce satisfactory solutions, it is possible that the door is opened to the spread of more radical sympathies.

Why Nepotism Is Necessary

You can only have an open and fair society when most people are willing to be fair.  If you keep playing nice once too many people are breaking the rules you just become everyone’s doormat.
Right now, the country is flying into a fit of hysteria about how non-rich white men are starting to advocate for themselves as a group.  What did they expect?  Virtually every other group and identity we can brainstorm already has its own movement aggressively lobbying for money from the treasury and legal privileges.  Once you have a tragedy of the commons underway and you can’t hope to stop it, the only choice that makes sense is to try to grab as much as you can before it’s all gone.  When you find yourself caught in an identity arms race, factional nepotism is the only reaction that makes sense, keeps you fed and a roof over your head.

I don’t especially care about white people.  I don’t like people that much.  But once I was an adult with bills to pay I rapidly discovered that no one I meet cares if I care.  Everyone who sees me immediately notices I’m a European male and this affects my role in society whether I like it or not.  Over a decade ago I was desperate for work recently out of college with a useless degree and living on a friend’s couch.   I once ran 4 1/2 miles from the sterile industrial park where he lived to a Waukegan temp agency and got myself a job at a frozen pizza factory, or so I thought.  I soon learned that the client took one look at my North Euro surname and immediately told the temp agent to find someone else.   I spoke passable Spanish but it’s not as if the client would have cared.  It was a question of identity.
I took an English teaching job in Korea hoping to travel while actually using my useless degree.  Another experience that changed my worldview forever.  I learned you really don’t know anything about a country until you work a job there and you learn people have the same old problems everywhere.  I’ve done a decent amount of traveling and roll my eyes every time someone blogs about the next “undiscovered” Eastern European  paradise.
Northeast Asians are some of the most cohesive peoples on earth.  Very tellingly, they all have a word for foreigner that just means “outside person.”  You know when you’re there you’ll never be one of them(forget that Dances With Wolves/Avatar/Last Samurai porn), but you also start to realize that while their media seems to idolize Europeans other races are in practice a curiosity to them.  I came to realize they regarded me the way I might regard a talking dog or a chimpanzee.  They may send their little girls to get eyelid surgery, but they know who they are.  It came together for me why the Japanese, a people known for their restraint and discipline are some of the worst to get conquered by.   Their culture has no room for the luxury of outside empathy—they are fiercely competitive among themselves as it is—the initial politeness naive whites rave about is a superficial mask.
I came home from Korea with more hard lessons under my belt but also with admiration for their unity and sense of shared purpose, qualities which I found totally lacking in the states.
Finally, I had the experience of working jobs in black neighborhoods.  Again, the importance of identity reigned supreme.  I got continuously screwed over in my first such job until I quit.  It was a catch 22, because I wasn’t one of them, I couldn’t be lazy like them but if I worked hard, as I did, that just inflamed their collective inferiority complex.  The next job I had, I learned to walk the tightrope and was able to stay on as long as I needed to without much trouble.  But I learned to expect that when you aren’t part of the dominant tribe, you’ll always be on the sidelines watching the worst among them still get promoted over you.  When your group isn’t in control, you get to “eat in the kitchen” if you get to eat at all.  That’s reality.
I’ve gotten a bit better at adjusting my spoken word choice over the years, but even when I worked for a small business run by a prole white family, they could get a whiff that I was educated and that was cause enough for them to hate me no matter how hard I worked.
I was told as a kid that hard work is what matters, but in my entire life, I’ve yet to meet one person that cares.  Identity comes first and people who get identified(whether they like it or not) under the same identity have to work together to maximize their access to money, space, and mates.  The price for failing to cooperate is getting wiped out by competitors who can work together to secure their interests.

When white people help each other as other groups routinely do they are denounced as “racists.”  The problem with this is that in real life every living human is racist, classist, ageist, everythingist.  People always have and always will make judgments about others based on identity.  They then help the people they think will help them and hinder the people they think will hinder them.  There’s nothing magical about humans, we’re just animals in the wild albeit in hives, just trying survive and procreate.  As a social species group dynamics is a critical element of our survival strategy.  To try to separate humans from identity is to ask them not to be human at all.  This is why secularism creates soulless, dehumanizing societies.
I grew up as what I call a ‘first generation.’  There was no meaningful culture or traditions to identify with.  When I was a young man I was never shown adult survival skills nor was there any tribal initiation.  I just was without any explanation and it was up to me to fill the void.
Many people in this part of the internet like to wax poetic about “Western culture.”  I must admit that I know nothing of it.  It’s not a heritage that means anything to me.
As an adult I’ve learned there’s a meaning that can be ascribed to my Irish, Ulster Scot, Anglo, and Norman French Huguenot blood but I don’t mistake that for an identity.  It’s not as if I can pretend I’m a part of any those cultures, I’m just what I am and live by my own barbarian values.  Nevertheless, I’ve learned when, where, and with whom I have to cooperate with in order to survive.  It should be telling when even someone as apathetic as I am just says “fuck it” and takes an interest in zero sum skin color politics.  I know from experience if Mexicans, Blacks, or traditional Asians run the show there’s no guarantee I get to eat and being one of a conquered people, sure as hell not getting laid.

See Also: The Three Keys To Anglo Success
See Also: Smart Racial Realism

The Future of Alt-Right Populism?

Let’s face it: Trump is behind.  I’ve waited for the nonsense after the conventions to die down but it seems like the race has stabilized at a 5-6 point gap.  I’ve heard all the typical complaints that polls are skewed but look where that got the wishful thinkers who wanted Romney to win.  I’m inclined to believe the average of the data that’s out there.  It’s easy to project one’s views onto other people but many Americans remain bewildered and horrified by the rise of Trump.  It’s possible a majority see him as a “racist,” an accusation that is steadily fading in power, but remains the modern equivalent of being called a “commie.”
Hillary has a coalition of single/professional white women, all minorities voting as a bloc, white male professionals, and a majority of college degree holders.  The reality is that this group is big enough to win and that the 2008 and 2012 elections conclusively demonstrate that “real Amurica” can no longer carry elections alone.  There are still enough Americans who have comfortable lives but are afraid of losing what they’ve got.  So their strategy is to turtle.  Those who are invested will double down on the status quo instead of supporting an upstart.
This race is by no means over, I suspect the debates will decide this contest—but if there isn’t a big change it looks as though Trump will lose.

A personality like Trump was necessary to tear down the increasingly out-of-touch opposition party but he might not end up being the one to rebuild it.  So I’ve been putting some thought into what a successful populist coalition would look like.
The core democrat constituency is obviously minorities and white yuppies, no use trying to convert large numbers of them.  The last desperate attempt of establishment republicans to be viable in a presidential election was to reach out to “natural conservatives” in the Hispanic population but all they accomplished was to alienate their base.

The most obvious low hanging fruit to grow a populist coalition are the discontented members of the alt-left.  Trump has focused his campaign rightly on the ills of blue collar Americans but I am surprised he hasn’t done more to exploit the opportunity revealed by Bernie Sanders’ unexpected popularity.  While successful professional whites may be core democrats, there are millions of frustrated educated whites who can’t get ahead.  They are the product of the last few decades of elite overproduction.  Just mentioning college loan forgiveness and restrictions on H1B visas would be a huge draw.  They’re already unhappy with the deal they’ve gotten from society but also feel that associating themselves with a blue collar movement will destroy whatever remaining chances they had of getting that lucky break into office cubicle wonderland.  To consider defection, they need reason to believe they’ll get a better deal than they’re getting now and that’s a pretty low bar.

The next group to focus on for defection might be those we call “model minorities.”  The new populist party is an explicitly white movement but like any non-majority political faction it needs to form coalitions with other groups to achieve common goals.  Ironically when the aspect of racial identity and racial interests is out in the open, rather than concealed and hinted at with “dog whistles” it will be more accepted.   Model minorities’ interests align better with working whites than they do with Blacks and Latin Americans.  This reality doesn’t seem to have dawned on them yet, they are still reacting to culture wars era paranoia.  The facts though, have a way of catching up.  Asians, Indians, other successful ethnic groups already occupy an awkward place in the democrat coalition, reminded of their “privilege” just like whites and blocked and discouraged from taking full advantage of affirmative action policies.  They are already told they aren’t “real” minorities.  They already suffer the same problems as whites when high crime groups move into their suburbs and devalue the property.  Model minorities are the ones who own most of the small businesses in dysfunctional neighborhoods.  The Sikh family that owns the corner store and the Koreans who run the liquor store can’t indulge in the same ivory tower thinking that predominates in yuppie land.

Beyond trying to grow a populist coalition, time is in its favor.  As the system continues to stagnate more will be disaffected enough to split away from the old system.  Every year, there’s fewer people living comfortable middle class lives.   The sprawling system of universities continues to exacerbate elite overproduction with every graduating class.  Even white professionals will begin to change their minds when they can no longer just shove all their problems on those who can’t afford to live in gated communities and shop at whole foods.  Right now the upper middle classes and their masters quite cynically use minorities to promote their interests over the working and lower middle classes.  They know there’s far too few of them to win elections in a democratic system so giving the “real” minorities unlimited bread and circuses gets them the votes they need.  However, the complete rejection of Bernie Sanders by the monolithic Black vote is a sign of things to come.  For the first time, a lot of democrat whites recoiled in shock as their preferences were flatly vetoed by those they had looked down on as loyal pets.  As minorities get more powerful their handlers will find themselves less able to control them.  When they finally lose control they will be forced to reconsider their alignment.

There is of course the possibility that no constructive political solution will be arrived at.  We stand at a crossroads.  The next few years will decide whether present issues can be resolved within the system or whether conflict will simply escalate.  In the case of a Hillary presidency, the status quo could be sustainable if she, like Obama, mostly limited her antagonism of red America to “clinging to guns and religion” mockery.  But looking back on her poor judgment and reckless belligerence as secretary of state, I have a feeling she will overextend. Furthermore, even were she as benevolent as can be hoped for, the laws that ban free association for whites while allowing it for everyone else and legal disincentives for healthy family formation will continue to chip away at the legitimacy of the social contract.  If Trump wins this, there will be nearly half the country that sees him as an illegitimate autocrat.  There will be an ugly struggle for power no matter who prevails in November.

See Also:  Trump and Sanders Are Part of the Same Political Movement
See Also:  Smart Racial Realism

 

Hillary’s Alt-Right Speech Is A Major Breakthrough

I mentioned in my last post that in less than a decade internet dissenters who would have been considered on a level with child molesters have gained influence in national politics.  Just a few days after this post Hillary Clinton to my complete astonishment and delight directly devoted an entire speech to the “alt-right.”  I would have thought this some /pol/ish wet dream if it hadn’t actually happened.
This speech is one of the biggest triumphs ever for internet dissidents.  Hillary has unwittingly ushered in a new age where anti-orthodox internet culture is openly acknowledged as real opposition to the establishment when but a few short years ago it was no more than the whispers of a ghost within the mainstream.  The term “alt-right” itself is only directly adopted by a narrow slice but a huge spectrum of internet personalities holding underground opinions have been suddenly given official recognition by one of the most famous and powerful people on earth.  Hillary is a living symbol of the orthodoxy, representing at once the apotheosis of 60s wishful equalism and the disastrous economics and blindly ideological foreign policy that’s held sway ever since Reagan.  In the social cosmology, she lives in the top rank of the heavens as a goddess so any being she sees fit to address must in the public eye be at least a minor god in its own right.   As someone who has spent decades in the business of social perceptions she should know better!
The speech itself was highly effective.  It was well-tailored to its target demographics of white women and establishment republicans while reassuring her base.  Bringing the alt-right into play may have been an effective rhetorical device but for a possible short term gain in one election, she opened a portal into a “dark” dimension.  She and others like her will come to regret it.

It is truly remarkable in that a prominent politician in a national election would address something that’s not a movement or even a political party—just a vast milling about of unsatisfied souls.
This sort of loose structure is not only proving successful in modern warfare but increasingly so in politics and culture.  I first wondered at this phenomenon in 2011 as the Arab Spring swept the world and almost simultaneously riots and protests rose across the globe.  I was especially intrigued by Occupy Wall Street.  I noticed that OWS marked a transition from 60s-style activism headed by traditional hierarchies and concrete agendas to decentralized movements of dissenters swimming in schools to enjoy safety in numbers but often cooperating little more than that:

For a few hundred years now, elites have had their own version of Anonymous that has helped them to accomplish their goals. It’s called a corporation.
Shareholders come together to in order to mitigate risk and allow them do things that would ordinarily be too risky. By acting collectively, they can do away with individual accountability.
These elites failed to understand what would happen if technology sufficiently improved the ability of the peasantry to communicate and coordinate their actions.
The result is effectively a counter-corporation.

In just a couple months most of this agitation had fizzled out.  I had thought at the time it would go further and looked at where I went wrong in my understanding of the situation.  I thought about demographics and realized that the older generations, especially boomers were still too prominent to be seriously challenged.  In 2011 there were still just too many adults who read newspapers instead of surfing the internet.  But at the time, the first of them were hitting retirement age and I realized by 2015 there would be a generation coming of age that couldn’t remember the 90s, had only ever known corruption and catastrophe, and had access to high speed internet their whole lives.  For them, I realized, a functional America would be something from a history book or an 80s movie.  I made a guess that around this period the time would finally be ripe for dissident ideologies to begin gaining a serious hold.  My guess didn’t require this new generation to be especially radical as a whole, but only that it would have no attachment to the old order and thereby bring the potential for real change.
Things have begun to change right on schedule, though ironically because even a large cohort of boomers has become disenfranchised enough to turn against the Old Regime.  Some of the same elders who were screaming at millenials to “occupy a job” are themselves mourning the lack of good jobs.  Also, the smartphones and social media that made the unrest of 2011 possible have greatly matured and become an established part of the culture.  Presently, with defectors peeling off from the older generations, millennials as disaffected and uninvested as ever, with a new generation hitting adulthood who’ve never known the old prosperity, there’s finally enough mass built up to challenge the established order on a larger scale.  The emergence of Trump and Sanders in 2015 was like the busting of a dam and by giving a speech on the Alt-Right, Hillary has given dissident internet-dwellers more direct recognition than her opponents ever have.  I cannot help but suspect that this huge miscalculation comes from being disconnected from the culture.  She and her advisors may simply not understand what they do.

See Also:  Anonymous and Occupy:  The Emergence of Counter-Corporations (2011 archives)