Milo’s Alt-Right

Atlantic Centurion
September 22, 2016

Milo Yiannopoulos is many negative things but stupid is not one of them. He recently gave a speech with the tongue-in-cheek title of “How to Destroy the Alt-Right” to a university audience as part of his speaking tour. The Summer of Trump is certainly a time unlike any other to capitalize on the Alt-Right, and having already established himself as the first major journalist to profile the Alt-Right, Milo obviously sees an opportunity to grow in that area now that it is a household term among the politically engaged.

But Milo is of course not an objective journalist. And I don’t hold him, or anyone, to that standard. To his credit he has repeatedly stated he is not “a member of the Alt-Right.” His coverage of the Alt-Right however, is certainly spun a certain way to make it more self-serving to his own agenda. The Milo persona is one of a sassy irreverent homosexual with an affinity for classical liberalism and a preference for Western culture (over say Islamic culture). Perhaps we could call this Oscar Wilde nationalism. Naturally one would expect Milo’s paradigms to come across in his presentation of the Alt-Right, and they do.

Right out of the gate Milo seeks to minimize the share of White nationalists in the Alt-Right. He sees claims that the Alt-Right is heavily White nationalist as a variation of how leftists brand all of their enemies as “racist.” And they do brand all of their enemies as racist (as well as claim that people of color cannot be racist). But a racist is just a White person who is illiberal on identity issues. The Alt-Right views identity issues from a eurocentric perspective and believes in ethno-nationalism (not the “ideas” or  magic dirt of propositional or civic nationalism). Hence if one truly is Alt-Right, on some level they must be sympathetic to if not outright in favor of White nationalism.

Milo also considers “the 1488ers”—and names people like weev—to be “the worst 5 percent” of the Alt-Right. This is a bizarre claim to make since the largest Alt-Right sites, the Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff, would not be possible without the commitment and technical expertise of people like weev. In other words, someone who Milo ranks among the “worst” people in the movement is actually very, very important to the movement and our propaganda and outreach efforts. Granted, the so-called stormfags have done a lot to earn many of their negative stereotypes. But Stormfront as a site, the namesake of that term, is decades older than the Alt-Right movement. One might consider them an absorbed group of people, but it is hard to make much of their influence. I don’t know anyone personally who is involved with Stormfront, and I am in contact with many Alt-Right people.

Milo gets right that the left’s excesses have in part driven the growth of the Alt-Right. The prominence of “identity politics and its hypocrisies” and of “anti-white racism” cannot be understated in the public discourse of most White-majority countries. Taking a page from Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric, Milo does a great job of highlighting a number of recent anti-White and anti-male headlines from major media outlets in his speech. Correctly, he observes “we have identity politics for everyone except white men.” Running a victim narrative of sorts, he adds that the designated oppressed classes of the contemporary West are “allowed to be openly racist and sexist towards white men.” And this is all true. We are a despised class of people.

He also notes that there are no ADLs or SPLCs for Whites. Smart people will look into (((who))) runs those and who they run them for.

Milo rhetorically tells the left that they are responsible for the Alt-Right and that he knows methods to stop it. And he is probably correct in saying that “you’re not going to do any of them.” But here is where his ambivalence starts to become apparent. Clearly there is a sympathy for older liberalism, but on the other hand a passivism towards the rising Alt-Right (which he does not want to actually see defeated). He runs his usual lines of criticisms of the left about having double standards for what meets the threshold of racism (DR3 = Dems aRe the Real Racists), chalking up “anti-semitism” and “racism” to just trolling or being a “merry prankster,” and describing the hostility towards all of the left’s sacred cows as a simple desire to break taboos for the sake of breaking taboos.

We do happen to like trolling and attacking the civil religion of the left. But we also happen to be committed to our principles, advocating for and defending our people and heritage, which are based in European blood and American soil. We are serious about this struggle on whatever front it takes place. That so much of it currently happens in cyberspace has given it a certain shock-and-awe character, but we are not doing this just to get a rise out of shitlibs. The meme war is about the fate of our race.

Milo does draw a somewhat helpful line between rootless elite cosmopolitanism and nationalism, which is a major critique offered by the Alt-Right. Describing this class of people (and without mentioning Jews), he says:

The globalist elites, who assemble in places like Dubai, Davos, and whatever unfortunate country hosts the Bilderberg Conference, don’t have a nation. Whether they’re from Istanbul, London, or Beijing, global elites tend to dress the same, act the same, talk the same, and think the same. They look at what’s different and unique about their home countries, and squirm in embarrassment.

He then chastises these wandering brahmins, telling them to “stop looking down on people who want to stay true to their roots, and remember the national values and traditions that made our progressive, globalized civilization possible.” Really? Is that what we are making a stand for? Progressive, globalized civilization? Progressive, globalized civilization is what’s killing us.

Milo denounces Islam and Muslim immigration, which are indeed things we don’t want let into our countries. But his subsequent neocon-esque framing of Islam as communist made me laugh out loud:

If you want to preserve capitalism, it’s probably unwise to let a million hardline bolsheviks into your communities.

We let the one million (((bolsheviks))) in years ago. About a hundred, a hundred twenty years ago actually. But it wasn’t capitalism they went after in the United States, not any more than it was capitalism they went after in Russia. They weren’t Muslims either.

And I don’t think that’s his point here at all anyway. Rather he correctly assesses that Islam is “utterly incompatible with western liberal values.” On the one hand, this draws attention to what appears to be an inconsistency on the part of the left. But what’s happening on the left now is the rising victory of third worldists over egalitarians. LGBT politics and feminism are indeed forced to play second fiddle to the interests of people of color in the new left’s coalition, and these people tend to be socially inegalitarian. It is a strained alliance, and Milo shows this by highlighting Cologne and Rotherham as examples of how the left is harming people it claims to want to protect. (He could have given the Orlando Islamist attack against a gay bar as an example of this too).

So on the other hand, people like Milo are being boiled off from contemporary liberalism. This alliance could very well kill them after all. So for him to try to frame the Alt-Right as an upgraded variant of classical liberalism and imply it would protect against this makes sense (for him). But the Alt-Right is not about rescuing feminists and LBGT people from the wrath of ISIS. Our civilization is not about childless women and pride parades. Our first and foremost principles are really a homeland and a future.

Milo labels the Alt-Right as a “cultural rebel army” but then places it on the side of “cultural libertarians” who are opposed to leftists trying to “narrow” the Overton window. This is also a mischaracterization. We are not trying to widen the Overton window as the libertines are, but to shift it in our direction and push our enemies’ views out of it. We want racially colorblind people to be regarded as stupid morons by the average person, not those who are racially aware. We want the monogamous heterosexual couple to be the highest ideal, not the polyamorous bisexual commune. The Overton is a zero-sum metaphor. It would simply be impossible to have a society where polar opposite sets of values are normalized without tension or conflict. The American Civil War is a great example of how such a society violently breaks down.

Towards the end of the speech, Milo attempts to paint the Alt-Right as a multicultural union against the left, one where White nationalists are just “in there.” He describes an Alt-Right (which I do not recognize much at all) that is:

Primarily white, but also consisting of increasing numbers of minorities. Jews fed up with the pro-Islam attitudes of elites. Asians who are now being penalized by affirmative action. Black groups like the Hoteps, fed up with Black Lives Matter.

I think there will be a ceiling of support from “allies of color,” as one author has put it. The Alt-Right is so exoterically a White identity movement that for large numbers of non-whites to ever identify with it would be the stuff of fanfiction. Let’s examine each group Milo has held up as an example of Alt-Right diversity:

For starters, it is completely rational for Jews to be anti-Islam, as Muslims are among the most anti-Jewish people on the planet. Yet the majority of Jews in the United States are not anti-Islam, since they view them as fellow Others in this country (contrasted with White Americans), and a majority of both will be pulling the lever for Hillary in November. Jews in fact have voted Democrat by a large margin in almost every presidential election since the early 1900s, and today remain aligned with what has become an overtly anti-white party. They were highly active in socialist movements in New York City in the 1910s-1930s, fought to end the national origins quotas implemented in 1921 and 1924, and played a crucial role in the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward, which they never stop congratulating themselves on by the way. Pro-diversity liberalism is indeed a Jewish tradition, and given how illiberal the Alt-Right is (to say nothing of its counter-semitism), one wonders why any would even bother claiming affiliation with us unless they were too stupid to read anything someone from the Alt-Right has actually written. Besides, Jews already have an ethno-nationalist movement. It’s called Zionism.

Asian people who oppose affirmative action are simply acting upon a tribal interest (as one would expect them to). That is hardly the threshold for being Alt-Right. Don’t blacks pursue a tribal interest by associating with the Black Lives Matter movement? A mere 12% oppose it according to Pew Research. Because affirmative action policies benefit blacks and mestizos to the zero-sum detriment of Asians, many Asians are opposed to them. Affirmative action could not have been banned without their support in California universities. Quite simply it is much harder to convince Asians to feel White guilt, especially when they feel they have worked to earn a slot in a university or corporation and are turned down over left-wing identity politics. As Guillaume Faye has put it, a multi-racial society is a multi-racist society, one in which all the different groups have conflicts with one another. There is a minority of Asians that generally sides with conservative Whites on political issues, but that too is a low threshold for being Alt-Right.

I’ll be honest, I have no idea what a Hotep is. I googled it and the best I can piece together is that Hoteps are socially conservative black people (typically men) who LARP as ancient Egyptians. That actually does sound like a black Alt-Right—here’s looking at all the non-Nords worshipping Odin—but I would be willing to bet that the set of blacks who both LARP as Egyptians and reject Black Lives Matter is small enough to fit in a football stadium. Far more common are the we wuz kangz types, who LARP as Egyptians and hate whitey. So I don’t know what to make of that. Maybe there can be some sort of rapport between Hoteps and Esoteric Kekists. Are there pro-White black people? Would they favor a world where they are the leadership caste of their people and have become separated from the American Empire as their own nation? Now our stadium is probably down to an auditorium.

“What motivates the left now is anti-white hatred, particularly of straight men,” concludes Milo, adding that:

“Systemic racism and “white privilege” are bullshit, unfalsifiable and bonkers pseudoscientific concepts designed to disempower white men in the societies and civilization they’re primarily responsible for creating. Unless the left abandons this insane hatred–and as I say, I doubt they will–the alt right will continue to grow, and in the future we can expect to hear more and more about the horrors of cartoon frogs.

Milo does seem to understand what the Alt-Right is actually about—it comes across too often in his speech for the whole thing to be labeled as a mischaracterization. He uses our talking points sometimes even linking to our content, documents the anti-white hatred of the left, implies Jewish involvement rather than being explicit about it, gives people something to google when he namedrops Jared Taylor or Richard Spencer, and in general does not provide hostile coverage.

Such flashes of redpilling almost feel like interruptions though when reading through his frame of classical liberalism and “cultural libertarianism,” which presents the Alt-Right as something most movement people hardly recognize. Milo’s Alt-Right, rather than being a nationalist big tent of different political philosophies (fascism, republicanism, national socialism, aristocracy, elitism, etc.), is instead a classical liberal big tent of people opposed to the regressive left. They are pro-white in a roundabout way that avoids actually securing a homeland and future—a way which is doomed to fail since our enemies won’t retreat and allow for White advocacy in a multi-ethnic society.

Many people opposed to the left are from the Alt-Right’s point of view just Alt-RINOs. They should not use a label associated with things they do not believe in. Civic nationalists, libertarians, anti-SJWs, people against feminism because they think it isn’t trve egalitarianism, Jews against Islam, and so forth are not Alt-Right. They’re not necessarily bad people either. I would prefer a civic nationalist society to a multiculturalist one. I would prefer a libertarian social order to one of anarcho-tyranny. I would prefer a society that doesn’t give SJWs a platform. But none of these people are Alt-Right if they are not ethno-nationalists who are on principle opposed to elite liberal cosmopolitanism, cultural subversion from the (((usual suspects))), and the destruction of the family by libertine social norms.

That Milo is lumping all of these people as Alt-Right is lazy at best. As a metapolitical movement, we have no interest in aligning with these people to build a new culture. These sorts of people might only be useful in an actual political coalition. In an alternate universe where the United States has multiple political parties as opposed to two wings of the System, perhaps the Alt-Right, the Right-Libertarians, and the Reactionaries form a governing coalition in parliament. But our world is nothing like that and we have nothing to gain from adding say, civic nationalists, to our coalition. That doesn’t bring us to power.

What would bring us closer to power is frankly to destroy civic nationalists as an ideological group by converting them to ethno-nationalism and forcing the hold-outs to choose between us or the left, the same way Republican voters have to choose between supporting Trump or enabling Hillary. Ditto for the other Alt-RINOs. We want to win, after all.