It’s Time to Retire ‘Dissident Right’

It is said that Alexander the Great wept for there were no worlds left to conquer.

I feel you, Alex. Sometimes it feels like there are no normies left to redpill and all the debates have been won. On X, the epicenter of right-wing internet culture, various factions and denominations of, essentially, White Nationalists are assuming a hegemonic influence.Con Inc. holdouts like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and James Lindsay are objects of ridicule and anyone caught defending Zionism is assumed to be on someone’s payroll. Pro-whites have no serious intellectual rivals remaining other than controlled opposition versions of ourselves (i.e. the BAP sphere/Thiel Network).

Right-wing Jews like Morgan Ariel have had to turn converso, pretending to be Christian in order to stay marketable in the current era and I must say, it is remarkable how many Jews will shamelessly go full race traitor and make antisemitic content for money and attention (again, Morgan Ariel is the ultimate example).

The Trump administration seems ready to take the threat of Antifa seriously. Granted, some people believe the establishment might have cynical reasons for doing so, either as a pretext to crush the more anti-Zionist segments of the left, or to distract the public from Israel or whatever. In my opinion, it is slightly suspicious that a moral panic over Antifa would emerge now when Antifa has been a shadow of their former selves for years. Whether or not Trump means his threats, the Left seems to be taking them seriously.

Then today I read that the ADL announced that they would be retiring their controversial “Glossary of Extremism”. The Glossary of Extremism had long been the subject of mockery for listing things like “Christ is King” and the “OK” hand sign as hate symbols. Several people have claimed that ADL’s glossary entry on them was defamatory.

My, how the tables have turned. I remember not long ago when White Nationalists were having to communicate their ideas in codes and having to talk about “you-know-whos” in order to beat the ADL-enforced censorship rules. A few years later, the positions have been reversed. Now, the ADL feels compelled to self-censor to avoid a public backlash.

Alexander wept, indeed.

To be clear, this is the world I fought for, a world where you could be a racist and an antisemite and still be considered a normie. Well, now I am living in that world. It feels good, but golly, what’s a keyboard warrior to do with no more meme wars left to fight? Just follow the trail of corpses: National Review, AnCaps, the Alt Lite, the YouTube Skeptics, the Dirtbag Left, the Intellectual Dark Web, QAnon, until you finally arrive at us. We Meme War veterans will enjoy the hard-won and well-deserved spoils of war, but our shitposting descendants who never knew such hardship and never needed a disciplined keyboard warrior culture will become increasingly decadent with each subsequent generation.

That’s not to say that the white race has been saved. What I am saying is that the next generation of White Nationalist heroes will be networkers and fundraisers, glad handers and charming midwits. Not the kind of people I would choose to have a beer with, but we’re gonna need to get to climb out of the Internet.

That brings us to the name of our movement: the Dissident Right. Is it time for a rebrand? Are we now like the Holy Roman Empire when the name is outdated? How “dissident” are our views in the current paradigm?

For newer people, here’s some scene lore on the history of the name of the movement.

When the right-wing internet scene first started heating up, it was called “the Dark Enlightenment.” This was circa 2012 and it was an umbrella term that encompassed White Nationalists along with a slew of other non-mainstream right-wing ideologies (NRx, monarchist, libertarians, etc). The biggest names of the scene were Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and John Derbyshire who was still at National Review at the time. This was the first time “the scene” got any significant media exposure.

However, “Dark Enlightenment” was too closely associated with Moldbug’s brand and two competing terms emerged for the white nationalist faction: Alt Right (invented by Paul Gottfried and popularized by Richard Spencer) and Dissident Right which was championed by John Derbyshire. Alt Right won out probably because it was catchier.

It was a little too catchy because then normies started like Steve Crowder started latching on to the term and diluting it’s meaning. This led to the Branding Wars, which was a debate over how big the tent should be. This ended with Hailgate, after which the term “Alt right” became toxic and more mainstream figures distanced themselves from the scene. Then Charlottesville happened and “Alt Right” became completely radioactive. Dissident Right started making a huge comeback.

Now here we are in 2025 and our ideas are not really “dissident” anymore. Here are my suggestions for new movement name.

Woke Right: This is what old Con Inc. types are calling us. These people never knew what “woke” meant until the Dissident Right explained it to them but they now try to pin it on us to try to make some kind of moral equivalent (“right-wing SJWs”!) and claim that they are the real right-wingers. I think “woke right” is a way for establishment Republicans to be able to talk about the racism problem in their party in a polite way without calling it a racism problem which would draw a lot of attention.

White nationalists could just “own the insult” with “woke right”. It’s already out there. I’ve even seen some people on the left picking up the term so it is gaining currency. The term was invented as a euphemism: it was designed to be inoffensive.

Alt Right: We could rehabilitate “Alt Right.” I always liked the term because it was catchy and looked cool on the page. You could imagine Alt Right on a t-shirt.

I was one of the last holdouts still using it. My editors had to make me stop. The reasons were understandable: the term had become too closely associated with Richard Spencer’s buffoonery. But that was years ago and Spencer has successfully rebranded to the point where “White Nationalist” is no longer the first word that comes to mind when you think of him. The counter-argument is that it runs into the same problem as “Dissident Right”: is it really that “alternative” anymore? Not anymore than “alternative music.” I just think for marketing purposes, Alt Right was ideal.

White Nationalist: If woke is dead and the Overton Window has been thrown so open as to make our most taboo ideas “safe edgy”, why not drop the euphemisms and call ourselves what we are?

The downside of this is the term may still have a lot of historical baggage and might be somewhat self-segregating.

MAGA: Some might say our counter-culture days are over and we should just become Republicans. We should just immerse ourselves into the Trump movement and start calling ourselves MAGA so as to better control it from the inside. This appears to be the strategy much of the Thiel-funded network is leaning. The downside is such cynicism is always transparent and can come off as inauthentic. A lot of us oldheads are creatures of counter-culture and not cut out for infiltration. God bless you if you can do it though.

Anti-Zionist Right: Anti-Zionism has become a popular brand with cross-party appeal. Anti-Zionism has a lot of intellectual credibility. Many big-brained professors are anti-Zionists. Being an anti-Zionist is a litmus test for being in the Dissident Right already. We could brand ourselves as “the Anti-Zionist Right.” It’s a polite term and it leaves the possibility of a larger tent than just being hardline White Nationalists.

The counter-argument is that the term does not do enough to exclude anti-Zionist Jews and if it does not, the scene would leave itself open to Jewish subversion if the group is not explicitly racial.

Pro-white: Like “White Nationalist” but more polite and without the baggage. Nothing offensive about the term in itself, and to oppose someone being “pro-white” implies that you are anti-white. However, like “Anti-Zionist”, not making the term explicitly anti-Jewish leaves the door open for Jewish subversion and then you have Ben Shapiro claiming that bombing Hamas is the pro-white thing to do.

Other: In the comments, add your own suggestions.

At any rate, scanning the political landscape in general and the right-wing internet ecosphere in particular, “Dissident Right” is an anachronism. The term was a product of its time and does not reflect current reality. I never liked it to begin with. The term was cumbersome and not at all catchy.

What’s in a name? Plenty.

What we call ourselves has some influence on where we will go in the future.

https://counter-currents.com/2025/10/its-time-to-retire-dissident-right