Life After Trump
I’ve been asked to share my thoughts on our movement’s “life after Trump.” The topic is ambiguous, however, because it could mean “after” the beginning or the end of Trump’s current term.
Life after Trump’s re-election has been great for White Nationalists, because he’s doing things that we want: closing the border, deporting illegals, shutting down refugee resettlement (except for white South Africans!), putting the squeeze on H-1Bs, shutting down USAID and the Community Relations Service, beating back wokeness and DEI, pushing back against debanking, even chipping away at the Civil Rights regime. As a nice bonus, Trump is even less pro-Israel than I expected.
Our life after Trump’s time is up depends largely on who follows him. If the Democrats regain control of the White House, they will be out for blood, and it will be very hard for our movement to operate in those conditions. Multiparty democracy in effect means handing one’s opponents a loaded gun from time to time. If that prospect is too horrifying to contemplate, then we need to have a conversation about simply banning the Democrat Party as a criminal organization. They are too dangerous to be allowed back into power, even if they do get the most votes. If we talk about this today, it will be talked about in Austin and Silicon Valley tomorrow, and in Washington D.C. the day after that. There really is what David Zsutty calls the “racist group chat to White House policy pipeline.”
Thus our first priority is keeping the Democrats out of power, preferably by banning them altogether. There are three main reasons for this:
- Republicans are slowing the Great Replacement, which gives us time.
- Republicans are rolling back wokeness and will maintain more freedom of speech.
- Republicans are more receptive to our message, thus they are more likely to do what we want.
Our job, of course, is not to follow the GOP but to lead it. In a real sense, we already are. A quarter century ago, when I joined this cause, we were voices crying out in the wilderness. Now, when we log on to X or Instagram, we hear our voices echoing back to us, multiplied and amplified ten thousandfold. Ideas like the Great Replacement, white genocide, and national divorce have moved from the margins of White Nationalism to the mainstream of the Republicans. Discussions about nationalism and populism are increasingly racial and identitarian. People are increasingly unapologetic about making racial and identitarian arguments. White people are taking their own side.
How did this happen? To answer that, we need to understand how political change happens, then keep doing things that work and stop doing things that don’t.
If you think that politics can be reduced entirely to carrots and sticks—bribes and threats, money and guns, greed and fear—and if you believed that the only way to overcome a stick is with a bigger stick, a carrot with more carrots—i.e., that only power can overcome power—then you are wasting your time. This worldview is called “realism.” It can also be called materialism, because it says that material factors determine politics. But the realistic conclusion of “realism” is that we are doomed. Good luck outspending and outgunning the people in charge.
Our only hope is if there is a factor in human nature that can overcome the greed and fear that keep our enemies in power. That factor is idealism. Idealists are the kind of people who don’t sell out for money or knuckle under to threats.
All our progress has come from the battle of ideas, because that’s where we have all the advantages. Our views are based on truths about human nature, tested by all of human history. Because our ideas are unfashionable, even persecuted, they attract the freest and bravest among us. The current system is based on lies about human nature, produces catastrophic consequences, and is ruled by increasingly corrupt, degenerate, and monstrous people.
Our enemy has many heads, many mouths, many messages. But the key dogma that keeps them in power and us out is very simple: it is the proposition that “Nothing is worse than racism and nationalism—but only for white people.” That’s it. Just a heinous anti-white moral double standard that condemns our race to extinction by vetoing every policy that might be good for us.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum—Left, Right, or center—all your aspirations must be squared with this ridiculous and indefensible dogma. Blacks look out for blacks. Jews look out for Jews. Asians look out for Asians. But white people have to look out for all mankind.
Want to overturn Affirmative Action? Then you have to argue that it hurts those loveable high-achieving non-whites even more than it hurts whites. Want to oppose abortion? Then ooze solicitude about black babies. But under no circumstances can a policy be advocated simply because it is good for whites. And heaven and earth would shake if you were to advocate a policy that benefits whites alone.
Our people want to have a future. They want nationalism, populism, and nice white countries. It is natural and normal. But these aspirations are vetoed by the false moral dogma that it is not right for white people to have nice things. That dogma inhibits us from taking our own side. Remove that dogma, and we get what we want. All our progress in recent years has come from chipping away at anti-whiteness. So we need to keep fighting. The moral revolution comes first.
We need to go all in on the battle of ideas, because that’s what works. The battle of ideas stokes idealism, which is the counterforce to the greed and fear that cement the system’s power. That’s why it works.
Since we have limited resources, we need to focus on the people who are most receptive to our message. In America, that basically means the 70 million white people who voted for Donald Trump.
What doesn’t work is anything that presupposes that we can beat the system where it is strongest: in the realm of guns and money. Basically, any form of political “realism” or “materialism.” At this point, a Hollywood director would dub in the sound of jackboots on the march.
There’s an important distinction between politics and “metapolitics.” Politics is actually contesting for political power, either through revolution or the ballot box. Metapolitics refers to things that you have to do before you can contest for power: basically propaganda (the battle of ideas) and community organizing.
In the American two-party system, starting what we hopefully call “third” parties is a waste of time and money. It is not how we will gain power.
But don’t political parties get out our message? Don’t they build community? Yes, they do. But propaganda and political organizing are metapolitical activities. So if you are going to do metapolitics, why not dispense with the trappings of a political party and focus entirely on these things? Why link them to futile political campaigns that will only taint your message with failure? If you actually want to pursue political power in America, do it through the Republican Party. In some places, you might even do so through the Democrats.
Now let’s talk about street activism: marches and protests. If you aren’t a revolutionary paramilitary rehearsing to storm the Winter Palace and seize power, you aren’t engaged in politics either. You are a metapolitical group, engaged in propaganda and fraternal organizing.
The best activist groups like the Identitarians in Europe understand this completely. They build teams to engage in outdoor propaganda of the deed: they gather, do their thing, and melt away. They realize that the greater part of any street activism is its perception in the media, i.e., its impact in the battle of ideas. Thus, they document and disseminate their actions through social media. They do not invite the enemy media to cover them. Nor do they wait around for police and antifa to show up. They look cool. They have fun. They communicate our ideas. They mock our enemies. And they live to fight another day.
The battle of ideas is low-risk and high reward. Bad memes and bad takes are quickly forgotten. Street battles are high-risk and low reward. When they go well, they might look cool. But what political impact do they really have? What are they demonstrating? Strength? Is a hundred guys strength?
When street battles fail, however, they fail badly. People can die, end up in jail, and have their lives ruined. Think Charlottesville. Ask yourself how many full-time metapolitical activists could have been employed with the hundreds of thousands of dollars sucked out of the movement by post-Charlottesville lawfare. We cannot repeat this. Activist groups really need to internalize the metapolitical nature of their work and not get caught up in political playacting.
Metapolitics works. It is what has brought us to where we are today. Thus, we need to go all in on metapolitics, both the battle of ideas, including “propaganda of the deed,” and community organizing.
Now, perhaps someone is thinking, “Of course Greg says that metapolitics is the way forward because he’s doing metapolitics.” That’s actually an expression of materialism: my ideas are simply dictated by my material interests. But actually, the truth is just the reverse: I do metapolitics because I am convinced it is the way forward. The idea came first.
The role of our movement is to change the culture, and politics will follow as a matter of course. If you want to do politics in America, that means going into the existing political parties.
Our success in the battle of ideas has a problem, though. When our voices come echoing back to us on social media, it has the quality of fever dreams, in which the day’s events come flooding back in garbled, surreal form. Someone at the UN can say “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is week,” and after it is translated into Swahili, then Urdu, then Tagalog, then Ukrainian, it comes back as “The wine is good, but the meat is rotten.” Basically, the problem is how to maintain the “orthodoxy” of our ideas and the quality of their messaging. We need something like a Pope of racism.
There’s a real danger that our movement might be a victim of our own success. We are winning. But we haven’t won yet. Far from it. Unfortunately, a lot of our supporters mistake having Trump in the White House for victory and want to go back to grilling. Support for White Nationalism fell off dramatically when Reagan was in the White House as well.
If we are going to win, we need to maintain the truth and quality of our message. That means maintaining our institutions. Our goal is for White Nationalism to consume the Trump movement, not for Trump to consume White Nationalism. Thus our greatest danger now is not defeatism but premature triumphalism and the complacency it breeds.