The Case for Trump 2024: Activist Brain

Nick and people like him so often feel “betrayed” because they’ve always deluded themselves into thinking MAGA was their movement, being infiltrated and watered-down by normies, when it’s always been the normies’ movement, and groyper types are hangers-on along for the ride. https://t.co/9yEeulOBVj

— Martyr Made (@martyrmade) July 19, 2024

Destiny was banned from Twitch for mocking the murder of Corey Comperatore. pic.twitter.com/Fsnrctl9hF

— Liberty Pill Memes (@LibertyPillMeme) July 20, 2024

“F-uck that guy that got shot at the rally”

Youtuber Destiny ATTACKS Corey Comperatore AGAIN, doubling down on the Donald Trump rally shooting.

People are calling for him being banned, but you want people like this to feel comfortable, so they show you who they really are.… pic.twitter.com/R8V7b2cHU7

— ThatUmbrellaGuy (@ThatUmbrella) July 16, 2024

In the 2016 election, I was swept up in the Alt-Right mania and supported Donald Trump. In the 2020 election, I was extremely blackpilled on the Trump presidency. I was exhausted and stayed at home. I assumed it was finally over. I was ready at that time to move on from Trump.

In the years that followed, I grew tired of the Biden presidency. It became tedious to keep up with the news. It has been one rolling disaster after another on issues like immigration, inflation and foreign policy. I found my attention being drained away from writing about politics. Everything sucks under Joe Biden. I would rather work and earn more money, read a book or spend more time with my family than cover our politics. I have developed new interests which have increasingly absorbed my time. As a result, I have become more detached from dissident politics which has given me some perspective.

The rise and fall of Joe Biden has coincided with the rise and fall of “woke” politics. We spent the Trump years clashing with these people in the streets. I use the term in air quotes because it has become a cliché to talk about them. In both culture and practical politics, the “woke” have become notorious for having extreme views which are repulsive to normal people. They have wrecked various franchises and institutions on the progressive Left and have alienated swathes of the Democratic coalition. These activists tend to be young people with college degrees from middle class backgrounds. They are hyper alienated, siloed away in toxic internet subcultures and have developed their own insane jargon.

You can probably see where I am going with this.

This is the infamous picture of Commander Matt Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker Party in full Dickies uniform from Rural King wearing a stahlhelm at Unite the Right in Charlottesville.

I’m not trying to trash or pick on Heimbach here. The point is that Heimbach in Charlottesville was suffering from a chronic debilitating condition which I have come to recognize as activist brain. He checks all of the boxes: young, college educated, middle class background, radical ideology, hyper alienated, insane jargon, siloed away in a toxic internet subculture, determined to force external reality to conform to his own pet ideology which was some combination of Strasserism and National Bolshevism.

It is a huge problem on the Left. It is also a problem on the Right. The ideological content is different, but I think of it as the same condition … activist brain. In our case, I often see activist brain taking the form of snark and cattiness, sneering at normies, talking down to ordinary people who do not understand, say, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, or how the Jews controlled Oliver Cromwell and the Bank of England. Activist brain is sometimes expressed in the desire to punish the normies until they grasp THE TRUTH because it has proven impossible to persuade them to care about some activist obsession.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to persuade our own activists to go along with their tribe? Ideologically, they are ethnonationalists who value group solidarity. They behave like individualists though. They don’t choose their ethnic group. Race matters in the abstract. The activist-normie divide is on constant display in our circles. The America First movement, for example, would say that foreign policy and specifically Palestinian human rights is the most important issue in the country. They have wildly different issue preferences from conservative normies who are motivated by the economy and immigration. Patriot Front bewilders normies who scream “feds” whenever they march through cities like Nashville. The accusation is untrue and Patriot Front is fedjacketed by bad actors who exploit the divide.

Richard Spencer’s content is an extreme case of narcissism combined with activist brain. The Apollo cult is another example of this. See also the people who have consumed hundreds of books about the Third Reich and who have become so nostalgic for it that it has alienated them from their peers. See also the people ranting about how Christ-Insanity is the ultimate Jewish conspiracy. See also the people who have consumed a thousand hours of “Red Pill” content online which has locked them in an ideological prison and left them incapable of approaching or maintaining a relationship with a woman.

The common thread is going down a deep ideological rabbit hole on the internet and being influenced and educating yourself in a way that becomes a handicap in relating to and interacting with your peers. Activist brain is isolating, generates resentment and creates obstacles for activists. It is easier to see at a distance how it operates on the Left where all the absurd woke jargon is an obvious political albatross in approaching and trying to win over normal people who do not understand activist obsessions like saying the right pronouns. Joe Biden’s immigration policy was captured by activists and was so extreme and out of touch with the sensibilities of normies that it has ultimately doomed his political career.

Donald Trump is the leader of rightwing conservative normies. Regardless of what you think about Trump, the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania has objectively bonded him closer than ever to his followers. The polls show that Trump is at the peak of his national popularity. Trump’s miraculous escape from death has stirred up strong emotions in his base. Once again, you don’t even have to like Trump or think he is capable of accomplishing any of his policy goals to grasp this, but I have seen lots of influencers afflicted with activist brain chiming in to demonstrate that they do not understand their audience. It might be too generous on my part to grant that they even still trying to persuade conservative normies of anything. In many cases, the activist-normie divide curdled into contempt a long time ago.

This brings me to the Trump rally in Butler, PA.

The bullets that whizzed past Trump struck three random MAGA supporters in the crowd that day. The shooter killed that firefighter Corey Comperatore who died protecting his daughters. It was a powerful reminder that all the Super Trump fans who I know are people like Comperatore or my brother-in-law. They are overwhelmingly good people even if they do not grasp every aspect of my own personal ideology. In contrast, the sort of White people who support Joe Biden are people like Destiny.

Martyr Made made a powerful point in his response to Nick Fuentes on X. MAGA was always a conservative normie movement. Pretty much my entire ethnic group supports Trump. I understand why people like my uncle, cousins and neighbors are voting for Trump over Kamala Harris. To be honest, I do not blame them for their choice. I am not going to stand in their way. I am going to choose solidarity with them instead of spitting in the wind and prioritizing some activist ideological point of disagreement.

Leadership is meeting people where they are at and moving them in the direction you want to go. Those who suffer from activist brain are incapable of doing this. They cannot get over the “meeting people where they are” hump. To be completely candid with you, I think Trump has better political instincts and has been better at doing this than many of our own activists who have lead their small bands of followers through the wilderness down all sorts of absurd tangents and dead end roads in recent years.

Note: nb4 someone points out the obvious.

I, too, have suffered from activist brain on occasions which is one of the reasons why I have written this article. I have become more self aware about it. I do not try to rigidly impose my ideology on anyone. We are influenced by the content we consume. If you surround yourself with five incel losers, you will probably become the sixth incel loser. If you listen to someone on a podcast for hundreds of hours who has demonstrated terrible political judgment, you too will likely misread political reality.

1. The Right finally moves on from Trump in 2028

2. The Alt-Right has terrible political instincts

3. Joe Biden has been a sedative as president

4. Activist brain blinds us and creates prejudice against conservative normies