The Case for Trump 2024: The Alt-Right

FLIP FLOP FUENTES says he is NOT voting for Trump! This comes after days ago, acting like he would take a bullet for Trump. https://t.co/p0ksZy1qBo pic.twitter.com/oZaX2hNrlo

— Bean World (@Beansoy_World) July 19, 2024

Definitely Trump

The combined political instincts and judgment of Spencer, Fuentes and Jordan Cooper do not lie pic.twitter.com/wzOftD6dOA

— Hunter Wallace (@LutherEnjoyer) July 19, 2024

As you have probably noticed, I have become significantly less politically active since Joe Biden has been president. I just don’t have as much time to keep up with rightwing dissident politics as I used to when Trump was president. I have a larger family now. I spend all my time working.

The Joe Biden presidency has sucked. We quit having fun a long time ago. I don’t feel like getting up every day to write about every senior citizen moment or record shattering month of illegal immigration. I can easily keep up with the news cycle on X and fire off a few tweets or two at work. In 2016, I was swept up in the Alt-Right wave that lifted Trump into the White House and I was blackpilled in 2020 about how our hopes came crashing down in the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

In 2024, I have a different perspective on both Donald Trump and the Alt-Right. Whether it is Richard Spencer claiming that Joe Biden has been the best president of his lifetime or telling Elle Reeve in her memoir that he is the kind of guy who would have crucified Jesus Christ, I look back on those years in genunine disbelief that I ever took a lot of these people seriously. I have never been involved in the America First movement that absorbed the remnants of the Alt-Right, but I have watched Nick Fuentes do things like burn bridges with every member of Congress who ever gave him the time or day and work with MILO on Kanye West’s disastrous presidential campaign. Time and again, I have come away with the impression that these people are unserious and have the political judgment of a cantaloupe.

Do you remember the time when we went streaking through Charlottesville with Matt Heimbach dressed in a stahlhelm and an outfit from Rural King to hear a speech about Nietzsche from Richard Spencer? In retrospect, it was a fever dream. We weren’t thinking clearly. I’m not saying that to knock anyone. I was there too. I even brought my wife with me to that event. I now look back on Charlottesville and see that as less Trump’s fault than our own poor decisions. It was a bullet we could have easily dodged.

I’m not blackpilled anymore about the demise of the Alt-Right. I now believe that it couldn’t have ended in any other way due to the delusional thinking and self-sabotaging behavior of so many of the people who were involved in it. Donald Trump never pretended to be Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Instead, some people who projected their own fantasies on Trump and MAGA became bitterly disappointed when he turned out to be just the man he presented himself to be and not the meme they fell in love with. He has always presented himself, for example, as a pro-Israel Zionist who is hostile to Iran. He always said that he was going to cut taxes. He never claimed to be interested in White Nationalism.

There a lot of people with “hot takes” on the internet. In weighing how to proceed in the 2024 election, I now give greater weight to voices who haven’t brought disasters down on themselves and their associates, to those who have been successful at mainstreaming a nationalist and populist message in American politics and to those who have built something. Those people tend to be supporting Trump while those who are loudly against Trump have been successful at marginalizing themselves.

Once again, I am not shilling for Trump. I am not telling you how or whether to vote. I am only sharing my own thoughts for future reference. In my view, the fact that Fuentes and Spencer are united in opposing Trump in 2024 is a strong point in his favor. I am inclined to go in the opposite direction.