10 Years As An Activist

Editor’s Note: The following speech was delivered at the Southern Cultural Center Third National Conference near Wetumpka, AL on August 16, 2023.

It has been a decade since I first spoke in this building.

In that speech called The Logic of Street Demonstrations, I gave ten reasons why Southern Nationalist activists were hitting the streets. After everything that has happened since then, I recently went back and read that speech and now it feels like it was delivered by a different person a lifetime ago. We have traveled a great distance from the tranquil politics of the late Obama era.

Today, I would like to share with you another list. It is the top ten things that I have learned the hard way over the past decade as an activist. Specifically, it is a list of traps and pitfalls that I have seen activists in the nationalist space stumble into and harm themselves and our cause.

1. Activists Have Principles – Activists tend to be college-educated, middle class radicals of above average intelligence. It is activists who have principles. The overwhelming majority of people in this world do not care about your principles. Politicians do not have principles. Ordinary people do not have principles. Even your fellow activists only share your principles to a greater or lesser degree. Your momma loves you but it is unlikely that even she shares your principles. We must have realistic expectations.

Activists make a mistake when they treat politicians and normal people like fellow activists. This delusion often takes the form of activists getting frustrated and upset when politicians betray their principles or when normal people express their lack of interest in the pet obsessions of the activist. This can lead to a cynical, negative attitude and contempt for politicians and normal people which is self defeating. It is not unusual for frustrated activists to storm out of the political arena and take their toys and go home. They will forfeit the game and congratulate themselves for winning a moral victory.

The job of the activist is to build public support for his cause and to nudge politicians to offer concessions. Your principles are only a guide to political engagement, not a reflection of political reality.

2. Activists Love Purity Spiraling – There are few things activists enjoy more than purity spirals in which their 80% friends become their 20% enemies.

This typically happens when the attention of the activist shifts from trying to influence the public and win concessions from politicians to a more self-absorbed focus on his own principles. Activists lose interest in the external world and become obsessed with expressing and displaying their principles to other activists. Fidelty to one’s principles and punishing any deviation from them takes on a more religious tone as a test of personal piety and character. Saul Alinsky was correct to identify “make the enemy live up to its own book of rules” as a major tactical weakness that radicals can exploit. The easiest way to destroy an organization of activists is usually to get a good purity spiral going among them. Just place swords in front of activists and convince them that the principled thing to do is to dive on them.

3. Activists Go Down Rabbit Holes – Are you based and red pilled?

If so, you have likely gone down a deep ideological rabbit hole. You have probably read dozens of books or listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts about some topic or another. You have educated yourself and have firm opinions about some topic which you want to share with others. You have become an activist who has seen through the myths and illusions that society has put in front of you and now grasp THE TRUTH. It can be the Jews. It can be women. It can be race or the Federal Reserve. It doesn’t matter. You can even be right in a sense about whatever it is that you have become so obsessed with.

The problem is that going down a deep ideological rabbit hole has a cost for the activist. It is like learning a new language or putting on a new pair of glasses with a strong prescription. It warps how you view the world and has an isolating effect. It becomes much more difficult to communicate with others who do not see the world as you do. This can take a heavy personal toll on your relationships.

It is much easier for us to see how this plays out on the Left with its woke jargon and 10,000 new genders. Activist slogans like “Defund the Police” and “Abolish ICE” have become political albatrosses which are deeply out of touch with the sensibilities of the median voter. They have become anchors around the feet of politicians who bowed to the demands of leftwing activists. We laugh at the idiots who ruined franchises like Terminator and Ghostbusters by catering to the sensibilities of woke activists. You probably know a lot of people who have sworn off Bud Light since the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco.

The same phenomena happens on the Right when activists become socially isolated, segregated away from their peers in internet silos, where they develop their own jargon and cultural touchstones and are influenced by likeminded people who have become similarly out of touch with reality. I call this activist brain and it comes across as weird to everyone else in society who has not gone down the same ideological rabbit hole. As an activist, it is a liability which can cloud your judgment.

Successful activists need to develop a sense of self-awareness about this. They should not lose themselves in internet ghettoes. Instead, they should try to remember who they were before they became red-pilled, if for no other reason than to better interact with people outside their bubble.

4. Uniting Activists Is a Mistake – In 2017, Jason Kessler came up with the idea for a “Unite the Right” rally. I was sold on the idea because it strongly appealed to my sense of honor. Many of us took the plunge and made the trip to Charlottesville. I went to Charlottesville for the same reason that I had traveled to other cities like New Orleans and Birmingham to defend Confederate monuments.

The problem with the ill-conceived “Unite the Right” rally was that it became a unite the activists rally. Various activist groups with different identities, values and missions came together to protest in Charlottesville and paraded in front of the cameras. The result was that the core message we were trying to send that day got lost after fights broke out with Antifa and one woman died. The most extreme activists became the story, not the removal of the Lee and Jackson monuments.

The upshot of Charlottesville is that the fallout from it weakened us. The Democratic Party is a coalition of activist groups, interests and constituencies. It was a fundamental mistake to assume that the Right is like the Left and that leftwing tactics like popular fronts would impress a rightwing audience. We doubled down on the mistake we made in Charlottesville with the Nationalist Front. We were trying to organize activists with different viewpoints and losing sight of the audience which is much more moderate.

5. Americans Dislike Activists – Americans are typically annoyed by activists.

Seven years ago, I wasn’t as sensitive to this fact as I am today, but Americans rarely approve of activist groups even those which have good optics and are on their best behavior. This is true across the political spectrum. While activists are necessary to bring about change, Americans have an instinctive dislike of disruption and usually respond negatively to it. We might think we look cool adopting the aesthetic of the Hells Angels and shouting at Antifa across the street downtown, but it is rarely appreciated by anyone except other radical activists. In fact, it is easier to stir up a backlash among Americans against activists because of this bias than it is to persuade them to adopt the views of activists.

As activists, we need to be very careful and mindful about the actions that we take, and how we are perceived by our own people and those we are trying to influence. In retrospect, streaking through Charlottesville with the NSM to see Baked Alaska probably wasn’t the best idea.

6. Activists Are In a Hurry – In 2014, I was in an activist who was in a hurry to engage in street demonstrations to smash taboos and force our views into the mainstream. I still think today that we got off to a strong start. I remain impressed with our early work. We came across as White Southern Christian nationalists who were striking the right balance between edgy ideas and normalcy. You could drive by our demonstrations and think maybe these guys are a little out there, but they are on to something. We were a early and true vanguard that was saying things out loud that millions were thinking.

Everything that we were saying a decade ago is now a part of the mainstream political conversation. This includes our most controversial and signature idea which is the desirability of National Divorce. Half of Trump supporters now support dissolving the Union. White identity is reemerging on the Right after decades of repression. Christian nationalism has flared up in our churches. The change was gradual and almost imperceptible at first, but it has greatly accelerated over the past five years.

Looking back on it, I think we became too impatient around the time that Donald Trump was elected president. This is where we began to go off the rails as activists. We inserted ourselves into the leftwing backlash against Trump, make ourselves a target and absorbed it at great cost. Later, the street demonstrations subsided, we got of the picture and the public was able to focus its ire squarely on BLM and Antifa, and there was a backlash against what is now called Wokeism.

There is no greater virtue that activists can cultivate than patience. Activists travel far ahead of public opinion and our biggest challenge is how we handle that.

7. Activists Should Focus Locally – While the street demonstrations that I attended in the past were fun, I quickly learned that there is nothing activists can do that is sustainable by driving 5 to 6 hours from city to city to meet up with our widely dispersed friends from the internet. Gathering activists from across the country to descend on Charlottesville to attend a rally / festival was a mistake because there was nothing that outsiders could have done to save the Confederate monuments there. It was also a strange move for people who ought to know how decisions are made by state and local governments.

8. Activists Confuse Twitter With Real Life – Write it down a hundred times until you internalize this.

In retrospect, I think the abrupt change in our activism from the Obama to the Trump years was largely driven by the migration of activists to Twitter. In the span of three years, we went from fairly normal and presentable street activism with normal people to wannabe gladiators showing up at our events in Roman-style armor. It only got crazier from there because conflict and going viral on Twitter created toxic incentives for activists. The narcotic of becoming a minor celebrity is what led to events like the Richard Spencer College Tour and Unite the Right. Most of us ended up losing our accounts anyway in the end. I now look at the glory days of Twitter as the activist equivalent of eating a few gallons of ice cream. It was a short term rush of fake calories that was bad for the long term health of our movement.

9. Activists That Burn The Brightest Burn Out – After a decade of activism, I have lost count of the number of people who became extremely radical and intensively active for a few years, but who then get disillusioned, go dark and who are never heard from again. It also seems like the loudest, most extreme activists are the ones who are the most likely to flame out and become turncoats. In contrast, I have been struck by the fact that more moderate activists – people like my father-in-law, Gordon Baum – are the ones who seem to stay the course and who remain active for decades.

10. Activists Should Not Go Outside The Experience Of Their People – Finally, some of the biggest mistakes that I have seen in my years as an activist – the things that created the worst publicity for us, which stoked the most division and subtracted from our ranks – can be summarized as things we did which went outside the experience of our people. Activists convinced themselves it was a great idea, but it struck other people as weird and unfamiliar and became a source of controversy.

To sum things up: activists should be positive, patient and pragmatic, try to balance edginess with normalcy, develop a greater sense of self-awareness about the ideological blinders they have on, focus on their own local area instead of building social media followings, avoid purity spirals and getting too radical or in a rush and always keep the audience in mind who are people who are much more moderate than us.