By now, you have heard of the Unite the Right rally in Charlotteville. You’ve probably also heard it turned into a gong show. We can lay blame on the police, politicians, antifa, the organizers, or whoever, but blame is not what this post is about. Also, I was not there, so my impression of events is formed by the first-hand accounts from Twitter, particularly Pax’s as he has gone in-depth on what exactly happened.
As my readers know, I’m an advocate of passivism. Lately, and somewhat hypocritically, under the heady rush of success the alt-right has been experiencing lately, I’ve found myself supporting activist activities. I overestimated how much legitimacy we actually had. I supported Unite the Right, particularly because of Pax’s involvement. As it turns out, things went exactly as passivism would’ve predict.
First, Trump and Sessions both denounced white supremacy, neo-nazis, hate, violence, bigotry, and racism and Sessions has sworn to crack down “to protect the right of people like Heather Heyer, to protest against racism and bigotry.”
This is bad for us, but not as bad as it seems on first glance. Neither specifically denounced the alt-right, its ideas, its constituent groups, or the actual people making up Unite the Right. No one seemed to notice this, which is one of the good things of the left’s inability to distinguish nazis and white supremacists from anybody else on the hard right.
Some are calling this a betrayal, but it is not. Trump and Session were never us, they were our allies with some common goals, but they were never a part of the hard, dissident, or alt-right. They’ve always been conservative civic nationalists. Anybody thinking they were us was fooling themselves. But they’ve treated us with benign neglect so far, which, all things considered, is good for us.
Unfortunately, the actions of James Field has given the media and left enough power to push their hands. So, we may no longer have benign neglect. We’ll see.
After the writing of the rest of this post, things took an awesome turn. Trump held a conference where he attacked antifa and supported the alt-right. Nazis are in for it, but we’re probably good for now. But we’ll continue on.
Second, it looked bad. The death and injuries gave the media ammunition against us; it will not play well among middle America.
Third, a rally is a display of power. A rally is not for building power, it is for showing power to widen legitimacy. Friday night with the tiki torches was great. We showed power, the left was truly afraid, we claimed the area, and we built legitimacy; it went perfectly. Saturday destroyed what was built on Friday. The police undercut us and delivered us to antifa, showing their power and undermining ours. It was bad.
Fourth, antifa displayed power. Antifa won and won hard on Saturday and they know it. This will embolden them.
Thankfully, this will be buried under the media cycle in a couple weeks. Things may get a little bit harder due to Trump and Session’s shift (if it’s truly a shift) and the emboldment of antifa, but as long as we don’t repeat our mistakes, it shouldn’t be permanently damaging.
So what lessons can we learn?
1) Most importantly, we should not pretend to power and legitimacy we do not hold. Having a rally go badly is far more damaging than any possible gain from a successful rally, as we just saw. Never hold a rally unless there is minimal chance of things going wrong.
2) The police, as a group, are not on our side. They will obey their masters. The police drove rallygoers into antifa. They purposefully (or through gross incompetence) set up violence. One twitter user, I don’t remember who, remarked that no cop even tipped off the rally about the betrayal the police were to visit on the rally. As well, Pax and a few others tried to get “civil disobedience” arrested, but the police didn’t accept the arrests and drove them into antifa. Do not trust the cops to protect our rallies or meetings. Do not trust them to protect the peace.
3) Planned and advertised rallies give the left and their supporters in the government time to plan. So, only make open, planned rallies where you are sure that either the police will act to protect the peace or where antifa will not have a free hand to destroy. So never make plans for future rallies in Democratic cities or states.
4) No swastikas, no sieg heils, no roman salutes, no red armbands, no public gassing/ovening jokes, whether its serious or meming for the lulz. This is not punching right, this is not virtue signalling, this is basic optics. Real life is not the internet, it is not 4chan. 90% of the population will react very negatively to nazi signalling IRL. This is not going to change in the foreseeable future. The media will pull the two people doing nazi stuff from hundreds and go “look they’re all nazis” and it will work to turn normal people against us. There is nothing to be gained from nazi signalling and a lot to be lost (same for any KKK stuff, but nobody seems to be doing that). The nazi well is poisoned.
5) Keep your cool. I don’t know whether Field’s attack was planned or if he just ended up trapped and panicked, but whatever happened, it hurt the cause a lot. Rally-goers need to keep their cool and not react disproportionately. Pax and others noticed that there was a blank shot fired during the rally. His hypothesis is that the police were trying to set it up so the right would fire on and massacre antifa. Thankfully, the right kept their calm. Keep your cool and don’t overreact. The left doesn’t care if their lumpenprol cannon fodder gets butchered; they will gladly sacrifice them if it gives them a weapon against us.
6) Stick together. My best guess is that Field was isolated, set upon, then panicked. It could have been avoided had Field not been isolated; he may never have been put in that situation or someone could have talked him down or prevented his panic. Don’t let people get isolated. Isolated people will be in danger and will either be hurt or hurt others in disproportionate way. Beforehand, set up a small squad structure. Make sure everybody has a couple of buddies who will stay with him throughout the rally. For those who come alone, set them up with a few people. However it’s done, make sure everybody is part of a small group looking out for each other and make it known to never abandon someone during the riot (unless he has been safely arrested; don’t start a fight with the cops). At the very worst, if you can’t plan anything better, have a box with numbers on paper and pass the numbers out as attendees enter, then tell everyone to stick together with those sharing their numbers for the rally.
7) Have a bug out plan. Nobody predicted this would happen, but now we know it can. So, any rally should have planned, safe escape routes (have at least one back-up in case your main route gets closed) should something like this happen again. Rallygoers should all be briefed on it (but not too far advance so it doesn’t get leaked). If a rally goes down like this again, use the route. Have a person (and some backups) ready to take control and lead the escape. Train a squad or two beforehand on how to make a spearhead to break through a antifa/police line if it comes to that.
8) Relatedly, have a transport plan. Set up beforehand a general area people will park, bus to, walk to, etc. to walk to the rally, or coordinate a bus or two or something. If everybody parks wherever, the chances of someone becoming isolated like Field did increases. If people all enter and exit from the same general area, then this provides some level of safety and order. Of course, if antifa finds out this area, this increases the likelihood of vandalism or violence leading up to extraction, but at least nobody will be trapped alone. If necessary, you can have a parking area far form the rally and organize a shuttle service/evac point to and from the rally.
9) Quality control. This will probably be hard to do in practice, it may be impractical, but we should try to find a way to control the quality of people at the rallies. To get to the point where ramming people with a car seemed like a good idea, Field had to have made a series of bad decisions, including isolating himself, entering his car into antifa territory, and punching the gas. Try to keep people who make poor decisions, who panic, or who lose their cool out of rallies, or at least position them so they can’t get into a situation where they can make bad decisions. I don’t know if this is possible, but it should be attempted. 100 calm, disciplined marchers is far more effective than 1000 people milling about in chaos.
10) The Friday march worked, and worked tremendously. The left was panicking in fear, the pictures and press turned out amazing, it looked cool, it projected power and self-control; it was a major win (promptly undercut by Saturday). This is what we should model future rallies on: minimal prior public notice, control and self-discipline, and a display of power. We asserted our control, everybody knew, on a very primal level, that the right was successfully asserting political dominance and building legitimacy.
11) Tactical leadership. Related to the squad idea above, every rally should have a set tactical chain of command, and all rally-goers should know to follow it. The police betrayal was unexpected, but had a command structure been set-up beforehand, rally leadership could have provided some order to react properly, punch through antifa lines and extract everyone with minimal harm and no deaths. If somebody refuses to follow a chain of command, boot him. We are the right, we value authority. At the bare minimum, announce to all rallygoers at the beginning, “these are Tom, Dick, and Harry, if things go badly they will lead us out. Obey them,” or pass out a few distinctive hats to leaders and announce to obey people with those hats if chaos erupts.
12) Start smaller. The rally made it clear we do not yet have the organizational capacity/skills to run a large, pre-planned rally given the obstacles presented to us. This is not a knock against any of the organizers or the job they did, but these capacities do not just spring from nowhere, they are built. So, instead of one large rally, we should focus on smaller, more particular rallies and get some people building experience in organizing, before the next large rally.
To summarize, for now we should focus on smaller, better planned, more disciplined suprise rallies (with torches). We should seek to emulate Friday’s march. The goal of the rally proper should be to march through and dominate an area, demonstrating that we have power over said area. Rallies should be a form of guerrilla political war.
However, the overarching goal and main focus of the rallies should be on building planning, organizational, and leadership capacities within the right. We should also be working on forming natural groups of men, so we don’t have to resort to the paper numbers method. The passivist building of bonds and capacities are far more important at this stage than the political benefits of a rally.
Once we have these built, then a few years from now, we can hold the Return of Unite the Right and display the legitimacy and power we have actually built.
On the subject of quality control, perhaps an easier way to manage the issue of the media singling out actual neo-nazis as typical for a whole event is to demand that participants wear a uniform, at risk of expulsion from the protest. Mike Enoch and the other TRS goys wore white polos. If they want to do something like this again, demand that every participant wear a white polo and khakis. Fly only the American Flag. There’s a couple of aesthetic tweaks the Alt-Right can take and spin into something successful. The tiki-torches against the backdrop of the night was on point – I sometimes think that neo-nazis, supposing these guys aren’t just honeypots, get so obsessed with projecting power they don’t actually have that they make the rather stupid mistake of leaning on the 3rd Reich as if anyone actually might worry that the Wehrmacht be right behind them.
Anyone who attempts to do this sort of thing again – and I am tentatively more in the passivist corner so I don’t exactly recommend activism – needs to give PR more thought from the visual/aesthetic perspective. Remember that Antifa is, um, a rather unkempt lot – rabble, really. When your enemy are wretched blue hairs and hungry skeleton junkies, you don’t need to work too hard to make yourself look better by comparison.
Fortunately, for whatever other criticism I might levy against the TRS people, they are sharp and they do learn.
The thing about charlottesville is that Antifa was actually unable to stop the march and came off the worse in most of the exchanges. It was the police that decided things. I think Charlottesville could have been spun into a success without the auto murder. There is some very dramatic footage of Damigo shrugging off the police mace, walking up the police phalanx and singlehandedly forcing them back five paces with his presence alone. But all that was drowned out by one panicky asshole with a car.
We can do rallies in blue states, but they have to be based on the Generation identitaire model..quick photogenic flashmob rallies designed to be seen on social media. They should have elements of pranksterism and humour in them.
Torches harken back to the old KKK and nazi rallies. Bad optics IMHO. The chants should have “USA USA USA” and singing patriotic music.
Rallies arent enough though. Basic outreach is needed. The Democratic Socialists of America are having an event where they will fix break lights for free. That’s the kind of thing we need to be doing as well.
I am doubtful about the value of rallies too. But when i hear whites bitching about being called racist again, I think about how that helped push me in the right direction.
But those guys are going to want to do it again. And it would be ideal to have a team in place- probably before the rally is announced. Do the recon, get some good observation points where you can observe the crowds and see what the police are doing, etc…
A solid communication system would be important to. Encrypted. Being able to communicate what’s going on to leaders within the rally grounds.
Figure out logistics too- maybe have people drive to an undisclosed location first, and then use buses or vans to go in.
>generation identity
That’s actually a great idea imo, there was an excellent article in radix I think, a long long time ago pointing out the poor aesthetic choice most American dissident rightists use relative to their European counterparts. I’ll see if I can find it in my home pc bookmarks
“Nazis are in for it, but we’re probably good for now.”
The narrative is that anyone on the alt-right are Nazis. Don’t fool yourselves thinking that you aren’t targets. They’ll probably use RICO in the U.S.
It’s good that Trump called out Antifa and it’s also good that the New York Times published an article about Antifa.
“Keep your cool. I don’t know whether Field’s attack was planned or if he just ended up trapped and panicked”
There was a real possibility that Fields would have been pulled from his car and would have been beaten to death.
Don’t ever attack others on the right.
Someone should have told those with inappropriate paraphernalia should have been told to leave or pack that crap back in the car.
It’s pretty clear though that some of the left were paid agitators. Spencer himself needs to be put out to the curb next to the garbage.
Trump showed some leadership by condemning the violence and acknowledging that the leftist were there to create problems.
Morons who cry Nazi, are appealing to a largely ignorant public – ignorant thanks to the state schools and the universities, where they were not taught to think critically, and imbibed a false view of history. They neither know nor care who the Nazis were, what they stood for, or what brought them to power. Politicians are parasites and liars, and when they declaim on non-existent evils, it is laughable. Hysterical childish behaviour is never attractive – particularly when it purports to be over what is essentially a storm in a teacup.
This event was a trap. A Soros operative and loser McAuliffe set it up. They sent police to disperse the crowd before the speakers spoke and Antifa was let in to attack while jackboot cheap paycheck cannon fodder looked on.
This is War now, and you are delusional. The fact is MLK was trained at a Marxist school. Those “peace” marches were all political theater. Those goofballs are just paid operatives of the system. And the outcome was predetermined before it happened.
There is no such thing as “peace”. War and struggle between races is the standard for life. All creatures have a territory. You cannot let aliens in or you will be pushed out. Owls need territory, and they cry a river for those birds. This is a Genocide.
Crying “Nazi” is a useful way to manipulate the Jews.. It’s troubling that Trump failed to name names and call the left “socialists”. His repub NoTrumpers are socialist lackeys, like most conservatives.
To quote a certain hipster:
“Of course protests are meaningless. I remember the protests against the Iraq War – BEFORE it started. The largest mass protests in the entire HISTORY of the human race, all around the USA, Canada, Europe and even elsewhere. It didn’t do jack shit because showing up in muh streets is a meaningless temper tantrum. It’s the lowest form of organization.”
Same for the Tea party protests, their only legacy is another straw man for the establishment to beat. Tea party type is almost as much an insult as nazi these days.
I’m with guest at 6:38 on this one
In terms of effecting policy on ballots or violence works and if you use the later in the presence of authority that is amenable to the other guy, the hammer will be dropped on you unless you are too strong to mess with. If it gets to that stage though, no one will use ballots
Anyway even if Charlottesville wasn’t a put up job, the real less for the .Alt Right is not to tolerate Nazis since they aren’t to use a Russian expression agreement capable (i’e don’t use certain symbology around the press or in public) and lack common sense
There was a time when Americans believed in freedom.
The US is dying from a million cuts. Part of the reason the USA is a nanny police state now is that whenever there is a problem, the kneejerk reaction in the US is to call for a new law.
Nanny state laws are not the best solution, however. Nanny state laws lead to more laws, higher fines, and tougher sentences. Thirty-five years ago, DWI laws were enacted that led to DWI checkpoints and lower DWI levels. Seatbelt laws led to backseat seatbelt laws, childseat laws, and pet seatbelt laws. Car liability insurance laws led to health insurance laws and gun liability laws. Smoking laws that banned smoking in buildings led to laws against smoking in parks and then bans against smoking in entire cities. Sex offender registration laws led to sex offender restriction laws and violent offender registration laws.
Nanny state laws don’t make us safer, either. Nanny state laws lead people to be careless since they don’t need to have personal responsibility anymore. People don’t need to be careful crossing the street now because drunk-driving has been outlawed and driving while using a mobile phone is illegal. People don’t investigate companies or carry out due diligence because businesses must have business licenses now.
The main point of nanny state laws is not safety. The main purposes of more laws are control and revenue generation for the state.
Another reason laws are enacted is because corporations give donations to lawmakers to stifle competition or increase sales.
Many laws are contradictory, too. Some laws say watering lawns is required, while other laws say watering lawns is illegal.
Many nanny state laws that aim to solve a problem can be fixed by using existing laws. If assault is already illegal, why do we need a new law that outlaws hitting umpires?
Nanny state laws are not even necessary. If everything was legal would you steal, murder, and use crack cocaine? Aren’t there other ways to solve problems besides calling the police? Couldn’t people educate or talk to people who bother them? Couldn’t people be sued for annoying behavior? Couldn’t people just move away? Even if assault was legal, wouldn’t attackers risk being killed or injured, too? Do people have consciences? Having no laws doesn’t mean actions have no consequences.
If there is no victim, there is no crime.
We don’t need thousands of laws when we only need 10.
Should swimming pools be banned because they are dangerous? Hammers? Bottles? Rocks? Energy drinks? Pillows?
Where does it end?
If one state can have self-serve gas stations, why can’t every state have them? If sodas were legal 20 years ago, why can’t they be legal now?
Freedom is not just a one way street. You can only have freedom for yourself if you allow others to have it.
Control freaks might get angry when a neighbor owns three indoor cats, but what did the neighbor take from them? Why should this be illegal? Is outlawing cats something a free country should do? Doesn’t banning everything sound like the opposite of liberty?
Instead of getting mad at people who like freedom, why don’t people realize that freedom is a two way street?
If you allow others to paint their house purple then you can, too.
If you allow others to own a gun then you can, too.
If you allow others to swear then you can, too.
If you allow others to gamble then you can, too.
Who wants to live in a prison?
Think. Question everything.