Response to Dave Greene's 'Assume a Can-Opener' Livestream
Dave makes some valid points and good suggestions, but his doomerism is not supported by evidence.
So
did a long YouTube livestream addressing a discourse involving me, him, and . It was mostly Walt who he was referring to (whom he weirdly called ‘Otto von Disney’ throughout), with Dave criticising both the approach of Walt and the various policies he suggested.He uses the analogy of some highly intelligent people locked in a room with tinned food but no can-opener, though there are some materials they could use to open the tins. They end up all starving to death, unable to open the tins of food, because they endlessly imagined ‘wouldn’t it be nice if we could eat all this food… assume we have a can-opener’.
It was rather a strange analogy, but I do get the point he was trying to make, that being that in his view it’s stupid to think of these policies, let alone ‘compromises’, because we don’t have the power to implement them. As somebody on the Dissident Right, Dave Greene is far more interested in understanding political realism and elite dynamics than proposing a convincing political vision (though he does have a vision, Trad Catholicism).
He critiques Walt Bismarck’s various points, like his reparations for slavery in exchange for ending affirmative action idea, the idea of making an ‘alliance with the Jews and Brahmins’, the idea of making it easier for guys to engage in casual sex in exchange for giving women the ability to sue men for ‘wasting their time at peak Sexual Marketplace Value’, and various others, whilst proposing his alternative policies. Here is the complete list:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6341817f-e260-4024-badd-1c3e39b646fd_1392x777.jpeg)
It’s a shame that it took Dave so long to come up with alternative suggestions, because some of them are really quite good. But he remains obsessed with the fact that he ‘doesn’t have the power’, ‘don’t have the ear of higher-ups’ (has he ever heard the ‘post to policy pipeline’ and
reading stuff in our space?) and this is ‘all hypothetical’. He made this clear at the end.I guess there is something admirable about Dave’s hard nosed ‘realism’. But the least realist thing possible is being able to inspire a committed group of activists, who will sacrifice a huge portion of their time because they believe in a political vision, without providing any political vision.
In fairness to him he does address this at the very end, saying that people need to have ‘belief’. But he is using this world in a religious sense, whereas I think activists having ‘faith’ in a political vision is enough; after all Wokeism does not need belief in a divine being to bind it together.
I’m going to be analysing Dave’s livestream. I will be adding in timestamps when I claim Dave says something, given that he has a tendency to say ‘I never said that’, and try to represent his position as fairly as possible. I will highlight what he gets right and what he gets wrong when critiquing Walt, and synthesise the idealism and gung-ho spirit of Walt, and the realism of Dave, to create something that might work, if we work at building it.
What Dave Gets Right
Dave is of course correct that we aren’t the Supreme Rulers of the United States with absolute power to implement everything we want.
He is correct in reminding his audience that people such as Chris Rufo have so much reach in part because they engage in a lot of quite dry and arduous investigative reporting and journalism to expose indoctrination, censorship, and crimes of the Woke regime. It is this that gives him the reach that he does, not that he simply wrote a list of policies on how to defeat Wokeism on an online blog and Ron DeSantis just read them and made him his key advisor simply because of his online writing. Rufo was somebody with major financial backing, was presentable and good-looking, and already had a career as a documentary filmmaker explaining rather than trying to shape the world directly.
We do need to build institutions. It is absolutely true that a tiny minority of people agree with us on issues like Civil Rights law, and for millions it serves as a fanatical religious doctrine. I do think books like the ‘Age of Entitlement’ by Christopher Caldwell, ‘The Origins of Woke’ by
, and ‘The Unprotected Class’ by Jeremy Carl, all books listed on the webpage of nationalconservatism.org, definitely show an opening of the Overton Window on this issue. However, just straight up and saying ‘we want to abolish Civil Rights law’ would be more politically suicidal than saying you want an abortion ban with no exceptions (which is partially why I think Walt’s reparations idea is not completely insane, but I’ll talk about that later).Walt also has a very naïve view of coalition building. In many ways, his ‘let’s just all get along’ vibe makes for a positive atmosphere in his space. On the other hand, it leads to personal ‘vibes’ coming above clear ideology. I did side with Dave over the
issue, and whilst I maybe went a little too hard on Tracing in the language I used to describe him, I still fundamentally agree with everything Dave and I said. In Walt’s response to me, he talked about his idea of ‘coalitional politics’, which as Dave said in this livestream, is very naïve. Many of his policy suggestions will not be perceived as ‘giving’ something to these groups, but simply taking something away (African-Americans prefer Civil Rights Law over reparations because they can keep milking it, though if offered additional monetary they’d bargain for the highest figure). From a strictly political programme standpoint, immediately endorsing reparations in exchange for getting rid of Civil Rights law will probably just lead to the reparations being channelled back into political lobbying to reinstate Civil Rights law.And some of Dave’s suggestions are good. Whilst I have an allergic reaction to privatisation, generally wanting the state to maintain its assets in one way or another (even in a National Wealth Fund), distributing government land to African-American settlements isn’t a terrible idea. It would be a way of making sure the ‘reparations’, if we absolutely have to do it (which Dave doesn’t think we should, and sentimentally, I’m with him) don’t go back into political lobbying. Even though he explained why he didn’t do this more often at the end, I do think it’s a shame that Dave doesn’t talk about these ideas more.
However, now that I’ve mentioned the areas where I agree with Dave, I’m now going to address the points where I disagree with him.
Legitimate Differences in Visions
I think part of the reason for Dave’s pessimism and Walt’s optimism is that there are fundamental differences in their political visions. Dave does have a political vision, it is a traditionalist Catholic monarchy. But as he knows that has no popular support whatsoever, he understands that such a state could only be brought into being after ‘the collapse’ probably not in his lifetime, so it is best to prepare for the new regime by building mutual aid associations and intentional communities, the classic ‘plant acorns for trees who’s shade you will never sit in’. His religion probably gives him a low-time preference in this regard, which is unquestionably of utility.
Walt is much more ‘populist’ in his beliefs. His views, or at least his presentation of them, would not be outside of what many White men of his age believe, something that has been termed ‘Barstool Conservatism’. He is a secular person like myself who finds religious arguments strange, is high in openness and averse to authority, and likes a light-hearted, laddish, and ‘fun’ spirit in a movement.
So unlike Dave’s trad Christian monarchy, Walt’s ideas of free association, a return of the laddish culture of the 90s and 00s, racial pride without hating other races, and a dislike for Woke censorship and cancel culture, are widely shared by much of the population.
Barstool Conservatism is generally a very ‘thin’ ideology, but I respect Walt’s attempt to make it more systematic. His ideas are still a little half-baked, but if refined and well-presented, could represent a political programme that could gain popular support amongst key elites and the American people as they are RIGHT NOW.
Now, Dave will say this represents a ‘ratchet effect’. In his view, Walt only represents a ‘liberal at the speed limit’, and because of the fact that public opinion is downstream from power, his programme only serves to consolidate previous liberal victories.
But the Christian Right does not have a monopoly on what constitutes right-wing politics. Walt is a consistent right-winger because he believes in human hierarchy and inequality, in his case in the form of HBD and Race Realism. He also believes in favouring the biologically ideal vs the biologically perverse, which would align him with me and Dave, though sometimes his ‘coalition building’ and ‘politics based on personal relationships’ can water down his ideology to a harmful degree.
The Nietzschean Right does have a rich tradition and is in every way a part of the Right; the quintessential right-wing villains of the 20th century, the Nazi’s, were pretty anti-Christian. Was Hitler furthering the Neocon Cycle? As Dave thinks the problem is ‘materialism’, maybe he does, but in terms of his beliefs in equality vs inequality, which is the commonly accepted definition of ‘left’ vs ‘right’, Hitler was the polar opposite to a leftist and in fact more right-wing than Christianity ever is.
People such as
and Dave have given convincing arguments as to why ‘90s liberalism’ was unsustainable. Unconstrained free speech allowed those hostile to free speech to undertake the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’, and Civil Rights law enabled ever more draconian lawsuits and frantic attempts for legal compliance. Indeed, the way it was set up institutionally, was always going to lead to Wokeism.But just because, as it was constituted, it was ‘politically’ unsustainable, does not mean the lifestyles of Americans in the 90s were societally unsustainable and most important, does not make them undesirable. Indeed, as I have mentioned, if America had been either a direct democracy or an authoritarian regime, it could have continued, with countries like Russia having ‘frozen’ the 1990s cultural paradigm.
Walt’s beliefs do in fact seek to make the 90s paradigm in terms of social and cultural relaxed freedom more long-lasting. Like many Rightosphere thinkers, he knows that ‘90s liberalism’ was unsustainable. But it was unsustainable because of Civil Rights law, judicial activism and the proliferation of extreme-minoritarian attitudes in the managerial state, having very little to do with the decline in religious belief in and of itself (aside from the fact the Puritan spirit was just secularised in the form of Woke) nor ‘promiscuity’.
The secular vs Christian divide also affects the way they see politics. For Walt, having been an influential part of the Alt-Right, just being passionate about politics, in a way Richard Hanania explained in his article ‘Why is Everything Liberal?’, is enough motivator to build institutions. He sees movements like the Ron Paul campaign and the Alt-Right as examples of these dynamic movements, and indeed the left hasn’t always had a complete monopoly on political passion. Right-wing parties across the world have memberships, activist bases, and think-tanks… obviously a great many people are willing to fight for them.
Because Dave’s vision is so much more removed from the modern world however, he correctly senses just engaging in politics isn’t going to work. It is chiefly that he doesn’t WANT the return of ‘90s liberalism’ even if it could be achieved and made permanent (authoritarianism, abolition of Civil Rights law, etcetera), because his desire is a return to a hardline Christian culture. This is something echoed by many on the Dissident Right, secular figures like
, who scoffed at the idea of this kind of society in ‘the Rufo Reich and Mecha-Bentham’ are even worse because they provide no alternative destination and seem to relish in being contrarian and black-pilled, whereas Dave does provide one, though to me it is unappealing.Doubling Down vs Expanding Base
Christian conservatives are having to grapple with the fact that America is becoming an increasingly secular culture. This does not have to mean Woke, and there is a limit to how far indoctrination works, the continental European Right making inroads is a case in point. But the European Right talks about secular issues like Wokeism and immigration, and rarely issues like abortion, which overwhelmingly only interests the Religious Right.
Dave may counter this by saying pro-life is more popular than repealing civil rights, but the difference is that most people don’t know what Civil Rights law actually does. Affirmative action has remained consistently unpopular and no amount of indoctrination has changed that. If people could be made to see that Wokeness and affirmative action is all downstream from Civil Rights law, people could be made to see through the propaganda. There’s a reason why the Alt-Right was censored post-2016, the regime saw it as a uniquely dangerous threat.
However, there is also a desire for freedom and experimentation within a secular population, and therefore talk of ‘discouraging promiscuity’ and carrying on with the obsession with abortion, does not land with a non-religious audience in the same way.
I am biased because I temperamentally side with Walt. The kind of lifestyle that he promotes, one that many men of my generation feel like they never really had, far more accurately taps into what young men desire today. One may argue for why such a lifestyle is bad, but young men don’t want to hear about that, because they see how the generation’s previously preceding them enjoyed that kind of lifestyle, and they’re thinking ‘why can’t I have that?’ Even though the elder generations might be saying they’re ‘not missing anything’, they’re only saying that because they got to experience it.
So if Dave wants to quit politics and become a full-time evangelist to try and convert society back to Christianity, then by all means, he would be a very engaging C.S Lewis-style apologetic. But the reason why he sees Walt’s orientation as ‘unfeasible’ is because in many cases he doesn’t ‘want’ it. That’s fine, but be honest, don’t say somebody’s vision is impossible because you don’t like it, be honest about the fact that your vision is different.
Dave also believes in a strategy of ‘doubling down on the base’ and not seeking to reach out. He uses NRx language here, like ‘rewarding friends’. But the issue is that amongst young people, the majority of people are not on his side. So just doubling down on the base is going to ensure that base stays limited at best, and at worst dies off as the beliefs are not passed down to future generations.
Walt is trying to expand the base. I know many people say that is ‘selling out’, but all political movements need to make compromises. Dave may find compromises on abortion for instance too much to bear, and he’d rather stay principled and lose than compromise and win. That’s fine. But all winning political movements need to prioritise certain issues and determine which are most important.
The fact that the Dissident Right interprets this line of strategic compromise, instead of taking the line of the most fanatical activists, as ‘betrayal’ and ‘punching right’ is a terrible strategy. The base is not the majority of people, and it is a tiny minority of the elites, who as per Elite Theory, have the organisational ability and resources to actually make change in an ideological direction we want.
Walt is trying to meet people where they are, and get a political coalition made up of a worldview that would actually be popular. Some of the specific policies may be badly thought through, but being a close friend of his, Walt is more interested in getting people of a similar kind of sentiment than specific policies.
If you really do think that any change from the unfiltered line of the ‘chuds’ is ‘punching right’, and that ‘rewarding loyal patrons’ is the most important thing, or hat any innovation or new ideas is just the turn of the ratchet and the ‘Neocon Cycle’ (which Auron MacIntyre and Dave have clarified that they see not in a Paleocon way of being ‘natural rights’ and equality oriented, but basically any move away from fundamentalist religion), then you’re going to be isolated unless there is a major religious re-conversion back to Christianity.
Again, perhaps Dave should become a Evangelist to win more people to the message, as a Christian-oriented vision is difficult amongst an ever growing secular population. For the meantime, whilst we have the population we have, it is better to use their moral paradigm to seek to persuade them, whilst resisting the ever greater slope towards egalitarianism and ‘natural rights’.
What is the Best Strategy?
Dave thinks that when we say ‘do something’, we mean ‘write hypothetical policy documents’, which he sees as a futile endeavour, hence why he didn’t do it until now.
However, I assume Dave knows what a think-tank is, and how they basically determine policy all throughout the world (though often modified to gain support of key players). I think he also knows that having a vision is something extremely important. They don’t say ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ for no reason. The fate of entire nations has been changed by ‘writing hypothetical policies’, after all, what was the Communist Manifesto if not exactly that?
Look how much Nick Fuentes has shifted the Overton Window, getting powerful brokers like Candace Owens on board, primarily through memeing. I know that isn’t all Nick Fuentes does, he has some powerful allies and he tries to organise his own conferences, but it’s clear that memeing is a very powerful part of his strategy. It was part of the strategy of the Alt-Right too. As Walt says, the Pepe the Frog memes weren’t a complete failure, and it is far less taboo to talk about the Great Replacement and anti-White racism today than it was in 2014.
So clearly, ‘writing policies’ is ‘doing something’. I think Dave might recognise this as ‘creating political content’, but a lot of ‘political content’ really is writing policies. When I was pitching the idea for this Substack with my friend, we recounted how influential William F. Buckley and National Review had been. In those days, you did need more connections to be able to start a successful publication. But I was encouraged by the development of Substack as it was the perfect platform to spread our message, and required none of the connections and resources that would be needed back in the 1950s. I have been lucky to have been picked up, of which the majority of credit goes to
, but it’s true that the barriers for entry are far lower than back then and you are also more able to have an influence. So what’s our excuse? Let’s get out there and spread our ideas.I also think Dave misunderstands that Walt is engaging in a sophisticated form of metapolitics, particularly with the reparations idea.
The Dissident Right sphere don’t understand that metapolitics often involves counter-signalling and ‘punching right’. It is part of a war of position where you fight to define yourself in relation to other groups, and increase your own powerbase.
The Nouvelle Droite were the forerunners of this, and a group we need to learn from. Acknowledging that the culture in post-war France was overwhelmingly leftist, they sought to use left-wing talking points and manipulate language deceptively, and often counter-signalling other forces on the right, but still making no compromises to the left-wing worldview in it’s true sense, that being a belief in hierarchy and natural inequality, and in their case race.
Auron MacIntyre will say that when you use ‘racist’ pejoratively, ‘you think you’re making the left live up to their own rules; but you’re really just reinforcing their framing’, something I know Dave agrees with.
But there’s a difference between sincerely believing what you’re enemy says, and utilising certain language to emphasise the opposite value judgement of what they intended.
For instance, saying ‘Democrats are the real racists’ to mean they’re racist towards Blacks does indeed reinforce the framing of ethnic minority interests needing to be put first. The people who use that don’t care about White interests and want to invest political capital in other issues
However, talk about anti-White racism and racism against the ‘indigenous European population’ is using left-wing wording to push a narrative totally separate from everything it represents.
When Walt is talking about the ‘Pro-White Case for Reparations’, he’s more talking about how to sell a pitch to repeal Civil Rights law to normies, not something which should be advocated without any trade-off. I don’t think Walt makes this explicit enough, and Dave makes a good point as to stopping it being channelled back into ‘enemy coffers’ and funding the Title VII of the 1964 Civil Right’s Act’s reinstatement.
But why would it be so hard to advocate for the repeal of Civil Rights law in-front of normies? Because high status people associate such a thing immediately as ‘racist’, and ‘racist = bad’. This isn’t a moral paradigm we like, but it’s the one that exists.
But if you say ‘reparations and free association’, high status people will be willing to give you a listen. Then you can talk about why reparations are a better ‘alternative to Civil Rights law’, and talk about Civil Rights law’s harmful effects, how it is the root of affirmative action, disparate impact, creates an oppressive regime of state oversight, and institutionalised anti-White discrimination, using Caldwell and Hanania’s insights.
We need to create a replacement ‘first stop’ on the Alt-Right Pipeline, something that was previously done by the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). The problem was that the IDW really were ‘speed limit liberals’ who firmly believed in the Civil Rights Regime and were allergic to anything smacking of HBD, as proven by the failure of ‘Heterodox Academy’.
Once people fall further down the rabbit hole, they may think repealing Civil Rights law without reparations would be better. I do agree with Dave that you shouldn’t make a compromise like reparations initially, because ‘if you ask for a lot, you will get more than if you asked for a little’.
The goal should be that the very word ‘reparations’ becomes right-coded. We should formally engage with people advocating for reparations, like in Blue States, as a spring board to talk about the reparations they’ve already gotten through Civil Rights law.
At the very least, we can get the left to distance themselves from reparations because it will be associated with dismantling Civil Rights law, and they like the flexibility of ‘never-ending redress’ that Civil Rights law gets. Bernie Sanders said he was opposed to reparations for this very reason.
Additionally, it’s far more appropriate to express opposition to Martin Luther King if you say ‘Malcom X was better’, and express support for his idea of ‘reparations and an independent African-American country/return to Africa’. We should adopt left-coded beliefs like ‘colorblindness is impossible’ and remind people that MLK didn’t really advocate colorblindness but anti-White racism, but with reversed value judgements compared to the Critical Race Theory activists.
Of course, our first choice should be just repealing Civil Rights law without any reparations, but we need to initially meet people at their current moral paradigm so they don’t immediately dismiss us.
It’s also useful if your ideas become diffuse, and you have numerous different groups with messaging towards different demographics. We set up a ‘line of bus stops’ for an Alt-Right Pipeline, have a first bus stop that uses language that can draw in liberals (reparations and a return to free association), and then create a bus station (straight up repeal Civil Rights law). In the final section of this essay I will give some suggestions of some institutions that should be built, that would prove that
The Conservative Movement
One of my favourite articles by Richard Hanania is ‘Conservatives Win All the Time’. It shows how much conservatives have won on certain policy areas that they have chosen to invest political capital into, and his gung-ho attitude is an antidote to the doomers who act sophisticated with their ‘realism’, when only focusing on a few issues where the left has won (Wokeism, which like Dave I care about deeply) and never acknowledging the successes.
Guns and school choice are two examples he cites heavily in the article because he approves of them. However, despite his loathing for the pro-life movement, he also concedes that the pro-life movement has been able to get stuff done through a mass political movement, and indeed Roe being overturned was an example of that.
The reason why Wokeism is so powerful is quite simply: conservatives in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s did not choose to focus on those issues, the anti-Woke lobby is weaker than other GOP-oriented lobbies.
In the 1990s, the conservative movement was extremely powerful, and got a lot of their legislative priorities through. They could’ve done more on rolling back Civil Rights, but political capital is finite, and it would have meant they may have had to compromise more elsewhere, like not aggressively angling for foreign wars, denying climate change, and killing Bill Clinton’s healthcare plan (it was unconstitutional, like virtually everything, but in-and-of itself was not bad.)
The reason they didn’t is that conservatives were true believers in the Civil Rights Regime. For a multitude of reasons, after the initial resistance to de-segregation, Whites gave up. George Wallace apologised, Barry Goldwater said voting against Civil Rights was one of his ‘biggest regrets’, and William F. Buckley in the middle of the 1970s embraced Civil Rights and in 1981 sided with William Bennett against Mel Bradford. Ronald Reagan was a former Hollywood actor, an original ‘Left left me’ type, who personally bought into women and minority rights. Indeed it was his decision to promise to appoint the ‘first woman’ to the court, of which he appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, instead of appointing a bona fide conservative justice regardless of sex (which would probably have been a man).
Why did they do this? A large part of it was anti-communism, with Jim Crow the greatest reputational disaster for the US in the newly independent countries, and an edge the Soviet Union had. The predominantly Jewish Neoconservative movement also felt an affinity with minority rights and held a fear of strong, majority populations due to paranoia about the Holocaust. A lot of conservative Americans genuinely were repulsed by seeing television broadcasts of what the Jim Crow South was like, whereas before it had been able to be ignored, and almost all of that generation had fought in World War II against Nazism. In fact, the Greatest and Silent Generations were just as important for spread of Wokeness as the Boomers, which I discussed at length in my article ‘Was Fusionism Ever Really Tried: Part II’.
Likewise, on Israel the GOP CHOSE to give unconditional support to Israel, because many of them were Jews themselves, and many of those that were non-Jews believed in the bizarre notion of ‘Christian Zionism’ and seeing Israel as a precondition for Jesus’ return.
talks about the resistance to the Civil Rights regime and why it failed. Whilst the Citizens Councils in the South were impressive community organisations that did manage to win victories regionally, the South was outnumbered in terms of population, number of states, and economic might. Greer reckons that the John Birch Society could have put up a more effective front on opposing Civil Rights, but they were convoluted by focus on other issues, with the Birchers being totally in thrall to conspiracy theories and the bizarre notion that Eisenhower was a secret communist (sound familiar?). Therefore, whilst they had periods of impressive growth and large membership, they remained unfocused, disperse, and not really with any uniting vision other than anti-communism.And the collapse of the Birchers is what happens when you double down on the base. When you see any reaching out to people who don’t already agree with you as ‘surrender’ and ‘disloyalty'. And when you make it an absolute principle to ‘not punch right’.
Dave has actually cleared up the confusion of ‘No Enemies on the Right’ (NROTR) better than anyone else. NROTR doesn’t mean can’t distance yourself from people, harshly criticise them publicly, and even exclude them from your spaces. All it means is ‘Don’t Feed the Left’ by doxing and exposing those with opinions to your right, and joining in with the left’s cancellation and censorship attempts, as the left will go above and beyond to try to destroy their lives and pushing those to your right out of the Overton Window pushes it in the left’s favour. This was why what Rod Dreher did with the ‘Thomas Achord Affair’ was unforgivable. But exclusion of certain for ideological tactical reasons is not only justified, it is required, as a ‘A Church Too Broad Cannot Convert’.
Dave mentions that Civil Rights law is far more popular than abortion ever was. Again, on the surface that is true. But CRT in schools, affirmative action, and disparate impact has never been popular; and so if we can link those things to Civil Rights law, in which they are inexplicitly linked, it becomes more politically possible to oppose it.
But doing so will cost us political capital. When you adopt liberal (currently hegemonic) positions on certain issues, you ‘buy’ political capital to be able to break with the consensus on other issues.
A big reason why ‘Beltway Libertarians’ supported the left on cultural issues was that they recognised there was a ‘tolerance threshold’ in the Overton Window. They wanted to spend all of their political capital on economic issues, and not be shunned, so they had to go above and beyond to prove their bona fides on cultural leftism.
Dave mentions not ‘throwing pro-lifers under the bus’, but from me and Walt’s perspective, what asset do they bring? As Scott Greer says, many of them are rubbish on other issues, and anti-abortion activists are almost Woke (another example of what I have described above). So what do we actually have in common with pro-lifers? They bring an enormous liability to us, and it’s an issue that secular people like me and Walt do not care about.
By ‘stigmatising pro-life maximalism’, Walt is ‘buying’ credibility and political capital on other issues, that he can spend on more important issues like Civil Rights law.
And this might be ‘appeasing the left’, but again, the Right cannot survive if it just doubles down on the chud base, and also many of us don’t agree with ‘the right-wing position’ on every issue, as there are ‘many lefts’ and ‘many rights. Richard Hanania has made a good point criticising the perspective of the Dissident Right of ‘selling out to the left’, because he emphasises that he doesn’t see, for instance not being pro-life, as a sell-out because it’s a cause he does not agree with.
The Right has to be able to win converts, and doing so involves meeting them where they are and focusing on a few issues that are most important to you. As a ‘religious right issue’, abortion is not one of those issues, especially given many pro-lifers bend over backwards to appease Wokeism themselves.
Had it not been for pro-lifers, the GOP would have won a landslide in 2022. The ‘Red Wave’ would only grow if they ended other numerous unpopular positions, like climate change denial (though that would lose them their fossil fuel bribes, which they have grown accustomed to), lacking any policies to tackle high drug costs, etcetera.
And then we can focus on issues that are actually important, like reducing the size of government, which you have mentioned and I think is very important, watering down and then eventually abolishing Civil Rights law and restoring free association, and stopping the Great Replacement.
What ‘Doing Something’ Means to Me
I admit just writing policies in and of itself is not enough. Nick Fuentes has built connections with various elites who fund him, as has Chris Rufo, who is much closer to the centre of power.
But I think Dave citing Chris Rufo quite badly undermines his other points of ‘not having power’. There are plenty of ‘elites’ who are sympathetic to us, Elon Musk the most notable example. Chris Rufo has many wealthy donors funding him, and has proven a charismatic and well-connected enough figure to have influence. And even though we are not Chris Rufo, Rufo is very engaged in this online space and has I think had his mind changed on the nature of Civil Rights law as an impediment to any real pushback on Wokeism.
I think what the Trump administration showed was that if you don’t have the personnel to be able to implement the policies you want, the permanent bureaucracy will thwart your entire project. This analysis is fairly well known by now.
So then why aren’t we building personnel? In the US, this has to an extent happened. Throughout it’s emergence in the 1970s, the ‘conservative movement’ has built a huge number of institutions that have furthered their agenda. Heritage Foundation, both their research think-tank department, their ‘resource bank’, and their ‘personnel bank’ is one example, as is the Federalist Society, the latter probably the most successful right-wing ‘counter-institution’ in American history.
The problem with Trump in his first term was that these institutions were not aligned with him ideologically. They had been built in the heyday of Cold War anti-communism, Fusionism, and Neoconservatism, and therefore had a particular set of priorities that Trump did not fit.
But that is now changing. Under Kevin Roberts, Heritage has made huge moves towards our position, essentially endorsing many Neoreactionary analyses of the managerial state in Project 2025. The ideology of Heritage is different compared to what it was in 2015, when it was dominated by Fusionists and Neoconservatives, who shared the same ‘Civil Rights’ worldview as the left.
It’s true that we are still vastly outnumbered in terms of elite human capital. This is partly why I think something like Walt’s project is needed, to actually expand our reach and not just rely on our core supporters. Walt is good at coalition building, as he creates an atmosphere of positivity and good-will. He is trying to gain the ear of these powerful actors, something not far-fetched due to the engagement of Chris Rufo and Elon Musk with our space and ideas, and Richard Hanania’s name appearing in Project 2025.
But the Dissident Right shuns mainstream politics, almost relishes in the humiliation of it’s powerlessness, wilfully ignoring successes that have happened.
Being British, my focus is naturally my own country, and I’m going to do a whole article on what ‘doing something’ means to me.
Fleshed-Out Ideology
Firstly, a comprehensive ideology should be created, with its own foundational texts, journals, think-tanks, and a single comprehensive manifesto, like the Nouvelle Droite in France.
This has also happened more recently in the Anglosphere, with the National Conservative and Postliberal movements. One would assume that the GOP, being in the ‘pocket of big capital’, would never start questioning free-market orthodoxy. Yet the Heritage Foundation mostly now is on board with the National Conservative agenda, Senators like Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and J.D Vance have abandoned Reaganism in favour of American Compass-style economic interventionism, and Trump has made high tariffs a key campaign pledge.
The fact that many didn’t believe this possible, that the GOP was too wedded to neoliberal economics, shows that the naysayers can be proven wrong. With enough money behind you (which we can obtain fairly easily), good organisation, good branding, and a cohesive vision, you can change the trajectory of politics.
And they did this, by… writing hypothetical policies, which now may be implemented.
Think-Tank and PAC
I believe somebody should create a think-tank for the kind of politics Walt Bismarck represents, but polishing and refining the ideas, and engaging with the key power players. It should probably put the reparations idea aside, because as Dave says, it’s better to ask for a lot than ask for a little. If the reparations compromise ends up happening, it should be a one-off lump sum, be dependent on signing the ‘Declaration of Absolution’ personally, and be in the form of vouchers so it cannot be channelled back into political activism. This think-tank should also have a PAC attached to it, with it raising money and activists for GOP politicians who are ‘aligned with White interests’.
Infiltrating Groups like the Federalist Society and America First Legal
Groups like the Federalist Society should be infiltrated, and the influence of ‘New Originalism’ needs to end. Instead, there should be a co-ordinated entryist campaign to promote ‘True Originalism’ on the line of Robert Bork, which would involve declaring Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional (which they unquestionably are).
A pro-White legal advocacy group should be set up, something that
suggested to me in our DMs, and indeed he is trying to build. The taboo towards this kind of politics will be an initial hindrance, and I personally believe his definition of Whiteness is rather limiting. However, if such a project could get enough financial backing, which groups like American Compass, American Affairs, and nationalconservatism.org get even though they pose a much more direct threat to the interests of capital than pro-White advocacy, this organisation could fund the legal training of White Advocates. Utilising existing organisations might also be useful here, with America First Legal perhaps being able to play a role.EHC-Attracting Organisation
The ‘reparations in exchange for Civil Rights law abolition’ idea should be promoted by a different, more public facing organisation which has the goal of getting liberal people disenchanted with Wokeism a ‘high status’ alternative. Infiltrating other movements, like the YIMBY movement and the Techno-Optimist scene, could bear fruits. Packaging Civil Rights law with reparations gives these high status people enough ‘left-coded’ soundbites that they may give you a hearing. Of course, not all, not even the majority, but nevertheless outreach would ensure that ‘more’ can potentially be persuaded. This organisation should talk in the language of ‘progress’, very much the ‘Progressive Rightism’ that I have started advocating, as ‘conservatism’ is inherently backwards-looking, pro-status quo, and will always be on the losing side. We should not seek to stall or reverse progress, but redefine it.
Funding
We get funding for all of this by meeting the ‘elites’ where they are are, which has already been shown to be a successful strategy. Substack is able to be a free-speech platform because some elite billionaires, namely Marc Andreessen, have come to our side, as have Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. This is an example of ‘Elite Theory’ being used to inform strategy and a positive programme for change, not just an excuse to black-pill. Elon Musk is not going to be persuaded by talking about Trad Catholicism, but the language of progress is something that he is amendable to. Indeed he has been recently red-pilled on White Identity, so could easily be moved in the direction of abolishing Civil Rights. He is already a villain in the eyes of liberals, so he does not lose any more social capital.
Memes
People like Elon Musk, and other elites, are known to retweet memes. Memes, particularly on platforms like TikTok, are a great way to generate engagement; TikTok is a censored platform but sometimes censorship can force you to up your game and messaging. The Alt-Right was almost entirely firepowered by the fuel of the meme. The Dissident Right is far worse than the Alt-Right was at meming, particularly the non-Groyper version of it that Dave Greene occupies. It is too focused on Christianity.
Presidential Run
Finally, a Presidential run can bring publicity, funding, and getting your ideas out there, even though you have no chance in hell of winning. Andrew Yang and Vivek Ramaswamy are examples of Presidential runs that were able to get their ideas out there and increase name recognition, despite getting nowhere close to winning.
Andrew Yang could have built off his momentum in 2020, but he foolishly wasted it on a disastrous New York mayoral run, where he was originally a front-runner but quickly declined in the polls because he didn’t have a compelling vision for the city and ended up angering all bases.
The original Forward Party had some good ideas, but it was a last roll of the dice and he’d lost a lot of political capital by that point. His abolition of all the party’s other policies to just become a Ranked Choice Voting PAC after merging with various Neocon Groups was rather unfortunate.
It would’ve been better had he used his brief moment in the sun that he wasted on running for NY Mayor in building a think-tank and PAC earlier.
Vivek is similar to Andrew Yang in a way, but he is a bit too kooky and playing to appease a MAGA-base too much. What the GOP needs is a Presidential candidate echoing the ideas of Walt Bismarck, putting forward both positive vibes, left-coded positions on certain issues, yet using his run as a platform for key ideas. The ‘reparations for Civil Rights Law abolition’ would, as Walt notes in his article:
The beauty of running on reparations is it gives you space to run *far* to the right of everyone else on issues of white identity. Crucially, it allows you to say the forbidden words White People instead of relying on dogwhistles like every other Republican.
You can talk about antiwhite crime, racism against whites, affirmative action being unfair to whites, and so on, and make all of these reasons to support reparations as a means of transactionally dismantling antiwhite policies.
I would go further and say that in order for a GOP candidate endorsing reparations to have any success whatsoever, abolishing all Civil Rights law post-1965 and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act completely should be the pledge (Title II can maybe stay). And once somebody like that makes a Presidential run splash, using reparations to articulate the evils of Civil Rights Law to a respectable audience, people can look further into the arguments, and then perhaps be won to the cause of Civil Rights law abolition WITHOUT reparations.
And some of Dave’s alternative suggestions are good, it’s a shame that he was so reluctant to write them down and made the entire livestream a point about how such is a futile exercise. Firing 50% of government workers (Vivek Ramaswamy suggested 75%), taxing dating apps, encouraging White pride, and distributing government land (though I think government-owned land is a valuable asset, so this should be very cautiously done), and getting allies to staff the bureaucracy permanently, are all great suggestions and should be a feature of our various publishing journals, think-tanks, PACs, and publicity-stunt Presidential runs.
Conclusion
I hope this helped clarify that I am not a ‘pie in the sky idealist’ or somebody who agrees with Walt on everything. I do respect Dave Greene massively, he’s a very intelligent guy and I love his video essays on cultural critique. Again, not all the suggestions were bad, so why has he waited until now to give them to us? Well, he says it clearly at the end, he doesn’t believe such an approach is effective.
As a Christian Theocrat who’s views are so far removed from the current discourse, so that a secular right-winger like myself struggles to even comprehend them, he’s probably right in that regard. But in terms of building an effective political movement, I think people like Dave Greene, and all people on the Dissident Right which I now see as utterly attached to this black-pilled doomerism arrogantly self-described as ‘realism’, are now more of a hindrance than a help. The ‘realism’ that Elite Theory provided has gone too far, and the pendulum needs to swing the other way towards some of the idealism of the Alt-Right, without doing idiotic stunts like ‘Unite the Right’. We should be like the ‘early Alt-Right’ that Walt Bismarck described.
Dave will no doubt say ‘I never said that’ when responding to my points, so I have tried to link to the exact things he’s said in this livestream and elsewhere. I keep ‘bringing the discussion back to Christianity’ because it is the foundation of his worldview, so it’s not hard to know what he’s talking about when he talks about ‘faith’ at the end of the livestream.
I hope we can continue having this discussion to refine our ideas and points, and clarify the differences between our values and approaches.
I like where this is going.
> distributing government land (though I think government-owned land is a valuable asset, so this should be very cautiously done)
I read "cautiously" as: in ways which ultimately empower rightists and disempower leftists.
I don't believe any reparations plan can be implemented. You can't get Republican voters to go along. It's against their moral instincts. They are too politically naive to understand political capital. Especially boomers and genx.
The problem is the base. They accept, and even cheer for, deplorable traitors as leaders. They avoid participating in politics. They have no on the ground game to speak of. Change must be pushed from the top down via organization and education.
I don't think "doomer" is fair to Dave. Christians have an ultimate positive vision: Jesus Christ is Lord forever. You don't see it or appreciate it because you don't believe.
There were a couple of other items which stood out to me, but I've blathered more than enough. Appreciate the article. Keep it up and stay positive.
Interesting article. I’m a trad Cath myself so obviously I’m going to lean towards Dave, but I think the fundamental difference is you think religion is just superstition or whatever dismissed by Darwin when it’s actually much more sophisticated than that, with quite advanced Scholastic Philosophy, might want to check out a guy like Ed Feser for more on this. Also worth noting you just aren’t going to have the 90s no matter how hard you try. The 90s were full of woman like your Queen Elizabeth who were raised in a Christian cultural setting and influenced their behavior for life. Once that’s gone good luck having enough family formation to even have a high enough birth rate to go into the future. Just imagine the average TikTok hoe as a 70 year old woman, do you think that society will be sustainable? No its going to require mass migration to stay alive which is why every great empire that has collapsed has gone through the same cycle of native born men and women not having enough children due to hedonism and then the government recruiting actual helpful members of society through mass migration and this leads to collapse. The reason for this is because belief is required to have the next generation because it requires sacrifice over hedonism and when you habituate yourself from hedonism you don’t break the cycle unless you have a belief in transcendence.