Factions of the Rightosphere - The Dissident Right
Classical Neoreactionaries, Christian Caesarists, Christian Parallelists, Neo-Luddites, and BAPists.
The word ‘Dissident Right’ is very confused. In the introduction to this series, along with making my now fairly well established distinction between ‘Third New Right’ and ‘Dissident Right’, I also made a distinction between what I called the ‘Dissident Right’ and various other Rightosphere movements, which included more explicitly racialist groups like the Neo-Alt Right and the Groypers.
I realise I was wrong to do that. After reading some of the Neo-Alt Right material from sources like Counter-Currents, I realised these groups also refer to themselves as ‘Dissident Right’, perhaps more frequently than my usage of the term.
So there are two groupings that use the same term to describe themselves, that are not that connected to each other.
‘Elite Theory’ Dissident Right
The first group is a movement centred around Neoreactionary (NRx) thought, pioneered by Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, which focuses heavily on Elite Theory. It is influenced by various earlier movements and individuals like the Italian Elite Theorists, Conservative Revolution thinkers, and Paleoconservatives like Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried. This tendency is very big on Substack, and you can find a lot of them, for whom it would be impossible to name all, on the recommendation list of outlets like New Right Poast, as well as the linkpage findmyfrens.net (except ‘Evelyn’ Grant, who is not a based woman, but rather an unwelcome infiltrator of a particular variety).
It is anchored around podcasters like Alex Kaschuta and J’Burden, and Auron MacIntyre, Dave the Distributist, Charles Haywood, Academic Agent… all of these people do collaborations with each other and appear on those podcasts. This group calls itself ‘Dissident Right’, and as I am in this scene I use the term primarily to describe it. But people in this sphere would never have somebody like Nick Fuentes, or even a more presentable figure like Keith Woods, on their show.
Racialist Dissident Right
The other definition of the ‘Dissident Right’ is more explicitly racialist, a replacement for the old ‘Alt-Right’ which died at Charlottesville. To distinguish them I will refer to them throughout the rest of this series as the ‘Racialist Right’.
An interesting insight into this scene was Keith Woods’ ‘Factions of the Dissident Right’ video, which focuses disproportionately on groups that I wouldn’t have even really considered part of the ‘Dissident Right’, but their own movement within the ‘Rightosphere’ like the Groypers.
The first definition of ‘Dissident Right’ that I use above, Woods simply describes as either ‘Christian NRx’, which even he admits isn’t accurate for people like Academic Agent, or as ‘BAPists’. The vast majority of the factions he describes are more race-oriented types, the scene that Wood’s is a part of.
Which is More Accurate?
I’m not saying that the NRx-adjacent Dissident Right is completely non-racialist, most are well disposed towards Race Realism. But for them it is ‘one issue amongst many’, for some even the main one, but other issues also matter. In contrast, the Racialist Right is completely built around race, at the expense of other issues like Elite Theory and general Wokeism.
The word ‘Dissident Right’ is easy because it is descriptive. It just means you are a ‘dissenter’ from mainstream conservative circles, and that could mean anything. But to summarise a movement as broad as the ‘Dissident Right’ is hard. I acknowledge I may have made a mistake saying groups like the Groypers ‘weren’t Dissident Right’, as doing a bit more research has made me realise they and people adjacent to them do use that term a lot to describe themselves. But my point is that they weren’t in the same space that people like me are in; and were quite far removed from it.
About this Entry
After doing an X poll, people decided they wanted me to do the NRx-adjacent Dissident Right, i.e, ‘my’ understanding of the term, first. So I have done so.
Because this movement is so predominantly online, and made up of anons, I won’t be able to name everyone. My intention of naming individuals and publications is not to list everyone, but simply to give examples of the faction, to explain the tendencies I mean, and give proof I’m not just making stuff up out of thin air. Inevitably I’ll miss out some important people.
Just like how I was doing 3 last time, and spent a bit longer on each of them, because I am doing 5 factions within this sphere, I’ll keep each one relatively short. I will simply describe what they generally believe, some examples of this tendency, and my thoughts on them.
Classical Neoreactionaries
So this is the movement that started it all off. Originally confined to niche tech circles, it was funded by Silicon Valley barons like Peter Thiel, allowing these ideas to get a wider audience.
What is interesting is that the originators of the NRx movement were not classical right-wingers. They were more in tune with libertarianism and the ‘Californian Ideology’, which was a 1990s form of Techno-Optimism which combined economic libertarianism with counter-cultural values. They saw how Silicon Valley had remade the world, and sought to remake government in a similar image. Also, unlike later mutations, the original Neoreactionaries were secular, still coming off of the New Atheist era and the low status of the religious right during and shortly after the Bush years.
Curtis Yarvin
Enter Curtis Yarvin. Writing under the name of ‘Mencius Moldbug’, Yarvin was a software designer born to secular liberal Jewish parents, not a natural background for somebody of the reactionary right. He started out as a libertarian, being influenced by the likes of Hans Hermann Hoppe, but libertarianism for Yarvin was a gateway drug to challenging the most basic precepts of liberalism itself.
In the late 2000s, Yarvin started his blog ‘Unqualified Reservations’ under the ‘Mencius Moldbug’ pseudonym, which is still accessible today. Using a heavy dose of irony and humour, he dismantles the ideas of the ‘right side of history’, liberal/Whig teleology, and ‘natural rights’.
Yarvin’s main issue is being anti-democracy, seeing it as creating an elite structure which is unaccountable and more tyrannical in practice than more explicitly authoritarian systems of government, like Monarchy. Similar to Paul Gottfried with his concept of ‘Mass Democracy’ (1), he sees communism and Nazism as being so brutal and despotic precisely because they claimed to be echoing democratic principles.
Channeling Elite Theorists like Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and James Burnham, Yarvin sees elites as inevitable, and oligarchy an ‘Iron Law’ of human existence. But he views democracy as worse than Monarchy because it is dishonest and cryptic in how it operates, whereas Monarchy is honest and ‘gives it to you straight’.
His political ideal is to return to a reformulated version of Monarchy, that he calls Neocameralism, whereby a ‘CEO-Monarch’ would be elected by shareholders, just like a joint-stock company. Most of the time this CEO-Monarch would have total power to control the state apparatus and make political decisions, though he would be accountable, being removable by an anonymous vote using blockchain by a Board of Directors.
As for the scale of states, he wants a system he calls ‘Patchwork’, which is essentially a modern day reinvention of something like the Holy Roman Empire, where there are thousands of privately owned city states, with various overlapping relations with each other, and people can vote with their feet by moving to whichever they feel gives them the best deal.
Yarvin originated the word ‘Cathedral’ to describe a loose, decentralised, faceless network of the deep state, HR departments, universities, and other establishment institutions pushing the same globalist, socially liberal values, that controls discourse to get people to believe whatever benefits this hidden elite. This term has become standard in right-wing circles.
The term ‘Red Pill’ was also popularised by Curtis Yarvin, to describe the process by which a ‘Blue Pilled’ (normal liberal) person becomes awakened to the brutal reality that democracy and ‘human rights’ are a façade for power. This was already common in the ‘Manosphere’ scene, but it was Yarvin who oriented it towards Elite Theory. Other parts of the lexicon he developed are ‘elves and hobbits’, ‘Cthulhu swims slowly, but he always swims left’, and RAGE (Retire all Government Employees). Yarvin has explicitly advocated RAGE as the policy that Trump should do, and indeed he is planning to do with Schedule F and Project 2025.
One of my favourite aspects of Yarvin’s political theory is the doctrine of ‘Formalism’, which posits a simple principle that ‘the system should work in theory how it actually operates in practice.’ There is no deception, no elaborate myths, no claim of equality; just law that is a simple description of what ‘is’, and if you know what ‘is’, you can use the limited power you do have more effectively.
Yarvin does not primarily focus on race issues, though he dislikes affirmative action, the Civil Rights regime, and is a Race Realist in a sense that he accepts biological explanations for consistent unequal group outcomes. However, this was far more taboo to say in the late 2000s, and made him a very ostracised figure for almost a decade.
You can clearly see he comes from a libertarian background, and he is relatively socially liberal, though this is from a 2000s standpoint. However, he takes Anarcho-Capitalism to a much more consistent and rational conclusion, shunning the idea of ‘natural rights’ all together. Admiring city-states like Singapore, and especially the UAE, the latter of which is extremely similar to Neocameralism, underlying Yarvin’s writings is a fundamental opposition to egalitarianism.
His writing style is deliberately nerdy and autistic, him going into hilarious detail about how ‘patchwork’ is like a software patch. In many ways this makes him endearing and fun to read, though often rambling and repeating the same points. He was a pioneer in the use of exaggeration and irony to hide the extremeness of one’s real views, something used today by the likes of Nick Fuentes. By the early 2010s, a small community around him developed, though his influence would grow in the late 2010s with the eclipse of the Alt-Right. He was brought to a more mainstream audience when he appeared on Tucker Carlson.
Yarvin has many similarities with the Techno-Optimists, in that he is not particularly nationalistic or race-oriented, and is clearly very excited by prospects for technological progress. It makes sense that Peter Thiel was his chief patron.
Recently, he has shown less emphasis on his unique political system proposal, and has had connections with staff in the Trump administration, advocating an ‘American Caesar’ who would ‘Reboot’ America, i.e., Trump. This discourse around an ‘American Caesar’ has become pretty normal on the American right, with the implication that Donald Trump should declare himself the ‘First American Emperor’.
All in all, it is impossible to understand the Dissident Right without understanding Yarvin. Whilst he is somewhat detached from the newer Substack and podcast scene, only coming on occasionally, all of the Dissident Right will have been inspired by Yarvin’s repopularisation of Elite Theory
Nick Land
Nick Land is another NRx thinker, who termed the word ‘Dark Enlightenment’ that it is sometimes called. Land is a hard thinker to understand, let alone describe. His philosophy is chiefly ‘Accelerationism’, wanting a hyper-capitalist dystopia to bring the system to its natural end. Much of his work is cryptic and aesthetic, with him bringing in a lot of the H.P Lovecraft aesthetic to the movement.
It is from Land that you get a lot of the more ‘Black-Pilled’ elements of the Neoreactionary movement, although Yarvin does also emphasise this as well. The difference between Yarvin and Land is that Yarvin does think a Reconquista is theoretically possible, just needing sufficient force, with half-way measures being the worst because it will invite backlash without accomplishing anything, whereas Land does not.
I must be brutally honest, I don’t really understand Land’s work. My sense is that it’s more metapolitical than Moldbug, who focuses more explicitly on political theory.
Neema Parvini
Neema Parvini (Academic Agent mostly and ‘OG Roland Rat’ on ‘X’) is an influential figure that pioneered the ‘British Dissident Right’ (I very much don’t take credit for this, even though it is underdeveloped'), terming key canonical phrases like the ‘Boomer Truth Regime’, ‘Sensible Centrism’, ‘Back to Fresh Prince’, and ‘Putting the Woke Away’ that have become standard jargon.
Neema Parvini’s book ‘The Populist Delusion’ is a great introduction to Elite Theory for those unacquainted with it. It came out in 2022, a time when the failures of the Alt-Right, with its emphasis on ‘street movements’, ‘meme culture’, and a populist upsurge, were finally being critically analysed, due to the ‘spirit of 2016’ having been crushed by big tech censorship and the PR disaster that was Charlottesville.
As a Brit of Persian descent, and applying Neoreactionary analysis to British conditions, Parvini believes Tony Blair was a Schmittian-like figure who declared the ‘state of exception’ to be able to rewrite the rules of the British state, and the current regime is the one that was created by Tony Blair. His analysis of the unique predicaments of Britain are very interesting, wherever you are from, though like me he gives a lot of attention to the United States as well, recognising that as the world hegemon it’s domestic affairs affect us all.
Parvini claims not to be ideological, and purely motivated by a dispassionate understanding of elite power structures, but this claim is dubious, as are all claims to be non-ideological. He often dismisses culture war issues and calls any progress on this front ‘containment’ and co-option. I find this strange as he also thinks elites are inevitable, so if he claims to not be motivated by ideology, what exactly are his problems with this particular elite? I guess he does believe in British nationalism, is anti-mass immigration, and quietly mentions the Jews as a hostile elite group, but he makes fun of the idea of ‘positive visions’ (in his Trumperton video, which admittedly is very funny), so it’s really hard to know why he’s even in politics.
To me Parvini makes the mistake in thinking that the Anglosphere and Western elites are rational and have a cold, calculated understanding of their own self-interest, when elites throughout history have only rarely had this level of rationality. This is the basis of his ‘Woke being put away’ prediction, that the elite will realise that Wokeness is counterproductive and will return to 1990s liberalism. However, this leads to both dangerous complacency, and also dismissal of any success the right has had as proof of co-option, which deserves an entirely separate article.
Either way, Parvini does some engaging analysis, and is great as a historian of ideas and culture. But he doesn’t have a lot to offer in terms of solutions; and he can end up just black-pilling, something that all of this group does to some degree.
Conclusion
What unites all these individuals is their strong opposition to democracy. The High Time Preference, the hidden elite power structure, the deception, the justification of controlling every aspect of life in the name of ‘the people’, and generally just being a fabricated and elaborate justification for the rule of an insidious elite.
A lot of these ideas weren’t exactly new, but they were synthesised and repackaged in a way that created an original movement. They revived Elite Theory to a new audience, in an era where populism was seen to have failed.
Whilst I appreciate their insightful analysis, and find Yarvin’s Neocameralist vision interesting, their tendency to Black-Pill and criticise people actually making a difference from the sidelines, personified by Yarvin’s frequent attacks on Chris Rufo and dismissing his very real successes, definitely irks me. This wouldn’t be so bad if they had a workable alternative plan, but a lot of it just comes down to ‘accelerationism’ which, if your child is attending a K12 school teaching them that mutilation of healthy body parts is ‘life-saving treatment’, doesn’t seem like a very attractive option.
I get that one must be patient, but the Classical Neoreactionaries seem incapable of celebrating any successes, however small. In the worst cases, like with Neema Parvini, they manage to be both Black-Pill AND breed complacency, which is what the whole ‘Putting the Woke Away’ discourse is about.
My view is that if Woke really was ‘put away’, actually, property, not just a tactical retreat, then the Dissident and Third New Right would no longer need to exist. Except Woke being ‘put away’ by liberals won’t happen, at least in a substantive sense, so the right is absolutely still needed, a topic that I will eventually get around to doing a separate article .
Christian Caesarists
This faction is pretty vague and disperse, but I will make it as clear as possible. Whilst the original NRx was mostly secular, the ‘Religious Turn’ (which I discuss in this article and is also discussed here) in the late 2010s and early 2020s caused more Christian-inclined people to take up the mantle of Yarvin and Elite Theory, so that as Keith Woods points out, there were probably more Christian NRxers than Secularist ones by the 2020s.
Auron MacIntyre is close to this faction, but I put him as a Paleoconservative due to being slightly more connected to mainstream Republican Party politics, and believing in capturing power at the state-level rather than the federal level, i.e, ‘the best thing for DeSantis to do would be to stay in Florida’.
However, there are some Christian NRx people who do want a Caesar figure to come in and end American democracy at the federal level, replacing it with a more explicitly authoritarian system. Examples of this faction include Charles Haywood and Charlemagne.
They usually see Donald Trump as an accelerationist figure to bring down the collapse of the American regime. Unlike many of the other NRx crowd, whilst this faction believes in accelerationism, they do not take that to mean retreatism. On the contrary, they advocate engaging with the political process, building networks of likeminded people to try and get this chemical reaction unfolding, and placing themselves as a vanguard to establish a new regime.
Charles Haywood in particular is a really funny and charming guy, I love his book reviews and he seems like that fun family friend who comes around for dinner who you can have interesting conversations with for hours. As a former shampoo magnate, he is also an ‘elite’, so he has deep pockets to devote to the cause.
Haywood outlines his vision in his ‘Foundationalist Manifesto’, which is essentially a futuristic and more aggressive form of Postliberalism, but one which is more explicitly anti-democratic, kind of echoing Charles Maurras. He also harshly criticises the Postliberals for not standing up for Whites and buying into the ‘America is a racist country’ narrative.
As an Orthodox Christian, which I consider one of the most ‘based’ sects of Christianity, Haywood’s interpretation of the religion is very much not grey and dreary like Catholicism or various Protestant sects. He abandons the pacifism and tolerance of modern day Christians and instead embraces the Crusaders and the Teutonic Knights, seeing the West’s Christian tradition in a more Pagan (and therefore better) light. Haywood is also interesting as a representative of the rare ‘Christian Futurist’ tendency, combining space colonisation with a loyalty to Christendom, which I must say I didn’t see as natural fit, but really is kind of cool.
But he doesn’t rely on Christian arguments for his beliefs. His manifesto has a funny line where he talks about the importance of religion, and the reason why Christianity will be the most obvious choice due to its historical significance in the West. But then, after he has made a strong secular case, he says ‘and it is also true, which is a bonus’ a funny example of compartmentalisation which I find quite difficult.
Charlemagne, one of the first Christian NRxers and an inspiration for Auron MacIntyre, started out having a more decentralised view but has since become an advocate of a ‘Christian Imperium’ (38:23). However, he is not a High Integralist, simply because he is not part of that scene, and is an explicit Monarchist.
Theophilus Chilton would be another example, who has made some of the best arguments against democracy on Substack that greatly influenced me, despite my disagreement with his religious beliefs, that I link extensively here.
There are a lot of individuals in this scene, but it is difficult to give more examples around what they believe because a lot of these author’s stuff is behind paywalls, and Substack paywalls can’t easily be bypassed (nor should they be, as they are a lifeline), so I can’t tell you exactly what they all think. Nevertheless, I find people like Charles Haywood engaging and interesting.
Christian Parallelists
So this faction is kind of a more radical version of Rod Dreher’s ‘The Benedict Option’, though Dreher is universally disliked across the Dissident Right for the Thomas Achord Affair, of which Charles Haywood led the charge against him. These individuals think that modern secular society is fundamentally broken and un-reformable. There is no way out of our current malaise, no ‘soft landing’, until we fully return to Christ, and live a trad-life of Christian communes.
Kruptos is the most radical of these, (the guy even denies evolution) and takes a semi-anti-industrial stance because he sees that as inherently intertwined with the unreformable managerial state, and instead believes in an anti-political, anti-rationalist, retreatist approach. He’s also one of the most puritanical people on the Dissident Right, always condemning women for being ‘sinful whores’, so I’m not a big fan of him, and wouldn’t fancy living in one of his ideal trad Christian communes, though wouldn’t oppose such a thing existing.
Dave Greene (The Distributist), a TradCath, is different. He represents probably the most normie-friendly Dissident Right thinker, even more so than Auron MacIntyre. As a former liberal living in a Blue State, he has a more gentle demeanour than MacIntyre, and therefore is able to present his ideas in a way that is less threatening to normies. His videos and essays are very insightful and interesting, talking mostly about metapolitics, political philosophy, and cultural critique, without talking about specific solutions. However, he seems fairly ‘Black-Pilled’ about the prospect of political reform.
I have a lot of time for Dave Greene, even though I’m not a TradCath. The guy is actually very pluralistic, unlike a lot of the Postliberal crowd, believing liberals should be able to have their spaces whereas the right should have the right to their own; and in this he opposes the Civil Rights Regime, because he rightly reminds people it ended free association. He is, as his YouTube channel name suggests, a Distributist, which is a movement based around Catholic Social Teaching that advocates for widespread property ownership and localism, advocated by early 20th century theorists like Hilaire Belloc and G.K Chesterton.
This group sees ‘secularism’ as the problem, the ill that caused all the rest. Unlike some of the Postliberals who will dress up this by saying their issue is liberalism, the Christian Parallelists, more so Kruptos but also Dave Greene, make it clear that there is no way back to normality without a return to Christianity.
They are very much in the Accelerationist camp, but it also wouldn’t be fair to say they’re just sitting down and waiting for the fall. They have been behind creating meetups like Scyldings and the Substack Old Glory Club, which arguably serves as their flagship publication. At Scyldings 2022 they did a panel on what it would take to build an intentional community to resist the regime, something that Kruptos has extensively advocated for. It is their view that the task now is to simply plant the acorns of renewal, and hope that in many decades, quite probably not in their lifetimes, will something better emerge out of the ashes of the Woke regime.
They take the (frustrating) Yarvin approach that doing anything in the realm of politics will just strengthen the enemy, and it’s better to just lay low, although they take this idea further than Yarvin, who at least opens up the possibility of a Caesarist reconquest.
Of course there are many other figures within this faction, and it would be impossible to list them all even though I almost certainly have missed out some you think deserve to be mentioned. As mentioned at the start of this article, I name individuals just to give examples, not to list everybody. For those looking for some more figures I advise you to look at Old Glory Club (a lot of it paywalled) and the website Praxarchy.
In conclusion, I am not a big fan of this group. I love some of Dave Greene’s work, with some of his video essays almost moving me to tears in a sentimental longing for the Britain of a long lost age. However, I find Kruptos’ worldview puritanical, dreary, suffocating, and repellent, and not somebody who I believe I could find much common ground with politically. In terms of their beliefs and strategy, I don’t align with them closely.
Neo-Luddites
So this faction is hard to place and bleeds into other factions. Just know they are the polar opposites of the Techno-Optimists we discussed in the last section, as different as it’s possible to be in the Rightosphere.
As the name suggests, Neo-Luddites have a suspicion of technology. They blame unchecked ‘Progress Theology' and technological advancement for the erosion of the human essence and human freedom, and want to slow down the rapid advancement of, at least some, technologies. They are all very distrustful of transhumanism, and see it as an extension of the transgender industry, all part of the same project to turn human beings into something ‘other’ than what they are, and easier to control in the process.
They are sort of related to the Christian Parallelists except they aren’t explicitly Christian and just want to resist ‘techno-globalism’ or ‘the managerial state.
Mary Harrington
The most moderate and mainstream representative of this faction is Mary Harrington, who I am a big fan of and have mentioned in previous articles. She serves as bridge between TERFism and the Dissident Right, with her work ‘Feminism Against Progress’ (2022) making the case of a new covenant between the sexes based on interdependence and difference. However, her narrative of industrialisation is unique. She argues that the shift from an agricultural to industrial society hurt women at the expense of men, who had previously been interdependent on each other, and feminism is an overcorrection to that.
Taking her Gender Critical Feminism to more comprehensive conclusions, she sees transgenderism as part of a broader movement to dismantle what it means to be human, i.e., transhumanism, and highlights the common funding between the two.
She calls this ‘Progress Theology’, a reckless pursuit of technological and social progress regardless of the costs, and transgenderism. Harrington is an opponent of artificial wombs, in-vitro fertilisation, and surrogacy, but also the contraceptive pill, as the ‘first transhumanist technology’ that fundamentally altered the natural relationship between the sexes. She is correct that the pill has changed the way the sexes interact in a fundamental way, and the environmental impact of the pill is still not fully understood and several reported harmful side effects may be more than just ‘conspiracy theories’. Mary Harrington is actually a very mainstream figure, being one of the most frequent columnists at UnHerd. She is a valuable figure connecting the Dissident Right scene to the mainstream British Right, because she is able to present her critiques in a way that is accessible to the mainstream.
Raw Egg Nationalist
Somewhat more problematic members of the faction are people like Raw Egg Nationalist, and other celebrity anons like Stone Age Herbalist. I was tempted to put Raw Egg Nationalist in the ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ faction just because I get kooky ‘vibes’ from his work. However, because I want to try and be fair I’m not going to apply that charged label to him, and his work generally is of higher quality than a lot of those circles. He also is the editor of the ‘Mans World’ publication, which is associated with the BAPsphere.
It is a personal choice to put him in this section just because I think he touches on some similar themes, but I understand that in terms of personal connections and presentation he is part of the BAPspere, which I will discuss next.
In his book ‘The Eggs Benedict Option (2022)’ and elsewhere, Raw Egg Nationalist talks about how there are all kinds of toxic additives and chemicals in food and people need to eat ‘natural’ foods. It all seems a bit 1980s crazy environmentalist for me, but I can’t dismiss it out of hand because my trust in mainstream scientific establishments has been critically weakened in the last few years.
However, one thing I condemn about these tendencies is how it’s made artificial meat ‘left-coded’, leading to destructive laws from right-wing governments, like the complete ban on artificial meat in Italy. This is immensely destructive, pointless, and will harm the environment and animal welfare, all simply for the purposes of appearing ‘based’ and appeasing farmers lobbies.
This ‘return to the land’, ‘eat steak’, go and ‘grow organic produce free from tainted chemicals’, that has become something of a staple on the Dissident Right, not just from Raw Egg Nationalist but many others, like the TradWest Instagram and X accounts (which also adds in Christian fundamentalism, so probably belongs in previous section), is just something which seems uneducated and low IQ to me. It sounds like how left-wing environmentalists sounded in the 1980s and 1990s, with a lot of fearmongering around GMO food and nuclear power, which turned out to not only be wrong, but the absurd overregulation, and in many cases the complete ban, of these things that these activists brought, ended up being catastrophic. Being anti-nuclear was the biggest own-goal the environmentalist movement ever made, and will make de-carbonization far more difficult if not impossible.
I therefore don’t trust these people who are against new technologies just because it give them the ‘ick’ of not being ‘natural’. Their kookiness getting a seat at the table 30 years ago was an enormous loss to humanity.
Kaczynskites.
Then of course there’s the most famous Neo-Luddite, Ted Kaczynski, known as the ‘Unabomber’. Whilst far predating the Dissident Right himself, Kaczynski has become something of a cult hero among them, with the meme ‘Based and Ted Pilled’ going viral in this space. It’s hard to name any particular commentator who is a pure ‘Kaczynskite’, other than a Discord server claiming to represent the ‘Dissident Right’ called ‘New Aristocracy’ who were very oriented around his work, which I found rather peculiar.
I will say that I think ‘Industrial Society and It’s Future’ (1995) makes some interesting points about how technology is both assisted by and encourages an ever-greater centralisation of state power. Covid was Kaczynski’s ultimate vindication. The obsessive focus on particular statistics due to the ability to test and trace every Covid case and death, and having this constantly reported on, with the implication that all these Covid deaths were the fault of the government for not acting, served to justify a never ending cycle of government mandates and restrictions, a curtailment of liberty previously unthinkable in the Anglosphere.
Nevertheless I don’t agree with Kaczynski’s solutions, I don’t think we need to get rid of technology entirely, but simply decentralise it with innovations like open source software and cryptocurrency. A higher tech world will require greater vigilance and trusting governments less, and the Social Democratic model, whilst suitable for the 20th century world, gives government’s too much power and motivation to intervene with 21st technology, and so must be abandoned.
I am in favour of keeping certain low tech methods like paper ballots in elections and physical cash, seeing them as arguably even more important in our digital age than before, given they can operate outside the manipulation of computers. Perhaps something in-between, like bitcoins with physical cash? Something like this is being developed, and with its built-in scarcity and lack of reliance on digital infrastructure, may be the best form of money.
Whilst of course not endorsing his methods, Kaczynski did make some interesting arguments that deserve to be thought about.
Conclusion
This Neo-Luddite tendency bleeds into anti-vaxxers (with the exception of Mary Harrington, who seems too intelligent for that), who are firmly in the ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ box, and who I will discuss when I get around to talking about the Conspiracy Theorists. Needless to say I hold that movement in very low regard.
I include the Neo-Luddite tendencies in the ‘Dissident Right’ grouping because because they are still focused on the ‘Managerial State’ and Elite theory, though they think this is inevitably tied up with technology, and it will only be solved by voluntarily refusing certain technological innovations and returning to a simpler life. Like the Paleolibertarians I discussed in the last article, I fundamentally disagree with this tendency, but I don’t dismiss them completely, and Mary Harrington and Ted Kaczynski do make some interesting points that deserve to be taken into consideration.
BAPists
Finally we have the BAPists. Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Alamariu) and his book ‘Bronze Age Mindset’ (2018) was brought into mainstream conservative circles by Curtis Yarvin, who had various Claremont fellows read it. Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) presents a Nietzschean vision that valorises the traditional masculine warrior and ‘Faustian’ spirit of the West, and claiming that this spirit is being sapped by the ‘Longhouse’, a now standard term on the Dissident Right.
BAP termed the word ‘Longhouse’ to describe female domination of community life. Contrary to mainstream narratives that present humanity as traditionally patriarchal, BAP puts forward the narrative that women have almost always controlled society behind the scenes, with Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment-era West some of the few exceptions. He criticises the ‘Bugmen’, a veiled reference to Klaus Schwab, who serve the Longhouse by facilitating the ever greater managerial control over young men, sapping out their Vitality. In response to this, BAP wants to create a brotherly fraternal order, where men can naturally dominate over weaker, inferior forces and beings in a Nietzschean fashion. Inspired by various warrior castes in the pre-Christian age, he calls this the ‘Bronze Age Mindset’.
BAP is often lumped in with a lot of the conspiracist-adjacent and kooky people, like Raw Egg Nationalist and Stone Age Herbalist. But I don’t think BAP himself is really like this, as despite the stylized typos, Bronze Age Mindset is actually a fairly interesting, insightful, and enjoyable read.
It is pretty obvious that BAP is a homosexual, but he doesn’t identify with the ‘LGBT rights movement’ as his homoeroticism is more traditionalist and classical, celebrating the dominance aspect of sodomy as opposed to thinking of himself as part of an ‘oppressed minority group’, so I really don’t care. He appreciates the beauty of the human form, and that is a refreshing change from both Wokeism and dreary Christian fundamentalism. An interesting thing about BAP is his relative lack of racism. Even though he sees European culture as inherently ‘cleaner’ and despises mass immigration, he thinks male fraternity is more important.
He brings a rival Nietzschean ‘Vitalist’ strand to the Dissident Right, which is often contrasted to the Christian side. Some like ‘American Reformer’ and Andew Saldin from ‘Culture Change’ have attempted to fuse the two with a ‘Christian Vitalism’, and indeed BAP has good things to say about groups like the Crusaders and the Teutonic Knights, even though he is not a Christian. He also is a big critic of Postliberalism, with his article ‘The Populist Moment Never Happened’ in ‘Mans World’ about Javier Milei making some excellent points.
The reason why he is so influential is mostly the terms he brought to the sphere, like the whole idea and concept of the ‘Longhouse’. He also presents a unique account of the toxic feminisation of society, and the necessity of recovering a lost masculine energy that western civilisation has lost. No other figure in the Dissident Right has really articulated this better than BAP.
BAP has created a space known as the BAPsphere which is personified in the ‘Man’s World’ magazine, and has various other contributors and which also intersects with the Neo-Luddite faction, though with an explicitly masculine bent, so Mary Harrington’s brand of Luddite TERFism wouldn’t fit. Raw Egg Nationalist is frequently associated with BAP, even though I put him in the Neo-Luddite faction, as aside from being associated with him I think this fits him slightly better. Another BAPist other than BAP himself is Zero HP Lovecraft, who has the esoteric, cryptic vibe of BAP, and echos some similar ideas. L0m3z would also be a key BAPist, who wrote in First Things ‘What is the Longhouse?’ explaining the idea of BAP to a more traditionally conservative audience, which I highly recommend you check out as it does give a very good overview.
Conclusion
It is harder to track the Dissident Right compared to the more mainstream commentators, simply because there are far more people who are in the online space. As I say, findmyfrens.net and New Right Poast, particularly who New Right Poast recommends, will give you some people who very much belong in the ‘Dissident Right’ sphere I’m talking about.
As always, my factions are to some degree subjective. There is a large degree of overlap and ambiguity and I am choosing to draw the lines in certain places and putting people who could be in different categories into one, for instance with Raw Egg Nationalist, where I choose to focus on the Luddite, naturalistic angle even though he’s heavily associated with BAP.
The next article will be about the other definition of the Dissident Right, that I will refer to as the ‘Racialist Right.’
As always, thanks for reading and I hope you found my breakdown useful. If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe.
Bibliography
Gottfried, P. E. (2001). After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State. Princeton University Press.
Your description of the dissident right really suggests it as a very nascent faction.
It reads like: Over here we have a Jewish Elite technocrat that thinks he is a dark elf and wants the world to be formalized. And over here is a bunch of guys who are obsessed with being super buff. And over here is a hyper-intelligent man who hates technology so much that he sends bombs to random people in the mail. And here is a doom-mongering British guy who is obsessed with the hand gestures of a British Politician from the 90s who he believes is the dark lord. And over here we have some very dedicated traditional Catholics.
In any other time, you would never categorize these people in the same group, but here we are. The political gimbals really have changed.
Here's the section I was looking forwards too, since I fall into these categories myself.
I think the unifying factor of the Dissident Right is the heavy intellectual bleed between all of the sub-categories here, even compared to your other groupings. Yarvin's writing is obviously visible in all of them, from the clear inspiration the Caesarists took ("if kings do return, I think it will be under the sign of the cross"), to the more subtle inspiration that BAP and the luddites take from Yarvin's more arch-reactionary musings on virtue. Similarly, you have Bronze Age Mindset clearly influencing a more masculine turn in the grouping, and the polemics and research of REN giving voice to the luddite streak previously exemplified by anons like Wrath of Gnon. Readers and anons like myself travel fairly freely between these sub-categories because, at the end of the day, they are all more-or-less unified by the same fundamental rejection of the idea of Progress.
I do however think that you've given somewhat short shrift to the neo-luddites. It's fairly clear that much of technological modernity is poison to the body or soul, and that our unproblematic embrace (may Allah forgive me for uttering this phrase!) of new technologies has had serious unrecognised costs. The food point in particular seems to be poorly understood - it is precisely the massive overproduction, poor quality, and waste of food in the first world that points to things like fake meat and other technological panaceas being a false hope at best. Things like factory farms and other titanic cruelties are because of technological modernity, not in spite of it, and properly rejecting them requires also the rejection of huge portions of our modern civilisation - to wit, the all corporate fast food and most corporate grocers would be a casualty