10 Lessons From 2023
2023 was an eventful year, and a fascinating time to observe events from the perspective of the dissident right. Event after event seemed to give credence to many of our narratives, and many of the topics which were once limited to us became hot topics of debate among very powerful figures. Here’s what we learned over the past year:
The Irish have had enough
People have questioned for a while how long the Irish will put up with the massive denationalisation project underway in their country, most visible in the plantation of small communities with migrant centres. 2023 saw an explosion of anger over the situation, with riots in Dublin, sparked by a stabbing spree committed by a migrant - making international news. Conor McGregor captured the mood and gave voice to the opposition that exists within the country to mass uncontrolled immigration, and the scam that is the Irish asylum industry, even promising a Presidential run.
At the same time, polls have consistently shown a growing opposition to the government’s immigration policies, and now, a willingness to support a potential anti-immigration political party. I don’t know what 2024 will hold, but there is no sign of the government reversing course on mass-immigration, with a record number of arrivals in the past year. Debate about this issue is increasingly entering the mainstream, and a political backlash seems inevitable.
There’s no Trumpism without Trump
In hindsight, my worst call going into last year was thinking Donald Trump was on his way to being replaced with a new Republican frontrunner. Trumpism was always a personality cult first and foremost, and no amount of tepid speeches from Trump or challenges from within the GOP to his policy failures were going to sway the MAGA base. The many legal attacks against him have further solidified Trump as the avatar of anti-establishment sentiment, a vibe that was missing in 2020 when he ran for re-election as a conventional Republican.
Trump handled the optics of his tribulations perfectly: that iconic mugshot, and the decision to sit out the Republican debates and leave his opponents to fight for scraps while he stands by as the nominee in waiting. Ron DeSantis was meant to be an example of how the Republican Party could move on from Trump himself while maintaining the populist energy. But he proved to be every bit as unlikeable as Trump is likable, and when he is handily put away in the primaries it will be the end of opposition to Trump within his own party for another 4 years.
Our enemies are not invincible
The greatest success for me personally was launching #BanTheADL, a campaign that became the number one trend on X, putting the ADL in the spotlight for its central role in the censorship regime, and alerting countless people to their organisation and the influence of Jewish lobbying efforts more broadly. This was a ground-up campaign led by small accounts and dissident influencers with no institutional backing, yet we forced the establishment conservatives and free speech advocates everywhere to get behind it.
Every response of the ADL only made things worse, with Jonathan Greenblatt reacting to every new development by smearing people opposed to his organisation as antisemites. For all the institutional influence people like Greenblatt have, they are increasingly struggling to justify their behaviour, and the internet is tipping the scales to where they can be challenged by the masses who object to their stranglehold.
The same thing happened with the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. The public were treated like fools with outrageous atrocity propaganda coming out of Israel, alongside denial of Israeli brutality. But narrative after narrative was undermined and defeated on X in real time. Mainstream media reported ,as fact, the story of Hamas beheading 40 babies, but by the time those papers were on the shelves it was already well debunked on social media.
As bad as censorship was for us, our decrepit elites are increasingly struggling to manufacture consent and create narratives the way they once did. Their strategy, which is to more aggressively demonise an ever broader group of people (everyone who opposes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza is now an antisemite), just makes their situation worse.
Advertisers still rule
We often speculated on what would happen if someone committed to free speech took over a major social media platform. We learned in 2023 that the answer is advertiser boycotts under the pressure of the racial lobbies which dominate civil society make it unsustainable. Musk claimed that the initial advertiser boycott, led by the ADL and other “civil rights organisations”, cost Twitter 60% of its advertising revenue in the US.
It's not that the CEO's themselves care so much about who has a Twitter account - as publicly traded companies are necessarily sensitive to any potential controversy. And activist organisations like the ADL and their allies in the media are able to kick up the impression of a huge controversy about "hate" when there is free speech on these platforms.
A lot of people brush off the advertiser boycotts by pointing to the rollout of X Premium, but the numbers are quite bleak. Back in August, it was reported that the premium service had 700k subscribers, bringing in around 25 million per quarter for X. For comparison, the most recent advertiser boycott, sparked by controversy over Elon replying to a supposed antisemitic Tweet, has been estimated to cost X 75 million per quarter.
When Elon was acquiring Twitter, his pitch to investors was that Twitter could have 69 million premium subscribers by 2025, and 159 million by 2028. At this point, it looks pretty unrealistic there will be 100x new Premium subscribers in two years, but this should put in perspective what a task it is for a company like X to lose reliance on advertising revenue.
Elon seemed to be less optimistic about the dream of transitioning away from reliance on large corporations recently, when he admitted the advertiser boycotts may make X unsustainable: "And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company".
The dead end of cargo cult activism
Last year closed with the very public and very humiliating implosion of the National Justice Party, an American White Nationalist organisation. The NJP never had much of an impact on anything, and apparently did not go beyond 600 members, but its collapse is interesting in that it seems to represent the end of the alt-right movement making any serious attempt at politics - the NJP grew out of the TRS podcasting network, which was one of the main influences on the alt-right. It is also interesting to me personally, because some of its leadership spent the months prior to their collapse publicly attacking me, insisting that their strategy of activism was the only game in town and everyone not following it was an enemy.
One of the most harmful things NJP leadership did was begin to attack “slacktivism” and downplay any online success with the absurd idea that any focus on the online space would somehow discourage people from “getting active”. This started with their baffling attacks on me when Elon Musk responded to a post about Irish hate speech laws - attention which helped make the issue a national conversation here and create real pushback. The lesson to be learned there is no reason to juxtapose online and “in real life” activism. I have done my share of real life activism this year, and I understand both the frustration at how difficult it is to get people to sacrifice even a few hours of their time for the cause, and the impulse to downplay everything that happens online as a means of shaming the “slacktivists”, but presenting the two things as in opposition is the wrong approach - most activists you meet “in real life” came to their beliefs through exposure to online media, and most party activism gets the bulk of its audience by broadcasting online. A smart strategy for the 21st century activism will make intelligent use of both, and recognise that the culture war of today is happening online. Since the implosion of the party it has been admitted that this was a cynical and conscious strategy to try and funnel people into their group as “the only game in down”, but unfortunately there were people dumb enough to be convinced by it. I hope future activists will take the lesson that it serves no one to set different types of activists against one another in an attempt to virtue-signal your status as a “man of action”.
TRS-NJP insisted that “the normies are already redpilled” and censorship is debilitating, and so the only option was to go straight to the masses with the 1960s-style-activism of protests and flash mobs, which would eventually build a mass movement. The mass movement never came, and no doubt many will blame the internal bickering or individual personalities, but I think there’s enough evidence to show this kind of cargo culting is a failure, as the owner of TRS himself made clear in a rant about the situation.
Nationalist movements in the West have to deal with the problem that there are a lot of 20th century history hobbyists who insist their history hobby should be intricately tied to making our moral case in the present day. NJP encouraged the worst of this, with their leaders regularly deconstructing and deriding the White American nation they were seeking to represent, giving speeches intended to mimic NSDAP leadership, Tweeting in German, and believing they would repeat the success of mid-20th Century fascist parties by giving big public speeches, getting a lot of people together at the same time, and monopolising the right-wing sphere by aggressively attacking all competitors.
I could go on all day about why this is a doomed to fail approach, but maybe the results should speak for themselves, and it probably wouldn’t do any good anyway. No doubt another group in the US will attempt to turn the post alt-right into a political movement and run into the same stagnation, infighting, and collapse.
There won’t be a Ukraine victory
I don’t pretend to be an expert on warfare, and I’ve limited my commentary on the Ukraine/Russia war as each side made the case that their victory is imminent. 2023 was something of a long stalemate - Ukraine gained about 336 square kilometers of territory while Russia managed to grab another 504. Promises of a crushing defeat for either side were way off the mark.
But it seems like Ukraine’s outlook is more bleak in a long war of attrition, where Russia has as much as five times the manpower of Ukraine, and is not so reliant on increasingly tenuous Western aid. In May, Bakhmut fell to the Russians, despite Ukraine’s pledge to hold it with the commitment of some of their best troops to the fight. Then, their much hyped summer counteroffensive was a big failure. Ukraine and its Western allies apparently planned a blitzkrieg-like attack which would drive deep into Russian-held territory and throw their army into disarray. Lacking the air support, firepower, or experienced troops to make this a success, and running up against substantial Russian defences beyond anything forecast, they made negligible progress. In December 2023, a number of mainstream media outlets began to acknowledge the counteroffensive was a catastrophic failure. The Messenger reported on assessments from a number of US military officials over meetings held in Ukraine in November and December. They
said that participants in the meetings agreed that key objectives of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which began in June, have not been met and that there was little chance that they would be, particularly if American aid was suspended.
…
American participants in the meeting went so far as to suggest that given the limited gains, a longstanding U.S. policy of letting Ukraine define the terms of victory in the war be reconsidered.
The explosion of the Israel-Hamas conflict has refocused American support on Israel, and while still committed to Ukraine, it is suddenly being acknowledged that there is a limit to how long this will continue, and that the Ukrainians may have to go to the negotiating table. 2024 looks like another bleak year for Ukraine.
Jews are turning on the left
The aftermath of October 7 was a wakeup call for many Jews in the West, who had assumed their non-White allies in the West would show solidarity with them in their darkest hour. Unsurprisingly, the Jewish insistence on their status as another victimised minority group was dismissed by non-Whites and large segments of the left, who correctly view Israel as a supremacist state built on the oppression of non-Whites.
There was once a well represented moderate left who would defend Israel’s right to exist, but this is a declining demographic, the aging boomer social democrats who were raised with the Holocaust as the centre of their moral universe. Jewish elites probably always anticipated some decline in support for Zionism as reliable White boomers were replaced, but they would have imagined events like October 7 would be a catastrophe every humanitarian would see as reason to at least defend Israel’s right to exist. Instead, it has made the situation worse than ever for Zionists: a recent poll found that the majority of young Americans now favour giving Israel over to Hamas.
It is now clear that Jewish elites are abandoning the Frankenstein’s monster of the “woke” left, which views the world in a victim/victimiser polarity where Israel is destined to be the victimiser. People may be shocked by the wild swings to the right they see from prominent Jews this year. Already, former ADL head Abe Foxman has come out to condemn the DEI regime, Jonathan Greenblatt has begun complaining of “victim olympics” in colleges - and seemingly came to some kind of detente with Elon Musk when he agreed to ban “from the river to the sea” on X, and Jewish billionaires have begun to withdraw funding for colleges which tolerate what they view as antisemitism from the left.
There will be more of this in 2024, and we may even see the emergence of a “Jewish alt-right”, which is willing to normalise discussion of race and IQ, replacement immigration, and anti-White ideology, so long as it comes packaged with a defence of Jewish supremacy and Zionism. One thing is for sure though, Jews will never feel as comfortable on the left as they did before October 7, 2023.
Zionism is losing
It’s not just anti-colonial leftists who now see the state of Israel as irredeemable, Zionism is now losing support at a rapid rate across every possible demographic. Israel being in the news has proven to be disastrous for their PR to the West. 2023 was the year the organised Jewish community declared it antisemitic to oppose Israel dropping bombs on children, and the charge of antisemitism will never have the same power it once did after that.
Not only are people seeing daily the horrors being inflicted on people in Gaza, but they are also watching the rank hypocrisy and ghoulish bloodlust of many of its apologists in the West. The left has become dominated by anti-White, anti-colonial framing which leaves no exemption for Israel, the demographics are shifting to be increasingly non-White and Muslim, and the right is starting to shift to either questioning why their country should have anything to do with this conflict, to investigating the nefarious role Zionists have played in their own countries.
I have observed many sections of the right who previously rarely spoke about Israel become heavily anti-Zionist this year. Stew Peters, best known for making the anti-COVID vaccine documentary Died Suddenly, went on Infowars to debate his recent conclusion that the Zionist lobby runs America to a startled Alex Jones. In the aftermath, Jones’ own comments section was full of Infowars viewers firmly siding with Stew and accusing Jones of dodging the issue. Other prominent influencers who hold sway on the right like Jake Shields have also become influential anti-Zionist voices since October 7, and even the ones who are still Zionists are less confident in publicly going to bat for the Israelis. Even Daily Wire host Candace Owens felt it time to take a stand against the Israel-first attitude of many in the conservative movement, starting a very public spat with her employer Ben Shapiro. Whether it’s conspiracy theorists, nationalists, or just regular conservatives who are tired of being involved in foreign conflicts, Zionism is losing the narrative war everywhere on the right having already lost it on the left.
It’s difficult to see how it can be pulled out of this tailspin, with no good arguments existing for why it’s in the interest of people in the West to support a project of ethnic cleansing by a racial supremacist state in the Middle East, especially when its leaders have suggested on many occasions that the West should deal with the fallout.
Censorship has peaked
This was probably true in 2022, but in 2023 it became clear that there is an ease in the oppressive censorship regime that started in earnest after Trump’s election as US President in 2016. Elon’s acquisition of Twitter has made the platform more free than it has been in years, removing much of the shadow banning that limited alternative voices to their own echo chambers, and restoring many accounts which couldn’t operate under the previous ownership but have since become very influential on the site.
Another big win is the growth of Substack, who remain committed to their free speech principles despite growing pressure from the usual suspects, and whose revenue model is not as sensitive to the advertising pressures as other companies. Rumble had big success too, acquiring names like Tucker Carlson, becoming an official host to Republican debates, and continuing its growth in regular users. On the legal front, both X and Rumble have announced legal action against censorship organisations in what will hopefully be a trend of coordinating to fight these groups.
I think a lot of the censorship we witnessed at peak was Trump derangement syndrome on the part of the censors, and probably many of these companies will realise the aggressive policing of content went too far as they begin to see less censored alternatives become serious players - YouTube even reversed its policy on “election denial” last year, a small step, but still a sign of the times.
We are winning
The progress made in normalising our ideas in recent years is quite something, and 2023 might just have been the best year yet. The term “anti-White” has become an accepted part of the lexicon of conservatives. The richest man in the world regularly interacts with posts discussing race and crime statistics, and affirmed a claim that Jewish lobby groups in the West promote an anti-White agenda. A candidate in the GOP primaries said the Great Replacement is not a conspiracy, but government policy, and this generated no real pushback or outrage amongst conservatives. The topic of the influence of the organised Jewish community has always seemed too untouchable for the mainstream, but the second half of the year was dominated by criticisms of the ADL and conservatives turning on Israel-firsters like Ben Shapiro. Even a conservative as mainstream as Charlie Kirk was willing to identify the Jewish community as “some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-White causes”.
The work of countless anons is paying off, as the anti-White agenda and replacement immigration are becoming central to the identity of the right. 2023 shows that despite the obstacles and our lack of institutional support, we can make a real difference to the conversation. Our moral case is unimpeachable, our talking points are more interesting, and we have the truth on our side. The only thing that can stop us making 2024 another year of huge progress is ourselves.
This Keith Woods character is shaping up to be a David Ben-Gurion figure for White people
Looking forward to another 'Year of Keef'.
Best wishes and thank you for everything you do.