When Are We Going To DO SOMETHING?!
Mailbag #1: Revolution, Ethnopluralism, Russia in a united Europe?
It’s time for the first edition of the mailbag. The question I will be devoting most time to this week is one I’ve been seeing for years - when are people like me going to stop talking and DO SOMETHING?
If you’d like to have your question answered in the next installment, leave a comment below.
American Idiot asks: What is to be done?
Democracy means rule by the demos, the people. It is not a set of procedures such as elections, parliaments, courts, and a free press. It is a condition in which an actual people, coherent enough to recognize itself as the thing doing the governing, controls the state it built. The procedures sit downstream of the people. Where there is no demos, there is no democracy, however many votes are counted. Nationalism and democracy are therefore the same thing. A demos is a nation, and a nation governing itself through its own state is what democracy has always been, from Athens through Rome through the pre-1965 American republic through the functioning nation-states of the present. Every durable democracy guarded the boundary of its demos, because a people that loses control of who belongs loses control of the state.
Augustus did not abolish the Roman Republic. He hollowed it while preserving its appearance. The Senate still met, the consuls were still elected, and the vocabulary of res publica still conferred legitimacy, but the Senate ratified what Augustus had already decided, the consuls executed what he had directed, and the elections were held on schedule while the people who voted in them believed they still lived in the Republic. The conversion was administrative, gradual, and dressed in the language of restoration. The shell continued while the people’s actual control of their state was removed. By the time the demos understood what had happened, the Republic was gone. This is the cleanest demonstration in the historical record of how a nation state is replaced by an empire while keeping the procedure of the thing it replaced.
Today the European nations face a far more sophisticated empire led by the international Jewish coalition to name a few, The Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee, The American Jewish Congress, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, The National Council of Jewish Women, the NCRAC is the institutional ancestor of the contemporary Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The same coordination architecture that ran the 1965 Hart-Celler campaign runs, with the same continuity, the institutional position on every American foreign and domestic policy question to the present day. Across the Atlantic, you have the Open Society Foundation and the World Economic Forum two pillars of international Jewish governance in Europe. All of this and it doesn’t even touch the organization downstream these groups influence or control, so again I ask, what is to be done?
Another post on X? another Substack? Another podcast? We have the people and the momentum they must be organized and put to work. The problem the movement currently has isn’t the amount of people, we have reached numbers this movement hasn’t had since the early 20th century. Many commentators, such as Nick Fuentes, seem to have no plan or ideas on where to go. They vehemently advocate against organizing due to the fear of being arrested or even killed. I ask you how could we expect nothing less, imprisonment and death are the price for the continuation of our people. The people of this movement must come to these terms, they are fighting for something far greater than their own lives, do nothing and you will by the end of your easy lives see your nations cease to exist in any meaningful way. The English will be a minority in the land that bears their name, the Germans will be a minority in the land they’ve called home for over 3000 years, there will be no European countries left, not in some distant future but in our lifetimes. So my question is, what is to be done?
What is to be done is we are to continue to make metapolitical and cultural change, shift the bounds of acceptable discourse, build our own institutions and parties, and acquire as much power as possible.
I see posts like these all the time, and they feel a lot like grandstanding and self-pity. Yes, our political enemies have many institutions and great power. Yes, it will be very difficult to unseat them from power. But repeatedly emphasising how lopsided the power dynamics are, as if that suggests the only answer is violence, is dishonest. If anything, people engaging in violence when institutional power is so monopolised by their political enemies only makes it more futile and counter-productive, since the existing power-brokers can respond and manage in a way that strengthens their grip on power.
But we should not mistake institutional size for health. The present order looks powerful because it occupies every commanding height of society. But ideologically, it is exhausted. Liberalism no longer offers a believable account of the common good, national loyalty, or even basic public order. It survives increasingly through overt censorship, managerial inertia, and the fear people have of saying obvious things aloud. This means that, for all the powerful institutions you listed, their greatest weakness is still in the realm of ideas — their increasing inability to manufacture consensus.
It is a silly false dichotomy then, to say things like “Another post on X? another Substack? Another podcast?” Yes, actually. Politics is shaped by people, and those people’s ideas are shaped by media. Almost all of the nationalist right’s gains in recent years have come by changing people’s minds through digital media.
At every point in the last ten years, I’ve seen the same people say we have reached our limit online and now is the time to DO SOMETHING. They said it after the censorship of 2017, when the black pillers wanted us to accept defeat over the online space, let our enemies control discourse, and switch to marching around in costumes. They said it during COVID, even though the years after saw a huge growth in nationalist ideas. When I told people to take advantage of the freer environment brought about by Elon Musk’s acquisition of X, I was attacked by the same people for taking people away from DOING SOMETHING. But shortly after my return to the platform, the attention a post of mine received made Irish hate speech laws a topic of debate in this country, and a campaign mostly coordinated online made the laws so unpopular that the government quietly dropped them. Then, I was told that we would be allowed some controlled pushback on the excesses of the left, but we were playing into the enemy’s hands, who would ensure discussion of the bigger issues of Jewish and Zionist influence could never be normalised. Then our #BanTheADL campaign became the top trend on Twitter, and the aftermath of October 7 red pilled millions of people on these topics. Meanwhile, there has been a normalisation of ideas like “remigration” to the point that official U.S. government accounts regularly promote the idea. More recently, the murder of Henry Nowak only became a national scandal in Britain because of the online backlash.
None of this is a substitute for organising, and everyone acknowledges that these kinds of changes will mean nothing if they do not have a lasting impact on the world outside the internet. But that is where people’s minds are shaped, and the biggest part of our task is undoing decades of leftist brainwashing against our ideas. Posting is not a substitute for organising, but the way to convince people of that isn’t to tell them that it’s a hindrance, either. The normies you want to reach are online. The capable people you want to organise with are online.
We do need organisation, but we need to be very clear about what organisation means. It does not mean a handful of alienated young men convincing themselves that politics is only real when it involves danger or theatrical confrontation. Serious organisation means building durable structures that survive censorship, personality drama and the normal exhaustion that comes with political life.
It means local groups. Reading circles, activist networks, social clubs, churches, schools, media outlets, legal funds, donor networks, professional associations. It also means networking professionals and people with skills, as well as finding people willing to do unglamorous work consistently.
It will also necessarily mean some level of entryism in existing institutions. Some people should build explicitly nationalist organisations, but others can have greater influence joining existing institutions and shifting their culture from within. Politics is not confined to elections or parties. It is shaped by the people who sit on committees, manage budgets, train younger members, hire staff, and set the informal moral atmosphere of an institution. The left understood this very well. It did not merely win public arguments; it embedded itself in the machinery of social life.
What will not help is encouraging potentially influential young men to throw their lives away in some fatalistic act of rage, or politically neutralising people by telling them “there is no political solution.” This rhetoric usually comes from people who are so black pilled that they contribute nothing to nationalist movements, and are convinced only some spontaneous deluge of violence, carried out by someone other than themselves, will remedy things. I believe this is immoral, but I also believe it’s wholly counter-productive to what the people promoting it want.
I have written before about why this fantasy of a right-wing revolt is so divorced from reality:
My basic argument is that we know a lot about how revolutions and civil war happen, and they require elite defection, state weakness, mass immiseration, organisation, and favourable geopolitical conditions, none of which exist for the nationalist right in the West. One thing our regimes are very good at is crushing armed movements, and the whole machinery of Western surveillance states has been directed towards managing the massively exaggerated threat of far-right violence now for decades. Violence would not only fail; it would give the regime exactly the pretext it wants for repression, censorship, financial deplatforming, surveillance expansion, and the destruction of any serious nationalist infrastructure.
Of course, the questioner says “how could we expect nothing less, imprisonment and death are the price for the continuation of our people,” but were he serious, he wouldn’t be posting such sentiments online where the security services could easily monitor him. The people who post these sentiments are almost never serious. They have an online profile telling other people online that their being online is a waste of time and they should DO SOMETHING, while they themselves wait for others to DO SOMETHING for them.
So yes, another post. Another podcast. Another article. Another campaign. Another local meeting. Another institution. Another candidate. Another business. Another school. Another family. Another donor. Another organiser. Another person persuaded who yesterday thought our ideas were unthinkable. That is how power is built. We need to gather more people who are serious about the business of building power and stop taking seriously people who demoralise in order to promote their own unrealistic solutions.
In the rest of this week’s mailbag: is ethnopluralism the way forward for Europe? Should Russia be part of a united Europe? How do we deal with fake populists? What’s the proper amount of immigration and is “integration” actually possible?
