Analyzing The Online-Right Schism

Christian Nationalist or Bronze Age Vitalist. Which way Western Man?

There has been a growing divide on the online-right (or what is sometimes termed the Alt-Right, the Dissident-Right, or the New Right) over the past few years. While there are several nuances both between & within the two camps, I think this schism can be broadly described as “Christian Nationalism”, led by figureheads such as Nick Fuentes, Andrew Torba & Keith Woods, on the one side, and on the other side something like “Esoteric Vitalist Nietzschean Bodybuilding”, led by Bronze Age Pervert and his entourage of anon “frog” accounts, such as Raw Egg Nationalist & Zero HP Lovecraft.

For the last several years I have been “mutuals” with all of these Twitter accounts. A fact I point out not to brag but to let you know, dear reader, that I have had one foot in each world for a while and this article will be me attempting to share what I’ve gleaned from that. I’ve sometimes joked to myself that I am like Charlie Sheen in Platoon. The prodigal son of two dueling fathers. The hardass Staff Sergeant, Robert Barnes, played by BAP, wants me to be strong enough not only to survive this world but to conquer it, and Sergeant Elias, played by Fuentes, doesn’t want my survival to cost me my soul. (Note: BAP unfollowed me after I sent him a rough draft of this article and asked if he would discuss these issues with me. I guess that’s a “no”.)

There are, from my accounting, two major disagreements between these two camps. The first revolves largely around the question of anti-semitism. What is the appropriate amount and how should such sentiments be expressed? I’m still on the fence about this, personally, and think both sides have made some valid points.

The BAPists seem to think Nick overestimates the issue of Jewish influence and that he and his followers express themselves in toxic ways that are not conducive to earning political victories. Bad optics. Nick, on the other hand, says they are all a bunch of Jews whose true purpose in the space is to obfuscate Jewish power and discredit those who discuss it. Like I said, I’m on the fence here so I’m not going to weigh in on which of these viewpoints is most credible.

On the second issue, I have strong convictions. This is the issue of sexual morality. Being “trad” versus being a hedonist. On recent episodes of his podcast, Caribbean Rhythms, BAP has taken more and more frequently to decrying the “moralfags” or “tradlarps” who screech incessantly about “degeneracy”. Trad has become a derogatory term in the BAP-sphere. A search of his Twitter account for the term “trad” is telling in the way he engages with this concept.

BAP sneers at the concept of virtue as if it’s some fake, gay, and antiquated pretension. He often treats the very concept of religion with similar derision. For example:

Trust the science? Ok. Promiscuity is objectively a recipe for social dysfunction. One needs only peruse the wikipedia page to get an idea of the litany of negative effects this lifestyle has on its participants. Having casual sex with a woman is essentially inflicting a form of psychological trauma on her. How can you claim to care about your people if you push destructive lifestyle choices on them? In the name of what? Having fun? Getting your rocks off?

The problem I have with these takes, much like Vitalism itself which we will get to shortly, I promise, is that there is so little substance to it. As if BAP’s critique of Christian morality could be boiled down to “that’s lame.” He never tells you what is bad about religion, what is wrong with morality, or what is good about hedonism, promiscuity, or pornography.

I hope I’ve made my point but there’s one more example I want to look at which should drive it home. It is an article written by BAP orbiter Med Gold and retweeted by BAP himself titled “The Dark Path to Increasing The Birth Rate”. In which he tells men they need to get their shit together so they can have lots of sex with lots of women. He also takes time out to tell us why marriage is a losing proposition:

“The conditions that make for a stable family and that create incentives for men to want to marry have been removed. The 1950's are far behind us and there's no serious indication that traditional values of that sort are coming back in our lifetime.”

This guy calls me a blackpiller, btw. lol. Then, when telling men why they shouldn’t care about a woman’s body count he explains that nobody actually does care to begin with, it’s just a cope that Christians came up with to explain why they can’t get laid:

“This kind of thinking is a pathetic excuse for men to explain away why they aren’t getting laid. It’s much easier for them to grip their Bible and shame men with high sex drives than to put themselves out there and risk getting rejected. They’ll call you a coomer and an incel for having normal male impulses as they’re throwing out a new round of crusty tissues after jerking off to an egirl. Men who think like this are shameful, not to be taken seriously. Their ancestors would spit on them.”

The entire article is juvenile try-hard edgy bullshit, but note the way he accuses the “moralfags” of gooning to e-girls. This is a typical cope of the depraved mind. They can’t imagine that anyone proclaiming virtuous temperance lives their lives that way in private. Hence the “tradlarp” concept. Everyone is gooning to porn and swiping furiously on Tinder trying to score the next hookup, I’m just honest about it…Is what the degenerate tells himself as he wanks his way to sleep at night.

The vast majority of Christian men that I know don’t have to “put themselves out there” because we are married, and have children. Marriage is the cornerstone of civilization, children are the building blocks of society, and it is much more challenging and rewarding than being a fuckboy, but little Meddy Weddy is scared of it. He’s also scared of being in a space with me, but I digress.

BAP himself has also railed against the idea that religion helps birthrates. He does this by pointing to ostensibly highly religious nations like Iran and their falling birthrates to make the point, but this is a methodological error, comparing two different populations to each other to determine the value of a given variable (religiosity in this case) rather than doing the comparison within the same population.

Incidentally, this is the same error Steve Sailor made when attributing African-American versus African IQs to the environment. We have many sounder studies to understand the effect of the environment, like all the twin adoption studies.

When people make specious arguments like this to discredit institutions such as religion and marriage, you do have to question their motives.

Respect For BAP

I’m going to be very critical of the substance of Vitalism here, so let me start with the disclaimer that I do think BAP is a talented podcaster, entertaining, and that there is value in simply offering humor, aesthetics, inspiration, and intrigue. Here is an example of BAP at his best, in my opinion. This is a clip I made after listening to one of his podcast episodes, in it he extolls the importance of a strong and inspirational racial and cultural identity.

Here we see BAP offering a real, tangible prescription that is bonafide dissident in nature. If he stuck to stuff like this and laid off constantly counter-signaling religion and morality, I would not be writing this article. It seems fairly trite to say that a cultural identity absent of religion will be weaker and less inspirational than a religious one.

Et tu, Vitalist?

This brings us to Vitalism, the term most often used to describe BAP’s ideology. But what is it? I once had the pleasure of hosting BAP on my podcast, Sex Wars, and while discussing the possibility of a Chinese-style social-credit system, but “done right”, he remarked, “I would not be allowed to talk on your show what my ideal political system is.” I didn’t think much of this at the time, as we were streaming on YouTube and it seemed obvious he was telling me that his views were too extreme for that type of platform. But years later I’ve noticed this pattern in everything BAP does, his book, his podcast, and his Twitter account. There are always allusions but seldom prescriptions. It is all style and little substance. After years of following BAP the best definition I could give for Vitalism is “nihilism with a fresh coat of paint.” Or maybe “secular liberalism but we’re also racist.”

What are the allusions? “Might makes right”, for example. Or some sort of elite oligarchy calling the shots. Or that leaders should be chosen based on physical attributes like strength & beauty, or that perhaps they should not be chosen at all but rather seize power through manifest destiny and, by virtue of doing so, restore the natural order that has been upended by sclerotic old bureaucrats.

There is a lot of symbolism evoked and it often has to do with transgressing against social norms and taboos. We love Hitler and anime girls of questionable age. That sort of thing. Lots of irony. Lots of “schizopoasting”. Lots of Aesthetics. Not very much in the way of red meat.

I was recently listening to an episode of The Killstream hosted by Ethan Ralph and he was talking to a man named Basil, who has been very critical of some of the recent developments in the BAP-sphere. I was surprised at just how similar his criticisms were to my own. It’s worth a listen.

The Carlsbad incident was one I was not familiar with, so I decided to go down a rabbit hole. This guy Nigel seems to be one of the first people to suss out BAP’s game. He created a sock-puppet account called Long Knives Enjoyer and tweeted out intentionally gibberish takes to show how easy it was to get clout within that clique. The thread in which he documents the entire thing is archived here and it’s worth checking out if you haven’t seen it. One of my personal favorites is this one, retweeted by BAP:

When you get down to the replies in the archived thread you will some people dismissing the whole thing with the argument that “we love to post schizo stuff and be ironic.”

This is fair and true, but the problem, as already stated, is that when you try to get to the meat of what these people believe, this is pretty much all there is. The schizo stuff is so bad that sometimes I think BAP just hates his own audience. A good example of this is some of the more out-there criticisms he makes of Fuentes, like that he’s Soros-Funded or working in league with the Daily Wire & the DNC.

Straight-up Q-level nonsense. As bad faith as it gets. I can only rationalize the existence of tweets like this by imagining that at some point, BAP realized he was surrounded by sycophantic yes-men who would never challenge him on anything, and gradually he began to hate them and put out more and more absurd takes to rub it in their faces. Like a fat tranny walking into the women’s changing room with a full five o’clock shadow and a shit-eating grin. Daring anyone to say anything.

In Conclusion

Alright, alright. That may not be entirely fair. BAP does occasionally offer sober and cogent prescriptions, as we saw in the above podcast clip. The problem is that he has a habit of undermining those golden moments by doing complete 180’s. In less than 6 months he went from “you must emphasize race and not be afraid to assert your superiority and the inferiority of others” to “you shouldn’t talk about race.” It’s difficult to discuss an abrupt about-face such as this without using the word “schizo”.

I think of it as a sort of motte-and-bailey employed by the frogs. You make allusions to grand and poetic schemes but when pressed for a real prescription you simply offer something pragmatic and downright banal. Compromise. I recently witnessed another great example of this motte-and-bailey. It’s the type of thing that once you notice you will start seeing over and over.

Do you see? Allusions to some ethereal ideal that we are supposed to be working towards, but when pressed on exactly what that ideal is, we’re told to help the GOP win elections. Sure, we all know Trump has to win. But I thought the whole point of this “dissident right” is to push ideas that are foreign and taboo. When pressed further The Captive Dreamer simply stops responding, something that is very easy to do on Twitter.

That’s all for today. Likely this post will earn me a few more unfollows. Allow me to just say that I strongly dislike right-wing infighting. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But I have watched his feud between BAP and Fuentes raging for over 3 years now, from the sidelines, biting my tongue and attempting to avoid taking a side. With Fuentes back on Twitter that no longer feels possible.

I respect BAP. I think he’s very intelligent, well-educated, funny, and a very talented podcaster. Believe it or not, I like him. I just think he’s setting a bad example for people and that that nigga needs to find God and stop leading people down the road of iniquity. These are honest and sincere criticisms I have and I’m happy to discuss them with anyone that wants to push back. I look forward to what I’m sure will be lots of well-adjusted criticisms.

I’ll probably only hammer out one of these posts every nine months or so. Writing is hard and I suck at it. Feel free to follow tho if you enjoyed this. And, for anyone unaware, my main medium is live-streaming. You can find my socials here.

Catch you on the flipside.

Peace out.