Some Thoughts on Syria, the AltRight, and Trump

First a few words…

So I’ve neglected this blog for a while now. Truth is I’ve been a little busy, and a little bit bored. I’ve neglected social media as well. Mostly I’ve just been hanging out on various AltRight Discord channels and talking with like minded people waiting for Summer and planning my future.

But now I’m thinking for sure my future will involve some form of public face. I’m interested more in culture than politics, but politics these days dominates culture and interacting with it is unavoidable. So I’m possibly going to do more interviews with writers. I enjoyed meeting and talking with them over the previous few months and Gab seems to be a little livelier these days than it had been in January and February.

So I think I’m going to make a little use of my background in military and European history today and put forth some of my opinions on the Syrian airbase attack as well as what it means for Trump and the AltRight. This might be a little stream of consciousness as well. Please forgive me. It’s not an in-depth analysis of anything, just a few thoughts. And really, isn’t that what a blog is about?

So first of all the attack on Syria.

It’s disappointing. I’m hurt by the fact that Trump went back on his campaign promise to not involve America in any unnecessary wars. And make no mistake about it, American involvement in a war in Syria is unnecessary. I’ve heard people on Gab talking about how we can’t let human rights violations go unpunished.

1. We’re not the world’s police. We have no moral or military obligation to “punish” anyone for anything. If you believe we do, then please go watch Black Hawk Down and tell me and the Rangers, Seals, and Deltas (and their families) what obligation we had to provide food to the people of Somalia in 1993. It’s okay, I’ll wait. Since the end of the Second World War there has been a drumbeat of politicians who want America to fight for the hearts and minds of the world via humanitarian missions. The notion that we have the responsibility to hold anyone accountable for “human rights violations” is to be polite, misguided. To be not so polite, it’s fucking absurd.

2. People have indicated that Assad did not have the chemical weapons. Here is a report from the Washington Post from 2014 indicating that Syria had turned over the last of its chemical weapons. It’s possible that it’s all bullshit. But let’s assume a leopard doesn’t change his spots. The people now on social media talking about how Obama and Kerry failed to get all the chemical weapons from Assad are the same people who lied through their teeth about there being nuclear weapons in Iraq. Fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me. I don’t trust these neocons and neither should any thinking person.

I’m not sure where this will lead. But you know what? Neither does anyone not in Trump’s inner circle. Lots of people on the right are saying we’re heading for WWIII. Possibly, but let’s hold off on that hysteria for a moment. Yes I’m mad about the attack on the Syrian airbase as well. But the fact that one attack happened doesn’t mean it will escalate. Remember it took politicians in Washington to turn the Gulf of Tonkin incidents wit the USS Turner Joy and the Maddox into the Vietnam War. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail.

About Trump and the AltRight…

Richard Spender of altright.com has posted a video you should watch. He is about as close as the AltRight has to an official spokesman so we should give some weight to what he has to say. Now I don’t agree with everything he’s been posting lately, but he is influential and thus we should take him seriously. Here is the video.

I know it is tempting to jump ship on Trump. We need to preserve our values and if Trump is going to betray us why should we stick with him?

The answer is quite simple: because it’s the closest thing we have to access to power right now. If we abandon Trump now he will be overwhelmed by neocons and in addition to war in the Middle East we’ll likely never get our border wall or the immigration reform he campaigned on. And if the demographics shift any further to the multicultural side, 2020 and beyond may become unwinnable. What then? We sit in our chat rooms and share MoonMan videos, Pepes and make jokes while Bernie brings in Somalians and Pakistanis? Sorry but that smacks too much of my libertarian days where we talked about theory all the damn time but never got anywhere.

Now, I’m not suggesting we change our beliefs or cuck out and go all in like we were posting “based” “dank” memes on r/The_Donald, but we need to understand that Trump is under a hell of a lot of pressure from people who hate him, and us. Every neocon and #NeverTrumper on Twitter and Reddit is gloating about the air strikes. They’ve turned a political defeat for their side into a (hopefully temporary) victory.

Fine. We all knew Trump was a businessman and a deal maker when we got on the TrumpTrain. That’s part of how we sold him to undecided voters, remember? Indeed on the eve of his victory he promised to be a President to all Americans. Unfortunately that also includes Bill Kirstol and Rick Wilson. Lindsey Graham and John McCain are happy again. It makes my stomach turn to know they feel joy today.

They scored a victory. But we can’t let an attack turn him into their puppet.

About the AltRight…

What happens to the movement if we simply turn up our noses and take our ball and go home? The AltRight has been the center of attention for months now. At least since Hillary’s stupid speech in August. This is attention that Vdare and AmRen didn’t get in years of posting. Don’t assume that it will continue. The left hates us and wants us to go to prison or be beaten to a pulp. The TruCons hate us and want us to go away so they don’t have to distance themselves from us at cocktail parties.

The legacy media and the cucks at National Review Online would be happy if they never had to write another article about race realism or the Islamicization of Europe again.

Continuing to support Trump, for now, is about keeping the Nationalist movement, identitarians, the AltRight, or however you identify yourself, in the spotlight and making sure we have a seat at the table.

There is the possibility that with a strong Trump administration, that we can put pro-Nationalism candidates on the ballot in some places for Congress in 2018. That would give us a little more authority. But if our voices are silenced the movement is as gone as the John Birch Society.

So, conservatives today should deal with Trump with the firmness Buckley dealt with the John Birch Society in 1962.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422461/donald-trump-affront-anyone-devoted-william-f-buckleys-legacy-george-will

And make no mistake that the neocons want their party back. There is no guarantee that the American right belongs to the AltRight today.

I’m upset about the Syria attack too. But I’m going to keep the faith, at least for a little while longer.

Now how much is a plane ticket to Budapest?

Interview with Joshua van den Ham

Well my name is Joshua van den Ham, I live in the Netherlands. Born in 1988 and i studied microbiology, ended up as a gardener and I am now busy as a community manager for Warnation and I am also one of the Co-Founders of it. I have led in GW2 the Desolation community for a while and we got to be number 1! For that time, and we were also so organized back then, that if needed, to stop a flood of band-wagoners from coming in by tanking, I even created a small system back then with multiple servers, to balance the bandwagon flood, so that they get thinned out so much that they would not make a majority anymore back then. 

So yeah I kind of have a movable life, but it’s also one that lets me keep on learning and developing. My biggest dream eventually is that i get so far myself, that I can give other people jobs, so that less people have to worry about their income and have a good time living on this planet, while taking care of their families. I have known poverty myself and also how it is if you need to take care a lot of your family as the only man in the house and i am proud to see how my little brothers and sister are growing up! Specially when my dad left, I needed to do a lot more to at least try to fill that role a bit for them.

Thank You Chris Metzen, for Giving Me More Time With My Brother

Chris Metzen has announced his retirement. I’m not shocked, but I am happy for him, and thankful for the role he played in my life.

I’m a gamer, and have been since I was about five years old when my mom left my brother and I to play arcade games at Mr. Gatti’s Pizza. My mom worked for a computer manufacturing company called Texas Instruments and one Christmas she bought us a TI Basic. We had a ton of  fun playing that thing. But we had consoles, we got an NES in 1986 and that kicked off our obsession with gaming. In 1994, the year I graduated from High School my mom bought me a desktop without much power. It was supposed to be for writing college essays and so she reasoned, it didn’t need much in the way of a processor or a graphics card.

I upgraded quickly.

Gaming in the 90s was awesome. It was the wild west in terms of what was available. Doom was one of my favorites. Then I discovered a game called Starcraft. My obsession with Blizzard had begun. I played for hours on end, only taking a break to read my assigned books or do homework. I had several frustrated girlfriends who complained about how they could never call me because I was always online playing Starcraft or later Diablo II and the xpac Lord of Destruction. Then came Warcraft III and The Frozen Throne. These were wonderful games that filled my imagination with things I had only ever read about in the great fantasy novels of my youth. It was as if someone had, by force of will, brought Middle Earth into my life.

I was alone a lot growing up, with the exception of my brother. We were close until he was thirteen and started doing drugs. I think in hindsight, and after many years of therapy that his drug and alcohol addictions were him self-medicating for schizophrenia. After his death my mother told me he spoke to dead relatives, called the cops because his Christmas tree was attacking him, thought he had been abducted by aliens among other things. I never knew this about my brother. I simply cut him out of my life when he was about fifteen because I could not take his drug and alcohol use.

Then in 2005 I went to visit him for Thanksgiving and he introduced me to a game he had been playing called “World of Warcraft.”

He let me roll a toon on his account to see if I liked it. I made a Night Elf priest and stayed up all night spamming star shards and smite at nightsabers and owlkins in Darkshore. I love it. When I got home I subscribed and created a gnome mage. We played Alliance because my brother just had to play a sexy female paladin and at this time pallies were ally only. We quickly leveled and got into a great raiding guild. We were farming MC and BWL in blues and some greens. (I remember kind of skipping Z’G except to get a few items for people who would not shut up about it). We got into the top guild on our server and opened AQ40 together. We pvp’d in Altrac and Arathi and Warsong and had so much fun. (To say nothing of Southshore – I miss world pvp). I would pew pew and he would follow me and heal me.

Burning Crusade was even better. We plowed through content eventually earing a spot in our server’s top guild. Server firsts were normal. We were respected and I made a lot of friends in guild. This at a very isolating time in my life. I was working on my MA and was surrounded by shitlibs. So it was nice to have friends I could talk to. But most of all it was nice to have my brother back.

But there was a dark side to it. My brother had a severe alcohol problem. He had kicked the coke and meth years before, but he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day. His health got worse and worse as time went on. He would fall asleep during raids, or fail to show up at all. I became an officer in our guild handling recruitment, and stalled on finding a replacement (shortly after server transfers were allowed). But I didn’t want to replace my brother. I knew without WoW he would have little to nothing in his life. He would be gone.

One day the other officers sat him down and asked him to leave since I refused to get a replacement. He understood and accepted their decision. I was right. Two months after leaving the game he was admitted to the hospital with severe liver problems. Then Wrath dropped. He would not be able to level fast enough to get into a good guild. So I stopped playing for a while and took the opportunity to spend time with my brother. We bonded again out of game and because of the game. We were at each others throats over his drug and alcohol problems for about a decade. But WoW and Chris Metzen helped heal old wounds.

My brother died of complications due to liver and kidney failure in February of 2009.

I miss him every time I log into WoW and see the bags he made for me that say “Made by Cyannide”

But I am thankful for the time I got with him. Metzen helped heal old wounds. He gave me a lot of good memories of my brother. I’ll never forget watching my brother, OOM, spam heal our MT on Vashj as I shot fireballs at her trying to bring her down. We were the only three left standing when we got that kill.

So Chris Metzen is moving on to spend time with his family. I respect that. He’s accomplished more than most of us ever will. But most of all, he built an imaginary community of friends, and brought my brother back to me. Even if it was only for a little while. Thank you Chris.

Alt-Right Entryism and a Lesson from Metallica

When I was in elementary school some friends and I got ahold of Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning.” This was the beginning of my love of metal. Eventually I became a musician playing in metal bands in my hometown and even opening for some big name bands. Life was fun. I had friends, not too many, and I wasn’t going to win any popularity awards, but most people knew me and I knew them as well.

Then in 1989 Guns ‘n Roses released Appetite for Destruction. Suddenly there were all kinds of kids, preppies and grits, we used to call them, that were interested in our music. We gave them pointers, taught them how to play guitar or drums, introduced them to people like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson to name a few.   But the Metallica dropped what would be known as “The Black Album” and overnight the preppies and grits were wearing Metallica shirts and learning the intro to Enter Sandman.

For those of us who had been into metal since the 80s it was shocking. Really shocking. These people who didn’t pay any attention to us now wanted to be our best friends. They wanted to come over to our houses and play Metallica covers. They wanted us to give them guitar lessons. In short, they wanted to be “in” with the new cool kids. But most of them didn’t realize that a lot of us were into metal because it expressed the rough childhoods many of us had. It spoke to us. They didn’t realize that.

And when we started to invite them in, we suddenly realized they didn’t want to be in because they loved what we loved, they wanted in so they could change what we loved. So we ultimately rejected them. Then the Metallica moment passed, and grunge became the undisputed genre of the 90s.

Was it a good idea to keep the preppies at arms length? I don’t know. In hindsight I suspect we could have taught them to love what we love, but we didn’t. We wanted our culture and our music to be pure. If you weren’t there at the beginning you had not place.

And this is what brings me to the alt-right today. There has been a lot of discussion on what constitutes alt-right, so I won’t go back over it. Voxday and TheRightStuff.biz among others have attempted to define the alt-right. But I’m concerned in this article about entryism. There is a bit of a paradox at work here, not unlike the preppies getting into Metallica. The alt-right is kinda cool right now. It’s young and energetic and has a lot of controversial issues. And people are willing to move to the alt-right. The catch is they must be Red Pilled so when they join our ranks, they are not infiltrating us with the intention of changing our core beliefs.

Recently I saw Milo on CNBC talking about the alt-right. Needless to say he got much of it wrong. He seems to think that the core of our values: white nationalism, stopping white replacement (White Genocide) and establishing white rule in white countries, is at the fringe.

It’s not.

So over the next few days I’ll be going over some of the groups that are attempting to claim alt-right and analyzing what their motive may be and how important it is to stop them. I’ll also address the notion that while many can’t be alt-right, they can be allies.