Aesthetic Dead Ends

Zionist Vibes, First-World Polemics, and the Real Stakes of Trump 2024

Alaric the Barbarian delivers a pro-fraternity perspective in an article entitled ‘Aesthetic Violence.’ Recent pro-Palestinian protests by the left occasioned counter-protests from campus fraternities. Some counter-protestors were pro-Zionist Jews. Many were White. They protected the Stars and Stripes. One White student from Ole Miss racially engaged a black, pro-Palestinian woman. He was promptly expelled from the fraternity. Meanwhile, Fox News promoted Jewish students from Chapel Hill who stated they were there to defend Israel.

The radical right formed a range of opinions from those facts they deemed to to be correct. Questions arose regarding who defended the flag, which “frat bros” were pro-Zionist Jews, whether “feds” were involved, and whether the Fox News narrative accurately captured the sentiments of all the frat bros, or if they were simply pro-Trump and pro-America. Alaric, on the other hand, wishes to deal with what played out at the level of what he calls “organizational logic.” I shall attempt to set forth his case as comprehensively as I can in order to offer a finely attuned constructive criticism.

Alaric devotes most of his effort to mapping out the respective disposition of forces. It will be key to establishing insight into organizational dynamics.

Left-wing students, however brown, fat, female, or hysterical, pose an implicit threat of violence. They seek to dominate institutional and social space. Once there, they link Israel to the settler-colonial oppression of White Western Civilization. It seems then, we ought to take them seriously. The boomer “snowflake” rhetoric has to go.

Behind the sit-ins and tantrums lurk the Usual Suspects. The Tides Foundation and Soros funnel dollars into the public facing front, Students for Justice for Palestine. It’s the very same NGO-oligarch ensemble to whom the Democrats outsourced the BLM color revolution against Trump.

In this current scenario, the Democratic establishment finds itself at odds with the extended regime of liberal governance. Leveraging the institutional fracture to right wing advantage, as suggested by Rufo, has faced opposition from a "third-worldist fringe" within the right, notably represented by Fuentes and his "groyper" movement. While Zionists appeal to patriotism and anti-Islam sentiments, the groypers cite the recent Anti-Semitism Awareness Act as evidence of ongoing Zionist misdeeds. They are prepared to ally with the third world if only to rescind Zionist capture of American sovereignty.

The salient aspect of aesthetic violence lies not in the ideological codification of a demonstration, but rather in understanding the "organizational logic" that propels it. “The decisive element governing whether it is possible to impose one’s will upon the political opposition in the public square,” avers Alaric, “isn’t the direct use of violence, but belief and morale.” The left shows they have agency, that they are the strong horse, and the right is not. The spectacle they cultivate amounts to phantasmagoric brinkmanship. The right loses its nerve, backs down, and adopts the paranoid stance any form of right-wing activism is a “psy-op” run by “feds.”

At this juncture young White men - chads - entered stage right. Defying conservative expectations, they exuded strength through joy. Instead of the usual rounds of carousing, shitlords beat back spiteful mutants and looked good doing so. The boys correctly intuited the continuity of sentiment behind lockdowns, BLM, and anti-Israel activism. Despite Fox News endeavoring to cast a glowing Star of David on their exploits, these bands of brothers confronted the uniform substrate of leftism itself.

By delving beyond the world of mere appearance, a thorough-going analysis uncovers the elemental levers of political conflict. The lens of “organizational logic” translates the criteria for endorsing a right-wing actor from ideological affinity to questions of mobilization. What’s the smart way to do it? What enhances morale? How can aesthetic violence, as opposed to actual violence, wrong-foot the left? Rather than prioritizing who stood for what on the right, and in what context, emphasis shifts to who mobilized effectively and how. Whatever guise the left adopts, he who strikes it strikes true. Stripped of “wordcel” embellishment, the left's primary motivation becomes evident: anti-Whiteness.

So end Alaric’s contentions. I find myself ushered along a broad and easy path, one well lined with Arguments, but missing pivotal considerations if the right is to make real progress. Alaric overlooks the distinct priorities of mainstream MAGA and the radical right. Who is his message intended for? MAGA, the GOP, Populist Inc, and Fox News require no persuasion; they embrace it already. So, is it the groyper third-worldists who should pay attention? If so, what about those of us who oppose Zionism not out of love for the Palestinian but due to its malignant distortion of Western sovereignty? While the "organizational logic" thesis intentionally blurs the line between mainstream and radical right, the failure to acknowledge the most coherent radical right position is worth noting.

Emphasizing organizational logic inevitably leads to the collapse of factional distinctions. Under the rubric of “aesthetic violence”, what counts is dealing a significant blow to the left. The technique’s efficacy justifies the radical right accepting the actions, effects, and motivations of the parties employing it.

As a standpoint, it does not strike me as especially vital. Standard-issue conservatives of whatever stripe are retarded. They have little to no grasp of the “real conditions of their existence.” It took a centrist liberal from New York to convert their residual political instinct into something to be reckoned with. Without Trump, they would be solely fixated on China, abortion, the unconventional conservatism of TERFism, and, of course, Israel.

“Aesthetic violence” updates the playbook with young White men placed front and centre. Assigned an exigent ‘right-wing’ label, they are cast in the role of capital R Reaction, notwithstanding their political naivety and inexperience. As we shall see, they unwittingly fell into the tyranny of the given.

There’s a basic distinction in sociology between agents and structure. Structure shapes the navigation of agents, and the cumulative decisions of agents sediment into structure. Societies, then, have a small-c conservative tendency. Agents tend to follow existing pathways, and that, in turn, shores up the extant socio-political infrastructure. Agents who effect change consciously act in ways which produce new structures.

Successful political undertakings combine positive emotional energy with structural transformation. The concert of the two inspires a virtuous cycle. Emotional energy sustains a struggle for structural renovation. New political forms serve as shared emblems for further mobilization. Without emotional energy, structural shifts will prove out of reach. Absent structural thinking, emotional energy will burn off into the ether of vibes, spectacle, and prefigurative role-playing (like the wholesome chungus ruralite LARP).

It’s the deficit in structural thinking which leaves Alaric’s analysis less wrong than it is unbalanced. Organizational dynamics configure resources (personal, money, morale, media, expertise) into coherent political articulations (“power concedes nothing without a demand”). But the resources from which they draw inhere in persistent structures: a polyarchy of institutions and networks whose concerted actions determine the distribution of sociopolitical power at scale. While it is true efficient organization on the right is a legitimate pursuit, the various right wings worth counting are subject to a dire asymmetry in organizational potential. We lack strategic depth. We cannot hope to match the left blow for blow. Only when the capacity to generate roughly equal amounts of organizational force arrives does domination of public space become relevant (e.g., the street battles of the Weimar Republic).

The frats set out from a structurally cucked position in two respects. They did not “advance” from a position of strength. I will not sign on to single young White man getting his life ruined because it was deemed “aesthetic” on X. Not one. Most importantly, whatever immediate injury they dealt to the left, the wider rippling effect reinforced Zionist control over the right. The counter-demonstrations slotted into one of two pre-set positions. These pathways automatically arise from ethnonarcissistic conflicts embedded in the pluralistic organization of modern America. When competing groups gain lodgment within the legal and institutional order of a polity according to their cultural refraction of bare life, the mass democratic state finds a natural function reintegrating the society of societies into the “societal community.” Right-wing energy is uselessly expended within the strictures of the status quo. The activist left of so-called “identity politics” and the managerial left exist in productive tension. Neither intra-ethnic spats nor the frictions between function-related priorities on the left present an advantageous opening for a right-wing intervention - radical or mainstream.¹

High levels of emotional energy matter when they enable political participants to take the road “less traveled by.” If the pattern holds over the medium term, new structures coalesce to compete with legacy structures. Trump truly was a harbinger of the world to come. Avoiding culture war diversions, he focused on foundational, that is, structure-impacting policies: immigration, deindustrialization, infrastructure, imperial overreach. Whatever concessions he had to make to the old structures (Zionism, corporate tax cuts, a light response to BLM) were worth entry into a transitional phase, into what some call ‘realignment.’

Stephen Miller, Trump’s right-hand super-Jew, worked studiously in the background of the administration to master the dark arts of wrangling a hostile bureaucracy. He successfully wielded the administrative state against a slew of migration vectors, all the while remaining a committed Zionist. Although an exception rather than the rule among right wing Jews, his genuine dual loyalties (i.e., he delivered on domestic, right-wing objectives) contributed to a non-trivial change in the status quo, on balance. Nevertheless, most right-wing Jews only have a purely circumstantial right wing alignment. As an ascendant partner in a coalition, they have a strong incentive to follow the cues of the structural status quo. It currently gives them whatever stuff they want (bombs, Golan Heights, IMEC Corridor, diplomatic cover) while also securing the conditions for getting whatever they want (inter alia, pluralism, a normative centrality for American Jewry/the Holocaust, and an interventionist foreign policy defined by “values” and “alliances” rather than interests). Instead of eventually turning the tables on them, we will be left squabbling over the crumbs which fall from the Passover feast.

In mountaineering, it’s said that a follower thinks about the task at hand, while a leader thinks about the challenge to come. Similarly, while the base may evaluate policy in terms of its first-order effects upon the domain it concerns, the vanguard must always also consider the second-order question of how it could set us up to compete better in the next round. Of course, our central policy planks should pass muster according to both criteria.

The White frat boys’ demarche gifted the libtard educational establishment and media an opportunity to make an example of the slightest deviation from bi-partisan negrolotry. Libtards and their cuckservative jannies demonstrated they remain firmly in charge of acceptable political expression on the right. Meanwhile, Trump avoided getting mired in a losing position while mostly ignoring the student protests (which likely scare moderates in his direction). He puts the onus on Israel to finish the genocide while bashing Netanyahu, reminding voters that he's not keen on expending American blood on conflicts that don't actually affect Americans. Trump offers something for everyone. “Reactionaries” turn a win (the enemy is engaged in fratricidal conflict) into a loss, in the form of a counter-protest that redounds to a negative value add.

Republicans in Congress naturally double down by adopting a prone position and offering their bowed heads as footstools for the Zionist lobby.  This conservative impulse can't be stopped, so Trump doesn't try (or complain about it).  He just goes along in the mildest way. In grasping the art of the possible, he can think three moves ahead.

Our strategic calculus is simple. Does a figure, event, or undertaking foster new, right-enabling structures at the expense of the old? If so, we lend our support and infuse it with motivational energy.

The (non-Jewish) frat bros hearts are in the right place. But in the long run, it does young White men no good if we, who ought to know better, endorse their de-facto instrumentalization by hostile forces.

It comes down to sequencing. Without setting the right wing house in order first, nationalist transformations will elude our grasp. President Donald John Trump himself put the principle best. “I often say the biggest problem comes from within. It's these sick, radical people.” Zionist Jews practice a settler-colonialism admirable in the abstract, but dependent on the practical negation of Anglospheric sovereignties. Their lobby will always cripple nativist turns in policy before they can take flight. Their elites understand pluralist institutional dynamics and cultural norms underwrite their staying power. Seething Palestinians (and anti-Zionist Jews) are just the cost of doing business (i.e., pluralism). A Zionist inflected politics would rather deal with blowback from its own agitated golem than risk an open contest with the awakened Saxon — better to reign in Beige World than serve in Based World. Anti-third worldism implies domestic anti-Zionism.

The boomer inertia backstopping this political equation has run its course. Zionist stock has experienced a precipitous decline across younger demographics and brown electoral silos. Chuck Schumer’s liberal Zionism is on life support. Zionist Jews are anxiously sidling rightward, seeking refuge from the forces they helped unleash. What they will find is a hard bargain and hearts closed to pity.

A true America First agenda will seek to systematically dismantle a spoils system which serves as the underlying structure of bureaucratized ethnic patronage (alongside the Civil Rights Act and DIE). Jews and blacks occupy the two foremost substructural facets, drain the most blood and treasure, and diverge the most acutely with the civic norms of Huntington’s Anglo-Protestant backbone. On the right, the Zionist Jew carve out has swelled to such cancerous proportions it modulates the totality of rightist institutions. Young Americans for Liberty and Turning Point USA are not conservative youth organizations who happen to defend Israel as part of their brief. Inculcating a pro-Israeli stance in young Republicans is their one and only mission. Everything else is camouflage.

Calibrating our political thinking along structural lines clarifies the role of the radical right in realignment. As a vanguard, an unequivocal embrace of the new distinguishes us from the mainstream right. It presupposes the integrity of internal messaging. Ultimate loyalties, real ideological commitments, and the designation of friends and enemies in concrete terms must always shine through polemical storms and theoretical abstraction. Nothing in such an imperative entails the joyless dogmatism of harping the “party line.” There’s no need to abandon biting polemics, or to express oneself against the dictates of prudence in an optically challenged manner One could simply state “[In] practice we face severe opposition from Jewish organizations in the West and Jewish leadership in the West. It hardly matters to me if Israelis are “based nationalists” in their own country (they are not).” With a second Trump administration in the offing, one might add that “any networks associated with pro-Zionist figures or funding count as one of the most significant obstacles to getting what we want from a ruling right-wing. Should you have the opportunity, neutralize them politically." I will leave the polemical formulation to the reader’s imagination. Either way, the positive identification of the actually existing representatives of friends and foe encourages an atmosphere of certainty and trust.

When everyone has a clear sense of the radical right’s positional integrity, we can turn a unity of focus to the matter of building bridges with the populist right. “Populist” is shorthand for “looking for leadership.” We lead not by endorsing reactive posturing, and still less by engaging in it ourselves (C’ville). Rather, we assess which possible structural changes improve the competition landscape for our purposes. Next comes the manufacture of palatable justifications (inside the current Overton window) for our preferred policies. In contrast to internal messaging, external messaging traffics in expedient rationalization. Once the effect of a policy kicks in, we rinse and repeat, each time ratcheting the center of socio-political acceptability further to the right.

Take, for instance, dealing with the issue of illegal biomass. Which strategy is more structural? Which sounds more effective? (1) We encourage “MAGA chads” to protest against sanctuary cities. (2) Our embedded personal and messaging press for E-Verify at the local, state, and federal level. Key MAGA nodes absorb the notion self-deportation follows from strictly policing participation in the labor market. We also bring to their attention the huge levels of corruption in wholesome “Red States” by Big Agri. One is exciting, one is not. One elicits a dopamine hit, the other is hard work. One reckons with the boring reality of the administrative state, the other romanticizes the politics of spectacle.

Radical right-wing politics requires a more sophisticated approach to strategy. We must hold in mind several truths simultaneously. I previously discussed the "Jewish Civil War" in a thread, advocating for leveraging the internal divisions within Jewry to negotiate advantageous terms with Zionists.² It drew the ire of the Fuentes faction, who accused me of enabling Zionist influence within the right. Once again, the right-wing struggles accounting for the multidimensional nature of politics. Dealing with Zionists necessitates establishing a baseline of integrity on the right while also managing purity spirals threatening the phasing out of Zionist influence. My friends and I advocate for a sharply delineated third way, distinct from both the "groidper" movement and “structural” Zionism. Anglo-Saxonism is our one core commitment.

1. The left is not split. The fractal lefts of parochial solidarities necessitates the top level left managing the society of “communities. The relationship is one of mutual presupposition.

“Societal community” is a term from the sociology of Talcott Parsons. “The modern societal community Parsons identified is both a generalized normative system in which all actors are linked by common rules and are legitimized – no matter how different their specific identities – by common membership and a pluralist structure of social solidarities.”

2. Important context to the thread here, here, and here. Both the thread and this Stack examine the ramifications of Zionism facing increasing headwinds in the West, and what conflict and cooperation will look like within the realistic scenario of a temporary transactional coalition as we prepare the American public to ratchet further to the right on ethnic lobbies (think: Alien and Sedition Acts).