Chris Brunet (Hailed Twice)

Chris Brunet is the one time protégé of Manhattan Institute activist Chris Rufo, for whom he did the investigative legwork into Claudine Gay’s plagiarism. Gay, the “diversity hire” President of Harvard, was stripped of her position in the midst of anti-Israel protests on campus. Most recently, Brunet has castigated his one-time mentor on X for the double standard of shielding Israeli ethno-centrism while preaching a race blind civil rights ideology in the US. To add insult to injury, Brunet alleges Rufo declined to scrutinize Bill Ackman’s wife, the Jewess Neri Oxman, in connection with the very same form of academic plagiarism for which Gay was canned. Rufo was courting Ackman’s donor dollars, and did not wish to earn the ire of a potential benefactor — especially a powerful Jew aggressively combating anti-Israel activism. In short, Brunet witnessed firsthand the manipulation of procedural outcomes underpinning the Zionist stranglehold over the institutional right.

The response from organized Zionism across right-wing leaning media followed with a vengeance. AG Hamilton, an American Jew who writes pseudonymously for National Review, took to his 179k follower account to denounce a “particular writer” (Brunet) for “antisemitism,” insisting he was projecting deep personal troubles onto “former colleagues and an entire religious group.” David Reaboi (also Jewish and a registered foreign agent with deep ties to Hungary and Qatar) struck a similar note, casting Brunet’s allegations as evidence of “psychic collapse” and a “mind virus.” Brunet’s detractors ranged into The Sphere, the ostensible hard edge of the right, with IM-1776 founder Mark Granza (an Italian national based out of Hungary) warning he was heading into a “dark place.” But this should come as no surprise. IM-1776 was fiscally sponsored by the Claremont Institute (by Granza’s own admission). Claremont and the Manhattan Institute share the funding of one Paul Singer, a Jewish billionaire hedge fund manager. Rufo has publicly endorsed the activities of IM-1776.

These various activist and media organs operate as an ensemble, each persevering within a brand sector, but always deconflicting fire, never acting at cross-purposes. On the mainstream side, Rufo browbeats his audience with the substitution of an abstract morality, the supposed “moral clarity” of Israel’s self-defence, for American interests. Challenged on his contradictory support for the Jewish State’s parochial wars when espousing (ahistoric) colourblind meritocracy, he fled to the Soros-funded COMPACT magazine to lament the relaxed constraints on free expression on Musk’s X facilitating “racialism” and “anti-Semitism.” It was a thinly veiled call for censorship. So much for the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, on the based dissident side, IM-1776 invites a “fashy” reader to fuse his self-concept with an Israel portrayed as an illiberal, “Nietzschean” dismissal of brown, Islamic, Communist Untermensch par excellence. Two pitches, one preference cascade.

What of Brunet? He himself is a rather curious case. His Canadian extraction recalls the pundits Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media sourced from a slim bank of young rightists frustrated by a left-trending country. He has admitted to being the victim of a (Jewish) fertility doctor who scrambled sperm — possibly his own — treating Brunet’s parents. It’s eminently plausible a level of anxiety inheres in his self-concept which drives a negative affectivity (neuroticism), perhaps explaining why he gravitated toward antagonistic activist journalism, and why his public presentation is riven by an erratic, impulsive style. There’s a temperament one comes to recognize in the White faces of Populist Inc, a discomfort with the self artificially balanced by excessive investment in a prefabricated cause.

As we begin to unravel the dynamics of the situation, dispassionately weighing the nature and affiliations of each actor, the insignificance of their particular cases becomes apparent. What presses to the fore is the pattern of personality formations and shaping circumstances — what decisions flow from the dispositions selected for by the determining factors of the field they inhabit? Agents behave according to institutional compatibility and alignment, true for both Granza and Burnet. No system is foolproof, however, and occasionally a cog refuses his role in the gearing. “Surely”, we think, “this must reflect the spark of individual dissent, the chaos of the human will.” If only that were true. I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear. I’m going to show where it’s dark, but have no fear.

Brunet was caught up in a constellated activist formation, not a singular instance of subversive pressure, but an entire regime of cognitive-discursive control (“cognitive warfare” the Chinese call it) enforced by mutually reinforcing elements. By dispersing operations into specialized components — by sector, by function, by name recognition — a totalizing uniformity of direction is achieved in spite of, and in reality, because of, superficial differences. For the cadres who never see “the big picture”, positional calculations are those of the blissful NPC. The tyranny of the given, once accepted, is no tyranny, but liberation from the burden of independence. But for those who reject the programming, life takes on a sinister, claustrophobic hue. Brunet’s neuroticism may explain why he wouldn’t settle for their constraining parameters of thought and action. Either way, he woke up in a nightmare world of routinized, nested exploitation stretching from horizon to horizon. Naive Patriots, like himself, were instrumentalized in service of modifying the behavior of the host nation for extractive purposes. Not only was he a victim of this parasitism, he was unwittingly complicit in it.

The sociology of domination conditions the form that the opposition assumes. A truly hegemonic apparatus hems in optionality, narrows the field of possibility to the saved and the damned. In other words, the roles are not of the players’ choosing, they are pre-ordained tracks which induce the very instability or incoherence which is then blamed for the defectors’ “irrational” break with the institutional consensus. The dissident of today’s world comports a resistance in very different circumstances to that of classical revolutionaries. Paul Revere could return from his midnight ride to the serried ranks of the Anglo stem-family, and an industrial empire in the silversmith and engraving business. Brunet has a Substack. And yet the locus of criticism is directed at his cathartic agitation, not the vast array of Zionist malfeasance that precipitated it! It’s sick.

Thus, Brunet’s errors in execution and ideological impurity deserve a degree of forbearance. Brunet has declared himself “groyper [groidper]-curious” and broached the schizo-coded “Red Heifer” meme, all the while endorsing miscegenation and framing his objection to Israel in the rights language of the post-war consensus. On the one hand, he’s creating an association between himself and the ineffectual machinations of Fuentes, and on the other, he joins Chris Rufo acclaiming a deviance which dilutes the ethnic and racial integrity of the West, and softens up our group consciousness for the very subversion he has denounced. 

Notwithstanding his shortcomings, Brunet delivered an opening salvo against the primary inhibitor of nationalist mobilization in the Anglosphere: the veto power of the right-presenting Jewish diaspora (for more on their primacy, see my previous ‘stack on the real stakes of Trump 2024). Rufo and the Manhattan Institute are far from done, but the sounds of “shots fired” sets a precedent of confrontation, and for that I hail Burnet twice, but not thrice.

The Big Accounts are basking in their Trump Victory arc. There’s a natural temptation to settle for involution masquerading as growth. They do not wish to broach the difficult matter of what follows after Trump’s final term — if in fact there is one. Rather than architecting new structures from the conceptual, aspirational, and rhetorical clearing opened up by Trump, we are currently on a recuperated¹ trajectory set by the coordinates of the mass soyciety coal-ition. We are not doing today what will enable us to do more tomorrow. Brunet may yet awaken us from our dogmatic slumber. Trump is not an end, but a means, a fulcrum for gaining purchase against hostile structuation.²

Have you ever wondered why the “groidper’s” accusations never peter out? It’s not because of a lack of counter-semitic or anti-Israel rhetoric across the scene. The answer is a glaring omission to gatekeep interlopers acting at the behest of long-standing nemeses. When Elon removed the homo-jeet throttling, we escaped from containment and attained a more central, if modest, role in information diffusion. Against this new backdrop, our inveighing against opponents is no longer purely theoretical. The enforced demilitarized zone is gone — we are directly adjacent to the marchlands of entrenched ethnic lobbies. A reasonable man measures positional integrity through the ownership of space, and Observes where compromised actors operate within our digital archipelago unimpeded. 

Rufo first garnered attention in The Sphere for launching World War T, a culture war issue the GOP could use to distract from Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. When he ousted Claudine Gay, the reception was rapturous — and understandably so. What American isn’t plagued by uppity ‘boons? But every scalp he collects (more accurately, the scalps the Young White Men in his employ collect for him) bolsters his legend and shores up his popularity, which makes him all the more effective at punching right. 

Trade Offer: we get vicarious enjoyment from Rufo targeting non-structural facets of the left’s system. Mr. Rufo gets a bully pulpit to police the bounds of our habitation and protect the structural enemy within the RW spectrum. If he can destroy a left aligned node, he can ruin any on the right like Brunet deemed insufficiently deferential to Jewish and Zionist precedence in American (and British) life. We don’t control the swivel of his guns because we didn’t hire him — Paul Singer did. Rule of thumb: the Rufo’s of the world only punch left to punch right (as indeed does Nigel Farage). Why someone punches left matters.  

So let us understand the situation. “ZOG” doesn’t capture the full extent of the subversion. Israel, the supposed end goal, is almost an afterthought. Barach Kogan (an Israeli “alt-right” Jew, probably brown) once complained DC “occupied” the Israeli government, and he was more right than he knew. We are faced with "ZG1” and “ZG1a”: Zionist Government 1 (America) and Zionist Government 1a (Israel), a full-fledged system domiciled in America of which the flagged entity, “Israel”, is an epiphenomenon. 

Either we begin a war of choice against the behemoth the Fates have spun in our course, or choose to fade into historical irrelevance. Blood (the motivated organization of spirit) can overcome money. That’s why our enemies monitor ideological developments so closely on the right — if the situation were hopeless, the influence ops wouldn’t be necessary. Yes, they may possess the commanding institutional heights, but they are afraid of the immunological response that only the right, with its instinct for biology, can muster. 

I said in the previous stack that “an unequivocal embrace of the new distinguishes us from the mainstream right.” It’s time to get hungry for real victories, to close with the immediate obstacles killing incipient momentum. “What if… the sky was relit?” Conceiving of the opposition to the Keyedstaat in abstract denominators is always easy: globohomo, GNC, “managerialism”, “the regime.” Narrowed antagonisms have consequences — for both parties. As a maturing force ten years into the Trump era, we must demonstrate our independence in deeper waters by designating friends and enemies in concrete terms. Unlike Trump or Stephen Miller,  RUFO ET. AL. insinuate Eichenwaldian tentacles into our scene, juice off our engagement, then pivot to counter-signalling and canceling. 

For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself… Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong. - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

There is no skipping the rocky adolescence of the 21st century radical right. The shielding willows above the rivulets where the first frogs matriculated on the net of the before times have passed out of reach — forever. We cannot afford the narcissistic fusion fantasy of “fitting in”, or more precisely, kidding ourselves that a boutique set of conceptual filters (“TND”, “longhouse” etc.) necessarily precludes an accommodation with the normalgroid status quo. Most assuredly, we have to employ calculated, smart tactics, avoiding head-on firefights with the enemy. But we can harry him from hill and ravine of narrative climbs, intercept his indoctrination of rising generations, and eventually gather the resources to change the incentive structure for aspiring talent in journalism, local GOP politics, and the staffers of populist politicians. Money talks, Zionism walks. Everywhere little micro-fascisms can be cultivated, each searching for the next, concatenating to macro, resonating in a giant black hole capable of swallowing the best laid plans of the semitico-cuckservative entente.³ 

Rationalizations for avoiding the coming conflict spring readily to group transactive memory. Transactive memory constitutes the knowledge exchange circuits of a defined population, which consists of individual understandings linked to meta-memories tracking the whereabouts of specific expertise, and how to operationalize them in concert. The operating assumption among the commentariat of the radical right are those of Sam Francis’ middle-American radical, the disenchanted rearguard of the polity no longer content with merely moderating the advance of race communism. These intuitions are fine as catalysts, welcome in fact, but they cannot serve as a permanent strategic compass. The default presumptions of the middle class are projected onto the designs of the various elites, each element of which is accustomed to a much deeper field of optionality.

The well-off Trump voter conceives of his wealth as a means of lifestyle: the boat, the McMansion, the Camaro, the two vacations p/a. Soros, Koch, Omidyar understand capital is power, a fluid measure of power differentials indexed to relative potential impact. A correlative of this greater potential for mobilization is the consciousness of strategic depth, of room for error, for a politics of maneuvre. If Section 8 housing threatens to “equitably” liquidate Ned Flanders’ neighborhood, he has few, if any good choices at his disposal. Either he endures rapid declines in a viable family environment, or takes the capital loss and works the overtime (or sends the wife out to work) to afford a new mortgage in a n-frei exurb. His political instincts mirror the reactivity attending socio-economic precarity. “A move” is interpreted along a single dimension, and considered the decisive settlement of a problem set. 

When Ackman floats an “anti-woke” balloon, the middle-American poster regards Ackman as decisively moving in favour of his preferred politics, “coming round” if you will to “common sense” after an “elite flight of fancy.” Alas, he has not been Lobe-bombed; he is proceeding from a position of strength — and it’s a position he knowingly used to fund DEI candidates, open borders, and the de rigor slew of think-tanks and lobbyists (and sometimes journowhores) who serve as Praetorian Guards in an informationized economy. The approach of a man heading an empire within an empire contrasts markedly with the patterns of survival and lifestyle in the middle of the bell curve. Theda Skocpol showed decades ago that the competitive advantage of organized politico-civic pressure groups threatened the conceptual assumptions of “one they/them, one vote.” Ackman, Singer, the Wilks brothers, Thiel, and Musk have the advantage of strategic depth. They’re the oligarchical equivalent of Russia. They can lose “Kurk Oblast” without blinking. Their citadels promote responses which seize the initiative since they can afford to sustain damage while making preparations. The pluralist politics of the mass democracy, a recrudescence of the old imperial technique of “divide and rule”, buffer their ascendency in the hierarchy. Each subaltern faction expends resources jockeying with peers. The oligarchs, and sometimes other centres of power in the polyarchy, pick the temporary winners.

Ackman takes stock of the state of play and sits back to figure out how to have his cake and keep his precious Ns (as I saw the expression abridged recently). He’s got what the PUAs used to call abundance mindset, i.e., several plausible ways he can fuck you and your peer opponents (pro-Palestinian shitlibs and browns). One way involves mutual neutralization by propping up a rough parity of forces . The Iran-Iraq war was a military version benefiting Israel — two sworn enemies grinding each other into politico-military heat death within the regional security complex. Whatever aid either received (from the West or the Soviet Union) brought forth an emergent instrumentalization. The plutocratic class are not “seeing the light.” They are repositioning pawns, and the layout of the pawns, once completed, equates to an instrumentalizing paradigm. Instead of structuring, we are getting structured.

The NRx/Generative Anthropology formula of “becoming worthy” of a patron is a related exercise in wishful thinking. The left did achieve a victory along these lines through the combination of the campus social milieu and large-scale ideological inculcation (“The_Raped”). Millions of trigglypuffs and bikecucks were molded for George Floyd worship and steadily transferred to the hiring pools of corporate America. This, more than “capitalist class warfare” accounts for “woke” sentiments in business culture. But we lack a deep well of human capital for the time being. We are not the tail that wags the dog. Our order of battle requires an economy of force, zeroing in on vulnerable chokepoints in the enemy’s centralized, top-down organization. I could imagine a Brunet exit from Zio-world calibrated to achieve a much greater fallout were the right preparations made.

We are not a force that can substantially influence the electorate, let alone the established elites, through mass messaging (although doing this where possible without cucking is still worthwhile, such as Captive Dreamer’s Haitian story that broke containment⁴). Nor are we negotiating on the floors of parliament with our mainstream-right counterparties, bargaining over the details of a binding resolution that will End Wokeness and replace it with something new. As such, we gain little on the mass influence front by moderating our stance toward compromised operatives, and lose a great deal by confusing the rising generational elite in our orbit — the very segment where our potential impact is greatest and most consequential.

Taking stock of our limitations should not plunge us into a world of omnipresent occult forces, the paranoid style in which Alex Jones externalizes the disquiet of his discombobulated audience. We can step forward in the Kingdom of Darkness and say NO; negate the negation, find within ourselves the will of an uncompromising generation. Speaking with the up and coming cohort of young guns, I’m struck by the strength they draw from reality contact. Their cognitive style is a potent combination of the idealistic and practical, an equilibrium of the extreme for the post-populist moment. They are our first priority. Only the diffusion of well-resourced young men into Western power verticals will ease the constraints preventing the articulation of populist agendas. 

So I entertain no illusions we can “defeat” the Manhattan Institute by xosting angrily into the void (as Brunet seems to think, sadly). Rather, our object revolves around shoring up political identities - conceptual “builds” - formed completely independently of the enticements the kosher right employs to discharge right-wing energy (including the most radical versions) in a neutralized form. The standards of positional integrity enacted today will inform the willingness of a future elite to choose conflict over accommodation tomorrow.  “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.” The bracing effect of real enemies in the here and now imposes the need to be strong in preparation for the showdown to come. 

Besides, what we have said does not concern any nation in particular, nor even the present time. It concerns the time when things will become serious, globally, not merely for the interests of the bourgeois, capitalist world, but for those men who know and, at that point, will still be able to gather together into an unshakeable bloc. - Evola, “The Decline of Heroism” in Metaphysics of War [italicization added]

1. A term from the situational Marxists which means radical intentions or signification are neutralized by the context in which they play out. 

2. “Structuation” implies what’s apprehended as “structure” is not set in stone for all time. Rather, it is a dynamic equilibrium of agents and the projects they initiate and in turn are produced by.

3. ‘Micropolitics and Segmentarity’, from A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari).

4.  Notably, the Haitian cat-eating story was disseminated without any concessions to race-blind ideology on our part. The left understood this racialist overtone, as could be seen in their extreme seething at the mainstreaming of a narrative premised on the otherizing of racial aliens.