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3,462 words

I fought in the Optics War for six years. Then, last December I declared that the Optics War was over for several reasons. The Right Stuff closing-up the National Justice Party project took the question of real-world activism off the table. Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes falling out over the Richard Spencer Question was a sign that old Optics War rules were no longer being adhered to by its most prominent figure. But more importantly, Elon Twitter/X had become the place for white racialists to be.

Elon essentially took the issue of optics out of our hands. He will decide what you can and can’t say. You can’t say “ZOG” or use racial slurs. You can’t call Jews pedophiles — apparently. Now, you can complain that Elon is not favorable enough toward free speech, or that he enforces rules inconsistently and at times arbitrarily, but I think there is value in having Elon as a sort of Supreme Court of Optics so that we don’t have to have those kinds of disputes anymore.

Now, however, it looks as if that Supreme Court may in fact be a League of Nations incapable of keeping peace among the pro-white factions. I fought for six years for a world where we didn’t have to debate about optics anymore, and yet I can see on the horizon that another Optics War is brewing. The lamps are going out all over Twitter/X, and we may not see them lit again in our lifetimes.

Since the events of October 7 in Israel, many on the dissident Right, particularly those who specialized in criticizing Israel, saw unprecedented follower growth on Twitter/X, some into the hundreds of thousands. Much of this was due to tweets going viral in adjacent anti-Zionist communities, particularly in the online pro-Palestine scene. This movement includes a lot of Muslims, but also includes white guys such as Jake Shields and Ryan Dawson, who are anti-Zionist but not explicitly racist.

Dissident Right figures such as Keith Woods and Lucas Gage started to build a following among this new audience. Nick Fuentes, who many assumed was washed up, enjoyed something of a social media comeback after being rediscovered and championed in the pro-Palestine scene. They come at anti-Zionism from a Palestinian perspective, and dissident Rightists have been able to contribute a more Kevin MacDonald-influenced critique of the Gaza War. They added something new to the conversation, and a lot of /ourguys/ were better spoken on the subject than theirs.

There was talk of a grand coalition against Zionism for a time, and there was a feeling that we were all in it together: the Muslims, the TikTokers, the White Nationalists, the anti-globalist Left, the normies marching in the streets, the woke college kids on campus screaming about settler colonialism. We may not agree on much, but we are all on the same side on this one issue. We each held down our own small portion of the front line, but we were fighting the same enemy in our own ways.

This development created a certain incentive structure that is problematic for the dissident Right, however. If there are massive amounts of attention and an audience to be gained by appealing to an outside group that is not explicitly pro-white and which contains many non-whites, there will be a strong temptation to “sell out” — i.e., to start tailoring your messaging to be more palatable to those groups. Water it down and sugar it up. Maybe tone down the pro-white stuff or the criticism of Muslims. It’s like when an edgy underground rock band gets a small taste of what a little MTV exposure can do for them and completely changes their style to accommodate that audience instead of their own.

All this talk of Whites making alliances with Jews, Muslims, etc… How about first we get Whites to form an alliance with ourselves before we start plotting who Whites are going to ally with from there? We’re not even capable of forming alliances until we are ourselves unified.

— Joel Davis (@joeldavisx) April 17, 2024

Joel Davis has been an outspoken critic of this trend. On March 27, Davis held an X space where he voiced his criticisms. His argument was that trying to appeal to non-whites makes pro-whites less effective at appealing to other whites. Davis believes that uniting whites should take priority, and that fostering a grand coalition with non-whites undermines this. Lucas Gage came in after an hour and 14 minutes, and the two had a debate. Gage said that it is fine to be pro-white, but that activists should not be overly hateful toward minorities. One should not hate Muslims, because after all, the Jews are the ones who brought them over. Davis replied, quite reasonably, that if a bunch of Muslims take over your country and start raping girls, you are well within your rights to hate them. The stream is worth listening to because it illustrates an emerging fault line on the Right.

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A few days later and out of the blue, Nick Fuentes issued a full-throated denunciation of “ideological White Nationalism” on the grounds that it is too egalitarian.

Fuentes has always had a disproportionately high percentage of non-whites among his followers and has conducted extensive networking with non-whites. He also has shaky relations with the broader pro-white community and several high-profile non-white supporters. He therefore has cynical reasons for taking this position.

Return of the wignats . . .

Meanwhile, the remnants of the old wignat community have slowly been migrating from Telegram back over to Twitter/X, with those who were permabanned doing so under anonymous accounts. The Right Stuff network, who were initially skeptical of Elon Twitter, have since been convinced by its potential and have instructed their audience to get on X. In a recent episode of The Daily Shoah, Seventh Son told his listeners:

There are things happening on these other platforms. There’s nothing happening on Telegram. . . . Telegram is a prison and sometimes it’s a prison for good ideas. Take those ideas and put them on Twitter and you can fight it out with the Jews.

Another group that has recently set up camp on Twitter/X is the Goyim Defense League (GDL), a semi-ironic White Nationalist troll group best known for their comically bad optics. A few weeks ago, GDL star Handsome Truth attended a city council meeting in Palm Beach, Florida where he gave a stirring speech railing against Jewish power before ending his speech with “Heil Hitler”: