Alt vs. Dissident Right
Discrepancies between the Millennial Right and the Gen Z Right [Jul 9, 2024]
I always knew there were at least a few differences between the group of people who lead the Right of the mid to late 2010s and the group leading the Right today. There are pretty obvious differences between people like Richard Spencer, leader of the Right of yesteryear, and people like John Doyle, who are quickly amassing audiences of young Gen Zers.
For clarity’s sake, we will call the previous generation of RWers “Millennial RWers” and today’s batch “Gen Z RWers” since that is basically what they are. Most of the iFunny crowd—myself included—falls under the Gen Z category, whereas the Substack crowd tends to fall under the Millennial category.
I never really knew how much different these two groups are. I think this is mostly because I was never really active in the RW sphere outside of iFunny for a very long time. Even when I was on iFunny, I spent most of my years outside of iPolitics. Then I lurked. Then I changed my name and account theme and started making my first (political) textposts, and gained several hundred subs. Eventually the automod got too tedious to deal with and I moved my textposting to the ‘Stack. But even then, I was not really interacting with anyone outside our iFunny circle. For a while, the only accounts I was subbed to on here were ones from iFunny. It wasn’t until Guillaume Apollinaire started to engage with other accounts—and his engagement made its way into my feed—that I started to engage with non-iFunniers.
I say all this because I imagine most of us (iFunnier transplants that is) probably have a similar story. I know many of us do not regularly engage in irl political discourse, for obvious reasons. I also know that most of us don’t really follow RW e-celebs that much, aside from watching their YouTube videos occasionally or something like that. For the most part, our political outlet was almost exclusively iFunny, until the automod forced us to branch out.
I don’t know about you, but this was really quite a jarring experience. Most of the time, when I found a new account on here and started reading their stuff, I would see one or two good posts, and then after that it would just be like 4 posts crying about how much they hate poor people or something, and then it would go back to more normal (read: decent) posts.
Why is this? Why are so many people on Substack—predominantly Millennials—so retarded? They are basically all some degree of hedonistic elitist, and they project this idea onto everyone else.
Background and Upbringing
Most Millennial RWers come from an affluent liberal background, often with an ivy league education. In fact, I can’t really think of any major Millennial RWer that wasn’t from an affluent liberal background.
Contrast this with many Gen Z RWers; most of us were never liberal in our lives. Yes, we were not initially as far RW as we are today, but we were never liberals/leftists. Most of us came from conservative households and were either conservatives ourselves or right-leaning centrists. Quite a few of us had a “libertarian phase” or an “anprim phase” that we look back on with some embarrassment, but these are still inherently RW ideologies. In fact, these phases were usually integral in forming our current political ideologies (libertarian to fascist pipeline and all that).
Similarly, most of us are also not from particularly affluent backgrounds. Most of us are middle class. Upper middle class, sure, but not upper class. Whatever financial struggles we had/have were usually either self-imposed or only temporary, but we never had the sort of disposable income that a lot of Millennial RWers grew up with.
Most of us also don’t have an ivy league education. That isn’t to say we are uneducated—most of us do go to college—or that we have a community college education—most of us seem to attend pretty respectable universities. But we don’t have an ivy league education. I don’t think this is a bad thing, in fact I am pretty confident in saying most of us are smarter than our Millennial predecessors despite their apparently superior education. More on that in a bit.
But we don’t have the cultural background of an ivy league education, just like we do not have the cultural background of an especially affluent family, or the cultural background of a liberal upbringing. I think this is what basically all of our differences stem from, and I think there are some pretty major differences between the RW of Millennials and the RW of Gen Z.
As a few other people have pointed out already, I think these Millennial types are basically just racist liberals when you take a closer look. That is to say, they carry a lot of baggage from their elite(ist) background. Their entire life they have felt that they were not only quantifiably superior to most people, but that they were quantifiably different as well.
One implication of this is that they are very detached from the lives of the average person. They don’t usually think about them, and when they do it usually isn’t in a favorable light. Take this statement by Walt Bismarck (a Millennial RWer) for example:
Degeneracy is ruined when you make it accessible to poor and uneducated proles who have less control over their actions and can’t financially absorb the consequences of bad behavior. It fills degenerate spaces with stupid and ugly people who kill the vibe because you have to explain everything to them.1
Controversial take: degeneracy is just bad and it is always ruined. The fact that you have to talk to poor people while you are snorting coke or whatever doesn’t make it any worse. You’re still (both) degenerate losers.
This also bleeds into their ideas for public policy. They will say things about depressing the value of labor to make things better for the lower classes (depressed labor values are literally what is hurting the working class in the first place, you know this automatically when you talk to the lower class), or when they basically just treat the lower class as near-animals whose only utility is the vote they cast. Look, I’ve written about this sort of thing before.2 Yeah, the lower classes can’t really compete with the upper class on an intellectual basis (usually), but this is a retarded metric to justify your elitism on. It just doesn’t make sense. I even agree that you need some bread and circuses to keep the lower classes happy. I just have the astonishingly hot take that poor people are still people and should be treated as such.
For one thing, it’s just awful optics for you to be so elitist. At least proper liberals know that they need to hide their elitist views. Somehow, Millennial RWers missed that memo.
When you see Millennial RWer discourse, it’s all basically just buzzwords and not-so-subtle bragging about how they have a much higher verbal IQ or something. Or they are complaining about poor people. I won’t deny that most of these guys are smart, and they might even deserve to brag a little. But good God man does it get real annoying real quick.
Much of it is also very thinly veiled liberal politics. Like what exactly makes “openness to experience” inherently positive? It is, at most, a morally neutral trait for RWers. You don’t see RWers running around talking about how we need to be more inclusive and diverse, and this “high openness” business is just a verbal reformatting of the same thing, from the same people. This isn’t even an uncommon sentiment. Walt Bismarck talks about high/low openness 9 different times in this article, three of which are in the first few paragraphs. Every single time he talks about high/low openness it is juxtaposed in such a way as to paint high openness as desirable (he also describes himself as such) and low openness as a trait of the poor and stupid lower classes. This is done in a way that never explicitly states that high openness is superior and that low openness is characteristic of the low IQ. It’s that same sort of thinly veiled comment that is so characteristic of liberal discourse.
When you compare this to Gen Z discourse, the differences become starkly clear. I think one of the best examples is when Sectionalism Archive or Layne A. Jackson responding to some guy here on the ‘Stack. I remember seeing some dweebish alt-right post that Sectionalism had responded to by making some random comment about Family Guy. It was really funny and I wish I had screenshot it, but I didn’t. Anyways, to the OP and his subs, Sectionalism’s comments probably just read as some sort of internet aspie’s random access humor rather than a critique of the post. But it was a critique of the post and Sectionalism isn’t just some internet aspie. Sectionalism is a right smart bloke, and this becomes evidently clear when you see his textposts where he rambles on about anthropology (needs more boob breaks btw). He could have made a well-articulated and poignant rebuttal to the post, but making some absurd Family Guy reference was somehow much more meaningful.
In short: some of these ‘Stackers should have been shoved in a locker as a kid.
Views on Religion
One of the other effects of the rather elitist background of Millennial RWers is their rapid adoption of atheism (or some sort of pseudo-atheism) following the New Atheist movement during the 2010s.
Most of us had become politically aware in the Bush years, usually through opposition to the Iraq War and the political influence of evangelical Christianity. As teenagers many of us had been involved with New Atheism, but around the time Obama became popular there was a mass exodus from Richard Dawkins to Ron Paul, and the modal contrarian nerd of our age cohort became a hardcore libertarian. This only accelerated after the famous Elevatorgate incident in 2011, when mainstream atheism became so overwhelmed by feminism that everyone but the far left abandoned the movement.3
If you’ve spent any time in /our/ circles, then you know that Millennial RWers are almost exclusively atheists or Nietzschean Vitalist types. The latter of which may occasionally abide by some sort of loose perennialism, typically focused around Indo-European folk religions. But for the most part, they are atheists through and through. Even when they adopt some sort of religious trappings from Greek mythology or something you get the feeling that they’ve never really devoted that much time to thinking about it. It’s also not at all uncommon for them to change their religious beliefs like a woman changes clothes.
Contrast this with Gen Z RWers, who are MUCH more religious than Millennial RWers. Notice that I said “religious” and not specifically Christian, because there are also many more authentic pagan Gen Z RWers than there are Millennials. Certainly, most Gen Z RWers are TradCaths, OrthoBros, or iProts (#winning) but there are still a lot of pagans as well. And the Gen Z RW pagans are a lot more authentic than the Millennial ones. The most you will ever really get out of a “pagan” Millennial RWer is that they think the soul exists. If you press them on what they believe, they will also either crumple under any pressure or simply not know what you are talking about. Contrast this with the younger generation like Vet (for my iFunnybros) and Sectionalism, who are both pretty “deep” into paganism, which I can attest to personally. Both of these people can have in-depth conversations about what they believe (and I have done so with them) and are genuine in their beliefs.
But I would say that most of the Millennial crowd are atheists, precisely because of their involvement with the New Atheist movement I mentioned earlier. I think the primary reason for this is not because the New Atheism movement was able to put up irrefutable arguments for atheism (frankly, they weren’t but that is a topic for a future post). Instead, the New Atheism movement drew the attention of these still young Millennials for two primary reasons:
It was a form of rebellion against the establishment; Evangelicals were much more powerful then than they are now and so being an atheist was a way to “stick it to the man” as they say.
This is also part of the reason why these types adopted alt-right ideas (at least nominally). They are just sort of inherently contrarian.
The New Atheism movement was REALLY good at making themselves seems smarter than they actually were.
The result is a way to rebel against the world of your parents and your parent’s parents, while also coming off as the smartest person in the room. By associating yourself with the New Atheism movement, and by regurgitating their talking points, you could not only feel smart, but you could also seem smart.
But what Lionel, and basically every other “RW intelligentsia” type, fail to realize is the reason why liberals think this way. To the liberal, intelligence is something that is basically entirely environmental (even though studies have shown this is not the case). We obviously all know why that is, so I’m not going to beat that dead horse either. In any case, the liberal is obsessed with education because to them, education IS intelligence. In this regard, you are (probably) no different; both the average libfart and the average RW textposter place intelligence on a pedestal above everything else.4
The Millennial RWers take this sort of sentiment to a whole other level. And because the New Atheism movement was able to effectively brand itself as the movement of the intellectual elite, it became necessary for many of these Millennial types to join up in order to placate their ego.
Frankly, I don’t think most of these Millennials were very smart. Definitely not nearly as smart as they think they are. I think they got into ivy league schools based more on daddy’s money than anything else. But that’s just me #ShotsFired.
Either way, the result was the same: an entire generation of dweebs with no real moral code.
Many people like to style The Enlightenment as the “birth of atheism” (among other things), but this could not be further from the truth. Every major Enlightenment writer wrote about the topic of atheism and none of them wrote about it favorably. At best, they believed atheists should be considered particularly untrustworthy and be effectively relegated to second-class citizens. At worst, they argued that atheists should just be exiled from society. This is because they considered a lack of religion to be synonymous with a lack of morality, thus making the atheist untrustworthy
I agree with this entirely. Each religion may have their own moral code, and they may be different. They may even be at odds with each other. But they still have morals. Atheists do not—can not—have morals. People have tried to fabricate moral codes for atheism, like the Utilitarians. The Utilitarians were (are) retarded and their morality was extraordinarily contradictory. But people, especially leaders, need morals. You simply cannot have an atheist as a leader and expect things to work out well. When you have an atheist leader, you end up with all sorts of atrocities with lame post-hoc justifications plastered on. And then the leader gets killed.
On a smaller scale, you get these alt-Right types who are just flagrant hedonists. Or those who basically just abandon the cause once they get bored. Or both. Usually both.
Conclusion
The immediate result of this is that many of the Millennial “RWers” will lament at being associated with “chuds” and will try to distance themselves from the more authentically RW groups. This usually isn’t a problem because most of the time these types aren’t really even RW to begin with so nothing is really lost, however it can get annoying when they get a few hundred followers or something and start acting like they are God’s gift to humanity and that they will single handedly save the West or something. You know who I’m referring to here.
On the other side, the more authentically RW Gen Z gets (understandably) annoyed at the softer Millennial crowd for grifting, being fakenats, corrupting the movement, etc. Obviously, this leads to a great deal of bad blood between the two groups and results in a conflict that just endlessly feeds into itself.
This is just sort of par for the course and it isn’t going to change until one party stops caring. In my opinion, that will be the Millennials first. They have demonstrated time and time again that they are not really invested in this movement and don’t agree with 90% of the ideas and people that make it what it is. So keep making textposts making fun of oldheads, raid their coalposts, and call them niggers and faggots and the like. It’s healthy.
I was going to try to write more for this but Substack is tweaking out as I type this and it’s becoming very grating trying to write this, so I will end it now and save the rest for another post.
This one was le banger
These types deserve a millstone around the neck and a deep bog