Bootcut and Low Rise: Race, Nationalism, Holocaust Revisionism, and Men's Fashion in the 2000s

I.

 

I read Angelo Plume's journey through the history of the past 14 years with great interest, not only because his impressions of the 2020s and the 2010s mirror my own, but because his journey ends at the same destination that many people in the movement have found themselves at: at the end of the line. In keeping with most ideological polemics written by those in the movement today, Plume's essay takes a negative and pessimistic view of the present and the future, and while that view is not one that I disagree with entirely, it is one that ought to raise the question, 'How on earth do you expect it to attract a following?'.

 

If we are to look to the history of politics since the beginning of recorded time, we see that no political movement has won power with the message that life is bad today, that life will be worse tomorrow, and that there are no answers. Experience shows that politics relies on simplicity and that it seeks simple solutions to difficult problems. Take Marxism, for example: life in Europe in the 19th century in the works of Marx is portrayed as hell on Earth; but fortunately, the way Marx tells it, the answer lies close to hand, and the misery of the working class will be resolved in the fashion of a 19th century comic opera or melodramatic novel; that is, there will be a happy ending. Today, the communist movement lacks that certainty, but so does the 'Alt Right' or dissident Right or white nationalist movement.

 

Some in the white nationalist movement project apocalyptic, millenarian, chiliastic futures, but others are smart enough to know that Western man has lived through the 'end times' many times - just look at European man at the time of medieval Europe - and they know that eschatology has every time come to naught. In any case, I do not think that apocalypticism, the breakdown of civilisation, and a reversion to Darwin’s 'survival of the fittest' accord with human nature; if we ever did see the breakdown of civilisation, and the end of electricity, gas, running water, sanitation, shopping malls, and supermarkets, then women would make sure that men had all these up and running again in no time. It is women's nagging men that drove men to devise these luxuries in the first place.

 

To return to Plume: Plume's problem relates to what we moderns call the 'standard of living', the 'quality of life', and what Aristotle called the 'Good Life'; and the doctrine of vitalism, associated with Nietzsche and Shaw, comes into it as well.

 

To explain how it is that these doctrines relate to the present, I will point to today's media. Every day, I check the news. And unlike my boomer parents, I do not read newspapers; instead, I look at websites. On my morning reading list can be found over two dozen conservative sites and under ten dissident Right sites. They serve up a diet of endless bad news, so much so that I have taken to calling my morning news the 'bad news bulletin'. Are the journalists writing this news portraying real life? No, says Nietzsche: no individual can sum up the value of Life with a capital 'L'. These journalists are portraying life as they see it, however, and that puts me in a difficult position. When reading the bad news bulletin, I do not disagree with the facts as presented, but I do ask myself, do the facts entail that life in the Anglosphere as these journalists see it is worth living? Judging by the articles, the answer often is no. The writers will make the rejoinder: 'No, what I have written for this week's column does not sum up my attitudes towards Life; when you read me, you caught me on a bad day'. Besides which (and this is the conservative writer speaking), 'All of America's problems will be resolved once we re-elect Trump'. My response is: perhaps, perhaps not, but it seems singularly unwise to stake the future of your country and the future of yourself on the election of one man.

 

Having said that, the coming to power of a distinguished leader can mark a turn towards the Good Life. Hitler was once quoted as saying - and I cannot find the origin of the quotation - 'We National Socialists have proved that Germans can live, and live well, without the Jews, and this is the hardest blow we have struck against them'. That quotation, if genuine, shows that Hitler valued 'living well', Aristotle's Good Life; and in part it explains the continuing appeal of German National Socialism eight decades later.

 

We can think of other societies and nations in other historical epochs that valued the Good Life, and among these is the Roman. For centuries, the Romans lived lives of refinement, as we have seen from their architecture, their houses, their clothes. Not every Roman approached the standards of the Roman upper class, of course, but any falling short hardly mattered; it was only the overall standard that mattered.

 

So, when considering overall standards, the question we in the West in 2024 ought to ask is this: is there any time in the recent history that we have overall, like the Romans, followed a certain standard that entailed the Good Life? And if we are no longer abiding by that standard, why? And surely any obstacles that stand in the way of our reaching the Good Life can be overcome - any difficulties smoothed over, ameliorated, if not resolved altogether, by politics?

 

The inspiration for this essay came to me in the lockdown years, when to pass the time, I watched past episodes of a long running daytime American NBC TV drama. In one episode from 2006, two of the heroes were sitting in a bar drinking a beer while ‘deep house’ music blared in the background. Both characters were played by men who were in their fifties but who looked young for their age and who had not let themselves go to seed. They were reasonably well-groomed and were dressed in the casual clothes (including the bootcut jeans) that were fashionable at the time. And I saw in later episodes that the two men's wives were equally as well-dressed and groomed; that the two couples lived in middle-class homes; and that the homes were well-furnished, clean, and full of light and air. Now, all this sounds unremarkable, and so it is; but you must consider that at the time I was viewing the show, simple pleasures such as drinking with friends in a bar were denied to me. And because of the closure of barbers, hairdressers, beauty salons, gyms, and retail clothing outlets at the time, it was quite easy for one to enter a state of dishevelment and hence self-degradation, the outcome sought after by our Covidian masters, who would arrest you if you had the temerity to walk outdoors without wearing a surgical mask. So, I envied these characters on my TV screen, and I wondered at the fact that once - in the America of 2006 - living the Good Life was the norm. For people in the years 2020 to 2022 had become quite deranged, and even though I liked to think in those years that I was holding myself aloof from the madness, gradually the madness came to infect even me, and like them, I began to lose touch with reality; but ironically, my contact with it was restored by my watching an old American TV show.

 

After the experience, I set myself the task of coming up with answers to two questions: what is normal? and what is the Good Life?

 

II.

 

The politics of the 1990s has been written about many times, and most of the writings revolve around the themes of the 'End of History' and the 'End of Politics', as we see in this Travis LeBlanc piece here. In America in the nineties, Far Right politics travelled along the same road as mainstream politics; both preached the doctrine of the 'End of Ideology' and 'End of Politics'. The white nationalist movement, the militia movement, the survivalist movement, all eschewed politics and participation in civic life, and the members of these movements isolated themselves in compounds and camps, the most famous being William Pierce's compound in rural Virginia, there to await the end of the world, which would occur in the year 2000 perhaps. 

 

On the Continent, the decade saw the slow rise of Far-Right populism. Interesting possibilities presented themselves after the reunification of Germany, and liberal observers feared a resurgence of German nationalism, but they need not have bothered, because whatever 'Neo-Nazi' movement there was in reunified Germany was overtaken by the skinhead movement, which was as apolitical as could be.

 

Far more interesting a subject than nineties politics or the lack thereof is how people lived. Were white people better off in the nineties? We could give the rote answer that our dissident Right ideology compels us to give, which is yes, the residents of the Anglosphere were far better off because while the Great Replacement was occurring in that decade, it had not yet picked up steam; in the case of Australia, the annual intake of immigrants would not reach the hundreds of thousands until the following decade.

 

On the other hand, one answer to our question, and one stock standard white nationalist answer, would be no. The Dukes, Metzgers, Pierces, would point to Jewish power, which to them seemed especially pronounced in the nineties. Even worse was the fact that little awareness of the Jewish question and the question of Jewish power and influence existed. For one thing, the Internet was barely in its infancy, and hardly any respectable person had heard of Holocaust Revisionism, much less accessed forbidden works online; in those days, if you wanted to read a book by a nationalist or a Revisionist, you had to write overseas to some publisher of forbidden books. The result was that in the nineties the proponents of Holocaust Exterminationism and anti-Nazism had free rein. The Jewish party line on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the National Socialists, the events of WWII, the founding of the State of Israel were spread all over the culture. The Holocaust and WWII stories had gotten their start in the seventies and eighties and became reached their peak in the nineties; most likely the turning point was the release of Schindler's List (1993), which at the time was acclaimed by all and sundry as a moving and truthful account of Hitler's persecution and extermination of the Jews.

 

But let us put these dissident Right views to one side for the moment. If we are to evaluate how good white people had it in the nineties, we must consider how they lived. And when I look at that period objectively, I must admit that were I transported to it in a time machine and made to relive it, I would most likely be bored and frustrated. For one, I would be forced to live without modern conveniences such as the smartphone and high-speed broadband Internet, both of which we today take for granted. These luxuries, especially the Internet, have become necessities, and they are no longer luxuries; we can no longer imagine a life without them any more than we can imagine it without electricity and hot and cold running water.

 

How do we transport ourselves mentally to such archaic times? To gauge a bygone epoch, your best course is to watch its TV. If you look up '1990s men's fashions' or '2000s men's fashions' in a search engine, the results will bring up photo after photo of garishly attired rap and boy band performers; you simply will not be able to find pictures of what ordinary men wore. It is only TV that can return you to your past. During lockdown, my positive experience of revisiting the past through watching old TV shows prompted me to obtain compilations of late-nineties episodes of a popular daytime American ABC TV drama; and in these were included all the advertisements that accompanied each broadcast. This complete package, to me, proved to be revelatory; watching the TV shows and the ads from a bygone age is the closest thing we have to time travel; when you see an actor wearing a particular article of clothing, all of a sudden a vivid memory can thrust itself up into the forefront of your consciousness; you are reminded of owning that shirt or that raincoat with that exact colour and that exact pattern. In addition, the advertising brings back memories when it promotes the popular TV shows and movies of the time: when watching the ads for these, you remember with a jolt that you had seen that TV show in your living room and that movie in the cinema at the nearby mall. (Back in those days, you had to visit a cinema if you wanted to see a new movie, and you frequently did want to see that movie; for movies were more popular and significant then than they are now).

 

A sociologist would find the advertisements to be of interest because they give an insight into American life. The ads hawk the usual products - snack food, medicines, household cleaning liquids, toothpaste, etc. - and, to my surprise, medicines, remedies, hygienic items, and enhancers for everything that takes place below the belt. The brutally frank treatment of intimate subjects blows out of the water the notion that Americans are prudish about their bodily functions.

 

In the current year, we are a little wiser, and we can say that most of the worst of the afflictions suffered by everyday Americans in the nineties - afflictions such as heartburn and constipation - came about because of the American diet, which is atrocious. And the subject of diet brings us to another staple of American life in the nineties: the fat man. In the eighties, most male actors, even the middle-aged ones, looked thin, and alarmingly so. The overweight actor, e.g., John Candy, was a rarity and usually a comic figure. But by the nineties, all that had changed. We saw more and more of the chubby character, in TV shows, movies, and advertisements; first we saw him as a background character, then as a lead. Towards the end of the decade, the balding, overweight, middle-aged, usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of baggy shorts, came to epitomise the American male. He is a pathetic and comic figure, and he is a slave to his appetites, a plump buffoon who dances ecstatically at the thought of eating a box of Pop Tarts or a Rice Krispie bar.

 

The countervailing force is the stock-standard nineties action hero - the muscle man who usually wears a trench coat and a mullet. The latter signified the hero's strength, power, and virility. Nowadays, it seems gauche. And so did most of nineties men's fashion, which wanted to revive some of the worst items of fifties men's fashion, e.g. the big, loose, and baggy suit. Perhaps the nineties man liked the baggy suit because it hung on his frame comfortably, and perhaps he disliked the eighties suit because it clung tight; eighties suits were made for skinny and runty men.

 

The nineties mimicked the fashion of the fifties but forgoed the staidness of the fifties. A word that springs to mind when contemplating the popular culture of the nineties is: disorder. An underlying zaniness and freneticism, a furious energy, exists, and when you are on the receiving end of it for hours and hours, it becomes intolerable. In the nineties, if I wanted to get away from it all, I would go bushwalking with my friends, because in the tranquillity of the bush, I would be completely isolated from nineties pop culture, politics, and civilisation.

 

A conservative and harmonious side to American pop culture at the time does exist. In certain of the TV ads, we see American life being depicted as a life of comfort, ease, and serenity. See this commercial for Folger's coffee, starring country singer Randy Travis. He wakes up in the morning on his tour bus, looking improbably well-groomed and good-tempered; not for him the early morning dishevelment and hangover. Naturally enough, the beaming Travers, wearing a mullet and resplendent in a pristine white t-shirt and a pair of tight jeans, bursts into song, and he sings the praises of the Folgers brand; and you the viewer cannot help but find the music pleasing and reassuring. I am tempted to call this commercial and the hundreds of others like it implicitly white, perhaps even explicitly white, because the advertising men, knowing their market, wanted the audience to associate the product with whiteness and Americanism. And on that level, the ad men succeeded.

 

III.

 

I, like millions of other non-Americans in the Anglosphere, once found American popular culture to be seductive and enticing; now I do not. And today many popular culture afficionados who are devotees of American movies, TV shows, and comic books agree with me.

 

Some blame the politicisation of pop culture that occurred in the 2010s. The narrative goes that Hollywood and other mass producers of American popular culture had in the 2010s been infected with the new creed of Social Justice; that Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) infiltrated the American entertainment establishment and turned it 'woke'; that, using the same methods of communist infiltrators, the SJWs snuck into the great institutions and subverted them.

 

I am in broad agreement with the critics of SJWism, and one would be foolish to deny their thesis. After all, it is confirmed every day by the latest announcement in the entertainment news that a white character from a beloved franchise is being turned black, that he is being replaced by a female, that he is being turned into a homosexual, and so forth. The SJWs now parody themselves, and worse, they behaved in such a flagrantly provocative fashion that they have drawn attention to themselves - the attention of the entire world. As such, they have made American pop culture a laughingstock.

 

But what strikes me as being most important is that popular culture no longer entertains as it once did; it no longer approaches the old standard. The American entertainment industry in the old days worked like a factory, pumping out a product of a certain quality that the world came to respect. Take for example Hollywood in the years of the Silver Age, when it worked under the now maligned studio system; it churned out movies every year that were often A-grade, sometimes B-grade, but never C-grade. Audiences came to expect their entertainment to be somewhat dull but always robust; they could count on the studios to serve a meal that was satisfying and nutritious. My father, a boomer, once confessed to me that he never refused to see a Clint Eastwood movie because, in his words, 'You know what you're going to get'. But now, the rug has pulled out from under that faithful audience, and the media / entertainment complex turns out a shoddy product.

 

Thanks to the Internet, today the longtime fans of a franchise can assemble on a message board and immediately comment on a new instalment. They tend to dissect it, and they strive to work out where it went wrong and how it could have been made right. One YouTube commentator came to my attention when he suggested a brilliant fix for the movie, The Force Awakens (2015), a flawed movie that was the first instance of 'Disney Star Wars', 'SJW Star Wars'. This way the fans write better stories than the screenwriters themselves; the screenwriters, who are generally incompetent, almost have their job done for them. Fans of a franchise will take it more seriously than the writers, directors, and producers who work on it. This close attention to past and present of a franchise is needed, because the studios today seem largely indifferent. A strange apathy pervades the media and entertainment complex, and this is conjoined with a lack of professional standards and pride in one's work. My reaction whenever I encounter a shoddy instalment is to ask myself: how difficult it could be to devise a piece of escapism that is up to the standards that we all held to only two decades ago? In those days, the men who wrote the movies, comic books, and TV shows, produced decent work with little effort. But today any delivering of a good piece of work strains the capacity of we moderns, thus proving the dictum that a good artist will make the act of creation seem easy, a bad one will make it seem hard.

 

IV.

 

When remembering the decade that followed the nineties, most of us would prefer not to remember it at all; it is a decade most of us would prefer to forget. Bush, 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the War on Terror: many good things may have happened in the 1960s, for instance, but no good thing happened in the 2000s - that is the consensus.

 

What of the politics; what was it in the 2000s that benefited the dissident Right? Unquestionably, the growth of the Internet proved to be a boon; it facilitated the spread of racialism, Holocaust Revisionism, WWII revisionism, Far Right nationalism, across the West - a spread that Jewry, liberals, the Left, the Antifa were powerless to stop. Activists of the dissident Right could now communicate with ease, through message boards, mailing lists, email, and social media. Old-time hands such as William Pierce, who had been part of the movement since the 1960s, took to the new media like ducks to water, and his incendiary American Dissident Voices talks were broadcast on Internet radio every Saturday every week of the year. And those who were new to dissident Right ideas could now devour the classics online; you could read Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium (1948), Pierce's The Turner Diaries (1978), George Lincoln Rockwell's This Time the World (1961), and the key works of Holocaust Revisionism, in addition to a great many other forbidden books.

 

The idea of a decentralised network that facilitated the untrammelled free flow of information outraged Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC, and if we are to look closely at the 2000s, we can discern in it the beginnings of the end of the conventional narrative of WWII, the Holocaust, and National Socialism - the narrative touted by organised Jewish groups, American conservatives, American leftists, and all the other political groupings. Hard as it is to believe today, YouTube hosted clips that explained to viewers 'How to spot a Jew'; in a crash-course in Jew-spotting, the viewer's attention would be directed to aspects of Jewish physiognomy, including the famous Jewish nose.

 

After the advent of the modern Internet, the attention span of youth shortened, for modern youth is not given to reading; it prefers sound bites, short film clips, and memes. But even though these fragments possessed little by way of written information, they sufficed enough to shatter the belief in the Holocaust. Belief in Hitler's gas chambers slowly and almost imperceptibly became 'uncool', and over the course of years only the fuddy-duddies, the boomers who read their morning newspapers religiously and beheld Holocaust epics such as Sophies Choice (1982) and Schindler's List (1993) in rapt wonder, held fast to the Holocaust tale. Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC looked at these trends with an unease and disquiet, an anxiety that grew into a panic when they realised that punitive measures against Revisionists such as Ernst Zündel were not working; how to stamp out the unbelief?

 

Because the Holocaust is nothing but the Jewish religion. As we know from the Bible, the idea of a Holocaust, a burnt sacrifice to Yahweh, a burnt sacrifice that is in the words of the Bible of a 'sweet savour to the Lord', forms the cornerstone of Judaism. Cain murders Abel for this reason: Abel offered up dead animals to Yahweh, and Abel's offering met with Yahweh's acceptance, Cain's offering did not; for Cain offered crops to Yahweh, who, not being a vegan, wanted animals instead; and so, Cain grew jealous of Abel and killed him. The account of the offering to Yahweh, and the stipulation of the right sort of offering, lays the foundation for all the Jewish history that came thereafter. A denial of the supreme efficacy of burnt sacrifice, whether that sacrifice be of animals or human beings, flies in the face of Jewish belief, and it is tantamount to heresy. 

 

To clarify: 'Holocaust' means 'burnt offering to God'; the word 'Holocaust' appears 13 times in the apocryphal books of the Bible, and 'burnt offering’ 243 times in the Old Testament. After the Bible comes the Talmud, which is a lengthy commentary on the Old Testament; and in it can be found the prophecy that six million Jews will be put to death in giant ovens by the non-Jews, all as a sacrifice to Yahweh who will, as part of his end of the bargain, restore to Jewry the lost State of Israel. By a miracle, the six million, according to the prophecy, will be resurrected, and the survivors of the Holocaust will go on to reclaim the land promised by Yahweh to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thus, the covenant between Jewry and Yahweh will be fulfilled.

 

Judaism = Zionism = Holocaustism. Once we understand this, we can understand the fury of Jewry, the extreme anger of Jews, directed towards Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, and Robert Faurisson. These men were persecuted mercilessly because of religion: viewed from a higher plane, the struggle between the political minions of organised Jewry and the Revisionists reproduces a religious conflict; a secular Zionism does not exist.

 

But that struggle, a metaphysical one, takes place at a level far above that of the consciousness of the 'normie'; the 'normie' could not give a tinker's cuss about either Holocaust Revisionism or Holocaust Exterminationism. So far as the 2000s is concerned, I am more interested in the 'normie' consciousness than the Jewish: so, I ask the question, how did people live?

 

V.

 

This article, which features many photos, covers some of the deliberately awful fashion choices made by the characters in the quintessential nineties TV show Seinfeld (1989-1998). Deliberately vacuous, blithe, complacent, and postmodern, Seinfeld, which proudly billed itself as the 'Show about nothing', embodies the nineties spirit. The article highlights some of the more grotesque of the men's apparel of that period, and perhaps by emphasising the abnormal, it neglects the normal; that is, if we are to pay too much attention to some of the weird and attention-grabbing pieces of men's clothing, we will overlook the day-to-day outfits worn by Jerry, George, Kramer, Newman, and the other male characters. And these day-to-day outfits were representative of the time: I argue that Seinfeld is typical nineties fashion and nineties aesthetic. I also argue that, going by Seinfeld, nineties menswear - and nineties men's style in general - is to be summed up as: functional but ugly.

 

Something that stands out is the typical nineties men's shirt worn by Jerry Seinfeld; it is a billowing and flowing affair, the sleeves slowly inflating like hot-air balloons before terminating in tight cuffs. It resembles the classic pirate's shirt (worn by Prince and other eighties stars) but without the frills at the front, and it recalls the shirt worn by the men of the Californian hippie and counter-culture folk in the late sixties, e.g., the men of Californian bands such as the Mamas and Papas.

 

Seinfeld, a comedy, prefers light to neutral colours, but most TV shows and movies of the nineties were dramas and inclined to the gothic and the Romantic. As such, fashionable women used makeup that made their faces look pale. In the time of the nineties, the makers of film and TV dramas wanted the dark as much as possible, and they filmed in shadow, the result being that the dramas looked as though they had been filmed in a cave or gothic mansion. In accordance with the dark and dingy atmosphere, actresses often were clothed to look frumpy and dowdy.

 

Why did artists make these choices? If we are to take up the method of the economist or the sociologist, we can trace the gloom or the optimism of a certain epoch back to that epoch's degree of economic expansion or contraction. Art that uses bright colours and tones matches a period of growth; art that uses dark colours and tones matches a period of recession. In other words, economics determines art, culture, life. But that model, which is a simple and reductionist one, does not fit the nineties. To ascertain this, let us make use of one measure that I have touched upon in previous articles: the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) divided by the price of the gold. Without going into detail, the DJIA is the most important stock market index of the 20th century, and to determine the Dow’s worth at a single point of time, we should use gold, which is the only true measure of an object's worth. If we assess how much the DJIA was worth in terms of gold throughout nineties, we will discover the following. In January 1990, the DJIA was worth 6.31 ounces of gold; in December 1999, the DJIA was worth an astounding 40.62 ounces. Never had the DJIA attained such a height and never since.

 

Some observers contend that the nineties ended not in December 1999 but in September 2001, the month of the 9/11 attack, because often the spirit of a decade will carry over a few months or even a few years into a following decade. For example, the argument could be made that the fifties ended, and the sixties began, at one crossroads: the month of JFK’s assassination.  

 

So, if we are to identify the end point of the nineties as being September 2001, what was the DJIA's worth in gold in that month? The answer is: 31.22 ounces.  Compared to today's, the value of the Dow then is extraordinary. I leave it to the reader to look up today's gold Dow for himself.

 

We should note that these valuations of the DJIA being worth ten, twenty, thirty, or forty ounces of gold reflect an estimate by investors of the future worth of America's capital stock. In their assessments, the markets are always looking ahead; they are not interested in the past; they are not even interested in the present; they are discounting to the present, that is, calculating the future worth of an asset and comparing it to the present worth. Accordingly, to judge by the absurdly high valuations made in the nineties, the future looked bright indeed.

 

So why then was the popular culture of America, and the Western world, so gloomy, weird, and gothic? Hazarding a guess, I surmise that the cultural arbiters of the nineties were reacting to the norms of the eighties; if we are to look back to the eighties, we remember that its colours were bright and pastel and that its spirit was relentlessly, even maniacally, optimistic. If you want an example of the eighties Zeitgeist, listen to one-hit wonder John Parr's St Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion). But the producers of culture in the nineties decided that as great as the decade of the eighties was, it had to be rejected and cast out.

 

This is the only explanation I can offer for the dark turn that the culture took. I remember reading a nineties music magazine and coming across an interview with the Jewish rock band Kiss; the lead singer Gene Simmons complained that the grunge bands took a too gloomy view of life. He agreed that yes, a band's first album could be expected to reflect gloomy tendencies, but after a band had gotten that first album out of the way, if a band experienced success, it should drop the affectations of doom and gloom. Simmons said, 'I don't understand these grunge bands: the economy is doing great, and they have all the p*ssy they want, so what is there to complain about?'.

 

VI.

 

I am not deprecating the pop culture of the nineties, because for the most part it sought to entertain, and that is laudable. When I am looking on YouTube at some of the best TV shows and popular songs from the decade, I feel, as many others do, exaltation, the cultural productions of the decade at their finest stand for pleasure, beauty, and life. The entertainment industry felt obliged to deliver something that was gratifying and pleasing, but that contradicts the ethic of the present age. Today's artists want to deliver something that is politically edifying, and the politics are always of the Left. And even when they are not being political, they want to deliver something that is not attractive but repulsive. Perhaps today's entertainers are motivated by the same desire as the practitioners of the Expressionist school of art a hundred years ago: both groups want to smear the world, tarnish it, make it hideous, and sap the will to live.

 

Having said that, with the passage of time come different views. In the 2000s, I thought that the reality show Jackass (2000-2007) was the most degenerate show on television. The show chronicled mad and self-destructive 'stunts', and the worst of these, in my view, was a dive by one of the Jackass 'performers' into a pool of sewage. When watching that episode, I thought to myself that America had reached the same level of depravity as Germany in the Weimar age. Twenty years on, I no longer feel the same response. The makers of Jackass wanted to shock, but today I can think of something worse than puerile shock effects, and that is the production of a piece of entertainment - whether it be a TV drama, a movie, a popular song, or whatever - that leaves us feeling flat and dull, demoralised, depressed.

 

When we are weighing up Jackass and other cultural confections of the 2000s, we must acknowledge the truth that in every epoch are to be found aspects of the good and the bad. For white men, especially Europeans, the worst decade of the 20th century was undoubtedly the 1940s. And even Americans, the winners of the war, spent time in misery after the war was over. The post-war gloominess gave birth to the film noir genre of American movies, a genre became famous all around the world, and copied, and finally, parodied. Looking back on the 1940s, I can say that I am glad that I did not live in it, and many of my contemporaries would agree. But can something good be said for the 1940s, especially the 1940s of the film-noir period? Yes, and that is this: the men and women dressed extremely well. Even at their lowest ebb, whites retained a sense of style. In the Anglosphere at least, that perhaps would have compensated for the post-war unemployment, inflation, rationing (which in the UK lasted for years after the war), recession, and so forth.

 

In summing up a particular epoch, we must acknowledge complexities, and again, that entails the acknowledgement of the existence of both the good and the evil. For now, when it comes to the 2000s, let us focus on the good.

 

As a starting point, look at men's fashion. A brief survey of a TV series such as Seinfeld reveals that there are two basic male body types, both of which were dressed in clothes that were in keeping with the spirit of the age. The tall, skinny, gangly Jerry Seinfeld body type opted for billowing shirts, tight pants, and belts with a large buckle; this fashion, as noted before, resembled the fashion of the 1960s; Jerry Seinfeld, when wearing his typical garb, looks like one of the frontmen of the Mamas and Papas. As a sort of contrast to Jerry, we are presented with the short to medium height male who is often overweight and who has a pugnacious temperament; think of the actor who plays Seinfeld's father. The type prefers mock 1950s clothing of a sort that is usually best suited for warm weather (Seinfeld's father lives in Florida).

 

All that disappeared on the 1st of January 2000. As soon as the 1990s finished, the style changed, and it is remarkable how quickly, judging by the TV shows and commercials that were broadcast in January 2000, the change took place.

 

It was as though a new edict came down as if from high, and that was this: you must, whether you be male or female, look good. When watching my favourite 2000s American TV dramas during lockdown, I was struck by how almost everything on the screen was chosen for its pleasantness and aesthetic appeal; every piece of decor, every couch, lampshade, bedspread, cushion, pot plant, was used in the same way that an Impressionist painter used colours on a canvas. The artistic choices blended in a harmonious whole, and the whole was pretty. And speaking of tones, the foremost of these were gold, bronze, and copper. The skilful use of these produced a pleasing and soothing effect that was to cross over from TV and into real life. In the cafés and bars that I frequented, one would see stained wooden floorboards and wall panels, purple or red painted walls, dimmed lights, and framed posters that were copies of posters from the Europe - usually France - of the 1920s. All of it conveyed stylishness, good taste, and evoked a distant and fondly remembered past. The same aesthetic impressed itself upon the interiors of upper-class houses, apartments, cafés, restaurants, bars that we saw on American TV. The stylistic choices sent a message understood by all, even if only subconsciously, and the message was this: it is permissible to relax, to let go, to enjoy yourself in pleasant surroundings.

 

Wearing nice clothes formed part of the new sensibility. What is notable is that men's fashion came to the forefront; we can speak of a new awareness of the value of men’s dressing well. The man's vintage tee made a comeback; manufacturers in the 2000s produced t-shirts that were in their design inspired by the t-shirts of the 1970s; these were conscious recreations the t-shirts that would have been worn at a Rolling Stones concert in 1973. The designs were of a cut that emphasised the good side of the male physique and made the wearer seem slim and healthy. Generally, the designs were flattering and could even transform a man; a good outfit would make a fat man appear thin and an old man appear young. For the hundred years prior, men's clothes had been dour and restrained, and perhaps that came about because of American influence - American men's fashion was influenced by America's Puritan and Yankee heritage - but now the stringency and restraint of the past was dispensed with; now the bright colours and pleasing designs of men's shirts allowed a man to preen himself like a peacock.

 

The new sensibility could be detected in the popularity of the reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-2007). The premise of the show was that five homosexual hairdressers, fashion experts, interior decorators, et al., would call upon an unwitting man of normal (that is heterosexual) proclivities; they would then rebuild his life from scratch; they would give him a makeover and the interiors of his house a makeover as well. Usually after the makeover, the man's marriage would improve, or if he was single, his romantic prospects would improve, and this was because – and so the argument went - the makeover had given the man a new lease on life. One could dismiss it all at as homosexual propaganda, and so it was, but the intentions were benign; the show's producer averred that the heterosexual man following the advice of the Queer Eye gang would make him so attractive to women that he would need to 'beat them off with a stick'.

 

The show's underlying message, one that was never openly expressed, was a racialist one. It was this: white man, enjoy yourself, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your life, make use of your white privilege. I would watch the show every week with my housemate, and both of us would be impressed by the transformation of the straight guy by the end of the episode; but my housemate reflected that the good life depicted in the show lay outside the bounds of possibility for the both of us; after all, the recipients of the Queer Eye makeovers were comparatively wealthy and established; they were, and I quote my housemate, 'cashed up 30 year olds'.

 

Nowadays we can laugh at the quaintness of it all. But at the time, I took Queer Eye seriously. It served as a wakeup call for me and hundreds of thousands of other male viewers. For years, I had neglected my diet, my clothes, my hair, my skin, my home. The last of these, when I compared it to the post-makeover homes in Queer Eye, was dirty, messy, and ugly. I had let it go in much the same way that I had let my hair, clothes, and every other element of my physical existence go. Acknowledging my shortcomings, I resolved henceforth to turn over a new leaf. My friends, who at the time seemed far more sophisticated than me, perceived my desire for self-improvement, and they gave me advice. They could not recommend good choices on interior decorating, but they could steer me on the way towards good choices in clothes and diet. In retrospect, I was retracing the path of the men of previous epochs – of men at the time of the Renaissance, for instance, or at the time of the Roman Empire - who had made the conscious decision to live life and live it well.

 

But if we want an example of that good living, we need not go back as far as the Renaissance. As we can see from one of the best TV shows of the 2000s, Mad Men (2007-2015), American males in the 1960s paid an extraordinary amount of attention to their appearance; they went to the barber, had pedicures, and wore suits and casual clothes that were elegant and slim fitting. It was not until the 1970s that men began dressing like bums; then they let standards slip, and chaos reigned.

 

Contrasting against one another in the photo below are two sets of protesters; one group is protesting the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, and the other is protesting the Israeli-Palestinian War of 2024. When you look closely, the men in the former group wear smart casual clothes, and the trousers, jeans, jackets, blazers, shirts, give evidence of good taste. Particularly striking is the fact that in this group men all chose good footwear. As for the fashion choices of the other group of protestors, the less said, the better.

 

As for women's fashion in the 2000s, there is not much to say. Women, unlike men, have always bestowed a high value upon looking good; they have always paid scrupulous attention to clothes, hair and skin care, and what other women are wearing. Having said that, an examination of the magazines, TV shows, movies, of the 2000s will reveal that women did seem a little more well turned out in the 2000s than in the 1990s, and for one women's casual wear had much improved. But one ubiquitous article of women's clothing elicits controversy, and that is the halter top, which was to the 2000s what the mini skirt was to the 1960s. I call the halter top the Lindsay Lohan maternity dress, for it does look like a sort of maternity dress and it should be associated with 2000s fashion icons such as Lohan. On a well-proportioned and healthy woman, the halter top looked good; on an obese woman, it looked bad. And another significant fashion challenge to woman was presented by the popularity of low rise jeans. A slender woman with wide hips and a flat stomach would look good in them, but the wearing of them took work, because staying slim in the 21st century took work. Fortunately for men, men's clothes had an almost magical slimming effect: a vintage tee and a pair of close-fitting bootcut jeans would make a man look as skinny as a member of Led Zeppelin.

 

As to what put an end to 2000s stylishness, the answer is obvious: the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Spengler writes that in the history of the Western or Faustian Culture, the transition from one epoch to another always takes place with great drama. The 21st century, so far, demonstrates this. The nineties came to an end on September 11, 2001; the 2000s came to an end with the financial meltdown of late 2008 and early 2009; the 2010s came to an end with the onset of the Covidian monstrosity in March 2020.

 

But let us dig deeper. It is true that fashions, tastes, appetites, ways of doing things, pass, and pass with the shifting sands of time. Who, after all, remembers the Emo subculture of the 2000s?

Emoism flourished for a time and then disappeared, going the way of disco in the 1970s. By the 2010s, Emoism was usurped by Hipsterism. History, Spengler writes, is irrational, and none of its shifts come about as a product of design: its mutations are as random as the bubbles that form and burst in boiling water. But I think that the ceasing of the 2000s-era style and beauty occurred because of a conscious decision - by women. Simply put, looking like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Avril Lavigne, and Jennifer Love Hewitt every single day was asking too much. Women in the 2010s found it far easier to take on a new persona: the frumpy, overweight, tattooed, blue haired Social Justice Warrior female with the horn-rimmed glasses. And men, too, in the new decade took the less demanding route, and ceased shaving and waxing themselves; following the way of the Hipster, which is the way of a quasi-Beatnik, they grew more hirsute. Statistics show that sales of men's razor blades plunged in the 2010s.

 

VII.

 

I wrote before that the economist or sociologist believes that economics determines art, culture, life. We live in a time that pays too much attention to the economic and the monetary, and it is natural when we look back at the 2000s and see how well people lived - or appeared to live - that we will assume that all these sleek, gleaming, happy people must have lived in a time of great prosperity; we surmise that the presence of money entails the good life, and that the absence of money entails the bad.

 

This hypothesis was disproved by the 2000s. In the first half of the decade, US markets did well, much better than they do today; but in the second half, which was Bush 45's second term, markets fell and fell hard. In February 2005, the month after Bush's second inauguration, the Gold DJIA stood at a respectable 25.43 ounces; but by February 2009, it had fallen to 7.42 ounces, and it had further to fall - by August 2011, it had fallen to 6.36 ounces. It goes without saying that all the other markets around the world, including the Australian, followed the same trajectory. Worldwide, the gains that had accumulated since 1990 had been wiped out in a replay of the crash of 1929 and the crash of 1973. What made the 2000s crash unique was that markets descended to the bottom slowly. If we are to trace the descent of the gold DJIA, we see that it moves like a tobogganist riding slowly and gently downhill. And so, at the time, one could ignore the weakening until it became impossible to ignore.

 

While the commodities, finance, and real estate sectors boomed - as these sectors often do in a time of inflation and depreciating currencies - none of the other sectors did; the expansion benefited the few, not the many. And yet, with only a small outlay, a woman could dress like Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff, mimic their hairstyles, use their brands of wax and moisturiser. Likewise, a male could buy a decent wardrobe quite easily, lose weight, use skin cream, get a decent haircut... Nothing prevented him from vacuuming his apartment and investing in new couch cushions, lampshades, and bedspreads. The good life, the easy life, was within reach. After all, did men in the 2000s experience the same penury and hardships, the same scrimping, saving, and rationing, as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the 1930s and 1940s? No, they did not. Materially, they lived in better circumstances, and potentially, they could afford to try different ways of living. A man makes choices every day when he decides to shave himself and shine his shoes, and in the 2000s, he could decide to put some grease in his hair and pull on a pair of Robert Plant jeans and don a smart blazer. He need not do these things, but in the 2000s, he operated under a set of rules, a paradigm, that in effect forced him to do these things. The same pattern compelled TV producers; if they were to set out to write and shoot a drama, they should do their utmost to make the clothes, actors, sets, look beautiful and not plain and ugly.

 

In contrast, today's media and entertainment fails to do its job, and it no longer makes a product that is aesthetically pleasing; that so much we have established. What is surprising and alarming is that the media and entertainment complex no longer wants to do its job. In the old days, people became involved in entertainment and the arts because they wanted to make a living doing something that they loved, and they wanted to become part of an artistic tradition that they honoured and revered. As a youth, I wanted to work in movies or theatre or literature or comic books, but I lacked the talent, opportunity, and drive, and now I thank my lucky stars that I did. What intelligent person would want to work in today's Hollywood? Imagine the self-loathing of the 'creatives' who are forced to labour on Disney's Star Wars.

 

The SJWs who have infiltrated the media and entertainment complex have been accused of hating whites, hating the Western Culture, and so forth. But not everyone who works in the field is a seasoned political activist who is striving to achieve 'representation' for 'LGBTQ+ folks' and 'People of Colour' (POC), although it may seem that way. I think apathy more than anything else explains Western Man's turn away from beauty and style. And in a way, this is more concerning; for feelings of numbness and indifference are worse than feelings of hatred and Nietzschean ressentiment.

 

VIII.

 

At the risk of stretching a metaphor, we can outline a difference between the worldviews, Weltanschauungen, that are inclined like capitalist economies to either expansion or contraction. We see the division when we look at the 2000s and the 2010s and how people deported themselves. It goes without saying that not every young woman in the 2000s dressed like Lindsay Lohan and not every young woman in the 2010s dressed like a pink-haired, overweight, bespectacled SJW; but as it was in the days of the Roman Empire at its height, what matters when gauging the style, mores, ethos of a period is the overall standard. And so, when looking at representative samples, we can say that the fashion and aesthetics of the 2010s mark a step down. When comparing the 2000s to the 2010s, we conclude that in the one decade morale expanded, in the other, it contracted; in one it grew, the in the other it declined. It is no coincidence that the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon appeared when it did; America gave birth to it at the time of the weak economic recovery in the Obama years; and because of their limited economic prospects and their myopic world view, young Americans felt an instant attraction towards it.

 

One irony presented by the young's newfound affiliation with the Left is that Americans were more better off in 2011 than they were in 1981; but perhaps this is not an irony when we consider that in the early 1980s, America was situated on the upward curve of the slope of economic expansion, and in the early 2010s, on the downward. But individual choice does matter, and economics is not everything. Western Man chose to ditch metrosexualism for hipsterism; he chose to grow a beard, wear rimmed glasses, don a flannel lumberjack shirt, and allow his belly to bloat - perhaps all that craft beer was to blame - and become hairy.

 

The political controversies of the 2010s are still with us, the main difference being that they have changed their aspect; we see different emphases and weightings. I do not want to discuss these here at length, because that would detract from my purpose, but suffice to say that the two most controversial ideologies, Zionism and Russkiye Mir, both of which turn up in our news feeds now more than ever, do fit into the expansion versus contraction model.

 

What is interesting is that American conservatives tout both ideologies every day, and that both these ideologies run counter to the natural American conservative tendency towards growth, expansion, enterprise, the spirit of can-do, the American Way. Americans on the Right like these things, which is why they like leaders such as Reagan and Trump, leaders who are indefatigable optimists. So, it is strange that, when considering the ultimately self-destructive tendencies of Russkiye Mir, conservatives regarded Speaker Johnson's forcing through of the passage of funding for the Ukrainian war effort as the ultimate betrayal; and that they took a dim view of further funding. A Breitbart headline reads: 'Show me the money!!! - Never enough $$$ for 4-eva war - Zelensky reveals US and Ukraine 'working' on scheme for 10 years of military aid'. Of course, Putin's efforts to keep Russia’s war going '4-eva' are never disparaged.

 

 

And then we come to dear little Israel. American conservatives treated the pro-Palestinian protestor encampments at American universities as a national emergency; the colleges must be cleansed of this 'anti-Semitic' vermin; Jewish students must feel safe; the Western Journal thunders, 'Let Jews Carry Guns'; to paraphrase Samuel Roth, 'Jews must live'.

 

We must ask, how do the ideologies of Zionism and Russkiye Mir advance and improve life? Russia reduces Ukrainian towns to rubble and makes the land as desolate as the plains of Mordor. Ukrainians are not elevated thereby. As for Israel and Zionism, Americans - especially American boomers - like to pat themselves on the back for being on the 'right side of history': the 'Nazis' were 'evil' for 'gassing the Jews', ergo, the Americans who fought against them were 'good'. But it is possible that the WWII Holocaust story is false, and in any case, it does not help; it does not, to borrow from the jargon of economists, add value.

 

The American boomer conservative Ward Clark writes that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators are 'useful idiots who are protesting in favor of violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians'. I chortled when I read this, and I asked to myself if Mr Clark had ever read the Bible, which is full of 'violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians', the problem for the likes of Mr Clark being that the 'barbarians' in question are Jewish. Animal sacrifices, burnt offerings, sacrifices of human beings to Yahweh - which is what the Holocaust story is all about - are barbaric and atavistic. A butcher's manual, the Book of Leviticus instructs, in scrupulous and exacting detail, how to kill, prepare, and burn animals for sacrifice to Yahweh. One must ask, how does obeisance to strange, backward, and dark rituals advance the welfare of the American people? In the Jewish tradition, sacrifices of animals - and children - are made in exchange for tangible benefits. Jewry won the State of Israel in 1948 in exchange for the sacrifice to Yahweh of the six million; and what did Americans get? Did the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 boost American economic growth, did it assure Americans a higher standard of living...

 

But if we speak too long about Jewry, Israel, and Zionism, we run the risk of digressing. To close our discussion of the topic, let us look at some of the books of the Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea - and mull over the threats that they contain; Yahweh, speaking through his mouthpieces the prophets, promises violence, desolation, famine, despair to both the Jewish people who have betrayed him; he even threatens to rape the Jewish women. In the last of books of the Old Testament, Yahweh wills the destruction of the twin kingdoms of Judah and Israel because he wants to punish the Jewish people; and the last books chronicle only Jewish defeat and failure.

 

Inspecting the final book of the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi, Steve Wells records the final utterance by Yahweh: 'The Old Testament ends fittingly with these words: "Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse"'. One cannot say that Judaism is an ideology of expansion; rather, it is an ideology of contraction. And prolonged exposure to it lowers a man's vital energies; the man who takes it up is turning away from the Life Force.

 

IX.

 

Throughout I have been using the language of Nietzsche and Shaw. Nietzschean and Shavian rhetoric broods and mediates upon the themes of life denial and world rejection; but perhaps this mode of thinking, which was most famous over a hundred years ago, fails to match the ethos of the modern age. A postmodernist would ask, what is life, what is the world? Perhaps these do not exist; instead, we only have 'codes', 'signs'.

 

Postmodernism here counts because one of the foremost of the postmodernists, Baudrillard, writes on the same subjects that I am discussing: movies, advertising, fashion, beauty, clothes, diet, fitness. He accords the same importance to these as I do; and these, according to Baudrillard, in the modern age have taken on a religious dimension.

 

In the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other--and even more laden with connotations than the automobile, in spite of the fact that that encapsulates them all. That object is the BODY. Its `rediscovery', in a spirit of physical and sexual liberation, after a millennial age of puritanism; its omnipresence (specifically the omnipresence of the female body, a fact we shall have to try to explain) in advertising, fashion and mass culture; the hygienic, dietetic, therapeutic cult which surrounds it, the obsession with youth, elegance, virility/femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul.

 

Unremitting propaganda reminds us that, in the words of the old hymn, we have only one body and it has to be saved. [Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970]

 

The above was written over fifty years ago but could have been written today. Baudrillard made a reputation for himself as being one of the worldliest and up to date of the French thinkers; after all, he was the only one to admit to watching television. His contemporaries, men such as Foucault and Derrida, gave the appearance of wanting to shut television and cars, aspects of the modern world, out. Baudrillard does not celebrate the phenomena of the modern world, and as we can infer from the tone of the above passage, he takes a dim view of them. But that view is belied by the passivity and acceptance that we detect between the lines; and these traits of Baudrillard’s make themselves felt more and more in the books written after Consumer Society. And indeed, what the devil is wrong with beautiful models and fast cars? In 1970, and even more so in 2024, are these not 'Life', 'The World', and is it not the case that the turning against these is the turning against 'Life', 'The World'...

 

The phenomena considered by Baudrillard are still with us, and we can still squeeze some enjoyment out of them, and so on that point I disagree with the pessimistic, life-denying American conservatives and white nationalists. But to extract the maximum value out of the modern world and all its despairs and joys, we must increasingly look towards the past, even towards a past that is quite recent, e.g., the past of twenty years ago, the past of the 2000s. That past shows us the way towards the Good Life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday's Hero: on post-war prosperity, postmodern apathy, pop Nazism and punks (cyber)

 

I.

Politically speaking, nothing matters more at the time of writing than the electoral fraud of the 2020 American presidential election - that and what those on the Far Left will do to us on the Far Right if they assume absolute power. So my writing on what is a purely theoretical question will appear to some to be an evasion. But in my own defence, in the last analysis one has to let the Americans - and Trump - fight their own battles. The Western nationalism that exists outside of America will survive 2020, albeit under straitened circumstances, and  it will after 2020 face an uphill battle no matter who becomes US president, as it must contend with a Left which is in near-complete control of the media, popular culture, the Internet... 

So let us look at a subject close to home. In my article, 'The Aussies and the Nazis', I defended the NSN (National Socialist Network) against that the charge that their National Socialism was un-Australian; my argument was that in fact the most prominent Australian nationalist group of the 1930s and 1940s (the Australia First Movement) did have close ties with the German National Socialists, as did most other nationalist groups (the ones that mattered anyway) in Europe. Today a Slovenian or Belgian or Swedish or Portugese anti-Nazi and anti-fascist may take the gambit of declaring German National Socialism to be un-Slovenian, un-Belgian, un-Swedish, etc., but that will not pay off, and we can see why from looking at the historical record, which is one of Nazi sympathising and even collaboration. 

A charge which is far more difficult to refute is that the ideas of German National Socialism do not bear upon the present era, that they are not pertinent to it; they have no relevance. They are a finished historical product, bound to their particular place and time; their importance, their meaning, does not extend past the 1930s and 1940s. 

The line of attack does hit home, and it is all the more powerful because any discussion resulting from it will bring up some thorny and profound philosophical disputes, one of them being the following: the Russian philosopher Kojève, when examining various Western philosophical world-views (or Weltanschauungen, as Hitler would call them), asks the important question, are these world-views ever-lasting or are they ephemeral? Are they are grounded in eternal truths or the fleeting notions of the day? Those who take the latter view argue that ideas, like popular music, are subject to fashion; they can be in one day, out the next. In this they follow the same course as any cultural fad. (Take the Emo subculture, for example, which was popular in the 2000s and then vanished without a trace in the 2010s, having went the way of the platform shoes and disco music of the 1970s). 

Kojève regards this historical relativism as false, and furthermore, pernicious, and he compares it to the doctrine of the

Sophists.  Nevertheless, my view is that its charges must be answered, especially when they are raised against a political ideology. 

It is a fact that the passage of time, which leads to a distance in time, does bring with it a certain objectivity. We recognise, at once upon encountering them, what exactly the fashions of the 1970s and 1980s were, but we do not recognise, at least with as much precision, the distinctive attributes of the fashion of 2010s or even the 2000s; in the former case, much time has passed (hence the instant recognition) since those decades, in the latter, too little. Historical distance and the flow of time make the past a finished product, a closed book, and thereby give us an understanding of what a thing essentially is. This is what Hegel meant when he said that the 'Owl of Minerva [the goddess of wisdom] spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk'. 

Was there a point in time after the war when we in the West understood what National Socialism was and viewed it with a degree of objectivity? Yes: in the 1960s. Given that politics is a visual medium - a thesis Hitler would surely agree with - my argument is that one means of getting to grips with a political idea is to see it. In the 1930s and 1940s, we grasped politics through newsreels and newspaper photographs; in the 1960s and 1970s and after, through popular culture - that is, movies, TV shows, comic books. Put that way, we see that a great deal of change in the popular depictions of National Socialism occurred over the past six decades. For one, by the time of Schindler's List (1993), the National Socialists (and the German people themselves) in popular culture had been transmogrified into a race of demons. A cynic would remark that such extreme ugliness in the portraiture of National Socialism always could be expected, but my contention is that it was not always so. Ernst Zündel remarked (in the 1990s) that whereas once the hero of the American war movie once raced against time to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima, he now races to liberate the concentration camps; popular culture, in portraying the war, had by the 1990s begun to favour the European theater at the expense of the Pacific and show signs of an obsession with the Holocaust. A shift had occurred, and I identify the turning point as the 1960s. In Rat Patrol (1966-68), Twelve O'Clock High (1964-1967), Combat! (1962-67) (the TV action shows devoted to the Western theater) the Germans are portrayed with (as Zündel observes) grudging respect, and in The Producers (1967) and Hogan's Heroes (1965-71), the subject of comedy. Undoubtedly the writers, directors and actors who served up this fare were attuned to the desires of the audience, a large proportion of which was made up of ex-servicemen, and this segment of the audience knew, from first-hand experience, that the Germans were not the monsters Allied wartime propaganda made them out to be. And so, perhaps, there was a pending reconciliation of sorts between the Germans and the Anglos? Whatever the case, the point is moot, because as Zündel remarks, by the 1970s the Holocaust had stepped in and nipped any rapprochement in the bud. 

Time heals all wounds, and by the 1960s, enough distance had been gained from the war for it to be represented with a reasonable degree of objectivity, or near enough to objectivity - as close as Hollywood could be expected to get. But that brought with it its own dangers. When you turn National Socialism into a not-so-serious TV show or movie or board game, you are showing a high level of detachment from it - you are not feeling a sense of involvement, politically, emotionally, spiritually or otherwise. This is what happens when National Socialism, and the war, become part of the past: the pages written on them have become closed in the book of history. For you, a member of the audience of Hogan's Heroes and Dad's Army (1968-77) and who lived through the 1930s and 1940s, the realities of that time are unpleasant to recall, especially when you compare them to those of the present, the present being distinguished by its peace and prosperity; but the fact that you enjoy these comedies reveals that you do not feel much in the way of trauma regarding the recent past, as it is water under the bridge. You have achieved closure. In this state of mind, one can look at the battles of WWII with nearly as much detachment as one would at the battles of the Napoleonic Wars or the Wars of the Austrian Succession. But that means you are approaching postmodernism, and with it, postmodern apathy and irony. 

What does that entail? In the past year, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been engaged in a war over a disputed territory called Nagorno-Karabakh. The Far Right, the Western nationalist movement, does not have a stake in the war; it has not pronounced, by and large, that one side is more 'based' than the other (as it did in two of the wars of the last decade - the Syrian Civil War and the Russo-Ukrainian War). If members of the Far Right were called on to play a wargame based on conflict, or role-play as soldiers in re-enactments of key battles, they would feel a sense of non-involvement; they would feel detachment. And no doubt they would utter witticisms while role-playing as the Armenian or Azerbaijani soldiers, witticisms which would express their ironic detachment. This is one of the key themes of postmodernism: a feeling of irony when one is re-enacting or repeating a past which one cares nothing about. 

Perhaps the first person on the Far Right to act as a postmodernist was George Lincoln Rockwell. His politics exhibited a dual nature: on the one hand, he took his brand of racialist conservatism extremely seriously; on the other, he treated National Socialism as a prank, a joke (that was the subtext of his actions - had he been confronted about it, he would have denied it furiously and declared that he was a sincere and committed 'Nazi'). Fifty years later, we come to Rockwell's spiritual successors - the pranksters of 4Chan who ironically espouse National Socialism and fascism. 

In a way, it was Jewish activism in the 1970s that saved National Socialism from descending into postmodern irony. As stated before, in the previous decade, the National Socialists were treated as objects of gentle ridicule in TV comedies such as Dad's Army and Hogan's Heroes, worthy opponents in action movies such as Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Anzio (1968). They were depicted as bad, but not evil. But then Jewish activists thrust the Holocaust story to the forefront of the public consciousness. No doubt the movie and TV audiences of the 1970s began to feel pangs of guilt at laughing at the antics of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz. By the time of the 1980s - the time of Sophie's Choice (1982) and Shoah (1985) - audiences had stopped laughing altogether. The Holocaust onslaught was well and truly underway, and audiences were being deluged by hundreds - no thousands - of Holocaust novels, movies, comic books, plays, ballets, education classes, documentaries, museum exhibits... National Socialists were no longer to be laughed at, they were to be taken seriously, extremely seriously: the war was painted as a primordial clash between good and evil. (It is no coincidence that at this time the governments of Europe began to introduce serious penalties for denying the Holocaust, penalties which included fines and imprisonment, whereas only ten years before, the same governments did not actively seek to punish Holocaust denial - one could then write a Revisionist work and travel through Europe a free man). 

Oddly enough, Holocaustism reached a fever pitch in the 1990s, the decade which represented the high-water mark of postmodernism. The postmodern-themed TV show, Seinfeld (1989-98), poked fun at Schindler's List, but that was the exception; 1990s popular culture for the most part treated the Holocaust with the utmost gravity. And the postmodernist, post-structuralist French intellectuals, who espoused a sturdy scepticism towards all 'grand narratives' (and the Holocaust, being part of Judaism and Zionism, is nothing if not a grand narrative), were taken in by the Holocaust like everyone else; hence their rote denunciations of the French  Revisionist Robert Faurisson. I must confess that I was taken in at the time as well - not having access to any of the Revisionist works on the Internet - and I, too, viewed the Germans as a race of monsters. But then, when all your intellectual peers are declaiming with absolute certainty that a certain event actually did happen and that an ideology (and the country that gave to birth to it) responsible for it are evil to the core, you tend to believe them - it is human nature.

By turning the National Socialists into creatures of evil - akin to vampires, warlocks, witches, werewolves - the Jewish activists reanimated National Socialism; they gave the corpse new life - a strange, unnatural life, but a life nonetheless. In order to kill National Socialism, to deprive it of life, they would have been better advised to mummify it, to make it a thing of the past, something which could be handled as a relic, a curio. The 1990s was the ideal decade to accomplish this. In a 1992 work which was perfectly in accord with the times, Francis Fukuyama, inspired by Kojève, pronounced the End of History. What Fukuyama and Kojève meant by the idea was that history could be conceived up as an epic with a beginning, middle and end; and once the epic had come to an end, there was nothing left for the protagonists to do - no great feats to accomplish, no high ideals to die for. At the conclusion of the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83), the Empire is defeated and the heroes Han, Luke and Leia resume their normal lives - lives which to us in the audience would have seemed dull and listless had they been put up on the big screen, as they would have been bereft of heroic exploits. Kojève's contention was that Man had arrived at the same point: the end of the story. Henceforth, Man would live an uninspired, base, even animal existence; he would be what Nietzsche called a Last Man, Spengler a Fellahin. And being situated at the end of history, he would look at the great and significant preceding events - for example the 30 Years War, or the War of Austrian Succession, or the Napoleonic Wars, or even the First and Second World Wars - with detachment. And with detachment, comes irony... One can see how this sense of historical distance lends itself to the anti-Nazi argument 'It's not the 1930s any more' - that is, while German National Socialism and Italian Fascism suited the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps, they do not the current year. And as it so turns out, Jewry in the 1990s could made effective use of that Kojèvean argument but instead it promulgated the Holocaust tale for what was mostly a religious purpose. 

But I must emphasise, again, how damaging the 'It's not the 1930s any more' line of argument can be. Leon Degrelle writes in his memoirs how terrible it was in his post-war exile in Spain to read through the morning newspapers every day and not see his name mentioned; as a man accustomed to notoriety, this was a cross to bear. In the same memoirs, he makes the passing remark, with a sniffing condescension, that anti-tank weapons in WWII did not work the same way as they they are shown in the movies today. One can speculate that it must have been an alienating experience for Degrelle, once a soldier, now a spectator, to watch the war movies of the 1950s and 1960s in a Spanish cinema. Degrelle would no doubt have felt that he had been left behind by history. Which raises the question, what would he have thought of today's cultural developments? Only a few weeks ago, the bestselling computer game Cyberpunk 2077 was released. The game pays tribute to the Cyberpunk movie genre and hacking subculture of the 1980s and 1990s, and boomers (the children of Degrelle's generation) have a hard time making sense of these. Given that, what would Degrelle and his fellow post-war fascists Otto Remer and Otto Skorzeny, have made of them? They would have no doubt felt consternation and confusion. And this lends weight to the accusation that Degrelle was an old fuddy-duddy and that his wartime fascism today smells rather musty. 

II. 

Before anti-Nazi readers start congratulating themselves, I will make the point that, at some juncture in our lives, we all grow old; and for those of us who have political careers, at some juncture, we all become yesterday's hero. The aged and declining despot Ghaddafi of 2011 (the year he was overthrown) presents a sad contrast with the young and exuberant reformer Ghaddafi of 1969 (the year he came to power). 

As a man goes, so does a civilisation: this thesis underlay Spengler's monumental work, The Decline of the West (1918-22). Kojève took much from Spengler, who anticipated his idea of the 'historyless man' (a phrase Spengler uses repeatedly), that is, the man left over after the end of the history of a civilisation; but Kojève's borrowing has never been acknowledged by scholars. 

But Spengler contradicts Kojève on when it is that history, at least history in the West, comes to an end. Kojève says it was in the year 1806, when Hegel saw Napoleon on horseback in the town of Jena and subsequently conceived The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), an ambitious work which aimed to encapsulate all of philosophy, all of thought ('Spirit') up that time. Hegel therein concluded that, after Napoleon, Man had reached the last stage in his progress, the terminus of his historical evolution. Spengler differed in that he believed that there was no history of Man as such, only the history of the eight High Cultures, seven of which had died long ago - today only the Western Culture is left standing. And that Culture would not reach the end of its natural life until three hundred years (or thereabouts) after the writing of the Decline. For Spengler's prediction was that by the 23rd century, Western Man will enter the last stage in the West's historical cycle and will become 'historyless', a Fellahin, a Last Man. He will look back on all that has gone before in the history of his race without any emotional connection, without any emotional involvement, and he will devote himself to animal pleasures. His vast empire - which he had built in the preceding centuries - will go to rot and ruin, and he will become the prey of newer, younger, more 'barbarian' races. In other words, the West will suffer the same fate as ancient Rome, India and China. 

Unlikely as it seems, it is here that Spengler rides to the rescue of the National Socialist (or as Spengler would call it, 'Prussian Socialist') idea. 

Spengler's maudlin and frightening vision of a fading West, if it is to come true, will only come true hundreds of years in the future. According to Spengler's prediction, the 21st century shall see no Fellahin and no pacifism, only dangerous political struggle. Politics in that time will be taken extremely seriously, as it was in the time of Caesar and Augustus. And after the time of struggle is a time of peace - a peace imposed by the new Imperium. As to whether or not in this period the German Idea (which Spengler called 'Socialist') would ultimately triumph, Spengler hedged his bets; suffice to say, he did not foresee a liberal future, and indeed, he prophesied that in the 21st century the system of ballot-box electoralism would come crashing down. (And I would argue of that of this the events of 2020 give us a portent). (In order to avoid misunderstanding Spengler on this point, it should be made clear that is not the case that such political systems simply stop functioning; it is that they fail to maintain the confidence in them that they had enjoyed before). Taking all of Spengler's predictions into account, then, one can infer from them, as Spengler's disciple Yockey did, that in the new century Spengler's 'Socialism' does indeed stand a chance. 

III.

My intention here has been to make vivid a contrast that exists between two different historical periods and their accompanying Weltanschauungen. 

Spengler and Yockey published their work in what was undeniably a most dangerous and unpleasant time in Western history; Fukuyama revived Kojève's ideas in a time which was not dangerous and not unpleasant. Given the choice, any Western European (or North American or Australian) would prefer to live in the latter period over the former. And he would prefer, one over the other, one of the two ethics that accompanied each of the two periods. What are these ethics? We find them in our four authors. Spengler and Yockey praise the martial virtues (self-sacrifice, renunciation, discipline, courage, sternness...) whereas Kojève and Fukuyama reject them - in the world view of the latter pair, Man is to become a contented cow or sheep, a creature which poses no threat to anyone, a 'herbivore'. It goes without saying Western Man, c. 2020, prefers the latter ethos over the former. And it is this preference which has placed an obstacle in the path of all Western nationalism for the past seventy-five years. The nationalist believes that the West, and the entire white race, are in danger of extinction, but upon becoming a political activist and commencing a crusade to defend the West, he quickly discovers, to his frustration, that Western Man, because of complacency or stupidity, will not fight to save himself. 

Discussions of this subject in nationalist polemics often lead to speculations as to what the breaking point, the last straw, for Western Man will be. And such a breaking point exists, for every nationality; September 1939 and December 1941 showed that even the most stoic and patient of peoples, once goaded beyond endurance, can snap. 

Western Man has for the last hundred years been forced to shoulder a number of  burdens. These are political and are in effect taxes which have been imposed upon him. They could be thought of as the price he pays for participating in normal society; if he does not pay them, he will be punished. A comparison could be drawn between them and the protection money paid to a gangster. 

The rate and number of these taxes has been steadily mounting since the end of WWII. Taking America as an example, Americans, by the 1960s, had laboured under what I call the negro tax for hundreds of years, and the rate of that tax was dramatically increased at the time of the race riots and the new desegregation laws; by the 1970s, whites had been ethnically cleansed from some of the great cities of the North-East - for example, Detroit. Around the same time came a new tax, a new levy - the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which abolished the whites-only immigration system which had been in place for forty years. Hart-Celler led to a massive immigrant invasion, the largest in history. Following this tax - which should be called the Great Replacement tax - Americans had to put up with an additional one, the mandatory Holocaust education and indoctrination tax, which took effect in the 1970s and 1980s. Forty years later, new taxes were introduced: the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) tax, the transsexual tax, the 'Woke Capital' tax, the Greta Thunberg tax, the '#MeToo' tax, the deplatforming tax, the cancel culture tax... The year 2020 saw a Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa riot tax, and one of the most devastating taxes of all - the Great Reset tax, which has led to the vexations of social distancing, mask mandates, contact tracing, lockdowns, house arrests, curfews, forced unemployment, forced closure of businesses and perhaps, in the future, the introduction of a compulsory (and potentially lethal) vaccine. The Great Reset has engendered, as we know, pathological social phenomena on a stupendous scale. And in case one thought that things could not get any worse, the year 2020 concluded with the Joe Biden electoral fraud tax, which will exacerbate tensions between the Left and Right to an alarming degree and could eventually lead to a sundering of the American republic.

Economic theory posits the hypothesis of what is called the Laffer Curve: this is the proposition that past a certain point additional tax hikes will see a diminution, not an increase, in revenue. Diminishing returns apply to tax collection. The same holds true to the burdens, impositions, outlined above. Past a certain point, the last straw will have been reached for American (and Western) Man; he will refuse to pay these levies.  

The Western nationalist's tolerance for these impositions is low, the normie's is high. The British nationalist, for instance, finds the Great Replacement tax (which was first levied in England seventy years ago) outrageous, and thinks that the British normie should be outraged by it too; he cannot understand why the normie is not outraged and was not even outraged after the Pakistani grooming gang scandal came to light. But the truth is that when it comes tolerance and endurance of burdens and impositions, different sections of the populace have different thresholds. We activists are all familiar with the somnolent type of normie who feels nothing but complete indifference towards politics and indeed any of the higher fields of human endeavour; prior to 2020, none of the taxes mentioned made the slightest impression on him. One is inclined to suspect that the political establishment, being aware of his notoriously high tolerance, imposed the Great Reset in order to test his limits; and in doing so, that establishment was possessed of a certain impishness and malice - like a child who teases an animal so as to make it bite. 

Looking past the somnolent and insensate type of normie, we come to others who are more promising. There is the conservative boomer, who was accepting of all the taxes levied up to 2000 or so, but has been baffled and confused - and angered - by the new SJW, transsexual, Greta Thunberg, etc., taxes, and wants things to go back to where they were. Another nostalgic is the popular culture-obsessed normie, who often belongs to either the boomer generation or Generation X. He lives in a dream world, a bubble, which is filled with popular culture - computer games, anime, comic books, movies, TV shows, action figures, role-playing games... Unfortunately for him, the late 2010s saw the infiltration by the extreme Left into popular culture, and as a result, his beloved franchises (among them Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Marvel and DC, James Bond) have been ruined by SJW politicisation. Like the conservative boomer, he instinctively holds to reactionary views and wants life to return to where it was in 1990 or 2000 or even 2010 - when the impositions were not as pronounced. He is prepared to pay some taxes, but not others. The negro tax and the Great Replacement tax do not bother him, as he is not a white nationalist by any description; the Holocaust indoctrination tax does not bother him, as he has been trained to hate all Germans, 'Nazis', by Hollywood; but 'SJW Star Wars' - that he will not abide. One consequence of his displeasure is that he has produced literally thousands of YouTube videos containing hundreds of hours of intricate analyses of Lucasfilm, Disney, Kathleen Kennedy, The Mandalorian (2019-), etc. 

Now, he can be chided for not spending his time on more worthy, serious subjects; but he could counter this attack with the question: after he comes home tired at the end of the working day, what is there for him but escapism? In his judgment, he feels he has the right to lose himself in the world of heroic myth. It means something spiritually higher to him, something he needs - man does not live by bread alone. 

IV.

The pop-culture obsessed normie is closely related to the bug man, who is in turn related to Nietzsche's Last Man and Spengler's Fellahin. The bug man, a conformist by nature, accepts nearly all of the aforementioned taxes, much like the somnolent, insensate and bulletproof type of normie. 

The Western nationalist will castigate the bug man: the bug man does not engage in a revolt against the modern world (Evola), lament the passing of the great race (Grant), hanker after the Imperium (Yockey); he is politically inactive and perfectly content with the way things are. But I envy him to a certain extent. To be obsessed by nothing but computer gaming, for example - that would be a life (I imagine) of uninterrupted bliss. 

This is where Cyberpunk 2077 comes in. 

The computer game was based on a pen and paper role playing game, Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future which was published in 1988 and set (amusingly enough) in the far-flung future of 2013. The original game portended, as one could expect, a dark, dystopian future for the West, like all the works in the cyberpunk genre; but paradoxically, the genre makes urban dystopias look exciting, glamourous, seductive. It prettifies the urban science-fiction hellscape and turns it into something beautiful. And this has real world implications. The Los Angeles of the movie Blade Runner (1982), the Chiba City of the novel Neuromancer (1984) and the Night City of the game Cyberpunk 2077 seem strangely familiar to us, as they resemble cities in which we live - Sydney and Melbourne, for example - and because of this, Cyberpunk 2077, an aesthetically pleasing game which beautifies the modern city, makes us appreciate our cities all the more. 

It is no exaggeration to say that for some, the game made 2020 worth living. The game had been in development for eight years (!) and the release date for 2020 had been slated for April, and then it was pushed back to November, and then December. The delay only increased the anticipation. The release of Cyberpunk 2077 was eagerly awaited by gaming fandom, and even those on the Far Right were swept up by the enthusiasm. On 4Chan, a common slogan was, 'Still buying Cyberpunk 2077': that is to say, despite all the negative political developments of the year 2020, I am still looking forward to playing this game which, I have been assured, will be a masterpiece. 

All this has an unlikely sequel, but before I detail it, I should be point out that the audience for cyberpunk is meant to react with revulsion, and not pleasure, at the prospect of the West turning into a dystopia filled with cyborgs, low-lifes, and servants of evil corporations ('corpos';); and it goes without saying that the white nationalist or National Socialist is meant to react negatively as well. (Read what Alfred Rosenberg, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), has to say on the evils of city life). On that, the cyberpunk dystopia presents a reverse mirror image of what Far Rightists, traditionalists, fascists of all stripes value. Peasants, cosy cottages, clean and healthy country living, beautiful landscapes, 'Aryan women standing in wheatfields': these occupy the most prominent place in white nationalist iconography, not corpos, low-lifes, urban squalor, smog, neon signs and cyborgs. You can find these typical white nationalist icons on display at the Renegade Tribune website; Renegade travels down the Rosenberg route, and goes even further, endorsing homeopathy and veganism. 

But all this raises the question: which of the two - the cyberpunk urban dystopia or the National Socialist eco-utopia - is the more modern and the more real? Reluctantly, I have to say, the former; perhaps we could have lived more close to nature, as Rosenberg wanted, over a hundred years ago, but not now. 

Another difficult question. The video for the song 'Yesterday's Hero' by John Paul Young is set in the all-white city of Melbourne of 1975. Supposing that you could go forward or back in time, would you travel to the Melbourne of that year or to the Melbourne of some hundred years after (say, the year 2077)? The pop culture-obsessed normie would choose the future: he operates under the assumption that the future will not only be more technologically advanced, but more exciting, which is one of the reasons why he likes Star Trek, Star Wars, so much. 

That type of normie accepts much of the existing political order, and modern technology, and modern urban living, as does the bug man. The underlying philosophy of these types of normie was first outlined in Fukuyama's essay 'The End of History?' (which appeared in the summer of 1989, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall). Fukuyama here expounded upon two propositions which many commentators found objectionable: the first was that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the second, that our existing political arrangements could scarcely be improved upon. Many on the Far Left took umbrage with Fukuyama, as could be expected, but so did many on the Far Right who are forever denouncing capitalism and consumerism. When I am in one of my less charitable moods, I am inclined to say that those the Far Right who adopted this position did so only because they are (like their counterparts on the Far Left) killjoys and moreover, people who are stuck in a distant past. The bugman, and the pop-culture obsessed normie, would agree. And they would venture that Fukuyama could have been right. Perhaps it is the case that a society which produces a work of beauty such as Cyberpunk 2077 cannot be all that bad. Why not, then, kick back and enjoy this marvellous world of supermarkets, shopping centers, and computer games - the world which our forefathers shed their blood, sweat and tears to build? Throw out your dusty volumes of Spengler, Yockey, Evola, and stop obsessing over race, immigration and Holocaust Revisionism. Become a postmodernist. 'It's not the 1930s any more'...

But there is a twist in the tale when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077. The game sold millions on the day of its release, but after playing it, gamers discovered that it suffered from glitches and other shortcomings; the sad truth was that it had been released before it was ready. The most hyped and anticipated game of the year - if not the century - had turned into a failure. The producers of the game, CD Projekt Red, took the unprecedented step of offering refunds to Playstation and XBox users. Disappointment was followed by fury; CD Projekt Red, are now facing a class action law suit from disgruntled investors. 

One moral of the story is, perhaps, that those wanting a more authentic cyberpunk experience would have been better advised to stick to the pen and paper games. But more than that, the story illustrates the ultimate failure of bugman-ism and normie-ism. The bugman could only justify Western liberal society and its economic system throughout 2020 with the following argument: despite the collapse brought about by the Great Reset, despite the scandal brought about by the Biden fraud, we in the West still live in a time which is unparalleled for its prosperity, luxury, technological advancement - and what better proof of this is Cyberpunk 2077? Even those on dissident Right, says the bugman, must acknowledge the truth of this argument, and they did acknowledge the truth of it, through their actions (but not their words), as the excitement the game caused led the 'Alt-Rightist' to drop his anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist pose. Anticipation for the Cyberpunk 2077 masterwork broke down all social and political barriers. Both Mark Zuckerberg - the king of the bugmen - and the anonymous 4Chan poster who coined the 'Still buying Cyberpunk 2077' phrase stood side by side in the queue outside the game store on the morning of December the 10th, the day of the game's release. And to paraphrase the Bible, Zuckerberg saw this, and behold, it was very good. For Zuckerberg wants nothing more for a member of the 'Alt-Right' than to become like him; he wants that 'Alt-Rightist' to buy a computer game, adopt postmodernist views, be content with the existing social order and take an Asian wife. 

But, as we know, things did not work out that way. 'Truth will have its revenge', as Carl Schmitt used to say, and perhaps, in 2020, 'Alt-Right' politics, white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, Far Right Populism were in accordance with the times after all, and were the truth.