THE IDENTITARIANS:

To take an example, the British online personality Carl Benjamin (better known by his nom-de-guerre, Sargon of Akkad) reposted a picture of the Waffle House employee with glowing eyes and the caption "Stand alone if you must, but you must stand". The subtext here isn't particularly subtle, and many of the comments made explicit what Benjamin himself only alluded to -- this was an example of White America finally taking a stand against its unruly minorities. Finally, the white man (or woman, as the case happened to be) was fighting back.

All this hype lasted until the star of the show -- the Valkyrie herself -- posted a video in which she told her side of what had happened that night. At this point, everything started going wrong. The woman in question spoke like a member of southern Louisiana's lowly white working class. Enthusiasm turned into disgust, and even in some cases rage. When people found out the woman had a black boyfriend, the jig was up, and it became open season for everyone who wanted to vent their hatred for the "ghetto trash", "garbage", "hoodrats", and "negroidified whites". "Millions must die", one anonymous account quipped, and those "millions" of people whose lives would be snuffed out to set America straight again would include many or most white people, for they were simply too far gone to be saved.

The parasocial attachment of an online "movement" to this clip, hailing a woman as a saviour for the white race before viciously turning on her, is telling -- because we in the West have been here before. The most famous example of this cultural and political whiplash occurred on election night in Britain in late 2019. After the British working class rejected the Labour Party and the "Marxist" radicals who had come to set large parts of its agenda, social media was filled with the exact same hatred towards the very people whom the haters were ostensibly there to "defend". Many who had earlier professed a deep respect for "the working class" spent the election night viciously denouncing those workers as "gammon", "racists", "ignorant", and of being "ungrateful" in not understanding that these radicals were only trying to help them.

While the people around Jeremy Corbyn formed something like an actual political movement, by contrast, the American "white nationalist" or "dissident Right" sphere describes an entirely online phenomenon, one that is mostly in the business of selling podcast subscriptions and dietary supplements. And yet, the problem facing the white nationalist or "racist" Right is the same as the one recently faced by the "pro-working class" or "communist" Left. It's not just that there's not a whole lot of real-world buy-in for the belief system being sold, though this is of course true. The deeper issue has to do with the sellers, not the reluctant buyers, of the radical ideology on offer. The radicals on the Right, just as the radicals on the Left, consist almost entirely of deeply dissatisfied people who stayed in education and "did everything right", but for whom success has never materialised.

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