923 words

2023 was the year when all of the dissident Right’s most fanciful, pie-in-the-sky “what ifs” came true. What if an eccentric billionaire came along and used his vast fortune to give us a platform? What if some high-profile Conservatism Inc. shills got red-pilled and started preaching White Nationalist talking points? What if the Overton window shifted so far to the Right that the Jewish question became mainstream?

All these things happened. It’s the Twelfth of Never, 2023. Pigs are flying, Hell has frozen over, and Tucker Carlson is talking about the JQ.

In my estimation, the most important dissident Right activist during this year was Keith Woods. After having been banned from Twitter for two years, Woods was reinstated by Elon Musk at the beginning of April. In the eight months since, his following tripled from 50,000 to 150,000, making him one of the dissident Rightists with the largest number of followers on any platform.

During the five years since Woods started his YouTube channel, he has been one of the most misunderstood people on the scene. By that, I mean that people who do not follow him closely will hear things he says and, not knowing where he’s coming from, fly off the handle and make outrageous assumptions. Keith has said positive things about Islam, so some accuse him of being a crypto-Muslim. They hear him criticize capitalism and accuse him of being a Communist. Keith expressed skepticism of some of the more alarmist COVID conspiracy theories — remember when some people were saying that everyone who got the vax would be dead in two years? — and thus was accused of being an establishment shill. He also took a hardline pro-Palestine position before it was fashionable, and received a lot of flak for adopting what has historically been a Left-wing cause.

But that’s the thing: All the controversies involving Woods have been about positions he has taken or people he’s associated with. Otherwise, he has had an entirely scandal-free career. He has never been accused of unethical behavior, never been implicated in gayops, and none of his friends have ever come forward and claimed that he is a monster behind the scenes. Some have criticized Keith’s lack of showmanship, but in the long term, his substance-over-style approach has worked to his benefit. Showmen have a tendency to say and do things to be entertaining which later come back to haunt them, but the optically superb Keith Woods has thus far avoided any Hailgate-style debacles. The establishment media has had a fairly difficult time finding damning soundbites for their Keith Woods hit pieces; the best they’ve been able to come up with is an instance when Keith ironically referred to himself as a raging anti-Semite.

The reason why Keith Woods was the most critical activist this year is by far due to his creation and spearheading of the #BantheADL movement. #BantheADL was a Twitter/X hashtag whose purpose was to highlight the Zionist Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) role in the censorship-industrial complex, which has included such shenanigans as organizing advertiser boycotts, usually by employing shakedowns, blackmail, and other ethically dubious practices. #BantheADL quickly expanded beyond dissident Right circles and into the highest echelons of mainstream conservatism to the point where even arch-Zionist Ben Shapiro was forced to begrudgingly bend the knee to the meme. #BantheADL put organized Jewry on the defensive in ways that I had never before seen in my lifetime.

While the most important person for the dissident Right is Elon Musk, and the most important event this year has been the Gaza War, without the #BantheADL movement, neither of those would have been as much of a win as they were.

Elon Musk buying Twitter for the purpose of reinstating free speech was a black swan event. Although I don’t think Elon appreciated how difficult of a task it would be. Perhaps he thought it would be merely a matter of clearing out the social justice warriors from the Twitter corporation itself. I don’t think the importance of organized Jewry in general and the ADL in particular to the censorship regime became apparent to Elon until after he took over. The importance of the #BantheADL movement was in giving Elon the moral support he needed to resist and fight back. Jews are very good at gaslighting people into believing that the consensus agrees with them. The #BantheADL movement succeeded in dispelling this notion and proved to Elon that if anything, the opposite is true: Most people would rather see the ADL banned and the racists unbanned.

The big event that pushed the Jewish question into the mainstream was the Gaza War. But had the Gaza War not been preceded by the #BantheADL movement, things may have played out differently. Organized Jewry had just spent a month fanatically denying that they were behind online censorship, and that to say otherwise was an anti-Semitic trope, if not a full-blown canard. By doing so, they painted themselves into a corner. Once the Gaza War broke out, however, organized Jewry suddenly found their options severely limited. Any attempt to control the narrative through censorship only proved the “anti-Semites” correct.

With the ADL censorship machine largely neutered, this opened the way for more unbannings, most notably of Alex Jones, and it allowed others such as Jackson Hinkle, who surely would have been banned by now under the previous Twitter regime, to reach their full potential.

2023 would probably still have been a win for us without #BantheADL, but it would have been a significantly lesser one. We owe that largely to Keith Woods.