2,168 words

I had no special access to the inner workings of the National Justice Party (NJP). The higher-ups always held me in contempt, and would have kept me at arm’s length had I attempted to approach the project. I didn’t ask. They didn’t ask.

I remained in my lane and, up until the last few months, kept my mouth shut about the ill-fated project.

I finally opened my mouth earlier this year as Eric Striker first took direct shots at me, and then started taking absurd shots at Keith Woods, Joel Davis, and other good actors. He was mounting these attacks as an NJP officer, and using NJP as a shield when I attempted to challenge him personally, and no other officer was either stopping him or clarifying that he wasn’t actually speaking on behalf of the project. As such, I decided to go ahead and attack the whole damn project, targeting what I judged to be its most egregious flaw: Sven and Alex McNabb were making arguments on their podcasts in favor of ultraviolence against non-whites while clearly associated with NJP, surrounded by party banners. This slimed everybody involved with very real legal exposure and effectively rendered the project a rolling liability for white advocates.

You can’t do that.

These guys — who narrowly evaded the Unite the Right trial by the skin of their teeth — should have been among the first to appreciate how even tenuous association with violent rhetoric can’t be anywhere near real people doing real political activism in the real world. And here was Sven himself, the final boss of both The Right Stuff (TRS) and NJP projects, making the incriminating statements.

In hindsight, we can now gather that Sven was deliberately sabotaging the NJP with such remarks, making a point about the primacy of old-school TRS jackass radio irreverence over new-school NJP political messaging and strategy. I unwittingly assisted Sven by spotlighting this situation, one that categorically required everything to blow up sooner or later.

The project was doomed from the start because Sven doesn’t want political activism. He believes his nineties jackass radio programming is the only political activism anybody should be doing. He made this abundantly clear in a big manifesto he wrote back in March of 2018, and reiterated the exact same points in his recent drunken podcast appearance where he celebrated the NJP’s demise.

Sven’s perspective has a few obvious flaws, the most obvious of which is that TRS had already started losing its mojo before the NJP came along. The NJP was allowed to happen precisely because audience interest in the content and the quality of the content dropped off hard after Trump was elected in 2016.

The NJP was an attempt to revive an ailing project, an attempt that failed. But Sven’s narrative that the NJP caused TRS to start sucking collapses and contorts the timeline. They haven’t said anything funny in nearly a decade now, and while their pre-election memes continue to define the space after all these years, they all precede the election.

Therein lies the most concise and definitive answer about why the NJP failed. From the very outset, Sven saw it as a distraction from his enterprises that detracted from those enterprises. It was designed so that the NJP would either grow big enough to push him out if it succeeded, or would drag him down with it if it failed. He had the means throughout the entire time to pull the plug, and finally saw fit to go ahead and do so. All of the other concentric circles of failure exist as rings orbiting this failure baked into its conception. That said, I believe it will be both profitable and entertaining to explore additional problems with the project.

Too Many Chiefs

The YCombinator Project specializes in mentoring and supporting tech industry startups. I couldn’t help but consider political projects as startups in a sense, and notice parallels between their advice for nerds and my own experience with political startups. Imagine explaining on Shark Tank or to a potential investor in your web3 startup that it’s organized with several people on a board, all of whom are free to make their own executive decisions, under a chairman with no leadership inclination or experience, which all exists under the umbrella of a larger project that fully controls it and isn’t fully aligned with it (to put it lightly).

The startups in their early phase that succeed almost always have either a singular Benevolent Dictator For Life or an especially close partnership of two — maybe three — people who are all on the same page. Boards can’t lead, they can only manage, and essentially exist to do nothing more than pick a dictator and sit around doing nothing unless he needs to be replaced.

The NJP was necessarily going to fail because it was structured incorrectly for a political startup. Even if everybody involved was great, it was designed in a manner that could only result in them bumping into one another, which they inevitably did.

History Nerds

The NJP’s leadership was comprised heavily of Traditional Worker Party leadership and supporters, to the point where some perceived it as a spin-off and successor. This seemed like a bright idea, taking the parts that were working well before the Chairman went off the rails. In practice, they recruited way too many history nerds, history nerds who can’t be anywhere near real-world organizing. Striker is a classic case. I admire and respect him a great deal, but this respect was never reciprocated because he sized me up as a Christian conservative reactionary, just like Hitler’s rivals during his rise to power.

Everything is about Hitler and the Second World War with these people, people who are actively opposed to adapting general principles to a different time and place than the one they’re escaping to with their anachronistic worldview. Not everything is about Hitler, but good luck telling Striker or Greg Conte that. I had been losing the internal argument on this in Tradworker in the year or so leading up to its dissolution, with my “faith, family, folk” messaging replaced with “NATIONAL SOCIALISM NOW!”

I extract some satisfaction from the fact that they got to fully eject me, try their angle with years of runway, and attract virtually no general audience or interest whatsoever with their tone-deaf history nerd nonsense.

Traitors

Part and parcel of being a history nerd on the German side of the Second World War is that America was a rival and enemy to be opposed. There was an iconic moment in an Internet argument on Telegram a couple pf months ago where Striker, completely out of context, demanded to know whether I wished that America had lost the war. For him, this is an important question that strikes at the root, exposing my lack of loyalty to a German Chancellor who died a century ago.

My answer is complicated, as I’m loyal to my nation while I also generally agree with much of what the Germans were fighting for in that struggle. I see the Second World War as a general tragedy and “bad deal,” one where millions of our best people perished, leaving the world a worse place. I believe every nation but Israel lost the war, with America’s loss taking decades to come to fruition.

But the war wasn’t exclusively about National Socialism and wasn’t pitched to the American people as such until after the war. It was largely seen then as the latest eruption in a time-honored chess match between rival European states, with America as a partner of Great Britain. They honestly, truly, deeply despise Americans and America, the lot of them. The whole project was overwhelmed with contempt for the people they ostensibly intended to lead. All of their geopolitical takes were basic bitch anti-American propaganda, casually ripping off rival powers without even bothering to reframe it in a patriotic, domestic dissident voice.

This is simply and obviously political malpractice. A nationalist project in a country should consist of nationalists for the country they’re targeting. There’s plenty of precedent in our own country for what we’re fighting for, but they’re all in on Eurasianist and Continental framing of America as a villainous nation of villains who exist to serve Jewish capitalism. If you agree with that take, then you should consider emigrating to and assimilating into a nation that you don’t believe to be intrinsically evil.

Libtards

Each error rests upon the previous error. They’re “traitors” because they’re history nerds, and they’re libtards because they’re “traitors.”

Sven and Striker especially hate rural white Americans, with both of them going on record as describing us as a vast sea of opiate-addicted, brain-dead, conservative rubes. With the Covid polarization, they went full MSNBC against the detestable rubes — rubes who were largely vindicated in their opposition to lockdowns and mandates when the dust had settled.

Like it or not, America is splitting down the middle between libtards and contards. You’re getting sucked to one side or the other. The contard side is the implicitly white side within which we can hope to operate — socially, culturally, and politically. This does not mean going along with MAGA and QAnon nonsense, but it does entail not overtly, aggressively, habitually siding with anti-white libtards against the side our people are on.

Degenerates

The NJP had a huge culture of alcoholism and partying which is antithetical to serious political organizing. The fact that Sven was proudly drunk in his only appearance to discuss this major event pretty much sums up the culture. And if that doesn’t do it, then the fact that most of the board members and rank-and-file opposed ejecting a board member for having orgies with members should do it.

Jerks

With a handful of exceptions that aren’t exceptional enough to be named, they’re jerks. Even the “good ones” are jerks, not one of whom resigned for a good reason. Every time somebody would fall out of their inner circle of higher-ups, that person was denounced by the remainder as a snake. After a certain point, it’s obvious that the whole thing is one big snake pit, and Sven is the king cobra.

I have several anecdotes, but the one that sticks with me is when Tony Hovater, on behalf of the NJP, contacted me about removing a political prisoner from the Global Minority Initiative (GMI) registry. Apparently a woman in the NJP was the girlfriend of another inmate who believed an inmate had “snitched” on her own inmate. We at the GMI had given this sort of issue a lot of forethought, and decided the only way to avoid the GMI becoming factional was to have a simple policy of listing everybody whose arrest or conviction had something to do with being pro-white, without getting into the messy specifics of their relationships and personal conflicts.

I attempted to explain this to Tony. He responded by threatening to destroy the GMI project with an NJP rumor campaign against it. This was very out of character for pre-NJP Tony, and came as a surprise. He was acting on behalf of the organization, an organization that centered on infighting as a top priority. Within a few months, a third of the GMI registrants had requested removal in response to letters they received about the GMI being a scam. I finally abandoned the project because there was less interest in assisting political prisoners than in speculating that I may be a fed.

Fact Check: I am not a fed.

This is not my own story, but everybody’s story. From Keith Woods through Patriot Front and everybody else who had nothing to do with me, the NJP adopted TRS’ culture of aggressive, destructive infighting. The goal of the project was to increase Sven’s subscriber base, not to advance white interests. And when the two priorities came into conflict, the former always took priority.

Lessons Learned

There are no lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of the NJP. Either the lessons are too obvious to bother listing, or you’re incapable of learning them.

• Growth-oriented startups require decisive, unified leadership.


• Nationalists should be nationalists for the nation they’re active in.


• Don’t promote racist ultraviolence.


• If you insist on doing so, don’t directly associate it with a political party.


• If the leadership of your party does that, resign promptly to minimize exposure.


• Don’t trust drug and alcohol addicts with anything.

The only non-obvious takeaway is that NJP’s message which held that the NJP was the only solution is false. Many of its former supporters are in a state of despair because they bought into the NJP’s messaging that they’re the last and only hope — and now their hope is lost. The cause of white identity has been steadily gaining momentum in the past decade despite a string of unforced and unnecessary leadership and organizational failures, and it will continue to.

The fall of the NJP should make one more hopeful, if anything. Good riddance.

The above is reprinted from Matt Parrott’s Substack.