1,587 words

Four years ago, the “wignats” declared war on Donald Trump. I thought this was silly and urged them to vote for Trump, largely because Trump credibly promised to slow the Great Replacement while Biden, as I predicted correctly, would kick it into overdrive. Trump wasn’t going to give us White Nationalism, but he would give White Nationalists time to build support for our policies. If, however, white demographic decline gets too far advanced, it will become increasingly difficult to turn things around. Frankly, saving the country as a whole is already a long shot.

But Trump has changed. As I explained in “Trump’s Great Betrayal on Immigration,” Trump is now indistinguishable from the GOP on immigration. He wants to replace white Americans, but selectively and legally. Why? Because business “needs” foreigners to replace us.

Of course, the bosses don’t need foreign workers. They just prefer them, because they prefer to pay you less, and expanding the labor market allows them to do just that. Siding with bosses against workers is not populism. Replacing American workers with cheap non-white labor is not nationalism. Since immigration is my one issue, Trump is now dead to me.

Going “off script” on immigration literally saved Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. For voters like me, Trump going off the GOP script on immigration is the only thing that will save his campaign. And, based on the growing backlash to Trump’s immigration betrayal among normie Republicans, this sentiment is not confined to the fever swamps of the far Right.

So is there any way that I can get Trump to walk back this folly? Should I join the “Groyper War”?

Nick Fuentes has declared “Groyper War II” against Donald Trump. The first Groyper War took place in late 2019. It was covered extensively at Counter-Currents. Basically, Nick Fuentes tasked his followers to attend Turning Point USA events and ask White Nationalist questions. I had no objection to the Groyper War as such. People should do this sort of stuff all the time anyway. They shouldn’t need Nick Fuentes tell them to do it, and they shouldn’t have stopped just because Fuentes got bored and moved on to something else.

The new Groyper War is directed at Donald Trump’s campaign. Fuentes wants Trump to vow to impose a complete immigration moratorium and not fight any wars for Israel. These are certainly reasonable demands. But why should Trump accede to them? Apparently, out of fear. If Trump does not give in, Fuentes has vowed to mobilize his Groyper legions to destroy Trump’s bid for the White House. For good measure, Fuentes has also demanded that J.D. Vance be replaced as Trump’s running mate and that Trump fire his campaign managers.

The responses from Trump loyalists have been swift, brutal, and hilarious. I agree with them that Fuentes looks ridiculous. He’s like a chihuahua posturing as a pitbull. I agree that Fuentes is a repulsive character: he’s vain, histrionic, contemptuous of his audience, and reeks of insincerity. I agree that his positions are awful at least 50% of the time. I also agree that there are good reasons to suspect that Fuentes is compromised by the Deep State. At the J6 protests, he urged crowds to ignore the police and enter the capitol. Many protesters have been jailed for far less.

But we shouldn’t be too hasty to dismiss Fuentes’ message or his threat. Even if you want to shoot the messenger, you need to take his message seriously.

To evaluate the Fuentes threat, we need to answer three questions. First, how big is the White Nationalist vote? Second, how much clout does Fuentes have among White Nationalists? Third, does a “Dump Trump” movement have any potential outside White Nationalist and adjacent circles?

How big is the White Nationalist vote? In all honesty, I don’t know. Nobody really knows. It would take expertise and money to find out. We have the expertise, but we lack the money. Our movement can motivate its members to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on airfares, hotels, and meals to attend conferences—most of that money going into the pockets of fervently anti-white corporations. But I have not yet figured out how to motivate people to give a fraction of that amount to an organization like the Homeland Institute, which could actually determine how many White Nationalists there are, where they are, how many of them are willing to vote, and above all: how many of them are willing to vote Democrat to punish the GOP for refusing to address white ethnic interests. Politically, we will never be “a force to be reckoned with” until we can deliver actual numbers that politicians can reckon with.

In 2016, there was a lot of talk about how “The Alt Right memed Trump into the White House.” This was equal parts self-delusion and “fake it till you make it” fraud. There’s no question that the Alt Right had some effect on the 2016 election. But we simply don’t know how big an effect. In 2020, basically the same people were claiming they would “meme Trump out of the White House.” Again, it was equal parts self-delusion and fraud. In truth, Trump won the 2020 election, and that time he managed to do it without the so-called “wignats.”

Many people believe that White Nationalism is smaller today than it was in 2016. After all, many of the leading figures, podcasts, and platforms of that era are washed up, marginal, or simply gone. There are fewer people on stage, so it is natural to think that the movement is smaller. But the that is an illusion. The true measure of the movement is not the number of people on stage but the number of people in the audience.

Based on our web traffic, our audience is more than four times larger now than it was in 2016. Our financial support has also grown more than fivefold between 2016 and 2023, despite the fact that we have been unable to process credit cards since 2019.

Obviously, Counter-Currents is not representative of the White Nationalist movement as a whole. Further studies are needed. In the meantime, though, it would be foolish to think that White Nationalists are less of a force in 2016 or 2020. Moreover, in a tight race, even small voting blocs can make a huge difference.

But would White Nationalists really stay home or vote for the colored woman rather than Trump? A good number of them might. Earlier this year, David Zsutty polled Counter-Currents readers. In his article, “Interesting Results from the Counter-Currents Reader Survey,” he reports the responses to the question: “Evaluate the following statement: Pro-whites should be willing to endure or even vote for Democrat rule in order to discipline/punish/destroy the Republican Party.” Of respondents, 26.8% at least slightly agreed with this statement, compared to 20.4% who were neutral and 52.9% who at least slightly disagreed; 31.4% strongly disagreed. Again, the numbers are small, and Counter-Currents is not representative of the movement as a whole. But until we have support for polling the movement more broadly, this is what we must work with.

If one quarter of our readership is willing to punish the GOP, and our audience is four times larger than in 2016, that means that the equivalent of our entire readership in 2016 would be willing to punish the GOP. Again, there are problems extrapolating from Counter-Currents to the movement as a whole, but if the movement as a whole is just as willing to punish the GOP as Counter-Currents readers, that would imply that a group equivalent to the entire movement in 2016 is willing to punish Trump and the GOP, either by not voting or by voting for the Democrats.

There are, moreover, reasons to think that the Counter-Currents readership underrepresents the proportion of the White Nationalist movement that would be willing to spoil the 2024 election for Trump. The average age of the respondents to the Counter-Currents reader survey is 46.4. The average age of those who strongly agreed with punishing the GOP is 42.3, and the average age of those who strongly disagreed with punishing the GOP is 49.2. This seems to indicate that the younger the audience, the more receptive it is to punishing the GOP. Again, we don’t have data on the movement as a whole (yet), but I think it is reasonable to think that the average age is considerably less than 46.4. This is certainly true of Fuentes’s followers, as can be seen by the people who show up to his events. If anything, many of Fuentes’s followers might be too young to vote.

Does Fuentes have the clout to swing the wider movement into tanking Trump? No. He is widely despised. But he could build alliances. Beyond that, the idea of tanking Trump has its own intellectual merits, regardless of one’s feelings about Fuentes.

Does a movement to tank Trump have the potential to break out of the far-Right ghetto and affect the Republican mainstream? Absolutely. In fact, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as “dissidents” confined to a “ghetto.” When I follow the same people on X as J.D. Vance, it is time to accept the fact that we’re the normies now.

Bottom line: This is going to be a close election, in which small, organized minorities can shift the outcome. White Nationalists and fellow travelers like Fuentes are a larger force than we were in 2016. The Republican mainstream is also closer to us than in 2016. If enough of us unite behind this project, we can tank Trump. Given the depth of Trump’s betrayal, what do we have to lose?