Right Wing LARPing and Right Wing Worldbuilding

Some Case Studies

If a recent article by New York Magazine is correct, I have been totally wrong about Patriot Front.

h/t

The American Sun

Like many, I have long believed that Patriot Front is on some level connected with domestic intelligence gathering. Wikipedia helpfully added plausibility to this theory by denouncing said theory as conspiracism. Few people on the actual right wanted anything to do with them and everyone not on the right placed them front and center in their demonology. They were duly listed in the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center’s rogues’ galleries and thus entered the imagination of the credulous media as an example of incipient fascism in America. The phenomenon naturally raised a lot of questions.

It’s not hard to see why people might suppose the group to be some sort of bizarre op. If one were seeking to design some wrestling heel named Evil Right Winger he would do well to imitate the cartoonish theater of the group. Marching in matching khaki and polo uniforms, with shields, hats, and balaclavas, the aesthetic is consciously contra-Antifa: prep-bloc tactics, as it were. One could be forgiven for supposing that it was all the design of some bored field office agent whose college-age daughter, fresh from torching small businesses in the PNW with her AnCom comrades, served as inspiration.

But according to David D. Kirkpatrick, the government is actually so uninterested in Patriot Front that it’s left to the brave men, women, and confused genderqueers of Antifa to do the work of infiltration and subversion. That’s literally how this article casts Antifa, by the way- a civic-minded fellowship just interested in protecting Our Democracy from the forces of Trump and Nazism. Make no mistake, the piece is trash, but it does advance an interesting thesis, that Patriot Front is wholly compromised from within, not by the state, but private (communist) actors. It’s an object lesson in what can happen when one’s idea of political action prioritizes spectacle over substance, and when one mistakes a shared signaling of ideology for friendship.

They totally watermarked it. Some commies you are!

The facts are the facts. Patriot Front has been infiltrated and has been doxxed, many of its members fired from their jobs, driven from their communities, and in general just ended up with lives worse than when they started. As the latter link above details, some members are suing the communist who pretended to be their friend in order to gain access to their personal information, which he handed over to his network of leftist nutcases for them to use against Patriot Front. It matters little that Patriot Front doesn’t seem to have committed any actual serious crimes (they mostly stole gay flags and said mean things online). They now face the prospect of actual crimes being committed against them by a coven of radicals with little hope of protection from the system. These aren’t wealthy or connected people; unlike Antifa, with support from a network of free lawyers and friends in high places, the membership of Patriot Front seems to be comprised of blue collar white men, or those with low-level office jobs, generally single and without wider circles of support. Getting your tires slashed at night by anonymous communist street terrorists when you’re paycheck-to-paycheck is a crippling disaster for men like that.

It may still be that the government is in some way involved in all of this. The article takes conspicuous pains to point out that Antifa refuses to cooperate with police in any way. Still, given the manifest eagerness of the author to paint them in a positive light and shade their cause into his own subtextual hatred for NormieCons and Trump, he may perhaps be unwilling to pry under rocks where he doesn’t wish to look. One can only speculate on the reasons Antifa networks are being taken down in California while largely being allowed to run rampant in other jurisdictions; are some comrades more willing to play ball than others? Who knows?

Sacrifices have to be made for any worthwhile cause. Men can and should endure poverty, opprobrium, imprisonment, pain, and even death for a noble end. Many members of Patriot Front have indeed lost a great deal because of their involvement. Was it worth it? What was accomplished? Patriot Front hangs out, trains in weightlifting and martial arts, reads books (some good, some not) and marches around in costumes in order to gain maximum attention for their program. All of the former could be done without the latter, and it is the latter that causes all the problems. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from making a spectacle of oneself without any realistic prospect of achieving some concrete goal, especially in jurisdictions that are violently hostile to you and doing so in ways that alienate you from people who might otherwise support you.

Take this example- Patriot Front showing up, uninvited, at the March for Life. If you spend any time online among wingnats, or if, like me, they regularly show up in your comments, you’ll quickly discover that, being pagans, they have no real problem with abortion and apart from all the other reasons they hate Christians the latter’s’ belief in the sanctity of human life especially offends them. Rather than have their own march consisting of literally half-dozens of enthusiasts, Patriot Front crashed a Pro-Life event that its supporters have spent literal decades building up into a real national presence. The media, which also hates Christianity, lost no time in declaring “Patriot Front's anti-abortion advocacy at March for Life sends a clear message: The white supremacist dog whistle is coming from inside the house.”

Pro-Life partisans who catch the eye of Sauron go to jail in America. They risk their freedom and sometimes their lives working to shut down murder factories. After decades of work they succeeded, under Trump, in getting a Supreme Court that destroyed one of the greatest leftist achievements of the 20th century. Along with Second Amendment advocates, Pro-Life activists represent one of two areas of real success for the right, broadly considered. And then along comes Patriot Front, trying to jostle into the parade, fooling no one but the idiot reporters who’ve finally discovered the Nazi/Pro-Life link they knew was there all along (because no one wants to stop mass murder like a Nazi) and ran with the story. Great job, Patriot Front.

Everything ventured, nothing gained. There’s a lesson to be learned here. The real tragedy is that young men with at least some notion of making the world a better place were essentially sucked into a LARP that took an outsized place in their lives. I understand what modern life does to young men. Unless you’re a prison employee I can assure you I spend more time in an all-young-male environment than you. It’s no surprise to me that, per Pro Publica, so many of Patriot Front recruits were gamers.

John Carter

has written before about the narcotic time-sink that is Pixel Valhalla, so have others. Deep down, some remnant of young men long for something more real. Unfortunately, without an authentic tradition to guide them, many just retreat deeper into Plato’s Cave and enact the real-life version of a guild quest, this one involving a U-Haul and ending with poverty, unemployability, and tires slashed by communists who may or may not be related to top Democrats.

But to be clear, I don’t think the idea of a LARP is wholly bad. The concept just has a bit of a bad connotation. We all, in our own way, play a role, a role that is constructed rather than wholly organic. We are each of us a mix of what we were born to be, what the world would have us be, and what we will ourselves to be (and, in a negative sense, what we imagine ourselves to be). Thinking of yourself as part of a grand narrative, with a part in it, is, I think, far healthier than conceiving of yourself as some insignificant collection of molecules bouncing around an indifferent universe. We are live; there is action to be performed, and a role to play for each of us. The thing to bear in mind is that it isn’t a game. In political terms, the main way to separate fiction from reality is to determine whether you’re just running around in a costume or if you’re invested in a story with consequences. In addition to developing a character, are you worldbuilding?

When I was younger, I played a good bit of Dungeons and Dragons, usually as the DM. I learned a great deal about worldbuilding during those years, about the need for plausibility in creating verisimilitude. To seem real, something has to be believable, which means, in some abstract way, it has to connect with some deeper actual reality. Everything in a story impacts everything else in particular ways; if the monarch of your fantasy kingdom is old and failing, but everything is running smoothly, either your narrative is crap or there’s some reason for that. It will occur to the players that something is amiss and they’ll start wondering why, an impetus to engage with the material. Perhaps some clever (maybe evil) chamberlain is the real power behind the throne? Fantasy worlds can never be more that interpretations of the real world, and the stories we tell in subcreation are ultimately reflections on creation.

If you know, you know, and you know they only go in a Crown Royal Bag.

Evola pointed out that the leftist conception of a revolution is a perversion of the term, and really of basic logic as well. A revolution is a return to a starting point, not a point of departure away from it. To be radical is to go to the radix, to the root of things. In Men Among the Ruins, he noted:

For the authentic revolutionary conservative, what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions, adequate for a specific period of time and in a specific geographical area.

Political LARPing in the positive sense is never possible without political worldbuilding, and building a proper world means adhering to principles that are timeless. It also means operating in the real world, building what will be from what it, based on what has always been. One might object that that is exactly what Patriot Front did- not quite. All of their actions, the marching in costume, the rhetoric, the symbolism, was merely ancillary to their online activity. It’s IRL trolling; their masks just the analogue version of Discord pseudonyms. It has no organic presence, it helps no one, nothing is built, nothing is preserved or sustained. It serves as an emotional release for young men left behind by a world that doesn’t realize it needs them. They get to play at being brave and fighting the system. It’s a higher level dopamine hit than that offered by World of Warcraft.

Compare that to the phenomenon noted by a New York Times in an article from this past summer. All over the country, NormieCons and rightists alike are pulling up stakes and setting up in intentional communities built around their notions of traditional life. Some of them are wealthy members of Con. Inc., others represent new and better trends in political and social life. Charles Haywood, of Foundationalism fame, Claremont, and others have been hard at work creating networks of engaged, talented, and wealthy men under the aegis of the Society for American Civic Renewal (full disclosure, Charles Haywood is a paid subscriber), now operating in a number of states. This paragraph struck me as particularly intriguing:

Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, [link added by this author] a Dallas-based journal that serves as an informal in-house publication for the movement, is moving to a small town outside Nashville this week with his wife and four children. Through his new professional network, he is raising funds to develop a corridor of conservative havens between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, where he has also purchased hundreds of acres of property. He expects about 50 families to move to the Tennessee town — which he declined to identify — in the next year, including people who work from home for tech companies and other corporations.

I live in the exurban to semi-rural South, and it has always mystified me that the natural potential of the area as a place of rightist renewal has been so overlooked. So often I read about something I’d be interested in being a part of, only to discover that it’s being developed in New York or the greater Washington zone. Such enterprises generally sink into compromise and grift, there being no organic community support for them and enormous local pressure to ‘evolve.’ An engaged population keeping the most traditional area of the US red and building networks of economic and social support there would be a truly powerful force. I’ve written about the educational aspects of this sort of thing before, but these men are far more comprehensive in their vision.

What’s necessary to accomplish this? The same things that were necessary for the pioneer forebears whom Patriot Front claims to venerate. First, a willingness to move. You have to be willing to sacrifice the comfort of the present for the possibilities of the future. For young men this is perhaps the easiest. Second, one has to be willing to do the often tedious and laborious work of building. You’ll have to create things from scratch, or repair things long fallen into disuse- your business, your home, yourself. Third, you’ll have to participate in family life. Get married and have kids. If that isn’t your calling, you can still play a meaningful role in family life by helping to create the kind of society that makes family formation as frictionless as possible. Or both- just not neither. And fourth and finally, you’ll have to be prepared to fight for all of those things. This isn’t the Benedict Option. Nothing good can be build without attracting the notice of evil. The NYT author points out in the article how disgustingly Christian and white the whole thing is, and ties it to a politics his readers are meant to find repulsive and threatening. What these men are doing is not retreat, but preparation, creating the infrastructure- material, economic, human, and spiritual- for resistance. Street-fighting Antifa in Seattle is a bit like diving into the ocean to wrestle squids; even a spineless creature best equipped by nature to fight with clouds of ink becomes formidable with all the advantages of environment. Then you drown. What the men now worldbuilding right-wing America have in mind is creating such favorable conditions for their own.

It’s a great thing to imagine a better future. In fact, for those with the faculties to do so, I would say it is a duty. But before a better reality can be willed into being one must be sure in the first place that the end in mind actually is good, that it is informed by right intentions and principles, in accordance with God and nature, and two, that the role you intend for yourself has the world in place to sustain it built along those lines. The wonderful thing is, what the radical revolutionary in the Evolean sense has in his favor is exactly what the radical revolutionary in the Maoist sense noted, that his forces move among the people like fish in the sea, provided that sea is not stagnant (and filled with used syringes). There’s a churning ocean of creative potential out there in the US and beyond. Like land willed up from the depths, so too can a new world be built by those with the foresight, will, and imagination to do it, and with the fortitude to defend it. There’s a better way.

tl;dr online fascism