March 2025 WhyNat Meeting

[previously in a series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

Ever since Trump’s election, the meetings of the Robinson Crusoe Society seemed livelier, more upbeat. Even those who had voted for Kamala were not particularly distraught by his victory. For had she won, it would have been a license to completely ignore the Online Right, the chans and the discord servers, Rogan and Hanania, HBD and the red pill, white nationalists with Asian wives and groyper Catholics who haven’t even gone through the formality of converting to Catholicism. The election allowed Alt-MSNBC to speak condescendingly to the Left, reminding them that women’s suffrage does not mean that only women’s votes matter; men’s votes count too. We’re “experts” on the far-right. They might want to listen to us!

I walked into the March 2025 meeting and found a higher turnout than usual. About 20% of the attendees were women, which, for this group, was more than was typical. There were quite a few attendees I didn’t recognize. I counted four who wore MAGA hats, something unseen before 2024. The honored speaker of the month was James Marcey, a tech company founder who had been outed as a far-right Twitter personality. As with many such doxxings, it propelled him to fame and didn’t seem to hurt his business.

When the clock struck 7, the congregants, who had been milling about and engaging in conversations, were called to listen to Marcey’s speech. He was a handsome white man with short, reddish-blonde hair and a beard. “My speech,” he began, “is entitled ‘from the inside looking out.’ That is where we are right now. I know many who are getting jobs with DOGE, who are crafting executive orders and sending them to friends in the Trump administration. Debates are being had that would have sounded unthinkable ten years ago. Do we direct academic funding to our guys, or go for gutting the whole thing? The answers are not clear-cut. But to even have these discussions, we must recognize our victory. For the longest time we stood on the outside looking in, and some of us made being outsiders part of our identity.”

“Why are people reluctant to acknowledge our success? Perhaps because it leads to the question, if we do these things today, why did we not do them in the past? It is always easier to believe you were crushed by overwhelming force than to accept that you could have succeeded but didn’t. This is one reason conspiracies are so popular: they allow people to indulge in powerlessness. Before 2016, I heard people say that democracy was a sham, that if ever a true outsider won an election, ‘they’ would throw him out in a coup. Few say this today, the old guard seems exhausted, drained of vitality. The crown was lying in the gutter the entire time. We could have picked it up. And now we have.”

“The ulra-blackpiller continues to try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This explains the weird and, if I may speak frankly, rather gay obsession with Palestine. They’re not losing at home, so they adopt the identity of someone who’s losing a thousand miles away.”

Marcey continued to speak against blackpillers before he shifted tack to discuss pronatalism. He said he had five children, a fact I was not aware of, and which I could tell impressed a great many people. “All,” he had said jokingly, “are biologically mine from my first wife, none of that blended family s***.” It was the classic joke that wasn’t really a joke.

At the end of the speech, Marcey asked if there were any questions. I and several others raised our hands. Marcey called on me.

“One of Trump’s talents is his ability to be many things to many people. The Bible thumpers almost universally see him as their champion against pagans, ‘Satanists’ or whatever. Yet because he is a Northern mainline Protestant, he doesn’t gross out moderate voters the way a Southern evangelical or tradcath would. You spoke about how ‘we’ are in power and never did you show awareness that there are other factions of the Right who think they are in power. To a great deal of the Right, you, the white tech company founder who lives in the city and eagerly talks about doing embryo selection, are the devil incarnate. They hate you more, in fact, than they hate the blue-haired radical feminist because they feel superior to her and inferior to you. I know the abortion issue has fallen off everyone’s radar, but someday it will come roaring back. These people, they absolutely intend to make abortion illegal across the entire country, and it won’t stop at abortion, either. IVF, embryo selection, all of it they want to ban. And then there’s the RFK people, who manage to be even crazier. You have people talking about in vitro gametogenesis while Nicole Shanahan, the crazy Asian chick who was RFK’s running mate, is running around telling infertile women to lie in the sun instead of doing IVF.”

“I’m not blind to that. And I know this may not satisfy you, but I’ll just say that politics requires coalition-building. We are not the majority of the country. We must work with others, even if we despise them and they despise us. I recently encountered a Substack with the byline ‘standing up against the creekshitter agenda.’”

Marcey was interrupted by laughter from about a dozen people, who evidently were just now hearing the “creekshitter” slur. He looked annoyed.

“Yeah, I know, it can be funny,” Marcey continued. “The edginess that was once directed at blacks, Jews, and gays becomes directed at the Republican base. Maybe it’s just a return to norm for the originally Left-wing atheist who became a gamergate anti-feminist and then part of the Alt-Right. I’m not going to get offended by it. As with the original racist edginess, the problem is when people mistake it for real political activism. Practical politics requires a certain level of politeness even for people you don’t respect.”

“But is there not a fear you will wind up saddled with the responsibility for everything Trump does, like the trade war with Canada? I hope we don’t have to learn this the hard way, but people don’t like losing their jobs.”

“The stuff about annexing Canada, you have to take Trump seriously and not literally. Most likely, it will be some noise and then an agreement.”

A MAGA-hat-wearing man I did not recognize raised his hand and looked like he very much wanted to speak. Marcey turned toward him and said, “yes?”

“I came here from Alberta, and let me say it is wonderful being in a Trump-sympathizing environment. I can tell you that every single person I know takes Trump’s annexation talk seriously. A few love it. Most hate it.”

“It’s absurd,” I interjected, “that our future hinges on whether a childish man means what he says.”

Marcey looked slightly frustrated. “I don’t know what to tell you. We have a line to the White House right now, and I’m not willing to cut it.”

“If you do have such a line to the White House,” I said, “you should consider using it thusly. Have Trump issue an executive order making it easier for Canadians to get political asylum owing to the lack of free speech in Canada. This would let him do his anti-Canada thing in a way that actually helped people.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Marcey said.

From the way he spoke, I suspected it was a rehearsed and commonly spoken line. I looked at him skeptically.

“Really,” he said. “You may have intended that as rhetoric, to illustrate the fact that it will never happen. I remember just a month ago, people were saying Trump and Musk were just whining about white South Africans and weren’t going to do anything to help them and then poof, executive order making it easier for them to come here. The blackpill worldview is not irrational. It developed from a long history of Republican failure. But when the facts change, your priors should change.”

“The white South African thing was one of the few things Trump did that I can embrace as an unadulterated good,” said Blake Johnston, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer. “None of the others, not the Democrats, not the ‘moderate’ pro-immigration Republicans, would have done that. But I also feel like this administration is a disaster waiting to happen. Canada and abortion were mentioned, but there’s also the Middle East, where we could easily have another disastrous war. Zoomers don’t remember Iraq, and there’s a lot of mythologization that has grown up around it. People see it as a failure of the experts, the media, the establishment, which it was. But it was also supported by the vast majority of flyover country. White nationalists were one of the few who opposed it from the beginning, which gave the movement credibility. That seems scarcely possible today because it would require them to say that the oh so holy non-college educated salt of the Earth white working-class is wrong about something.”

“Creekshitters!” someone yelled.

“It’s funny,” Blake said. “When guys flirt with old-school aristocratic reactionary thought, it usually means they want to establish a dictatorship of the Trumpenproletariat. And then they’re shocked when I direct aristocratic contempt at the obese Wal-Mart shopper who goes off about pedophile rings.”

“Rule by the elite, wonderful,” Marcey said. “I’d just love having mandatory affirmative action in every workplace, spending trillions upon trillions on green energy, and still being in COVID lockdown.”

“I said flirting with it,” Blake said. “I see elites and the masses like ‘separate branches of government’ that can check one another and provide a better system than rule by either one alone. Right now, I’m thinking the elites need a bit more power. Maybe increase terms in office, have House reps serve four years instead of two.”

“Whether a good or bad idea, it’ll never happen,” Marcey said. “Nobody has addressed my point that there’s no path to political power with this stuff. Republicans, moderates, and Democrats do not want to elect anti-Trump Nietzschean centrists! I have some real, non-condescending advice for you guys: get involved in your local Republican parties. Run for state legislature, run for city council. Are you elite human capital? Act like it. Nietzschean centrists glorify Napoleon and Ceasar, Men of Action. What would Napoleon be doing were he alive today? He’d be running for office, telling the proles what they want to hear. You have no respect for the creekshitters? Rule over them, natural aristocrat you! A lot of these guys don’t want to deal in the democratic system; don’t want to take up the gun and fight it either. They just want to have their podcasts and laugh at the proles. I’m like, ‘that’s fine, but can you be a little less self-congratulatory about it?’”

“I think we’re talking past each other,” I said. “You speak of exercising political power in the here and now. Whereas I’m concerned about the next generation. Smart young people look at the Right and they see a bunch of superstitious country bumpkins, neurotic conspiracy theorists, and devotees of a low-IQ man’s personality cult. They turn away. We could stop that if we offered an alternative, but we can’t do that if we’re pretending to support Trump.”

“It’s not nearly as bad as you say,” Marcey said. “Among whites with college degrees, 45% voted for Trump.”

“We’ll see how much it is after the next recession,” I said.

“The America First blackout,” Blake said.

“The American will always tell you his electricity got cut off, but he’ll never tell you why,” said Ishwar Bharadwaj, a computer programmer of Bengali heritage.

Several people chuckled at that, evidently referencing something I did not know. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s a Russian proverb,” Ishwar said. “The Jew will always tell you what happened to him, but he’ll never tell you why.”

“Alleged Russian proverb,” Blake said. “Like the alleged Polish proverb, ‘the Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you,’ I wonder if it’s just modern people projecting onto medieval peasant antisemitism a level of sophistication it did not have.”

“About the electricity thing,” Marcey said, “Ontario threatened to charge us more for electricity and almost immediately withdrew the threat. Have you considered that Trump might win? He has most of the cards, the Canadians need us a whole lot more than we need them. And as for tariffs, look, economists don’t like tariffs, I know. But how many people are aware that there are tariffs between Canadian provinces? They’re still living in the Articles of Confederation. And economists will wag their fingers and say, bad. But they get really really excited when they can be anti-Trump since Trump is low-class. While all the media coverage is on Trump’s trade wars with Canada and China, those two countries are busy waging an entirely unrelated trade war against one another. Trump defies economists openly and contemptuously. The ‘responsible’ ‘grown-ups’ in Canada and Europe are polite and deferential and then they turn around and do the exact same thing. People let their views get clouded by Trump’s personality. Look at the actual policies.”

“The policies are often good,” I said. “Anti-DEI, NEPA reform. But you can’t just say, ‘the policies matter, ignore the personality,’ because the personality drives away smart people, which impacts future policy. What happens when the old-guard corporate Republicans are succeeded by people who became Republicans because of Qanon and ‘mRNA vaccines?’”

“You tell me,” Marcey said.

“Well, how about land use policies? The federal government owns huge amounts of land in the American West. Westerners have long been demanding the federal government part with it. There have been some noises about doing that with DOGE. And then a bunch of anti-immigrant monomaniac Twitter accounts showed up and started whining that they shouldn’t do this because immigrants, foreigners, and ‘multinational corporations’ might buy the land. Right now, everyone’s moving to Florida and Texas. Will that still be true if those states end up run by people who will say no housing, immigrants might live there, no roads, immigrants might use them, no factories, multinationals might own them? And I know what you said, ‘get off your ass, run for office, work for DOGE, yada yada.’ That’s all fine and good, but it misses something. George Orwell said that to see what’s in front of one’s face is a constant struggle. These DOGE guys who start pretending to like Trump, in an environment full of people pretending to like Trump, may start thinking, this is a smart group of people, trying to do good, so maybe there’s a method to the madness. We need to be there holding their feet to the fire, saying, no, the man you work for is insane. And I’m not just talking about Trump but Musk, too.”

“Well, I guess I should thank you for holding my feet to the fire,” Marcey said sarcastically.

“You’re welcome.”

“You know, I think some of you are looking at the pre-Trump GOP with rose-colored glasses,” said Steve Martin, a middle-aged conservative journalist. “It wasn’t just edgy teenagers told they couldn’t tell Holocaust jokes. Remember how Jason Richwine got fired from the Heritage Foundation for a f***ing Harvard dissertation? The same process of kicking down the door that allowed the GOP to be flooded with cranks also allowed for bright young people to have a future in the conservative movement. A ‘return to sanity’ cannot mean empowering those people again.”

“Maybe it should, if they’re willing to play ball with us,” I said. “I’m serious. You know, people have been aghast at me for going to these meetings, rubbing shoulders with open white nationalists. But I’m consistent; I don’t see why Jonah Goldberg and David French should be off limits.”

“Eh, maybe,” Steve said. “I freely admit I have a great deal of resentment against those people, which might cloud my thinking. But it’s not like they have much power anymore. Right-wingers under thirty are all either libertarians or some flavor of Alt. David French-ism has no purchase among them.”

“They know how to run magazines, at least,” I said. “Maybe there ought to be a hatchet-burying. Get Jason Richwine and the people responsible for firing him. Make it a big media event.”

“Not a bad idea, though I don’t think the latter group would be interested. I haven’t seen them offering any remorse.”

“Maybe they will if we acknowledge that while they went too far, they were acting out of noble motives?” I said. “When someone warns you about something, you dismiss their warnings because they seem irrational, and then the exact thing they warned you about happens, that should make you think. It’s perfectly normal on Twitter today to see conservatives expressing the view that the ‘freedom of religion’ in the First Amendment should be interpreted as only protecting Christianity. It’s actually a good thing to have gatekeepers saying no, you can’t be part of our coalition if you say stuff like that. So you get both sides to come together and agree that those who purged Richwine did the wrong thing for the right reasons and that the other side went too far in decrying any ideological policing as ‘cancel culture.’”

“It didn’t seem like noble motives to me,” Steve said. “It seemed like cowardice.”

“Suppose you do this,” Marcey said. “You have a bunch of anti-Trump neocons and former Trump supporters coming together, you get a few articles in the press, and then what? One group with little popular support joins another group with little popular support. Elections wins you will not have.”

“You keep assuming that the present political conditions will last forever,” I said. “Suppose the Trump administration is a disaster. 30% of the country will support him no matter what, but the swing voters turn against him. MAGA splinters as Trump doesn’t choose a clear successor. Whoever wins the 2028 nomination loses in a landslide. Trump dies the following year. In 2032, various candidates take the Trump mantle, but because Trumpism is a personality cult that doesn’t care much about policy, it doesn’t work for any of them. Republican politicians in swing districts realize that winning elections requires distancing themselves from Trump. And we will be ready with a platform to hold candidates to. A new contract with America. Things like ‘don’t take medical advice from washed-up MMA guys’ and ‘no religious tests for public office.’ In the meantime, we hold our future power over the heads of people in the Republican Party. Tell them that if they go off the deep end too much, they’ll find themselves excluded from committees, denied endorsements and donations.”

“They’d just laugh at the threats,” Marcey said.

“Maybe now,” I said, “but give it a few months for Trump’s approval rating to nosedive.”

“By the way,” Ishwar said. “Have we forgotten we’re four years out from AGI?”

“No,” Blake said. “We just got bored with talking about it.”