How we got here

In 2015-2016 I used to be one of the top posters on /r/the_donald subreddit, posting under the name AngryRedditorsBelow. I jumped on the Trump train very early, promoted him heavily during the 2015 primaries. A lot of my free time was spent promoting the Trump campaign online. When he won in 2016 I was overjoyed and felt I could sit back after a hard battle where we won "the meme war". A little while later my account was banned, as were pretty much all right wingers from the site. It wasn't really until around the 2018 midterm period that it became clear that we wouldn't get the fundamental shift in direction that we needed. It seemed that at every turn there was an invisible force that kept the country moving to the left, regardless of who was president. The Drag Queen Story Hour kept on being more and more common, TV shows/movies kept being more and more filled with progressive messages, the world kept getting more clownworld-like, the anti-white racism kept intensifying and exploded during the past year and the policies coming out of the White House were being constantly undermined. A lot of Trump's policies weren't even close to being far right as the media claimed, they were basically something similar to what a 1990s Democrat would want. Trump's "Muslim Ban" was a very mild temporary stop on travel from specific countries in Obama's terrorist threat list, yet it was treated like it was end of the world by the media, protested instantly in major cities and shut down by the courts on multiple occassions. After 2 years of supposedly total Republican control it seemed nothing was done except the tax cut. When the BLM riots broke out this year and I saw pretty much every corporation, every media source, every celebrity, everybody in academia completely bend the knee to intersectional SJWs it became clear that the left was only ascending even with Trump in the White House. As much as I loved Trump as an icon of a resurgent right wing, it became harder and harder to cheer on Trump as some ultimate savior figure, as someone who could restore American pride and defeat the left. It became more and more clear to me that the very nature of who holds the power must be reconsidered from our side.

The problem with telling ourselves we're constantly "winning"

The right is inherently biased towards seeing itself as powerful and masculine and never as being the weak side, as constantly winning and as the rightful rulers of the West that have recently and temporarily lost power. The constant "winning" feeling that was being sold with Trump is something inherently appealing to most here. But it actually holds the right back, it causes us to vastly, vastly overestimate our power and vastly underestimate the left and just how much power they wield. It causes things like the Qanon, where right wingers can easily be pacified and told that everything will just work itself out automatically. This desire for catharsis, for the feeling of winning by voting in elections, keeps us from gaining the real seats of control. After 2018 I read a lot, from older right wing thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Bertrand de Jouvenel to the more modern right wing thinkers. The best explanations on political power that I've read came out of the more niche world of modern neo-reactionary blogging.

Power and The Cathedral

It was during the Trump presidency that it became more and more obvious that there was an unelected decentralized concensus that ruled the nation, that emerged out of the information management aparatus of society: the mass media, the social media and the academia. It was back in the 1930's that the Italian leftist Antonio Gramsci realized that you need to change the culture in order to gain political control, and his views became highly influential among the young left wing activists. A series of highly influential left wing intellectuals from the Frankfurt school of economics came over to the University of Columbia and Berkley, and implemented Gramsci's cultural infiltration. Communist defectors like Yuri Bezmenov pointed this out, but it was too late. By the 1960's the left has infiltrated most humanities university departments, and started indoctrinating young journalism students. These students are today's leaders of CNN, MSNBC, New York Times..etc. Same with so many other fields, from business HR to marketing to English to film-making. This collection of information dissemination and concensus creation is what is now called "The Cathedral". It is institutions like Harvard and New York Times that set the cultural tone of our civilization. They are to modern times what the Christian Clergy would have been in medieval Europe. This is not some conspiracy, New York Times and Harvard aren't meeting in a dark cave with capes on to sacrifice children and pray to Moloch, no matter what Alex Jones says. Instead they naturally arrive at a consensus of progressivism in order to maintain their power. Modern progressivism essentially seeks to consolidate power by exploting the weakness of democracy. In any society there will be the Pareto Distribution of power (the old 80/20 rule), essentially 80% people will be low status while only a few wil be on top. In such a society there is an incentive to ally together all the low status people to take down the old power structure. It is not by accident that they now have created a coalition of racialized minorities, LGBT, Muslims, fat feminists with purple hair and other people who previously used to be low status. These people will all be incredibly loyal to the progressive left coalition because they know that in a meritocracy their status would sink faster than a hammer down a well. This concept is called bio-leninism, the blogger Spandrell explains it quite well.

This is where the power is. We saw with the Twitter ban that it is these progressive institutions that control information dissimination that actually have more power than the president himself. This is what any right wing movement must have a plan for, some way to either create parallel institutions that can compete with Hollywood, mainstream media, social media and univerities, or at least some plan to push against them.

Trump was an important symbol for the right, an icon that there is still at least some resistance possible. But we can't depend on him to save us. What is actually needed is someone to lead a cultural revival that creates new cultural institutions. Trump could have done so much more to move people away from Twitter and towards a new platform. If he does create the Patriots party, it will need to be something that can go around the Cathedral, around the control of the left. This can only happen if we create our own institutions and media that attracts people disengaged from the mainstream.