WaltBismarck's profile

WaltBismarck 8d ago

this is a very sweet and thoughtful comment, thank you!

I completely understand your reaction and don't resent you for it. As I said in my other comment, on some level I am playing a character with Walt Bismarck and want to piss people off. Right now I just need to very rapidly build salience. That will tone down once I doxx myself and can relax into a less exaggerated persona.

I think at that point you'll find me a lot less annoying.

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WaltBismarck 8d ago

I respect this attitude. All I'll say is that I'm trying to quit my normie bug job as fast as possible, and once I can pay my bills via Substack will likely adopt a less explicitly provocative approach. That kind of naturally happens anyway to creators once they reach the 25-50k mark. My public persona will grow to resemble someone like Kaschuta or Default Friend. But it's literally impossible to grow at a decent rate initially without throwing a few grenades.

Even now, I think you'd probably find my overall metapolitical strategy mostly agreeable. I am a very civicminded person and believe in building bridges and talking to virtually anyone. I just like to "pop the zit" when it comes to scary topics instead of letting pus fester under the skin. This isn't always pretty or clean, but my actions are definitely helping to sanitize prowhite / rightist politics. If I can pull any of my old friends out of the ghetto I will be very proud of that.

"Jeb Bush who talks like Benito Mussolini" is kind of shorthand for my rhetorical strategy as well.

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WaltBismarck 9d ago

I explain how my videos influenced the discourse in my retrospective. Feel free to consult that.

In summary--my videos cemented a lot of memes/brainworms that defined Alt Right culture in late 2015 to early 2016 ("shift the overton window", "don't punch right", "no enemies to the right") and this absolutely influenced tactics on the ground.

These ideas had been kicking around for decades, and who is to say that the alt-right really had anything to do with their recent popularity since there are so many confounding variables.

Bizarre statement. The Alt Right was their recent popularity. Their newfound relevance literally manifested as the Alt Right.

Do you think if your "propaganda" never existed then there would have been any measurable difference in the alt-right's popularity?

Absolutely. I was one of the most influential content creators from this period and I've spoken to literally hundreds of people who said they found the movement through me. This includes a lot of future leaders of the movement, including Richard Spencer's current right hand man: https://x.com/TAlbert0Barbosa/status/1720146998358049043

Jared Taylor would not have had me create a music video for Amren 2016 if I hadn't been one of the most important figures in the movement at the time.

Your articles mostly went viral for all the wrong reasons. They had more negative reactions than positive ones even on the dissident right.

That hasn't been my impression at all. The IDW is currently raving about me for instance.

In any case, my essays have gotten people talking about me and have put thousands of dollars in my pocket. That's the first step to creating any kind of influential platform.

Also, I'd like to note that in another comment you say this:

I'm a long time lurker but I found his post that I responded to extremely irritating. So much so that I had to create an account to respond to it.

Ask yourself why I was able to get such a rise out of you that you created an account just to lambast me? Does that not speak to a particular talent or skill? You yourself have demonstrated that I'm able to inspire exceptional reactions in people.

Right now I am optimizing for controversy because I need to rapidly increase salience, and to that end it's fine to piss some people off. Whenever guys like you loudly complain about me, there are inevitably a few people who are rubbed the wrong way, and a few of those guys will end up giving me views and money.

So I welcome the negative reactions. At this stage all publicity is good publicity.

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WaltBismarck 12d ago

I did not participate in Charlottesville. In 2015-2016 my content brought tens of thousands of people into the Alt Right. I was the biggest AR creator on Youtube for several months. You can learn more here: https://newaltright.substack.com/p/how-the-alt-right-won

Since returning to the public sphere I have built a large and lucrative Substack extremely quickly and several of my essays have gone viral. I can pretty consistently influence discourse in the dissident right and adjacent scenes whenever I want.

It's just empirically demonstrable truth that I am an effective propagandist.

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WaltBismarck 14d ago

This thread speaks to something I really don't like about rationalism.

It is incredibly pedantic and overly concerned with explicit formalist truth/knowledge in a way that doesn't reflect how identity and power work in the real world. It comes off as extremely autistic at times. The fact is that reality is nuanced and messy and contradictory, and virtually all heuristics will be inapplicable to some situations. It's sturm and drang, not high minded spergy debate. As a successful propagandist, I know that irrational emotions and especially the invisible rules of prestige/cultural coding are a million times more powerful than beautifully crafted syllogisms.

When it comes to race--The shoreline of England is infinite if you keep zooming in. You can't define the world in terms of edge cases. Sometimes you need the low resolution filter to reflect how people actually behave. And in a lot of situations people will only use (and very frequently, can only use) the low resolution filter. When you are attacked as a white person, it makes sense to defend yourself as a white person, and not as some New Libertarian Man who exists outside of the world's tribal classification schema.

You might not care about race, but race cares about you. In prison you hang out with the other white guys or you get raped.

When it comes to immigration policy, from a WN perspective there simply isn't a good answer as to where to draw the line and any smart WN will tell you this, but that doesn't mean race is irrelevant. Race is clinal, and whenever you try to chop it up into discrete subgroups you will have to make some simplifications that reduce the accuracy of your model. This doesn't mean the variation covered by the original cline/gradation isn't significant. It just makes creating immigration policy etc. that isn't overly accepting or too prohibitive very difficult.

This is something WNs are very thoughtful about and will discuss internally, but when asked by an outsider it always feels very shifty and bad faith. Thankfully as a former WN who hasn't renounced my past, I can still have those discussions with active WNs in a way you can't. If you look at episodes 5 and 14 of my podcast I explicitly grill them on where/how they draw the line, and they make a genuinely good faith effort that leads to very interesting discussion.

I don't appreciate you trying to frame my rhetoric as shifty or evasive, or trying to "pin" me. I'm not some drug kingpin you're trying to prosecute. We're supposed to be gentlemen trying to hash out how the world works, and these are incredibly complex and nuanced issues that need to be answered in an expansive way with the proper historical and scientific context. Sometimes you need to let someone ramble for a few minutes so they can adequately provide this context, but you were grilling me like a prosecutor with very simplistic and direct questions and it felt on many occasions that you were coming at me in bad faith or with an agenda. I don't think that's what you wanted to do, but I also think you have a lot of unexamined biases.

there were only so many ways I could rephrase a question

I detected in the first few minutes of the discussion that you weren't interested in a broad historical/philosophical discussion that could get into the meat of the issue, and wouldn't let me provide enough context to satisfy a neutral party. I subsequently gave an extremely direct answer to literally every question you asked. But no, I didn't let you trap me into defending something I don't even believe, because I have a much higher IQ than the frog twitter wignats you're fighting with on Twitter, and can tell when I'm being baited.

I know a white supremacist I've been talking to for years who has been agonizingly obfuscatory on very elementary questions across many years, so I didn't have high hopes for clarity.

This reflects an uncharitable and supercilious attitude I think you should work on. Nobody calls themselves a "white supremacist" first of all, so when you say this you just sound like an asshole who won't let someone define their own beliefs. But I know you're not an asshole, so you should stop this behavior.

Second, I am clearly someone who is engaging in good faith in an adversarial environment, and deserve be treated entirely on my own merits, and not be spoken down to because of your interactions with past interlocuters of an ostensibly similar worldview. But you were acting like I was still a WN and were entirely uninterested in my deeper and more abstract thoughts about race.

If you had let me ramble more and actually flesh out my worldview rather than pressing me to defend tenets of an ideology I had very explicitly abandoned I think the convo would have been more enlightening.

Perhaps we can aim for that in a future discussion?