Once Bitten, Twice Shy?
The MAGA hat is BACK ON. Have faith, but keep your powder dry.
I THOUGHT FORMAL POLITICS WAS ‘FAKE AND GAY’, WHAT HAPPENED, IB?
The 14th floor. If you were there, you were there. I know a lot of you love Trump. Me, too. Funniest man alive. I don’t know that a lot of you were there in the Tower in 2016 when the news broke, or watched Trump say, in person, “Sorry to keep you waiting, complicated business.” on election night. I took the A train back home to Bed-Stuy. I wore The Hat around in the East Village. I saw Rudy Giuliani lock himself out of his phone. I saw General Flynn eat the shoulders of a cake that looked like Donald Trump. I saw people sticking it through the worst moments of the ‘doomed’ campaign end up working with household/TV names:
I’m not—as the president says—saying this in a braggadocious way.
I’m just saying, I’ve seen some stuff.
A friend reached out to me recently after seeing me fill up his timeline with politics. What happened to the tech takes, what happened to the Indo-European language and myth? What happened to the gun posts? It’s been months since I’ve talked about how beautiful and perfect was the 2011 Lincoln Town Car.
And what about parallel institutions, huh? Indian Bronson? What about those parallel institutions? The credit unions? The private membership clubs that become private cities? What happened to the guy that incessantly linked people to this article, written now nearly five years ago?
If you’re not on the left, you’re on the right. Which do you think will be the bigger side in time? And why do things ‘go’ any direction first of all, because of ‘the times’ — why is that? If you understand these questions, you’ll get why 2020 is only fit for you to watch on election night with some popcorn.
“How did that guy start soliciting donations for an RNC fundraising committee?”
A deep cut. So deep I felt compelled to write this and interrupt editing a different article in response to
, on how I think Trump Vance 2024 can sail to a landslide (electoral) victory. This is copied and pasted from a frenetic dictation into a Signal chat as I greatly annoyed everyone else at gate E2, Terminal 3, SFO.So, My view of the 2015-Jan 2017 era was this:
All of the stuff that we'd all learned and updated to about a DECADE AGO, induced us, whoever we were, to be strident American Nationalists. And we discovered, nearly a decade ago, this incredible thing happening: the Trump campaign, allegedly not even started in total sincerity, found itself with Steve Bannon advising it, and adopting a very radical nationalist message.
Build the Wall. Deport the illegal aliens. We’re gonna be great again. Fair trade deals. No more stupid endless wars. It didn’t hurt that it was the most iconic Noo Yawkah saying all of this either, and that he was undisciplined and hilarious. Idk if you were old enough to be politically conscious and young enough to be Very Online from 2013-2017 but if you were, good Lord. You know what I mean.
We, as Nationalists, as ‘dissident rightists’ as the fringe who pined for Buchanan, looked at this and said "holy shit, he's really doing it. This guy is speaking for us; he's speaking about immigration, he's speaking about national identity, he's talking about manufacturing, he's talking about trade. This is incredible. There's never been anyone talking about this stuff!” Because, not so long ago, the brainchild of the GOP on immigration was Marco Rubio and his Gang of Eight telling us we needed amnesty now and border security later, in a reheated, shitty version of then-Rep now-Senator Chuck Schumer's 1986 IRCA. Trump’s campaign was like finding a desert oasis and we drank deeply.
The campaign—good lord, the campaign. You can find me, you know, in some of the PA rallies, on some of the stages. You can find me in the news photographs. My Mom has one that’s now totally faded on our fridge. It’s me in my shooting flannel (this is WELL before T-Rex Arms did it, to be clear) and camouflage MAGA hat (I got them all, including the super-rare OG white text on black one) screaming myself hoarse, with, I’m not ashamed to say, tears streaming down my face: BUILD THE WALL. BUILD THE WALL. USA! USA! USA!
Do you remember /r/the_donald? Yeah? Late night crew discord? Hi. henlo.
A huge component of 2016 was the reversal of the internet-savvy Obama team stomping the dinosaur like consultant class of the Bush-era GOP. This time it was us with all the best memes, it was us with the radical energy, it was us with the know-how and verve to dominate conversations and make people dance to our tune. You have to remember, even the big tech platforms hadn’t really figured out censorship quite yet. You could get away with a LOT. Much of today’s anon-culture and ever more abstruse and elaborate linguistic games emerged as a response to the ratcheting of censorship that only began back then. To underscore how different the internet was back then, please look at this highlighted sentence fragment in Slate, written by a Turbo-Lib (check his twitter today lol), arguing for a free and open internet in 2014, just two years earlier.
Seriously click that link. Read that shit.
I’m not kidding, don’t go on until you read that and sit with it for a bit. Unbelievable.
Anyway, we won.
But then the transition kicks off and something terrible started to happen. Suddenly there were Bush people everywhere. James Bacon explains it in this talk which is worth your time. The campaign didn't have contacts in government, it didn't have much of an operation itself; it had outsourced that stuff to the GOP. So when it suddenly came time to staff up, it did the same, and who did the GOP recommend for everything? Their friends and people from former administrations — not necessarily people who saw eye to eye with the campaign and its army of supporters and volunteers.
This was horror to witness. You’d watch as sensitive and serious young men like Thomas Baptiste—chronicled briefly in Corey Lewandowski’s and David Bossie’s book Let Trump Be Trump—a gentle soul, but a warrior, working night after night on the campaign to do everything in obscurity, through thick and thin, were sidelined by the anonymous remoras of whales like Pompeo or Bolton.
The Transition became its own entity, shutting out most of the campaign, and the campaign folks were left to do Inaugural planning and not much else. Some of them ended up at HUD with Sleepy Doctor Ben Carson.
And then, in February of 2017, the headlines started.
Trump wanted to show GREAT HEART to the DACA KIDS. There were suddenly lots of meetings slated with Netanyahu. The whole cast of characters from Bolton to Pompeo to lessers like Scaramucci or Kirstjen Nielsen came in and out of service in a WH filled with backstabbing and leaking. Kushner people didn’t trust Bannon people, the few campaign people didn’t trust Bushies, the old didn’t trust the young and the young were getting drunk a lot. A LOT. Vendettas became leaks, leaks became weaponry to remove problems. Messy, gross.
It was 100x more of a mess than anyone outside knew. I won't dox anyone, I won't name names, but there's a certain RED HEADED girl who was at a certain AGENCY, who really, really ought be totally ashamed of herself. You, dirty bitch.
Sorry, where was I - and anyway, this goes on with Trump dilly-dallying on immigration, acceding to the demands of Paul Ryan and Jared Kushner. Bannon is long gone, the WH composition is totally locked in with Swamp Creatures, and Trump is basically out to lunch, constantly hounded by the media and 'on tilt'. We were being inundated all the time with Russian Collusion, a complete fabrication of the US intel permanent-State and the US news media apparatus.
The Midterms come in 2018 and there's a reckoning. The GOP is utterly humiliated in elections, and the Democrat Party smells real blood in the water. Where Trump once had a full house; the WH, Senate, and Congress, he now has a class of freshman grandstanders from AOC to Ilhan Omar and the "Squad" being a pain in his ass. There's no kind of progress at all on immigration or any nationalist priorities. It’s constant Russian Collusion and Impeachment Talk. You can STILL find people with Bob Mueller memes. You can STILL find people who are excited about Michael Avenatti. God. What a fever dream that all was.
And then, 2019, 2020 and our national experiment in repeatedly saying:
“You’re muted. You’re on mute.”
You probably remember COVID and BLM. You probably remember them somewhat accurately. You *almost certainly* do not remember them very accurately, and there are many critical points of reality that you will likely be ideologically blind to because they involve criticizing Trump or criticizing certain conservative dispositions. I won’t bring them up. Operation Warp Speed.
However, on net: utterly retarded "Public Health" types + social justice warriors egging on black rioters devastated the country and gave Trump a huge shit sandwich to eat, which he did. That was the environment in which everything from the Hysterical White Woman coalition to probably some fraudulent Dem votes won 2020. They cheated. But they cheated fair and square. Biden-Harris.
Following an abortion of a protest and jolt of anger (one surely saturated with Feds trying to do a palace coup) on January 6th, we entered the Biden Years.
What do we really have to say? Since 2018, there's been a huge class of grifters and influencers and increasingly "New Republican" types dominating the information-waves by talking about the Latest Democratic/Liberal Outrage.
Boy are there a lot of them. But something always missing in everything they would talk about, even when the Biden-Harris admin would let in egregious amounts of illegal aliens, was the zest of 2016, the spirit, the sense that we were going to change things - that this time, people were really angry and really going to MOVE on the Capitol - it surely didn't help how farcical January 6th's Boomer FreakOut was. The whole Biden administration has been that. Incredibly boring.
Even more pathetically than the impotent rage of January 6th, Biden then just stepped out of the race. And someone tried to kill Trump. And that was merely two weeks ago!
But does anyone care? As of this writing (July 30th), we've got..."BRAT" and Kamala Harris energizing Atlanta, and establishment whore Chris LaCivita who disputed Trump's support of AG Paxton now leading the Trump campaign:
and inducing Trump to disavow, again, his loyalists staffing up Project 2025, in favor of himself, the establishment vanguard. That’s where the conversation is.
What's the reason to go *anywhere near* this election, or even care?
‘Indian Bronson - aren't you the guy that said 2020 is only fit to watch with a bowl of popcorn and to build parallel institutions in 2019?’ Aren’t you the guy in who 2018, and then again in 2022, even advised the suicide-bomber strategy of voting STRAIGHT TICKET DEMOCRAT in the down ticket races to hurt the traitorous GOP Donor Class for being totally cucked on Nationalist Issues?’
‘Whenceforth your new vigor for Formal Politics?’
In a word, Vance. I think Trump's choice of Vance is a more significant factor in winning the race that Trump's own attempted assassination, and in fact, I think that should be very clear now, now that everyone has basically stopped talking about it, despite an at-the-time "iconic" photo. A moment that was mentioned in every single RNC speech, has faded completely in weeks.
This just isn't that kind of country.
But it is a country — with an electoral system — where someone like Vance and an election strategy that PEOPLE, we nationalists, not even the campaign entirely, can pursue. We can make a difference and we act with agency.
And Vance is worth doing it. Trump's selection of Vance — someone who is a good friend of Don Jr. as well — is the selection of someone who isn't like Pence, who isn't like Paul Ryan, who isn't like Reinhold "Reince" Preibus (incredible that this is name).
In fact, let’s suppose that every darkest and most cynical view one could have of Trump the man and Trump the phenomenon is true — sensitive souls and Baby Boomers and people with low reading comprehension who cannot entertain hypotheticals, this is the time to look away — Let's say Trump is impulsive, has a terrible case of ADHD, has zero instinct for hiring people politically, is endlessly suckered by Swamp/Establishment types, is deeply insecure about media criticism, desperately desires media approval, and more or less doesn't care about nationalist issues but likes whatever gets him cheers at rallies. (I disavow)
Even supposing all of this were true (I say, I disavow!):
The Vice President is a white guy steeped in Appalachia and the Midwest, who went to join the Marines, married well, has handsome kids, and is keenly aware of how he's been viewed as up-jumped white trash, by people who don't give a shit about the country and are often only recent arrivals to it, his whole life.
He follows some interesting people on Twitter. He got emotional over Garden State. He's a skater punk trailer park emo scenester turned Marine. He's a Millennial, he still hasn't deleted his Runescape scoreboard. He's our guy.
It matters that Trump picked him, it matters that he'll have a say in staffing the White House. It matters that Trump asked him to be VP in order to help him govern. There are no hard material promises and probably there never could be any articulated about the future administration’s desire to consciously satisfy nationalists on National Question issues, made by Trump or the campaign.
I'm sure that Vance, if he is accosted by journalists tomorrow about following Bronze Age Pervert on Twitter, will quietly unfollow the outré online right once the news media is on something else or demure it or whatever.
I would doubt — and I wouldn't advise him — to come out and start speaking in fren/groyper talk in ‘clapping back’ at journalists. That would be stupid.
What matters is that he mobilizes people like him: White, Christian, Men, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. What matters is Trump back in the White House and by his very presence, rebukes a permanent state that wants to get permanent control of the American polity - which it may already have - by perverting the electorate. What matters is that we win, and then set terms for victory. We won't be able to do the latter if we can't contribute to the former.
Is this the only thing that we do?
Of course not, I'm Indian Bronson.
If it were all so simple, it wouldn't be one of my substack posts, now would it?
How I look at the evolution of the future is a span of bubbling and rising and vanishing probabilities. Every moment that follows the present is an evolution from the last, with the initial positions and momentums of t=0. The old Classical physicists, before they bit the Quantum apple, even speculated you could completely predict the future with kinematic equations. I think you can tell what tomorrow's weather is likely to be, some of the time.
I think that we won't know — but will find out — what the real balance of demographic heft and solidarity is through the assay of the 2024 election.
What happens in 2024 will come down to our own decisions against our own reality. Maybe there's no amount of action we can take to win, because the numbers just aren't there. Might could be.
But maybe not. I think though, that we're about to have a final weighing of the scale. 2020 and COVID was something else. I don't think that was a real test of how the US electorate is composed - demographically or spiritually.
But I think 2024 is.
In fact, start the work you think you need to do after a 2024 loss, now. Try to dovetail it with mobilizing the white working class in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, in fact. Today you're mobilizing voters, tomorrow, who knows….