Andrew Anglin has written an article about this over at The Daily Stormer. I’ve responded below with some of my own comments:

“There has been an ongoing debate within pro-White circles about the value of internet activism vs. the value of real life street activism.”

The debate is more about how the internet has consumed the White Nationalist movement since the 1990s than it is about e-activism vs. street activism.

Has this been a good thing? I’ve been around for 15 of the last 20 years that the White Nationalist movement has been dominated by the internet. When I first started posting on messageboards in 2000, the White Nationalist movement in the US was stronger, better led, better funded, and better organized than it is today 15 years later.

“I understand the argument that internet activism is a worthless circlejerk and ultimately an admission of defeat, but I believe that there is a lack of an understanding of what exactly internet activism should be.”

I’ve seen 15 years of it: Yahoo groups, then vBulletin forums, then WordPress blogs, then podcasts, and lately, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. After 20 years of e-activism, we are weaker today than we were in 1995.

“The internet is now where people go to have their realities shaped, in the way that they used to go to the television. The ability to influence someone’s core perceptions of reality is obviously a very powerful thing, if it is taken advantage of. Saying “oh no, no reason to mess with it, let’s go out on the street and hold up signs instead,” then going on to complain that the world is hopeless because not enough people are out in the streets holding up signs, strikes me as much more defeatist than making a genuine attempt to use the vast potential of the internet to influence the minds of potentially millions of people.”

There’s some truth to this.

I agree that the internet has become the public square in America, that it can be used to educate people and spread ideas far more effectively than literature drops, and that it is shaping their identities and core perceptions of reality, BUT it is also misused in the same way that computer games like Minecraft are used by gamers, as a purely masturbatory form of time-wasting and as a substitute for forming real relationships. If the internet is going to substitute for engaging in politics in the real world, why not set up an online forum and christen that “the ethnostate”?

The moral of the story: just as an e-girlfriend is no substitute for a real girlfriend or a wife, online communities are no substitute for a real world ethnostate. Insofar as the internet is misused to blow off steam and avoid conflict with the opposition, the time we spend online can even hold back our cause.

Some people act like reporting Facebook pages are battles like raising the flag over Iwo Jima.

“If you read this site with any regularity, you are aware that I focus on continually pressing certain memes, over and over and over again. This is a method by which, through repetition, you are able to give a person a lens through which they view reality. They then spread these memes both through various different internet outlets as well as in the real world. This exponential dissemination of simple and yet very powerful ideas, as it builds momentum, can continue to expand indefinitely. … This is the exact method which was used to create the social justice movement. This was done on the internet. Now it is basically the dominant ideology of the entire Western establishment.”

We’ve all been exposed to The Mantra which is undoubtedly the most famous example of pushing online memes. When people post photographs of The Mantra in toilet stalls, when they wear masks in public, distribute literature at 3 AM, and when they throw their hands in the air and quit after they are “exposed” by the media, the message that is sent to ordinary people is that these people are ashamed of their own beliefs and that even these racists must agree that they are doing something sinister.

“The rate at which the internet has accelerated the spread of liberal thought-forms is mind-boggling. Because Jews are clever people, and they saw the end of an age of standing out in the streets with signs, and moved into the age of viral electronic information as a means to shape reality.”

The ascendancy of Jews to the apex of America’s social pyramid goes back to the 1920s to the 1960s – they were firmly ensconced in power and were in the cultural driver’s seat long before the rise of the internet in the 1990s.

Jews are in power. More than any other group, they are overrepresented in the American elite. Why would they take to the streets when they have Harvard, Hollywood, Viacom and Goldman Sachs?

“Along with the basic distribution of memes, the internet provides us with the ability to create massive spectacles which get picked up by the larger media. During the operation against Luciana Berger, the Stormer Troll Army was able to get the words “filthy Jew bitch” printed on virtually all mainstream news sites, and what’s more, the masses of people in the comments sections sided with our right to express our political views on the internet, even while knowing that we were distributing a message of “virulent” anti-Semitism.”

Here’s another way of looking at this: the internet allows people to create anonymous personalities which enables them to avoid conflict with these people in the real world which they substitute for online trolling. In much the same way, men substitute masturbating to online pornography for courtship with real women.

“I can say that I am the only person who has attempted to apply these concepts to right-wing ideology (save for Alex Jones, if you want to consider him “right wing”). It wasn’t some kind of massive connection to make here. Shockingly, no one else has even attempted to get on board with this concept, save my own readers, and instead we have endless moaning about how we need to “get out in the streets.”

This is probably because of a lingering doubt that trolling Jews on Twitter with disposable pseudonyms is just another way of avoiding conflict with them in the real world. It’s not going to change Jewish power in the real world. The same could be said of older tactics like making prank phone calls to the SPLC.

“And yet, there is no plan as to what we are to be doing in the streets. If I was trying to organize street protests – again, I am not trying to do that as I have other goals that I am focused on – the first thing I would have is a clear list of political goals/demands. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” is not an obtainable objective that you can rally people around. At the same time, very few are inspired by the idea of randomly finding trigger-issues and standing up against them with placards. This is clearly why no one shows up to street protests. They appear to an outsider to have been formulated to purposefully fail.

The real reason that so few people show up at street protests is because our political beliefs are taboo and controversial. It means engaging in conflict and confrontation with the opposition and that means risking something. Most people who subscribe to all these ideas aren’t willing to risk anything, least of all their social status or their middle class lifestyle, for the sake of their identities and beliefs.

That cuts to the heart of what is wrong with e-activism and why 20 years of it had the effect of weakening us: as a platform, the internet is a great tool for educating people, for spreading ideas and molding identities, and we have been successful on that front. It’s far more effective than literature drops, BUT where the internet fails is in cultivating the indispensable moral qualities that shape character.

If you believe all this stuff, but you are unwilling to act on your identity and beliefs because you are afraid of the social and economic consequences, what does it really matter? You’ve been neutralized. No amount of e-activism in cyberspace will ever make up for a conscious decision to avoid conflict in the real world where it counts.

“Again, all you have to do is watch how the other side behaves and repeat that behavior. The homosexual rights movement, for instance, has for 25 years had a list of demands, and they have then proceeded to get these demands met by working out the most efficient possible way to organize their people for this purpose. They were supported by Jewish memes distributed through popular electronic culture.”

The mainstreaming of homosexuality in the United States and other Western countries, much like its predecessor, the Civil Rights Movement, was a social revolution that was imposed from the top down by elites on the masses.

“To be fair, the anti-abortion movement has followed this pattern of street organization correctly, and yet been overwhelmed. The reason that they were overwhelmed was that the Jews are the only people using the reality-shaping media technologies for the purpose of framing the issue in the minds of the masses with simplified memes. “Right to choose” won out over “right to life” because the meme was better disseminated and attached to larger emotional triggers. It never mattered which was more moral or truthful or best for society, because that isn’t the way this game works.”

The Christians who oppose the legalization of abortion are in a similar predicament: they are facing a hostile elite at the apex of the social pyramid, and they are locked out from key institutions of cultural power.

“Both internet activism and street activism are valid methods of resisting the hell that is coming down on us and I think the goal needs to be for them to work in tandem with clear objectives. I wish more people were involved in the use of memes to spread our ideology on the internet, but I believe it will pick up. On the street side, both National Action in Britain and National Youth Front in America are making good progress.”

The paradox of the internet is that we have never been more connected than we are today through social media, but strangely enough we have never been more atomized and isolated from each other, even in our own cities and towns. Because of the internet, which in theory should be a great networking tool, we have never been more disorganized, more risk averse, and easier to dominate.

We have replaced real world relationships with pseudo-relationships which are low trust, more fragile, and easier to disrupt. We’ve created a habitat where trolls and all kinds of idiocy flourish, but that is a topic for another day.

“I see a lot of reasons to be positive. And I am certain that no one ever got anything done by talking about how no one is doing anything.”

If no one is doing much of anything, there is a probably a reason.