There's a point at which LARPing becomes lying.

LARPing can be forgiven as naïve, but eventually, it becomes annoying, disingenuous, and even immoral.

On August 15, 2017, Jason Reza Jorjani resigned from the Alt-Right Corporation. He no longer owns shares in our organization nor is he involved with its guidance.

Jason published his resignation letter without consulting any Board Member or announcing his intentions to us. Despite this lack of courtesy, we parted ways on what seemed to be amicable terms.

Jason has always strongly identified with what he calls the Iranian Renaissance movement. Jason informed us that, after Charlottesville, he had been given an ultimatum: leave the Alt-Right or leave the Iranian resistance. It reveals much that Jason preferred the interests of a Middle Eastern country over a movement that represents the identities of White people in America and Europe. As his strange airing of dirty laundry reveals, he valued the Alt-Right as a means of advancing Iran.

The Iranian Renaissance is an attempt to de-Islamify Iran and return it to its Aryan and even Zoroastrian roots, making the country a staunch ally of Europe and identitarian movements. Laudable . . . quixotic . . . perhaps dangerously de-stabilizing . . . I ultimately find this movement utterly dispensable to our broader goals. My personal instincts are towards realism, and I would have no qualm with European states having diplomatic, respectful relations with the current Iranian regime. Haven’t we had enough “regime change” in the Middle East to fill a lifetime?

Some history is in order. I had first become aware of Jason last fall when he took over the editorship of Arktos Media from John Morgan. While John’s personality is passive and listless, Jason’s is that of an energetic “dreamer,” in the best and worst senses of the word. He has a brilliant intellect and wide knowledge of philosophy, but also possess a tendency to indulge in the esotericism and other-worldliness of which Anglo-Saxons and Germans are rightly skeptical. Put bluntly, Jason has a tendency to LARP (Live Action Role Play), that is, to live in a synthetic world, as opposed to working towards changing the real one.

Jason put very little intellectual capital into the Alt-Right Corporation, in terms of editing, writing, commissioning, fund-raising, web-design, infrastructure, etc. To be fair, he had academic commitments and Daniel Friberg has reported to me that his editing of Arktos manuscripts was impressive. But his influence on our collective project approached zero.

What novelty Jason did bring was his vague and dubious, though always enticing, promise of funding through a secretive, Indo-European society. (I never planned to discuss any of this publicly, but since Jason has dilated on his scheme at length, the Board and I agreed that we should address it.)

In February, when Jason first told me about this endlessly wealthy group—about how they would invest in the Alt-Right to the tune of millions, if not billions, and offer Jason the chance to own Arktos outright—my gut arrived at the following odds: There was a 90 percent chance Jason was delusional or engaging in wishful thinking; there was a 9 percent chance he was being deceptive or manipulative, and there was a one percent chance the story was actually true! After our magical funding was “delayed” for various illogical reasons, each one more baffling than the last, Daniel, Tor, and I began politely rolling our eyes every time Jason would bring it up. And while Jason kept the faith, the three of us did the real work: producing blogs, news items, and podcasts, paying our excellent editors and full-time writers, Vincent Law and Melissa Mészáros, and migrating AltRight.com to a secure new server.

LARPing can be forgiven as naïve, but eventually, it becomes annoying, disingenuous, and even immoral.

When Jason announced in June that we should reorient AltRight.com in a “Neo-Scythian, Ukraine-based” direction, I became utterly exasperated. What would such a thing even entail? And why should we engage in a project at the behest of magical (no doubt non-existent) donors who have yet to give us a single dollar and only communicated to us through Jason’s vivid imagination?

Moreover, Jason’s public announcements—and bragging to an antifa infiltrator—of a connection to Steve Bannon is unsound and unwise to an extreme degree. First, if one has such an entrée into the inner-sanctum, it’s best not to talk about it, particularly with a person one has just met. And while Bannon might have read Julius Evola, every interview and public statement he has made reveals a man whose political philosophy was formed by the 2000s-era Tea Party, not by the Italian aristocratic radical.

I’ve always been quite upfront about my rather unimpressive connections to the Trump administration. I met Bannon very briefly at a cocktail party, but have had no contact or influence. I knew Stephen Miller quite well while we both attended Duke in the mid-2000s (I was a doctoral student and Stephen was an undergrad), but I have not spoken with him in at least five years. Dreaming big and projecting power and influence is good, but there comes a point at which LARPing dissolves into lying.

My guess is that Jason recognized that his LARPing had crashed against the brick wall of reality. As opposed to facing up to the truth and moving forward realistically, he has left both Arktos and the Alt-Right Corporation with nothing to show for it all. For someone who styles himself as a hermetical operative and mastermind, this must be rather embarrassing.