The main problem that the neoreactionary Right faces right now is anonymity. Three years ago it was not enough people. Now, many, many new people are joining, but the vast majority are doing so under the cover of anonymity. In this post I will explain how anonymity holds us back and how we can change that.

Our objective is to roll back leftward drift, put the breaks on the signaling spirals leading us towards left singularity, which is ultimately Stalinism or 1984:

But this guy is unusual, right? No, not really. Cass Sunstein, who was Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during Obama’s first term, has called for legal restrictions on conspiracy theories or racial epithets meaning you could be put in jail for using a racial slur or for saying Bush did 9/11. Sunstein is married to Samantha Power, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Such efforts to punitively punish speech hearken back to Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” essay which argues that tolerance is something which ought to reserved for the Left only, never for the Right, or even further back to the Communist notion of free speech as a “bourgeois freedom”.

If people like Sunstein ever succeed in getting a bill that restricts free speech (meaning socially conservative speech, which is what they want to ban) passed, it will be pretty much game over. We have to raise a fuss now to prevent that from happening. We need to show the United States that we value our free speech and we mean to keep it.

The best way to defend the front line of free speech is for an individual to go out in public using their real name and face and to say socially conservative things which offend the liberals who control much of the media and government. This is why I can sometimes appreciate Ann Coulter. She says bombastic things, some of which make her seem unstable or intentionally inflammatory, but for my purposes I don’t really care if she actually believes them or not. Regardless of the intent behind these statements, they serve as a barrier which must be taken down for leftward drift to proceed. She serves as a nuisance to the left, a valuable nuisance which acts as an umbrella for other people to follow behind her.

If the statements made by Ann Coulter were made by an anonymous Twitter account with an oil painting avatar, they would carry much less weight. The whole reason Ann Coulter became a major name on the national political scene is because at some point, in the late 90s, she put her face and name out there and attached it to controversial statements. In the late 90s, when Coulter began writing columns, it was more socially acceptable to say socially conservative things in print. Her background and the momentum behind her words carried her to the national stage.

Coulter has an elite background that gave her the opportunity to reach national exposure. In law school, she was an editor of the Michigan Law Review, was president of the local chapter of the Federalist Society, and was trained at the National Journalism Center.

When politicos like Coulter are at the start of their careers, they survey the scene to see what seems socially acceptable and what doesn’t. They then make a compromise between their true views and what they think is socially acceptable. On the Left, people do this as well. Someone may well be a Communist in the closet, but write from the perspective of a liberal because they think their content will gain a better reception that way. A paleoconservative might try passing himself off as a neocon if he thinks that route will more effectively spread certain key ideas.

The “scene” that people like young Coulter looked at can be envisioned in a social grid format. Think of it as a network of dots connected by lines which represent relationships. These dots cluster around powerful individuals and organizations. Today, dots representing anonymous Twitter accounts might be represented as faded grey spots. The grey spots fan out over a wider area, both the extreme Left and the extreme Right, but they don’t matter too much if they are occupying a volume by themselves. To really matter, they need to be integrated with other dots; those representing real people. Think of these as black dots. These real people needn’t be rich or famous, but they must be real; a real name or a real face, and preferably both. These real people may appear as random commenters on the Internet, but at least they’re real. They have substance, corporeality.

The most important dots would be the bright blue or red dots; these represent powerful progressives and conservatives. These are the people who write columns for major newspapers, edit opinion pages at places like The Daily Caller, or run organizations like the Heritage Foundation. From the perspective of elite students eyeing their way up the political ladder, these are the only people that matter. Don’t blame me; I didn’t set up this system. I’m just telling you how it works. For a Yale or Harvard student, only a certain kind of person matters in politics, and it’s the big names. Otherwise, they don’t really give a damn. They may pretend to, but they don’t.

What is interesting to me is how growth of black and red or blue dots can occur by growing out into new space; space that was previously populated just by grey dots, or even by nothing. Ta-Nehisi Coates would be an example. In the 90s, he never would have made it as a columnist; he is too radical, making statements such as calling for reparations for slavery in the pages of The Atlantic. Yes, others have called for reparations before, but it’s the combination of socialist or far-leftist views in addition to the prestige of The Atlantic that makes Coates unusual. The “reparations” political space was not a grey zone until Ta-Nehisi Coates started writing on it, but it was definitively losing steam. His activity has rebooted it, allowing other “blue dots” to flood into the area in a way that would not have been possible before because someone, a new columnist with a fresh reputation and a new generation, had to take the first step.

Taking the first step is always difficult. Look at Moldbug. He has largely been saved from receiving fallout in his personal and business life due to his political writing because of a network of well-established professional connections and sympathetic individuals. Yet, for many years, he was largely alone in this space, alongside a few grey dots like Foseti. He didn’t even become a red dot until relatively recently, when his name was made public. Now he is a red dot in a space with a few other black dots: the likes of Nick Land, myself, and a short list of others.

In this brave new space, to the right of libertarianism, to the right of the Republican Party, to the right of… well, practically everything, is neoreaction. In the last few years, the influx of grey dots has accelerated to an impressive degree, to the point where it is fairly clear that there are at least 1,000 people regularly following neoreactionary activity, and probably many more who are familiar with the general ideas, are interested, and bring them up in conversations. The problem is that the number of black and red dots has not increased proportionally to the influx of grey dots. This is in contrast to something like transhumanism or utilitarianism where nearly everyone uses their real name as a matter of course.

Many of these grey dots could be transformed into black or red dots overnight; they would just have to go public. Of course, in doing so, they would expose themselves to potential fallout of the kind that Brendan Eich or Pax Dickinson suffered. But my point is that eventually, this has to happen if we are to succeed. He who dares, wins. Only through taking a risk with regard to our name can we halt the leftward motion. If we were all to go public simultaneously, we would be a formidable force. There are a number of powerful neoreactionaries in business and government who are secret because they have to be.

The problem is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. From the “rational” perspective of Person A, it is more advantageous to hide himself and speak anonymously than to take professional risks by sharing his political views under his real name and face. The same applies to person B, person C, and so on. Everyone has an incentive to defect. But, if everyone defects, forward movement cannot occur. The weak-willed and the timid all defect, and we get locked into a timeline where left singularity is a real risk. Only through changing the incentives so that participation provides a greater reward than defection can we achieve our objectives.

There are many ways to do this, but they fall into two categories: carrot and stick. As always, they are most effective when used in combination. One form of a carrot is to assign higher status and respect to those who take the personal risk of making their names public. This happens automatically, but it can be encouraged deliberately. A stick would be a form of social discouragement which frowns upon someone if they have been in the community too long and they still plan to hide their name forever, for instance.

The nice thing about social pressure is that it is the most powerful motivator in the world. In nearly all cases it is a more effective persuader than violence, which people innately fight back against. Social pressure can be configured to uphold arbitrary status systems, which can be made stable and self-perpetuating. Once certain changes are made, if they are stable, they have a tendency to get locked in and persist as a matter of social convention. Civilization itself is an example of such a status system.

The young and powerful, the Harvard law graduates of the world, can and will creep to the Rightward edge of the Overton window, but only if they see a crucial threshold of black and red dots in the target zone. If they only see grey dots and a few black and red dots, they will not move. Only a sufficient density will cause them to take a risk and attach their name to new political territory. This is similar to how large donors will often only make six or seven-digit contributions to a non-profit if and only if there are already many hundreds or thousands of donors making contributions in the two or three digit range and dozens making contributions in the four or five digit range.

The way the world works is “unfair” in the sense that what a Harvard law graduate believes, politically, carries tens of thousands of times more weight than what a truck driver in Oklahoma believes politically. Again, I didn’t invent this, I’m just saying how it is. The morality of it all is irrelevant. What matters is that this is reality.

When the reactionary truck driver in Oklahoma refuses to take risks and put his name or even his face to his political views, he is selling both himself and his fellow travelers short. If only he and more people like him would take the risk, it would create a sufficient density of authenticity around these new views in a way that would attract elites. This is why these types are very wrong when they say what they think doesn’t matter; it does matter. Their faces being public matters because it adds up to conversions of more powerful people who can actually change things, things like preventing left singularity.

Today, the neoreactionary Right is like a class full of first graders at the edge of a small stream. To get what they want, they need to cross over to the other side. But everyone is afraid to make the first jump. To avoid perpetual leftward drift which ends in Pol Pot, the class will need to make the crossing, even if some of them temporarily lose their livelihood. A flawless crossing with no casualties is not possible. There will be people who lose their jobs, but this is a price that must be paid to get the future we want. There will be new jobs, new opportunities created within a new framework we build, but only if we stand publicly and proud. If we are only underground, we are weak. If we are public, we are strong. Sooner or later, a leader will push the class into the stream, and they will have to sink or swim, whether they like it or not. The stakes are too high to have it any other way.