Death of a Conservative

From Scruton to Evola, from preservation to annihilation

Over the past few days and months, in light of the rapidly shifting Overton Window, I’ve been reminiscing about the personal and moral journey that I have undergone over the past decade or so. Much has changed since then, many hurdles have been overcome, and much knowledge has been learned. You now have government organs posting deportation art and recruiting posters, things that would instantly vaporize a pre-2016 person if you showed it to them with the help of a time machine.

The seeds of a lot of my opposition to the current state of affairs began long before I cared or knew anything about anything. When I was just a kid that liked WW2 and a bit of history. It really started during elementary school and the first contact with the outside world and some other authority figure and institution beside the family. The Lovecraftian horror prison known as the education system shaped the core of the rebellious side of my personality. I never accepted the authority of teachers from a moral point of view, seeing it as illegitimate, nothing more than a forcefully imposed bureaucratic position. I see it as such to this day, even more so because a lot has gone downhill in that particular area of my country. The few truly great exceptions, the ones I can name on the fingers of one hand, are people who I will fondly remember until the end of my life and who also went against the system in their own way, shielding us kids from it. The families of all of those that went with me to elementary school were good people and raised their children to be the same, incidents of even small proportions were few and far between, and the neighbourhood was stable and peaceful. It was this that made my admittedly few instances of vocal opposition to something or other in the system quite significant for the surroundings. However, most of my resistance was inner. I increasingly viewed the whole thing as pointless and sort of degrading in a way. It’s this that made me quite receptive to BAP and that whole sphere much later. I saw openly chimping out as not only moronic but futile in the grand scheme of things. It just painted a huge target on your back, and you would instantly be scolded by the bureaucratic matriarchy for behaving this way. I found that opposing their words and attempts to “properly socialize” us with inner defiance as more effective. I listened to their little lectures, but they could never emotionally stir me up to the point where I would feel a moral obligation to act in accordance. A great lesson in rebelling against real tyranny is to be learned here.

Now, I grew up with the internet and spent a lot of time on it, reading Wikipedia articles and watching Youtube. Gamergate was firmly in everyone’s mind (including mine even if I was only able to understand its outlines) and that whole discussion was very very slowly beginning to trickle into other areas when I stumbled across the American presidential election of 2016. As someone from a geopolitically unimportant and politically petty country, that being Croatia, this was quite a spectacle to see. There was some short woman and some memey guy battling it out on stage. Somehow, I learned of Hillary Clinton’s opinion on how Russian interference in the election would be considered an act of war. I honestly don’t even know if that is the correct way of things but that’s sort of how I remember it and I can’t be bothered to look into it and see that sclerotic old woman again. But it was that piece of information that had me rooting for the other guy, without knowing anything about him. Within just a month or two, everyone on Earth, myself included, would come to know the name Trump.

One of the earliest reactions to his victory came from a interviewee on the national news, who was like some local patient zero of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Of course, his one and only critique was “HE’S GONNA START WW3!!”. I found such sentiments pretty odd; didn’t these people know that Hillary was threatening Russia? Regardless, the internet struck once again and the politically charged atmosphere that was spreading from America also effected the online sphere. SJW’s were being owned left and right, Shapiro was disregarding feelings and affirming facts, every issue under the sun was being debated. I watched it all, the PragerU’s, the Steven Crowders, Shapiros, and whatever else flooded my feed. It was also the time when I started high school and saw first-hand the great shadow that loomed over us, turning this sort of honeymoon initial phase into something far more sinister.

As I was now both older and more aware than before, I started noticing some of the things that were either explicitly or implicitly being said in all the videos I was watching in the real world. The boys were trashy and pretty promiscuous, as were the girls too. The sort of conservative tendency that I had at the time couldn’t really deal with it. I didn’t like drinking, I didn’t care for parties or the trashy girls, none of it appealed to me. I began to resent that whole world and begin moving towards a type of Christian morality but without explicitly becoming Christian. I highly regarded it but despite my relatively very Christian environment I never went all the way. However, all the political content I was watching and all that was happening among my peers shaped me into a typical centre-right conservative of the 2016-2020 era — where opposition to societal decay was expressed by hyper supporting the sacred cow of the free market and being a meritocrat. Where “the Left are the real racists” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” ruled the day. Right around the end of that era people such as Jocko Willink and the discipline gurus were breaking into the mainstream. In retrospect, they represented a slightly more radical, if implicit, opposition to the prevailing atmosphere of the time (the well-known tolerance, peace, love, equality obsession). It was also during this time that political correctness, that overused phrase, was spreading across the globe and polluting many of the recently-politically-awakened youths. It was for this reason that I saw Trump’s character in a positive light. I found it funny, boyish, and rebellious when he came up on stage and called someone a fat lesbian or something. These kinds of tactics are more effective than any debate. Simply calling out your opponent for what they are in no ambiguous terms.

Also, there was The Golden One, a Swedish lifter and political commentator that I would every so often check up on (and still do just for the sake of it). He had some interesting takes for that time that appealed to my syncretic Christian-secular-conservative understanding of things. I also came upon the great speaker Jonathan Bowden and all of his speeches. He was much firmer and much more interesting than the mainstream conservatoids I knew well. He fit nicely with the whole “revolt against the modern world” subcurrents that were growing at the time. I consider him a great man that fought the good fight, especially in the totally defeated atmosphere of the UK.

Nevertheless, despite all the memes and fun times online during it all, I saw first-hand what was being opposed by all the commentators and posters. Things were not normal, or at least not how I considered normal to be. A creeping decay had begun to spread, men and women hated each other, men were supposedly toxic, a sense of defeat and ultimate futility of all these positions we were taking was looming over my shoulder. The migrant crisis, especially in Europe, was starting to take on greater and greater proportions.

It should also be said that music, or rather a certain kind of music, had a great deal of influence on me during this time. Among other things, I liked listening to various military marches, political songs from 80+ years ago and that whole thing. Of all the songs, Teufelslied will remain an all-time favorite. A great instrumental version.

Eventually came 2020, the year in which at least two decades went by. Trump was starting to get cornered, the initial intoxication had passed, and no West had been saved. I was still your typical conservative type, even though by now I was starting to question what the hell we were even doing as it didn’t seem like our ideas were being accepted in the general Spirit of the Times. Orban was sort of the only one in Europe who was noteworthy to the broader “international and online right”, even though Hungary is just as socialist as the rest of the EU, but it just doesn’t like migrants. COVID hit hard most places in Europe and lockdowns and draconian measures were in place by summer. It was this that really changed everything. I saw how your friends and neighbours could and would either slander you or straight up rat you out. The vast majority of boomers were permanently damaged by the whole thing, and it is influencing their decisions to this day. My family denounced my opinion that young people’s lives are being ruined by all of this. They said that I wouldn’t think that if one of them died from it!!!! (none of them ever even got it). Then the whole Summer of Floyd thing came and that was pretty much the end of my cuckservative era forever. The burning down of cities and general anarchy over the killing of a petty lowlife could not be defended. “Colorblind meritocracy” crap pushed by mainstream rightist was caught with its pants down in the rain, civic nationalism seemed like some joke totally out of sync with things happening around us. I saw the people that we were supposedly integrating into Western society chant death threats to all Whites, denounce our entire history, and demand that we kneel before the hordes of very much blood-and-soil-rooted third worlders. Couple that with a few friendships with leftist in my own personal life that showed me the true meaning of slave morality and civilization hatred, and the game was up. One of the few other good things that came out of it all was that I started running and lifting as best I could during lockdowns. I lost some weight and built an interest for all that came with lifting, which would later become a pillar of my worldview. During the winter of 2020-21, amid the chaos of Trump’s defeat and the oncoming globalist tyranny of censorship and political prosecution but with pride flags, I came upon Oswald Spengler.

It must be said that learning about Spengler and reading the Decline of the West, especially as a sort of mainstream right winger, hits you like a truck. No going back from that. In Spengler I found the answer to so much. What was culture, what was civilization, what was leftism, what is man’s place in this grand play of history, what is the true meaning of the seemingly unstoppable societal decay, what is it with the hordes of non-whites that hated us, what about depopulation and birthrates — all in Spengler. Admittedly, he was very black pilling but at the same time calming. It felt like it was all outside our control, a process that has to run its course no matter what. If the Romans couldn’t stop it, how would we? Even when I surmounted that initial black pill, it reorients your worldview so much that you forever carry a bit of that pessimism with you — after all, optimism was cowardice.

It was with Spengler that I was launched into the broader Conservative Revolution sphere of 1920s Germany and other connected actors. Junger, Schmitt, and von Salomon just to name a few. Evola and Genon as adjacent too. Other one-off unconnected people like Ted Kaczynski or Mishima as well. Great writers and thinkers that left a lasting impression on me, especially Junger, that courageous and truly free man of action and life. Of course, it cannot be overstated how important Friedrich Nietzsche, the intellectual predecessor and foundation to most of these, was. I read and read, watched video after video. I retreated into the mountains like Zarathustra, with the marching of the great leviathan of mass migration and pride parades down in the valley, to learn what I could and forge a new strength. Nietzsche was my final break with the last vestiges of my Christian-like and civil morality and worldview. I now yearned for a higher life, a new type of life, away from the oppression of our times, the hothouse of modern life. I now no longer cared to conserve, there was perhaps nothing to conserve anyway. Now I saw the clash between the higher and lower tendency within the human race, the radical of passion and vision, of defiance, who wishes to grasp a life beyond himself. And of the yeast, of the bugman, of the defiler and soiler of all higher hopes! Man is the master of all things; the power of the world lies in his will and in his hands.

As I was becoming well acquainted with all of these writers, I finally decided to check out Bronze Age Mindset in late 2021 or early 2022. I had already heard about it online but never committed to reading until then. This made me a bit late to the party, since the book came out in 2018, but at the time that was sort of niche, and it took some time to mature. BAP’s view of things was liberating because, in part, he is a good modern embodiment of a lot of these thinkers that are important in our sphere. To an extent he cut down a lot of the “excess fat” when it comes to right wing theory and got to the crux of the matter in a half-shitposty way, something which made him stand out. I don’t consider him a thinker or anything of the sort — he is more like a signpost, someone who shows the general direction we ought to be facing, considerably adapted to the present day.

The post-2020 world saw and continues to see a massive explosion of third world immigration into the West, it is what was called “the new normal”. It was never about the little gay masks and vaccines. Now, Croatia evaded the vast majority of the 2014-2020 migrant crisis that plagued the broader EU. It was something you read in the news or saw online, but not at home. Of course, being someone who was engaged with world events, I was ahead of the curve. Even though there were no migrants on our streets just yet, I saw the danger that was looming all around. And then finally, in 2022-23, the dam broke. Migrants now flooded even us, all the lower-paying or manual jobs got taken within six months. Although crime has not yet risen (at least not officially) there is a notable decline in the standard of public life. Migrants infest the parks everywhere, talking in their guttural languages, most barely even know English, let alone Croatian, small towns far away from major economic activity have groups of them wandering about, they blast their video calls on full volume on public transportation, they drive their scooters like they’ve never seen a road before, and they have begun forming a separate social class because there is enough of them so they can group together, causing clashes at times. The problem of migrants in the EU is that they are mostly not of the illegal kind, rather they are here either on various work contracts or as asylum-seekers. This makes it extremely difficult to oppose their import on anything other than nationalist blood-and-soil principles, which are a massive danger zone in gay Europe. The thing is that the “far-right” in Europe is practically non-existent and the little that there is is just exclusively focused on migration, with all the other neoliberal principles in place. This makes them vulnerable to any changes that the establishment parties make on immigration. If they undertook some half-assed remigration scheme and significantly limited their import, the right wing in Europe would dissipate. It’s hard to say if Europe is 3-5 years behind on some of these core issues compared to the US, or if it will never have the capacity to change no matter what. The general sentiments of the population might be 3-5 years behind, but the actual state apparatus is hell-bent on keeping the massive social states afloat, even if it means totally destroying everything else. There is a noticeable lack of true visionaries or even more energetic characters across the continent. It’s all bureaucratic party apparatchiks that give their little conference speeches and endlessly talk and talk with the other 506 parties. It’s just that some of them touch on migration a bit more. Part of the problem is the system of parliamentary democracy that forces all these parties to compromise and form coalitions. There won’t be some great sweeping victory of the Hitler 2.0 incarnate party that will militarize the Mediterranean or something. No, the best you’re gonna get is a few cabinet positions until a incompetence or the oh so feared “comment” scandal (many have had their political careers destroyed because of some comment they made 300 years ago) occurs, after which the coalition will collapse and its back to square one. It’s sort of funny in a way because it shows you how real sweeping political victories occurred in Europe prior to WW2, everyone was fed up with the constant bickering and party-politicking. The problem is that those Weimar conditions won out in the end, browner and more Americanised now. It’s not as simple as saying “first fix your country and then comment on the world”. It’s questionable what even can be fixed. It was incredible watching these complete political dead ends, non-entities, and entrenched bureaucrats with dead eyes turn into bloodthirsty Bandera-style nationalist as soon as the Russo-Ukrainian war kicked off.

Over the past year or so it was impressive seeing Trump, after all the prosecution and system pressure on him, win out once again and this time with what seemed to be a real will to act on many of the pressing issues that had accumulated during the Biden years. The good that has come from Trump is the increasing push against immigration and the worst excesses of leftism. The good that can come of this is that MAGA-style positions become the default state of the moderate right, which makes it far easier to continue to push things further. The bad is that it could just as easily fall into the typical conservative attitude of only stopping the worst of leftism and just sort of freezing this decay in place. Trump and his entire coalition are obviously still libtards (apart from maybe the very fringes), there is still talk of endless equality, meritocracy, legal immigration here and there and so on. They are still children of the post-WW2/post-1991 globalist world order and the broader Age of Enlightenment on a philosophical basis. But a lot of the good is implicit, it’s not directly stated. To make America great again would mean reintroducing and reforming the conditions that made it and the broader Europe-descendant world like that in the first place. In a general sense, Trumpism is facing the right direction, the things we talk about today in the mainstream were unimaginable during the Obama-era or before. The European world was on the cusp of a quiet, creeping, post-racial, leftist hellhole with third world conditions. While it has mostly continued in that direction, it hasn’t done so unopposed, which led to it having to burn up a lot of good favour that had accumulated in the post-WW2 world with a lot of excesses. I thought a lot about whether it would have been better for conditions to continue to get worse or if now was the time to oppose it all however possible, even in our own small lives.

The problem with allowing or wanting things to get worse, in the hopes that it will radicalise people and political actors into real action, is that the system moves too fast for that to be possible. In just four years of Biden, ten million illegals came into the US, pride flags flew from the White House, radical multiculturalism and diversity were imposed both culturally and economically, migrants were completely occupying great European cities, London fell to like 30-35% British, an internationalization of most Western and European nations began in earnest. There isn’t enough time. What could be radicalised was radicalised already prior to 2016 and then again in 2020-24, and a lot of the heavy lifting of the latter was just 2020 alone. Even us just talking about radical measures that are needed means that the process is complete. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t be talking about it — it would still have to be slowly spreading and the general sense of exhaustion still growing. We will have to take the good that can be had with all these mainstream types and keep on going.

This brings us to today. The old conservatism that I had once held to has long since passed. The real problem is that a lot or even most of what makes up the European world today isn’t desirable to be salvaged. This is why I sometimes jokingly think to myself that people fear nuclear war too much, there isn’t that much to lose. The decline has been so rapid and so thorough that the problem is spiritual and not material. Even if we deported 200 million non-whites next week, we would still be left with all the values that made this whole mess possible in the first place. This is the real filter between moderates and radicals. For anything to truly blossom, there would have to be a fundamental revaluation of all values, and that might not be possible at this stage of our civilization. What should and can be salvaged, firstly and foremostly our common European group, must weather the storm and act as a springboard for something in the future. The West is done for as we know it, it would be just as horrid to revert it back to 90s conditions and give it a decade or so of borrowed time before that too would just collapse. The real issue is existential; it’s on the most basic level of survival. For this reason, I have abandoned various forms of system building or ideology clutching — what matters is your own attitude to all of this. Do you just shift from one side of this rotting bed to the other? Or do you have a fundamental reorientation of your worldview and the core values that govern it?

All the old stuff that used to get everybody riled up seems so petty in comparison to what has occurred over the past few years. Abortion, gay rights, trannies, blue-haired feminists, taxes, bathrooms for something other than men and women, the whole thing. It doesn’t fundamentally matter at this stage, it is a product of the slow asphyxiation of our civilization through old age, it has happened before in history. Pandora’s box is opened, and you can’t close it now. You won’t get some heckin’ based 1950s trad world, and we wouldn’t want that. Hell, my own country is governed by what most Christian nationalist types would consider a major win, a right-wing Christian government. Similar trends are also in other parts of ex-eastern bloc countries. The populations are pretty conservative too. And? The decline continues. The longhouse grows. Most of the current Christians, especially those that are political, have adopted Christianity as a sort of ideology, something that seemed edgy back in the day. We live in such fundamentally secular times that it is impossible to have truly spiritual Christianity, let alone some kind of moral rebirth. We have a new religion, the religion of Science and the welfare state. I foresee a future where Christianity will be taken over by leftists, especially with the demographic shift of all these Christian migrants flooding the US, and it will become their talking point. Even pure, narrow nationalism is detrimental to our goals. It reopens old territorial and national disputes between Western countries when that isn’t at all important at the moment. There won’t be a national dispute to debate if the nations are destroyed, your political and racial enemies gain control and push you out.

The other “nationalism” that is already forming, and that is much more useful, is something akin to a pan-Western and pan-European shared identity and goal, at least for now. That’s the difference between a conservative and a truly radical new approach. Yes, mass democracy has to go, yes, universal equality has to go, pacifism, globalist capitalism, consumerism, the worship of minorities, the hordes of pensioners, the creeping socialist longhouse, yes all of this has to go. But that’s not happening right now, and it won’t be possible until it has run its course, and we should not be trying to paint the facade of this burning house in some kind of traditional or whatever colors.