TradWorker: Reflections and Lessons

A brief look back at the most interesting chapter in my life

It’s been over five years since the dissolution of TradWorker. When I look back on that time of my life, it’s mostly regrets. They’re not, however, the regrets one might presume.

I don’t regret “throwing my life away” in terms of career, finances, or public reputation. What’s the point of a life but to invest it in one’s faith, family, and folk? I do not regret our public activism. Most importantly, I don’t regret the original vision, that of a “Traditionalist Worker” orientation of White identity that is comprised of a fraternity invested in the uplift of young White American men struggling to achieve affordable family formation against a system and culture set against them.

The regrets were in compromising with people who didn’t share that vision in order to build a coalition. This counts both within the organization and between our organization and others. I needed to work with men with leadership and organizing qualities that I don’t have in order to get anything done, and ended up with different things getting done than I intended.

While it started out very strong, and we did have some incredible success with grassroots recruitment and mainstream political engagement, the history nerds prevailed. I wanted to focus on organizing on behalf of 21st century White American families. Instead, the party’s messaging, framing, optics, and actions became consumed with relitigating 20th century European political and military bullshit.

Instead of confronting the alienation and degeneration striking small town America, the focus became on denying war crimes in foreign labor camps in a different century, on a different continent. Adding insult to injury, the dominant position became a sort of fetishization of a foreign national identity in opposition to our own. It became a “nationalist” project about venerating a foreign nation, the dumbest bullshit fathomable.

People want to boil it all down to “optics,” but optics are downstream from principles and action, with bad principles and ill-conceived actions inevitably resulting in “bad optics.” If you’re a random Midwestern guy who’s obsessed with a German chancellor and his failed political project, and you insist on that being relevant and resonant in mainstream politics in the current year, then you’ll look stupid because you are stupid.

By the end of it, my political situation paralleled my personal situation, having allowed myself to be painted into a corner where I was in a project set against my faith (most were atheists or outright anti-Christian), family (lol), and folk. The majority of the leaders of the project will, to this day, insist that my nation should have been defeated and humiliated. And most of them blame Americans, our identity, heritage, and culture, for the problems of the modern world.

I would have suffered fewer compromises of my principles, priorities, and values had I saved myself some trouble and volunteered with my local Democratic Party. These errors in judgment were egregious enough that I’m disqualified for political leadership. One must be honest with oneself, while not abusing oneself. By understanding and working within my limitations, I can work towards my goals without being a “leader.”

All I have left to show for that chapter of my life is some advice earned through bitter experience.

Avoid History Nerds

It’s great to have hobbies, and there’s nothing wrong with an idle interest in military or political history. But if you allow people whose first concern is another time and place to run anything, they’ll run it directly into the ground.

Avoid Transgressives

We’re all transgressing popular culture to some degree by being pro-faith, pro-family, and pro-White. For most of us, this is a bug, a problem to solve. We wish to move the culture in the direction of our ideals. For a subset in dissident politics, transgression is a feature to be embraced and extended at every opportunity.

For our society, racism is the new satanism, the surest way to shock your parents and express one’s oppositional / defiant character defect. It’s easy to believe, upon being unfairly thrown in the trash, that everything else in there must also be unfairly discarded. A lot of what’s in the wastebin of our society is indeed trash. Angry and hateful nerds who glare at blended families at walmart are to be avoided.

Avoid Networking

When people are drowning, they try to climb on anybody or anything to save themselves, often drowning the people swimming near them. Networking seems like a positive thing, but it’s really just inviting infiltration, subversion, and compromise. And with our country’s blank check “conspiracy” and “racketeering” laws, even the most innocent and public of collaborations introduce profound civil and even criminal liability (ask me how I know).

It may be tempting to build from pre-existing parts. Apes stronger with more sticks, right? No. Your bundle of sticks is probably a faggot.

Don’t Rockwell Pivot

George Lincoln Rockwell is an important figure in nationalist politics who should be carefully studied as both an intelligent political thinker and as a failed cautionary tale. He leveraged his family’s vaudeville background to engage in showmanship to achieve bad press that he would seek to turn to his organizational and ideological advantage.

We referred to this move as the “Rockwell Pivot,” where cameras show up because “nazis are on the march” and then you leverage that platform to achieve organizational and ideological goals. It’s a temptation for any dissident organization, and somebody is always going to be doing it, for better or worse.

Don’t be the guy who’s doing it. It may not even be obvious to yourself that you’re doing it, so double check with yourself that you’re not doing it. There’s an argument, one I’m sympathetic with, that it made sense during the mid- to late-20th century, when there was an orwellian monopoly of media and popular communication by a handful of hostile media conglomerates. You used to need to resort to clever stunts to achieve an audience, but devolutionary technology trends have changed the game.

Don’t Follow the Money

If you’re doing the activism well and taking basic steps to allow people to support you, you’ll receive the maximum amount of financial support. The moment you find yourself compromising for donors, supporters, subscribers, or clicks, that’s the moment you start losing.

The losing typically isn’t obvious right away, and may even look like winning for a long time. But the air of authenticity, credibility, and relevance eventually wafts away from somebody who has compromised their authenticity, credibility, and relevance for money. And then you’re in the all too common doom loop of having to shill harder and harder as donors, supporters, subscribers, and readers organically lose interest in less authentic content.

Don’t follow the money. Make the money follow you. Admittedly, you can’t pay your bills with “integrity,” but if you choose to sell it rather than build with it, you won’t be paying your bills with activist work for much longer anyway.

Don’t Derad

If you have a true change of heart, you’re not going to continue listening to my advice anyway. But even if it feels like a change of heart, ask yourself if you’re truly experiencing a change of principle or whether you’re exhausted with the subculture, scene, and grind.

Don’t turn against what’s right just because you’ve had it with “the movement.” The movement can’t improve if everybody who’s fed up with its dysfunction bails out instead of sticking around and working to improve it. That said, if you need to go, the movement’s not an airport and you needn’t announce your departure. There are plenty of fine reasons to retire from political activism, and you needn’t justify your decision.

Just go. Unless you were an especially public political activist and are locked into an especially public career, the whole doxing thing isn’t nearly as big of an issue as lore would have it. Most recently, about five years ago, I was fired from a Budweiser delivery job after one of the bartenders complained about my politics. I was in a different truck making more money within a week and Budweiser’s now being boycotted into oblivion for being politically correct libtards.

There is no deradicalization network or project that isn’t trying to put you in an even worse bind than the one you’re trying to get out of. Truth be told, the people who care about “anti-racism” are typically so anti-White or Jewish Chauvinist that even if you conclude that being pro-White is “hate,” you’ll just be trading one hate group for a better funded one (one that’s unlikely to share the money with you).

Consider a sabbatical. Being a lifelong activist is all about pacing yourself, and that can include resets, vacations, and sabbaticals from being engaged in political activism. One of the reasons to not become too financially invested in the cause is that you’re liable to become burned out and disengaged but fiscally obligated to continue going through the motions, stinking up the cause with an inauthentic and tone deaf political shtick.

Conclusion

There were plenty of lessons to learn, many of them bitter. But there’s no substitute for leaving one’s signature on history, of leaving a permanent record confirming that there were indeed men in this age who stood for our confederate heritage, who spoke up for White families, who faced down and defeated antifa in every single confrontation.

TradWorker was undefeated until it defeated itself. And I was merely one man in an organization much greater than myself. Lord knows I wasn’t the decisive element in any of the street fights, but I did my part as well I knew how. Organizations and their flags rise and fall, as well as the individuals behind them, but it’s all part of a broader resistance to liberal modernity that transcends time and place and will eventually prevail.

I am thankful to everybody else who was involved in TradWorker and I offer a general apology for my role in its dissolution. Many of you sacrificed gravely and your sacrifices were squandered by failures of leadership, vision, and action. And some of those failures were mine. Thank you.