Thread by @RichardBSpencer

There is no evidence, and no reason to believe, that Patriot Front are "feds," in the sense that they are government agents on a mission to "make conservatives look bad," provoke another J6, or whatever it is they're being accused of.

Conservatives making the "fed accusation" are acting in bad faith, and I bristle at this, as someone who's been called a "fed" by various right-wing figures, with no evidence offered or required.

Whatever your opinion might be of Patriot Front—mine is mixed and ambivalent—there is no question that they demonstrated organizational ability and group discipline and cohesion in what was, on the whole, a successful event.

That said, what are people thinking or feeling when they make the "fed" accusation. Yes, jealousy is part of it. But there's something deeper. And it begins with the masks.

Anonymity and authenticity are mutually exclusive. Period. In recent years, the online far Right has convinced itself of the opposite. This is wrong, and the fact that it thinks this way is its fatal flaw.

Most normal people respond to anonymity with revulsion, and there's a lot of justification for that.

PF is not really protesting anything real, nor do their declarations rise above bromides: "Reclaim America." What does this even mean? I guess there's a certain virtue in being all things to all people, but vagueness strikes me as lacking in courage and conviction.

At least Fuentes openly announces himself as an incel. He deserves some credit for that.

I offer this criticism of PF constructively, but it might not prove to be very constructive in that anonymity is the one thing the current far Right will never change.

Anonymity and nebulous rhetoric might be pragmatic at this point in time ... but it is ultimately a structural failure that will prevent any real growth. You have to be who you are. The most basic concept of identity: I am who I am. A masked man represents nothing.

At its best, PF represents an IRL Twitter storm or a Discord forum—not an actual movement. This was a deep problem with the Alt-Right of 2016, which has not changed over the past five years, and likely won't change.

PF, and similar post-Alt-Right entities like the NJP, might tell themselves that "the people" are behind them...secretly...but there's really no reason to believe that.

Anonymity is a component of not having the courage of one's convictions, but also results from a certain shame over being labeled an "evil racist" etc. It is *shame* of being ostracized from society and not simply a fear of losing one's job.

Self-loathing is a dynamic unique to the far Right. And until that reality changes, nothing is really possible for those who identify with that sphere. (For what it's worth, I don't count myself among their number.)

The answer to the question, "Why does the Right always lose?" is a *moral* question fundamentally. The Right always loses because it is fundamentally illegitimate in the minds of most people in the Western world—including the minds of most Rightists.

Even those who agree with the online Right are terrified of showing their faces—and the terror goes beyond the prospect of losing their jobs.

If one so desired, deconstructing the basic moral framework of Americans and Europeans is the only means of fundamentally changing politics. But right-wingers are as afraid of addressing that issue as showing their faces in public.