Thread by @hradzka

Articles like this make me remember what Michael Crichton said about the "wet streets cause rain" effect
forward.com/news/national/…

I am not an accredited expert on Hard Righties by any means and do not spend massive amounts of time monitoring them, but even I can tell you that article would be more productively titled, "What if the stuff we got wrong all along actually wasn't true"

CHARLOTTESVILLE. *draws together maybe 550 people from a gazillion little actualfa groups*
GATHERINGS AFTER CHARLOTTESVILLE. *are one or two actualfa groups at most*
JOURNALISTS. "wow, their crowd size really shrank after Charlottesville"
ME. "it was never huge, you morons"

The thing you should always remember about Richard Spencer is what he actually does: he is an independently wealthy blogger who operates a cargo cult think tank

so imagine, basically, an extremist E.J. Dionne

Now imagine that E.J. Dionne needs, like, a bunch of guys to fill seats and march with him and make him look cool and grand and stuff.

You're laughing. Because E.J. Dionne can't do that. *That's not what think tank guys do.*

Richard Spencer previously depended on Identity Evropa to provide his warm bodies; now he has turned to the TWP

which does not have warm bodies

reporters love to stress Dire Implications but they place little emphasis on the only thing that matters, which is numbers

so I'll sum up for you

TWP's leader gave a major speech at UT Knoxville, brought every guy he could: 35 dudes

TWP and League of the South and NSM did stuff like Pikeville and that kind of thing, total massed bodies: like 120-130 dudes

tl;dr: the actualfa are desperate for dudes and *nobody has them*

this is one reason you see so much infighting: they're squabbling over followers, because they have so few of them

The Daily Stormer is trying to boost its Book Clubs right now, build more of 'em. That's IRL meetups for actualfa, a decentralized activist network to do whatever. So a bigger profile for TWP is a concern for them, hence the recent feuding.

By doing big public stuff with Spencer and fighting antifa, TWP is boosting its profile, and the DS guys are worried their potential recruits are going to be potential TWP recruits.

Note that Spencer is still outsourcing his movement, and even if people go to join TWP bc of their association with him *Spencer himself still has no actual guys.*

When it comes to the actualfa, Spencer isn't the guy to watch. What the press still doesn't understand -- willfully, at this point -- is that he never was.

oh, and while we're nose-counting: Identity Evropa did a flash demonstration in Nashville today. By my count of dudes in the photo, they turned out a shade under 60 guys. Multiple chapters, I suspect, but respectable by actualfa terms and far ahead of TWP's turnout in TN and MI.

(By contrast, the typical photos IE runs of their chapter actions tend to have like eight guys in them, which is also the size of the published photo of the DFW Stormer Book Club from a little while back. Small groups, remember!)

The press won't notice this, but if Spencer left IE for TWP hoping he'd get more manpower, IE successfully turning out more people than TWP should be seen as a poke at Spencer, TWP's Heimbach, and former IE leader Eli Mosely.

Still, the fact remains that "respectable turnout by actualfa terms" means "still doesn't matter" in, y'know. Reality.

(Evidently they had a conference, which is why they had so many people in town. Their claim is it was a bit under a third of conference membership, but never trust actualfa numbers claims, only actual physical people you see.)