ARC, D’ARC, Novara…and the nouvelle droite

Perhaps the most interesting moment during the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference, that many who were only there briefly (The Guardian, Novara) missed entirely, was when Nigel Farage burst out with: “GOOD MORNING EVERYONE!”

I felt a certain pang of cultural arrogance at a very specific instance of ultra-British Gen-X humour pulling the rug out from under the good doctor. Farage quickly adjusted his approach: “Pardon me, force of habit—old upbringing.” The emphasis in the interview was on the need for British re-industrialization and on ending institutional obsessions with achieving Net Zero emissions. After all, even if achieved, these wouldn’t put a dent in those released by China and India — countries desperate to modernize and with no time for such luxury beliefs. (My interactions during a press briefing with the economist Bjørn Lomborg on just how badly both the US and Great Britain have managed the risk on this issue, versus — I don’t know — prioritizing the overwhelmingly burdensome problems of sclerotic illness and obesity, might be recounted in a future article.) Yet what Farage’s humorous interruption revealed had almost nothing to do with the issue he and Peterson were meant to be discussing. What the joke represented was a fundamental tension between the Christian internationalism of the serious ARC scene and a far older, established nativist Right, rooted in British customs (i.e. saying “Good morning!” before the first exposition of the day).

Paul Marshall, current owner of GB News and UnHerd, and the chief financier of the conference, seems to be making some of the same investment decisions as Bill Ackman made last year during the 2024 US Presidential Election. The difference is how astroturfed all this felt in a British context. Katharine Birbalsingh, “Britain’s strictest teacher”, spoke of using her school structure as a model for integrating radically dissimilar cultural groupings in the context of Britain as a whole. The sentiment was: “If you want to have diversity, you have to give up your own values, natives, and compromise (with us).” In her school, Michaela, vegetarian dining is the norm in order to accommodate various religious cultural prohibitions; yet as Amy Gallagher has mentioned during the Bombshells podcast, if it’s necessary for Brits to make all these sacrifices for the benefit of an outgroup not historically part of the nation state, what is the purpose of having so-called “diversity” to begin with?

At times, ARC seemed like an attempt to transform the nationalist British right into a carbon copy of the American Republican right, either because they expect that the same tactics that worked in the US will work here, or because they expect that it will be necessary to reterritorialize the British right into an obvious extension of the American right in order to make sure we get the best deal over the course of Trump’s rejigging of the United States into a self-conscious Global American Empire. In this sense, Trump’s consideration of acquiring Greenland and Canada is just the tip of the iceberg.

The best part of the event was the people there. Over the course of my three days at the conference, I encountered former publishers; members of the Scottish Conservative Party I was familiar with from my days at Edinburgh (Kellen Hatfield); a now married old friend from secondary school who I hadn’t met for five years; the pro-natalist activist Malcolm Collins; the pseudonymous writer, mentioned in my article on “Right Wing Aesthetics”, called DeliciousTacos; legendary blogger Curtis Yarvin; the owner of the Trumpian hipster club Sovereign House in New York; the bizarre Edward Dutton; the surprisingly charming leader of the Homeland Party Kenny Smith (at the after party); the up-and-coming YouTuber Kai Stevens, whose videos on Communist propaganda in British education are really a must; and most significantly, and hilariously of all, the Anti-Communist activist and Mathematics PhD, James Lindsay, who tweeted this about me — “the subject” being what he calls the “Woke Right”:

The context for this is my friend Andrew — insisting on telling Lindsay that I “didn’t want him to ruin my life” after hearing me talk about the necessity of mass deportations; but, oh well, here we are, and it’s not like Lindsay had anything to meaningfully oppose my position with anyhow! Lindsay was surprisingly astute in person, despite his ongoing defensiveness around the coinage “Woke Right” — supposedly I am “Woke” for being a Postmodern Traditionalist and Identitarian, whatever those words exactly happen to mean. In essence, despite not being a Christian of any denomination, James still did not want me as an Englishman using any of the same collective tactics that every other group in the world uses for their own betterment, and which work for my own. How an unrelenting civilizational norm is Woke, I am uncertain. But both due to James Lindsay’s no-nonsense personal attitude and quite hilarious American insecurity — on hearing me talk dismissively about having a burger, he immediately paraphrased Mad Men, and told me, “We don’t think about you at all!” referring to the British Empire — I was very glad that I met him. Those you dismiss online can be very much more personable in real-life. Also, apparently, I am more challenging to speak with than Carl Benjamin, which is a great compliment, unless, as Andrew again joked, by “challenging” Lindsay meant emotionally rather than intellectually. I guess we’ll never know.

But let us leave ARC behind us and talk about D’ARC, the New Right after party where most of the so-called “Woke Right” gathered — or nouvelle droite, to use Alain de Benoist’s perhaps outdated term. Given the hysterically stupid response of Guardian columnist John Crace to the main event, calling it “Alt-Right Heaven” of all things, I wonder what he would think had he attended the actual Alt-Right gathering that followed. The party took place at an open bar at the Cuckoo Club and beforehand a select few, and then a great many, in actuality, were presented with little black cards with the phrase “D’ARC” written on them. I got mine from the wonderful X user Future Moldovan Citizen, who before the party offered to go out drinking with me on the dock with his Hispanic Leftist paramour. The event itself was hardly anything more than a concretization of the Alt-Right or New Right impulses that were an undercurrent at ARC itself but got little to any time on stage; it was artsy Twitter in real-life. A fair few people snuck into the party: this was Kai, Kenny, and a few others. As I explained to my grandparents after returning home the next day, I felt like I had been invited to a 70s-style cultural night out, where you could say anything you felt like, man, and which the suffocating mud of the Longhouse has effectively squashed in every university today. This was the kind of the scene that Alan Ginsberg would appreciate, more than anything else.

Yet because Right wingers having a good time cannot be tolerated by the terrorists of the Left, we had to cancel the first location because a journalist doxxed it to Fossil Free London, and other groups with connections to the quasi-MI5 security services extension HopeNotHate. As my friend Abigail Anthony reported at National Review:

“WE SHUT IT DOWN,” wrote Fossil Free London in a second social media post, adding that “the pressure that we all put this venue under has led to them pulling out.” The post included an image of a message from Omeara that said “the planned event tonight has now been cancelled,” but such a statement didn’t clarify whether the organizers or the venue withdrew. Regardless, Fossil Free London applauded its campaigners, particularly the “amazing queer community in London,” and celebrated that the cancellation led to “attendees scrambling to find out where the new venue is going to be.”

Obviously, this did nothing to alter the fact that the party we had was a great time indeed. But, both this assault, and a particular supposedly “undercover” article from Novara media about D’ARC caused me to have a fair few revelations about my cultural politics. Related to these, this paragraph from Luther Blissett’s Novara piece sticks out like a sore thumb to me:

“If these are the shock troops of a plan to make being right wing cool in the UK, they weren’t sending their best. Or maybe they were. Maybe this is it. Maybe the new right is not edgy and cool but in fact exactly as boorish and culturally shallow as it seems. Maybe it’s shit.”

Well, if it’s shit, Lucius, why are you paraphrasing Donald Trump instead of Ash Sarkar, one of the anti-White grandees that works at your supposedly supreme paper? Hilariously enough, “Novara” is derivative from the Latin “Nov”, for young or new. And yet it was fairly obvious who pseudonymous Lucius was by just looking at his face — if he is the left-wing journalist who I think he was, namely the one who leaked the first location online, and when asked about his opinions on the Rotherham Industrial Rape Gangs at D’ARC said that he wanted to “hear their side of the story”, it is no wonder why he projected we were shit. Rant over.

Now to the revelations:

1) They wouldn’t have tried to shut us down if they thought we were just “boorish and culturally shallow”; the impulse I had of being amongst a real pulsing heart of culture is the correct one.

2) Our opponents are miserable, but you knew that already.

3) As mixed of a bag as ARC was, D’ARC indicated that the place where the most honest, hilarious, and interesting cultural influences go at a massive political conference is where the weird and slightly cool young people hang out, and, on a long enough timeline, where a great deal of money is going to want to end up. The presence of Toby Young at D’ARC is significant in these terms, as was the DJ’ing of an old member of the Royal Academy art’s scene like Matthew Glamorre behind the music booth.

Finally, the secret reason why the Left come to our events and not vice versa is because our events are plain and simply better. Meanwhile, you couldn’t pay me any amount of money to infiltrate Antifa.