Rhetorical Dominance
Too many on the right rehash the same debates over and over without making any progress, thinking they can win people by merely stating the truth and exposing falsehoods.
The Post-Loser Right
Conservatives, as a rule, are losers. This fact is undeniable and a literal truth for anyone who takes more than a cursory look at politics. Frequent elections that exchange Democrats for Republicans and Republicans for Democrats create the impression that the teams are evenly matched, which is enough for the majority of the population to be pacified. Unfortunately, conservative electoral victories never reverse leftward achievements and sometimes just lock them in permanently. Americans get used to the changes so much that today’s conservatives have fully internalized as their own the leftist battleground issues from previous election cycles. This is the “ratcheting” effect discussed elsewhere by many on the right.
The American right cannot be content with mere dissent: we must learn to win. Conservatives are so used to losing that they cannot conceive what victory would look like. They lack a political vision beyond expressing their opposition to liberals on the issue of the day. This is not what winners do. It is not only wrong, it is pathetic.
Who can respect a police officer who is unable or unwilling to perform an arrest? Or a husband who will not stop a home invader from attacking his wife? Yet conservatives are content with merely expressing their discontent. The transgressions of the left are beyond parody. You could invent the most cartoonishly evil thing you could think of and they have already done it. Monuments to Satan? State-mandated kidnapping and mutilating of children? How can you respect a group of people who recognize the evil of the left and yet feel there is nothing more required of them than to vote and vent? Who told you it was acceptable to lose? Why are you not embarrassed?
If conservatives were given the keys, they wouldn’t know where they wanted to go and they wouldn’t know how to drive. In other words, they lack a positive vision and they don’t know how to win.
The Ascendant Right must ensure that this never describes us. Our vision can be summarized in a single word: Nationalism. We want a country of ethnic Americans that exists to benefit ethnic Americans. This entails a reawakening of an American ethnic consciousness that sees ourselves as the rightful heirs of American greatness and prosperity. The good news is that greatness comes naturally to Americans, especially with God’s blessing added. From our humble origins, we have been a Christian people who settled an untamed frontier and built for ourselves a mighty empire filled with countless heroes that time would escape us to enumerate. We already know how to make a great nation and we have already defeated many enemies that threatened our way of life. Now we must rise and do it again, but this time the battlefield has changed.
To defeat liberalism, it must be destroyed institutionally, but this will do us no good if it is not also uprooted from the minds of our people. As long as we continue to believe liberal mythology and adopt liberal values, we will immediately recreate everything we once sought to destroy. This is painfully clear as we watch conservative Christians leave liberal churches to start new conservative churches that become liberal in a single generation. Or worse, during the early 2020s with COVID and the George Floyd riots, we saw the rise of “anti-woke” commentators who turned their sights upon the right within three years! Every political solution that involves building must also involve destroying, if nothing else, the liberal mythologies harbored in the mind.
Every time you see individual men truly escape the liberal mold and boldly advocate for distinctly nationalist ideas, they get attacked by liberals and conservatives alike. Even the people who complain about the downstream issues from liberalism, like DEI politics, abortion, or transgender ideology and its abuse of children, will instantly snap in line and side with the liberals to crush any nationalist sentiment as it arises.
If we want to win, we must change mass opinion, and that in the context of an intellectual environment where certain lines of argument are off-limits, and you will be attacked personally for bringing them up. It’s fine to argue about “topics,” like DEI or abortion, but opposing liberalism itself will get you proverbially, “called into the office.” The only solution is to grow a spine. Our American heroes had to risk their wives becoming widows and their children being fatherless when they left home for war, and many of them did, but they preserved the American way up to this point for us to inherit. Have courage and fight for the American legacy.
Winning Arguments by Dominance
Anyone who has spent any time arguing or observing arguments about politics knows how rare it is for people to change their minds when presented with good arguments. The liberal uses arguments like a drunk uses keys when trying to unlock their door at night. They pull out a key and try the lock. If it doesn’t unlock, they switch to the next key and keep trying keys until one of them unlocks the door. The net result is that liberals never “lose” arguments and the conservatives with better arguments end up feeding the frame of the liberal. It never crosses the mind of a liberal that having an argument refuted means they should never use it again.
If good arguments don’t change the mind of a liberal, this only confirms that they never reached their original position by logical arguments in the first place. Of course their ideas don’t hold up to logical examination! They are very stupid arguments.
Charles Chapel explains this phenomenon in his incredible book Hammer of the Patriot:
When people within the same group debate a point, they are playing for the same team, and genuinely want to learn the truth, because they will all benefit from having correct knowledge. But debates between opposing groups of people like liberals and nationalists are not about logic, or finding out the truth. They are struggles for dominance. They are shows of force. The two parties don’t want the same thing, they’re not playing for the same team. So the public wants to know which team to join. They don’t care which team has the best arguments, they want to be on the side of the winners. In such a verbal struggle, strength is truth.
We don’t need to win every individual. We need to win the struggle for dominance against liberals and conservatives alike. This is easy with conservatives, because they’re losers. Not always so with liberals.
What does dominance look like? Chapel helps us again:
The essence of dominance is to impose our will on others. How this is done, in the absolute simplest way describable, is to reward others when they do what we like, and punish them when they do things we don’t like. The king is dominant because he can shower his friends in gold and put the heads of his enemies on spikes. Then how does submission differ from that? The submissive man cannot punish people for doing things he doesn’t like, because he doesn’t have the power or the courage to do so. He can only reward others in the hope that he will be liked and accepted. But he will not be respected, because others understand they risk no punishment for trampling on his expectations. The submissive man rewards people when they do things he doesn’t like, in the hope that they will feel bad for him and stop.
In a world filled with anxious people who are terrified of being judged, public approval or disapproval is a powerful weapon. Marketers know this. Prior to theorists like Edward Bernays, businesses just advertised how good their products were, but in the era of propaganda, marketing taps into the emotional realm of the customer, telling them where they are included, validating them as people, or promising them fulfillment. When we argue in public, we have the opportunity to visit people on an emotional level, using negative emotions as punishments and positive emotions as rewards.
In friendly company, we need objective and detailed intellectual work, but in the public arena, we must seek to be as dominant as possible so that we can be in control of the public will. The audience needs to understand that there are public consequences for crossing you, but that you are gregarious, entertaining, and naturally on their side. Your frame must be unshakable. Refuse to admit even a single concession to an enemy. Even if the public believes the conversation has become a “dumpster fire,” they have still learned that there are consequences to speaking up in favor of the liberal view, and they are less likely to join the opposition the next time.
Compare the following frames and see which is more dominant:
A. “I understand where you are coming from and I am sympathetic to your intentions but unfortunately that would not work.”
B. “Do you think that we are stupid? Why are you insulting us with such idiotic arguments? At least have the decency to make a good lie.”
The first frame implies the enemy has good intentions when the direct evidence shows otherwise. Even if “good intentions” were real, they are worse because misguided moral crusades carry destructive zealotry that is unconcerned with whatever bad consequences come from it.
The second frame dominates. It shows that boundaries being crossed will not be tolerated, it insults the enemy, accuses him of wrongdoing, and implicitly claims the support of the public. The enemy will be forced to either defend himself, which is a submissive position, or to mock and scoff (or the Facebook equivalent of laugh-reacting at every comment), which is a sure sign to the public that he has lost.
Dominance can’t be faked. You must actually be a dominant person, which may involve unlearning your patterns of submission and meekness that masquerade as a virtue but only hides insecurity, powerlessness, and craving for the approval of others. Get your own life in order. Learn what your boundaries are and assert them, lift weights, eat healthy, and ascend in your career. You must also become clear enough in your moral convictions to have the confidence to persist when people treat your dominance as a character flaw. Not just in the correctness of the positions themselves, but the concept of fighting to win and seeking to crush your enemies. These are skills that are developed with practice.
A Christian Examination of Dominant Rhetoric
Christian readers at this point may start to get uncomfortable with language like “crush your enemies.” Aren’t we supposed to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us? How can we on the one hand enforce our boundaries, punishing those who cross them, and on the other hand “turn the other cheek?” We must draw a distinction between personal enemies, like a neighbor who cheats you, from public enemies, like the invasion of a foreign army. Our goal is not to play out personal power fantasies, but to restore American greatness and destroy the power of liberalism that infects and corrodes everything it touches. When Jesus told us to love our enemies, he had in view the repayment of good for evil to those who wrong us in our personal lives, not aiding and abetting the invasion of a foreign army, which is not righteous, but treasonous. Absorbing a personal insult with dignity is a glory to a man and can be a sign of strength. When King David was insulted with a false accusation from a member of the losing house of King Saul, it was a sign of his strength to let the insult fall to the ground unanswered (2 Samuel 16). He felt secure enough to not defend himself.
Jesus himself spoke with a dominant frame at all times. When some people interrupted his teaching with the message that his mother and brothers were looking for him, he cut them off, saying that his disciples are his mother and brothers. When disputing with the Pharisees, he openly calls them vipers, tombs, hypocrites, and children of the devil. When Peter suggested that he die to protect Jesus from the cross, Jesus identifies him as the voice of Satan. I can hear the liberal now say, “What a dumpster fire!” Jesus had a mission in mind. He was willing to wash feet, willing to go hungry, and even willing to die, but he was completely unwilling to be taken off his mission or to lose at anything he came to do.
Is it a good work to save your nation from corrosive ideology and foreign enemies? Then it is good to fight, and win.
Conclusion
Too many on the right rehash the same debates over and over without making any progress, thinking they can win people by merely stating the truth and exposing falsehoods. Others have invested significant time and energy seeking to understand the deeper aspects of political theory or theology, but have no plan to bring anything into real life. There is value in understanding the truth and how to articulate it carefully, but it is not a solution. Black and Jewish activists openly say that they celebrate the coming end of Whiteness. Racial caucuses and interest groups openly operate for the express purpose of advancing their own race against others, with Whites being the primary target. Diversity in institutions is calculated and celebrated by how few White Americans are present. It already directly impacts the opportunities you and your children face in education and the economy, and their physical safety from crime and the legal system. This is not a hypothetical problem. It is already here.
Conservatives somehow still believe that White Americans must be worried about racism, and they would side with Antifa before allowing anyone to awaken a White American racial consciousness or advocate for American racial interests. Are you going to let the liberals win? Are you going to let the conservatives lose on your behalf?
I’ve provided a list of some recommended reading below. Developing the skill of winning rhetoric is not something you can learn from a single article. Study the people who use rhetoric effectively. Learn the mindset of winners. Focus on those who win the crowd, not those with the best ideas. Most of all, practice. Get in the arena. Stop rationalizing laziness and cowardice as Christian virtues. We can’t do this alone. Every man has people in his life he can influence and opportunities and skills he can employ for this war effort.
Key Summary
1. Losing is unacceptable, and conservatives are losers.
2. Nationalism is the positive political vision.
3. The dominant side wins arguments.
4. Emotional rewards and punishments are powerful.
5. Dominance is in harmony with Christian living.
Further Reading
—Charles Chapel, The Hammer of the Patriot
This is the practical handbook on nationalist rhetoric. This article is deeply indebted to Chapel. The introduction explains much of the theory outlined in this article, and the majority of the book is sample arguments on relevant topics like politics, society, and race. The book was self-published, and as of publication of this article, is only available as a PDF online, but freely downloadable. The author was ultimately doxed and jailed under Canadian hate-crime laws for the “crime” of writing articles.
—Mike Maxwell, The Cultured Thug Handbook
This book summarizes critical right-wing political concepts in an easily digestible format, which otherwise would require hundreds of hours of research. It is written with a popular audience in mind and there are no wasted words. Most topics are explained in 3–7 pages and the author provides chapter summaries that condense them into three simple sentences. It is available at Imperium Press or Amazon.
—Edward Bernays, Propaganda
Relative of Sigmund Freud, Bernays is the father of modern propaganda and public relations. This is his “advertisement” for the concept of propaganda itself, which explains its power and how it works, directly from the source. It is available on Amazon and Archive.org.
—George Thompson, Verbal Judo
This book is a practical guide on tactical communication, originally formulated for police officers working the streets to achieve voluntary compliance from difficult people. The skills here are complementary to the work of Chapel, focused more on the use of calculated empathy and management of escalation and de-escalation to achieve a desired outcome. It is available on Amazon. Also see verbaljudo.com.
—Jeremy Carl, The Unprotected Class
This is the book for understanding in detail the threats against the White race in America. Extensively documented, it demonstrates that the situation is both real and dire. It is available from Regnery and on Amazon.
