Return of the Alt Right

Those of us who followed the 2016 election may recall the media furor surrounding the racism and anti-Semitism of the alt-right and its support for Trump. After Trump’s victory, white nationalist Richard Spencer attempted to raise the alt-right’s profile even higher by participating in the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. But viral images of angry, tiki-torch-waving white men chanting "Jews will not replace us" turned the rally into a PR disaster and the movement disintegrated.

Or did it?

It's my belief that the disaffected young men who formed the base of the alt-right didn't disappear; they simply rebranded as the “dissident right.” This movement is now attempting to ensnare a new generation of recruits who are fed up with wokeness and are looking for answers. Since a handful of self-identified Christian Nationalist leaders like Joel Webbon and Dale Partridge are courting the dissident right, it's important for Christians to understand its ideas.

The Friend-Enemy Distinction

One of the most important concepts on the dissident right is the "friend-enemy distinction." This term was introduced by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political. According to Schmitt, all politics is rooted in the distinction between "friend" and "enemy." The political "enemy" is not necessarily evil but is merely foreign enough that he poses an "existential threat to [a people's] way of life" (26-27). The people's "sovereign" (i.e., their supreme ruler) alone can determine whether the enemy needs to be destroyed, and no neutral third party or universal moral standard has the authority to contradict his decision.

While Schmitt is wildly influential on the dissident right, his "friend-enemy distinction" has been substantially reinterpreted to have virtually no connection to geopolitics or actual warfare. Instead, the "friend-enemy distinction" is applied to Twitter spats and the culture war. Anyone who is not sufficiently radical in their beliefs about the Current Thing—whether repealing the 19th amendment, deporting millions of American citizens, or blaming all the world's problems on the Jews—is an "enemy." And anyone who is sufficiently radical, no matter how morally reprehensible, is a "friend" since there are "no enemies to the right."

Even more troubling, Christians on the dissident right are increasingly willing to cast aside the Bible’s repeated injunctions regarding honesty, kindness, and pure speech, on the grounds that "war" against "the enemy" justifies deception and vulgarity.

Ethnocentrism

Another major feature of both the alt-right and the dissident right is ethnocentrism. Mike Maxwell, the owner of the dissident right publishing company Imperium Press, writes in his Cultured Thug Handbook that "The oldest, strongest, and most consequential things—patriarchy, ethnocentrism, traditional sexual roles, the family, authoritarianism, and above all, hierarchy—must be deferred to. Not because they're good but because they're the source of all good" (65). Elsewhere he writes: "'Racism' just means white people having a sense of their own identity. Any other race doing this, preferring its own company, or having its own interests, is acceptable. 'Racist' is really an ethnic slur against white people" (258).

This emphasis on racial identity is being embraced by dissident right Christian Nationalists. For example, in an X post on Jan. 6, 2026, Christian Nationalist pastor Joel Webbon stated: "I am AGAINST interracial marriage. That is to say, I believe interracial marriage ‘generally’ goes against God’s normative design for humanity, nations, and cultures." On June 20, Christian Nationalist pastor Dale Partridge posted, "The West is being taken by low IQ, female, pagan foreigners because White people were afraid to be called 'racist' and 'misogynist.'" On June 25, Christian Nationalist C. Jay Engel posted that the U.S. needs to "denaturalize and deport over 120 million people who are only here because of the 1960s immigration reforms [e.g., third-generation Asian-American U.S. citizens].

"Obviously, the sentiments expressed above go well beyond reasonable concerns about illegal immigration or how accusations of "racism" are weaponized by progressives. Instead, the dissident right is openly urging whites to embrace racial identity politics.

The Longhouse

The concept of "the Longhouse" was first introduced by the pseudonymous figure Bronze Age Pervert and popularized by the pseudonymous writer L0m3z. L0m3z writes that "the Longhouse" is meant to describe a "vast constellation of social forces" that are influencing culture. However, the term calls particular attention to the way in which our institutions have been infected by feminine values: "More than anything, the Longhouse refers to... centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior." In other words, whether we realize it or not, we live in an effeminate culture whose feminized ruling class imposes its values on all of us.

We see this view expressed in Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, where he writes: "We live under a gynocracy—a rule by women" (p. 448). In an X post on Jan. 15, 2025, Christian Nationalist Andrew Isker stated that "we live under a total gynocracy, where any masculine expression anywhere is immediately stamped out." On Jan. 30, 2025, Webbon posted: "We live in a gynocracy - total rule by women (of both sexes)." This last assertion is important because it shows that the dissident right is not primarily concerned with the gender of the people in power; after all, men are still overrepresented at the highest levels of government, law, medicine, business, and academia. Rather, the Longhouse is about the subtle ways in which feminine norms and values govern our institutions. 

That said, the concept of “the Longhouse” can shade into outright misogyny, as when Pastor Webbon declared on a livestream that "Women are atrocious today. They are immodest. They're hoes. They're dumb. Like literally intellectually unintelligent. They are shallow. They are deceitful. They are wicked. They are vile” (59:25).

Neomarxism Revisited

If you’ve noticed several striking similarities between the views of the dissident right and the Woke Left, you’re not alone.

Both the dissident right and the Woke Left believe that society is divided into oppressed groups and oppressor groups along lines of race, gender, and sexuality; the only difference is that all the roles are reversed. According to the dissident right, straight white men are an oppressed group, not an oppressor group. 

The dissident right and the Woke Left also both believe that the ruling class imposes its views on culture through subtle systems of norms and values, whether white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and ableism (for the Woke Left) or egalitarianism, the Longhouse, the postwar consensus, and Zionism (for the dissident right). 

Because these oppressive norms and values are so deeply embedded in our culture, they are only visible to those who have achieved a critical consciousness, either by becoming “woke” (on the left) or by getting “red-pilled” (on the right). 

Finally, neither faction wants incremental change; both want revolutionary social transformation.

While space doesn’t permit a full critique of the dissident right’s views, they are wrong for precisely the same reasons that the Woke Left’s views are wrong. We cannot oppose racial identity politics when the left deploys it but embrace it when the right deploys it. We cannot reject ethnic Gnosticism on the left but coddle it on the right. We cannot repudiate grievance-mongering and scapegoating from progressives but tolerate it amongst conservatives.

Equal weights and measures. We must reject unbiblical ideas no matter who is wielding them. Our primary allegiance is to God, not to our political co-belligerents.