Vintage Internet Hate Site Trauma!

Vanguard News Network's Cartoon page and cooper2723.

Once upon a time in 2003, there was a website called Vanguard News Network, and it was the brainchild of a suspicious man named Alex Linder. Linder, who broke off with the National Alliance in 2002, decided he could take on the kooky and cultural white supremacist cult operated by William Pierce, George Lincoln Rockwell, and Ben Klassen, and continue it from there.

Twenty years later, I don’t think any political Overton window has been pushed, other than the fact that the internet engulfed reality and pushed transhumanism as a value. To this day, Kevin Alfred Strom, the infamous neo-Nazi pedophile, still blogs and audio records his articles on the National Alliance website. As for Linder, he still does his neurotic collage art over at the Kirksville Review.

Vanguard News Network is also a vintage treasure trove of articles written by then 31-year-old contemporary queer white nationalist writer, Dr. Gregory Robert Johnson. He wrote under the names “T.C. Lynch,” “The Cat Lady,” “J.P. Nash,” and “F.C.I. Clarke” to name a few. Johnson is one of my favorite eccentric writers, and to find his secretive post-Phd writings written after his dissertation, “A Commentary on Kant's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer,” is a must-read. Johnson talks about his love for Hindu movies and sadomasochism, calls homophobia a form of Jewish intolerance, and bashes his fixation on Jim Goad while he talks about burning old punk zines. I always thought Johnson was a pure, straight-edge kind of guy who believed in platonic relationships and ethics. But revealing the younger self shows he does have issues with Christianity, projects his hypocrisy, and is willing to feel guilty over his love for toxic punk culture. Johnson once told me in private, and to paraphrase, he said something along the lines of, “I love this subculture and I don’t want to go.” That explains a lot.

I also have to mention how nutty Michael J. Polignano was at the time in 2004. He wrote an article defending George W. Bush out of white nationalist interest. Holy shit. What a way to prove your contrarian and avant-garde against logic! This is the same guy that lived with Greg Johnson in San Francisco and had to share downstairs for Greg’s gay “sex time” with some hip Grindr boyfriend. Jesus.

Looks like he is still mad at me at the fact I pointed out that Kyle, or that “Scott” kid, is another slave for Greg’s grooming service.

“Doxxed” a friend of yours??? What the hell kind of accusation like that? He’s freaking public! I diddu nuffin! I like his art!!

I even had to write another article about this stupid hipster club shit of being secret about everything. I even reached out to the mohawk metal punk Aedlhon Cassiel, whom I met at Amren, and where we both exchanged numbers to hang out. Guess he too had a mental breakdown and couldn’t handle the punk shit that comes with being radical.

These kids believing in some kind of “trust as the key ingredient in winning the culture war” is the biggest ruse found among Boomers and Gen-X types. Only Antifa types believe in this, but it’s also connected to those who are invented within the subculture, and when one is either shunned, punished, or moves on from the clique, they expose the rest as an informant. It turns out Counter-Currents writer Claus Brinker or Nathan, was an Antifa informant and exposed a majority of Counter-Current fans in the Philadelphia and New York area. Ouch. And I sent him an email, politely asking if we can take the mother fucking MegaBus to the New York forum together. It’s exactly like a high school gossip circle. Goes to show he was nothing but a snitch to begin with and plays into Polignano’s Gen-X paranoia about being a good “white nationalist by subculture” libertarian boomer. And now Polignano is riding the whole “yeah Johnson is bad but I have a better cult” bus. Jokes on them. 20 years of this and it’s still going nowhere.

I don’t hate Greg Johnson. Utter bullshit. I love his work. It’s rather a personality clash and the misunderstanding between what can be said and who’s saying what. That is the miscommunication here.

But not to get sidetracked here about stupid shit, that isn’t the point. I love Polignano and Johnson for being queers. And I love the old website of Vanguard News Network in all of its “No Jews. Just Right.” glory. But no, not just the front page, but the very special decades-old Cartoons page! While The Alternative Aryan links are down, all “cartoons” are active and can be examined. Oh, and how much I love these cartoons!

Where to begin?

Some of the photos are extreme, and I put a PARENTAL WARNING disclaimer here now.

…Ok? Got it?

The point of the transgressive shock was to get people interested in racial nationalism. But when I put two and two together… We got… Boyd Rice? Skrewdriver? Nick Bougas? …Something is not right here. It’s not about practical race realist politics, but something cruder, and something more akin to Tom Metzger's “hatecore” type of misanthropy. Who remembers that anti-hate commercial with Metzger where he advocates violence against blacks? It’s like he was out there to cause mayhem and rioting. At least the American skinhead subculture around Metzger was captured on video camera.

Nonetheless, the cartoon pages on Vanguard News Network present a different zeitgeist far from the generic meme culture of today.

Take a look at a few. The original and corny internet “memes” of 2001!:

…Check out a very violent picture here if you dare…

…And so on.

Notice the trend here is that they are meant to shock you, to cause confusion, and to offend you. Strange, because being offended becomes a part of punk culture, and the idea of “saving white people,” something that sounded so normal in a different era, now becomes categorized as a crime. And those who want to be evil then become white nationalists!

There’s another “holocaust revisionist” kook by the name of Carlos Whitlock Porter. Besides arguing whether or not the holocaust happened, Porter believes it’s okay to post a page of dead fetuses to make the point that “The Jews” are behind such depravity. But does it make any sense to post imagery of dead bodies to make someone become a white nationalist? Sounds to me that Porter is rather interested in death metal and horror films.

All of this is a hobby to some. A blogger by the name of Ted Sallis writes daily notes about “Der Movement” and the kookiness of the far-right. In particular, his obsession with Greg Johnson is no different from Porter’s interest in “The Jews.”

This kind of transgressive imagery is the origin of racial politics in America and its connection to the immoral. A sincere conversation about race always leads to those who are arrogant and evil. Only postmodern irony has been able to cover up this icky past found at Vanguard News Network. And where to go in 2023? Is history repeating itself? Are the same Metzger skinheads walking around the National Justice Party convention halls? What is sincere, is that hate is a political motivator, more important than the praxis of conserving and working with others to get that white community they so desire.

And what is repeating is the celebration of the past through irony.

A YouTube user by the name of “cooper2723” has amassed a following of 332k subscribers over his artistic and satirical creation around poorly done videos in low-res. As if his actual videos can be passed as sincere videos made by backwoods people who make fan “Top 10” videos around metalcore.

Just watch some of his ironic videos.

…And yes, they are all deliberately made to make it look like they were made by middle school kids.

So how can cooper2723’s art relate to the vintage cartoon page on Vanguard News Network?

The authentic internet collage art is found on a fringe hate group site. Yet cooper2723’s videos try to capture the humor, the original shock, of the authentic through an analytical understanding of that zeitgeist. We laugh at cooper2723’s videos because of how accurate and anti-artistic they are, but we end up loving the sincere Vanguard News Networks “cartoons,” even if they are based around extreme racial hatred, because of the unapologetic and cultural sincerity. It flirts with cultural anthropology, and how the internet was an early tool to shed light on those who were too fringe for society. They had their art, and it was sincere. Today, we have internet humor trying to understand that poor medium.

Both Vanguard News Network and cooper2723’s videos can give anyone trauma. It’s the shock of the authentic that counts, and yet, the irony glues the meaning together.

What can we learn from the past and how is it applied to the present?

-pe

3-7-2023