2024 began with a declaration of failure from within the white nationalist movement: The National Justice Party (NJP) is toast. Billed as a working-class white political party from the people who ran The Right Stuff (TRS) podcast network, and the racist talk radio vehicle TDS (renamed as such after being originally called The Daily Shoah) in particular, the NJP was an intentional effort to soak up the remnants of the “alt-right” who wanted to continue their public activism after most of their organizations had collapsed.

The NJP positioned itself to offer what few far right organizations were currently doing: be both politically militant and upfront, building interest around contemporary issues and using elections as a place either to potentially run candidates or push wedge issues often manipulated by white nationalists. The NJP came together under the control of several different people who came to prominence from the alt-right, such as hosts from the Right Stuff and Greg Conte, former collaborator with Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute. They would create NJP chapters around the country, find issues that appealed to working-class white voters and show that they were willing to take positions the Republicans and Democrats were unwilling to, thus positioning themselves as a political vanguard fighting for white workers. But despite becoming one of the largest “post-alt-right” white nationalist groups in the country after its 2020 launch, their recent collapse reveals that internal fractures are continuing to keep the modern white nationalist movement in disarray.

The alt-right emerged in 2010 as a new form of branding for fascist politics, linking up different dissident strains into a de facto ideological coalition, and moved from online to “IRL” (in real life) organizing around 2015 with organizations like Identity Evropa, the Proud Boys and the Traditionalist Workers Party (which itself had been formed earlier). But after public blunders such as their public violence at August 2017’s Unite the Right rally, significant deplatforming from tech companies, and aggressive counter-organizing from anti-fascists, their earlier model of street activism never became a significant force for community organizing.

While the alt-right successfully moved Trumpism, and subsequently the entire American conservative movement, far to the right, the GOP still fails to be an explicitly white nationalist party and, thus, appears tragically moderate to these right-wing militants. Their subsequent destruction holds key lessons for anti-fascists, who can exploit white nationalists’ vulnerabilities by understanding the problems that they will face as they attempt to regroup.

“With the help of our fantastic National Staff we will be folding up the corporation and dissolving the party after Christmas,” the NJP published on its Telegram channel on December 14, at the end of a series of public outbursts from various podcasters and party activists who were celebrities in their movement. A fracture between podcaster Mike “Enoch” Peinovich and his various NJP colleagues and his TDS co-host Jesse Dunstan, also known as “Sven” and “Seventh Son,” started to form when Sven publicly said that the National Justice Party was a failing front organization for the larger TRS project. Since 2022, the TRS subscriber network, which has sustained the most popular white nationalist podcasts in the country after they were shunned by payment processors and web hosting companies, has transitioned to the NJP supporters’ network, thus uniting the party and the podcast network to become one singular organization. There would now be no division between the party and TRS; they were one body with one pathway to participation and a single financial infrastructure.

This process had uneven support in the organization, and at the end of 2023 Dunstan engaged in a series of public rants, calling other figures in their organization “parasites” who contributed nothing, such as the national socialist podcaster Eric Striker. “I never needed him and my website is worse for having him on board,” said Dunstan. These outbursts give a window into a key contradiction that has plagued the party since its inception: remain racist celebrities on a podcast network or organize. The activists wanted to have in-person rallies, flash mobs and political events, usually highlighting incidents of what they considered “black on white crime” or to draw attention to white working-class areas hit with disasters, such as East Palestine, Ohio’s environmental emergency or the opioid crisis in rural Appalachia. This is a fundamentally different theory of change than that found among those who only want to publish articles and make podcasts, as the latter was built around the notion that changing minds through propaganda was the most effective route to, eventually, changing their political reality.

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