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The Atlantic: The Alt-Right’s Intellectual Darling Hated Christianity

The Atlantic is attempting to push the Steve Bannon-Alt-Right-Julius Evola narrative:

“In the summer of 2014, years before he became the White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon gave a lecture via Skype at a conference held inside the Vatican. He spoke about the need to defend the values of the “Judeo-Christian West”—a term he used 11 times—against crony capitalism and libertarian capitalism, secularization, and Islam. He also mentioned the late Julius Evola, a far-right Italian philosopher popular with the American alt-right movement. What he did not mention is that Evola hated not only Jews, but Christianity, too.

References to Evola abounded on websites such as Breitbart News, The Daily Stormer, and AltRight.com well before The New York Times noted the Bannon-Evola connection earlier this month. But few have discussed the fundamental oddity of Evola serving as an intellectual inspiration for the alt-right. …”

As we saw a few weeks ago, The New York Times took the first stab at this anti-Trump conspiracy. This is a giant nothingburger of a story.

1.) First, Steve Bannon is guilty of making a passing reference to Julius Evola in a single speech. He is probably familiar with who Evola was which by itself proves nothing. I’m familiar with Karl Marx and Ayn Rand, but that doesn’t make me a communist or an Objectivist.

2.) Second, Julius Evola has a lot of fans in Alt-Right circles, particularly among those who are non-Christians. The Alt-Right, however, isn’t a religious movement. You will find people who identify as Alt-Right across the religious spectrum. There are atheists and agnostics who are Alt-Right. There are Odinists. There are traditional Catholics, Orthodox Christians, evangelical Protestants, etc.

3.) Third, I’m not terribly familiar with Julius Evola. My colleagues at AltRight.com and RADIX Journal are much more familiar with his work. No one who is really Alt-Right uses the term “Judeo-Christian West” to describe our civilization, Christian or otherwise, and I say this as a Christian.

4.) Fourth, as I understand it and as the article suggests, a Radical Traditionalist can be a Christian. I’m only vaguely familiar with this subject, but I know several people who identify as such.

5.) Finally, there is no conflict between being Anglo-Saxon and “Far Right.” Indeed, it is possible to arrive at Alt-Right conclusions from a totally different set of influences, as my own story indicates. I’ve never even read Julius Evola and yet here I am responding to this story.

Hunter Wallace
the authorHunter Wallace
Hunter Wallace is the founder and editor of OccidentalDissent.com

14 Comments

  • Evola was a traditionalist and didn’t hate any religion. He was more of a comparative religious guy, purely interested in the metaphysical. He even wrote a book on the metaphysics of war and another book that was a critique of the National Socialists.

  • Bannon is not an idiot. I am sure he is familiar with many strains of political theory on the left and right. That doesn’t mean Bannon is a disciple of Evola.

    But this is great news because it pushes Evola into the mainstream. Evola will now be to Trump what Leo Strauss and the Frankfurt School were to the Bush years. Bannon’s comments on Evola will spark renewed interest in Evola’s work.

    Evola is an important philosopher of the right, perhaps the only postwar theoretician to effectively critique liberalism and modernity.

    • As far as I can see he mentioned Evola once in a speech he did about Alexander Dugin a few years ago. This doesn’t indicate that he identifies as an Evolian Radical Traditionalist. He indicates that he’s aware of who Evola is. Big deal. The Jewish media is just desperate to attach the Trump administration with Naziism and white supreeeemacy.

  • Evola once said he would rather have a conversation with your average Catholic priest than any famous European literary figure.

    He would have especially despised lying American journalists, who are always eager to stir up controversies over nothing.

  • If you just say you’re pro-white you can’t be smeared like The Atlantic is trying to do. I’m pro-white. You’re attacking me for being pro-white? OK, you’re anti-white. You hate white people. You’re trying to demoralize white people into accepting their own genocide.

    • “If you just say you’re pro-white you can’t be smeared like The Atlantic
      is trying to do. I’m pro-white. You’re attacking me for being pro-white?
      OK, you’re anti-white. You hate white people.”

      Doesn’t this just invite them to vomit out their egalitarian rhetoric? One race the human race blah blah blah?

      • Correct. That’s what we want. We want them to cuck themselves. It’s a loser strategy. Whenever some idiot White or Jew says that I always tell them, “Then move to a nigger neighborhood. Go ahead! But you won’t. You know the property value is low. You know it’s not cost. You won’t move because you’re a liar and a phony.”

        Say it to their face and they crumble in embarrassment. Many will fight back with charges of “racism” but then you just double down.

      • Whatever they say you have to destroy their terminology and narratives and impose your own.

        Of course they’re going to fight back. The anti-whites hate white people and want them gone and will do everything they can to bring that about. They try to discredit you. Your job is to discredit them. One way to do that is to point out their contradictions. One minute they say whites are evil, the next minute they say race doesn’t matter. One minute they say whites stole America, the next minute they say America was never a white country.

        Power comes from legitimacy. If you destroy your enemy’s legitimacy, you destroy their power.

        General George Patton was annoyed that his staff kept telling him “The Germans are going to do this and this and this to us.” He told them to spend more time worrying about what THEY were going to do to the Germans.

    • This is the first time I’ve heard Lewis ,or anyone else for that matter, described as a “fundamentalist Anglican”. The phrase fundamentalist is usually reserved for Evangelicals. A more apt ,or at least common, description of the author of the Narnia series might be orthodox Anglican or traditional Anglican.

  • To say Evola “hated” Christianity would be quite a stretch. He espoused an extremely militant ethos; as such, he wasn’t big on certain Christian teachings. However, he did look favorably upon Medieval Christianity, which he views as being distinctly Aryan.

    Moreover, as a Traditionalist/perennialist, Evola found truth in many different religions/philosophical systems — Christianity most certainly included.

    The Atlantic piece can be summarized as: “Here’s a nearly irrelevant factoid that totally shatters your worldview! Checkmate, racists!”

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