Alternative Right Builds a Treehouse
Britain's Most Serious Men Finally Build a Treehouse Nobody Else Is Allowed In What the Funny People Are Saying About the Alternative Right There's something genuinely impressive about a group of chaps who looked at the entire modern world and said, "Do you know what this needs? Fewer people." Not fewer emails, not fewer meetings, not even fewer adverts on ITVX, just… fewer people. It's bold. It's minimalist. It's Marie Kondo, but for humanity. They examined civilisation, took notes, frowned a great deal, and concluded that the issue, fundamentally, was the guest list. The old Alternative Right website reads like a digital campfire where everyone brought their own philosophy textbook and nobody brought biscuits. You scroll through it and think, "These chaps are either planning a civilisation… or running an extremely intense book club where nobody finishes the book." The footnotes have footnotes. The footnotes' footnotes are having a row in the comments section about whether Spengler was misunderstood by his publisher. According to historians who track these movements, the whole thing emerged online in the late 2000s as a reaction to mainstream conservatism being, allegedly, too mainstream. Which is a fascinating complaint. That's like refusing to eat at a Wetherspoons because too many people enjoy a £4.50 pint. Or boycotting tea on the grounds that it has become depressingly popular among the British. Somewhere along the way, they decided the real problem with the modern world wasn't the trains, the council tax, or the price of a Freddo. No. The problem was conceptual. Identity. Civilisation. The sort of words that make you feel cleverer just by holding them in your mouth for a moment. Try it. Say "ontology" out loud in a Pret. You've just been promoted to thought leader. The Philosophy of "We're Not Like Those Chaps"… Immediately Followed by "We Are Those Chaps" One of the most charming elements is the branding effort. The early pitch was: this is not your grandfather's fringe movement. This is refined. Intellectual. Think tank energy. A flat white, not a Nescafé. Hardback, not Penguin paperback. Tweed, not nylon. Even the founders reportedly wanted to distance themselves from older extremist imagery because it was, quote, "a total nonstarter." That is the most British way anyone has ever said, "We need better marketing." It's the verbal equivalent of putting a bowler hat on a fox and announcing the rebrand of vermin. So they rebranded. Same intensity, but now with fonts that look like they belong on a Cambridge philosophy journal. It's like if a Hells Angels chapter swapped their leathers for cardigans and started quoting Roger Scruton at the school gates. The chains are now reading glasses. The Triumph is a Volvo estate. The roadhouse is a Waterstones café in Guildford. Dr. Reginald Plumbottom-Smythe, a fictional civilisational analyst at the equally fictional Hartlepool Institute for Things Men Shout About On Forums, told us, "What we are observing is a textbook case of identity inflation. They have issued so many opinions that each individual opinion is now worth less than a Liz Truss-era pension fund. Soon you'll need a wheelbarrow of grievances to purchase a single resentment, and the wheelbarrow will be subject to a council surcharge." The Internet as a Gym for Ideas That Skip Leg Day Academics studying these movements call the participants "ideological entrepreneurs" competing in a marketplace of ideas. Which sounds frightfully impressive until you notice that every idea is doing bicep curls and absolutely nobody is working on balance. The whole movement looks like an upper body. There are no calves anywhere. It's all biceps and grievance, like a stag do that forgot to book a venue. Online, everything gets sharper, louder, more confident. You start with "I have a question about society" and finish with "I have solved civilisation, please subscribe to my Substack." There is no middle. The middle was banned by moderators in 2014, then deplatformed by a different group in 2016, and now lives in Lisbon writing a memoir. It's the same energy as a chap who watches three YouTube videos about property and immediately starts introducing himself at the Dog and Duck as a "housing strategist." Except now the strategy is for housing 800 million people, none of whom have been consulted, and most of whom have plans of their own — usually involving a kitchen extension and a row with the planning officer. A leaked internal memo, which we have read forty times because we are concerned, reportedly stated: "Our content strategy must reflect our commitment to civilisational depth. Action items: more Roman statues, fewer mirrors." The mirrors part is included as written. We have questions. Specifically: about the mirrors. Why are the mirrors a threat? What did the mirrors do? Did the mirrors say something at the AGM? The Romance of Being the Last Chap at the Party There's also a curious nostalgia baked into the whole project. A longing for a past that, if you asked ten historians to describe it, would produce eleven arguments and one nervous cough into a hanky. The past they are nostalgic for did not, technically, occur. It is a director's cut of a film never made, set in a country that does not exist, scored by Edward Elgar after a particularly wistful sherry. The appeal is emotional. You get to feel like the last defender of something grand and collapsing. It's heroic. Cinematic. Also frightfully convenient, because if everything is already collapsing, you never have to fix anything. You just narrate, preferably in a tweed jacket, ideally with a labrador. That's the trick, you see. If the world is doomed, you're not responsible for your bit of it. You're just narrating the fall. Like a chap at a barbecue explaining why the gazebo was always going to blow over, while standing on the rope he forgot to peg in. An informal poll of 1,200 self-identified online intellectuals — conducted entirely in our kitchen by a man named Nigel who insists he isn't that Nigel — found that 87% believe civilisation is collapsing, 83% believe they personally are the last sane voice, and 100% have unfinished newsletters. The maths overlaps because the maths always overlaps. Nigel was very firm about this. What the Funny People Are Saying Jack Dee: "Every movement reckons it's the last sane one. It's like the last bloke at the pub muttering, 'Everyone here is drunk.' Mate. You're talking to the cigarette machine. You ARE the situation." Frankie Boyle: "These lads have looked at modernity, with all its complexity and chaos, and concluded the answer is essentially a gated community with worse Wi-Fi and more references to Hellenic statuary. Bold strategy. Honestly, it's the kind of plan that makes Brexit look like a fully costed manifesto." Jimmy Carr: "They say they want to defend civilisation. From who? Mainly from people who use civilisation. Which is — and I'm just going to say it — most of civilisation. (pause) That's the joke. You can clap now." Sarah Millican: "Nothing says 'serious intellectual movement' quite like a comments section that reads like a medieval curse written by a man who's just stubbed his toe on a copy of Plato." Romesh Ranganathan: "I read one of those websites once. Four sentences in, I thought, 'I bet this lad has never been forced to share a Premier Inn breakfast queue with a hen do from Bolton.' And honestly, that's the real test of civilisational strength." Lee Mack: "Marketplace of ideas, they call it. Have you been to an actual marketplace? Half the stalls are flogging knock-off perfume and the other half are arguing about whose pitch is whose. Sounds about right, actually." The Real Punchline Nobody Wants Here's the twist that even the most serious essays cannot outrun: every ideology that promises to simplify humanity eventually runs into humanity. Humanity has a 100% win record against ideology. Undefeated since the invention of the first opinion. The streak is longer than the Premier League's existence and considerably less corrupt. People are messy. Contradictory. Annoying. They like bad music, decent curry, and opinions that don't line up neatly in columns. They vote one way and then marry someone who votes the other way and then their daughter grows up to vote a third way nobody saw coming, usually after a gap year in Vietnam. It's a nightmare for spreadsheets and an absolute delight for everyone else. Any worldview that tries to turn 67 million Britons — let alone several billion humans — into a tidy, labelled spreadsheet ends up discovering the same thing every frustrated HMRC clerk learns: the numbers do not stay still. Row 4,000,001 just married Row 6,000,002 and they have moved to Margate, where they are now opening a vegan chip shop staffed by their cousin from Glasgow. This is where the free-market view of human flourishing quietly wins the argument without raising its voice: actual liberty assumes people will be weird, contradictory, and unmanageable. That isn't a bug. That's the whole product. The state cannot tidy you up because you are not a kitchen drawer, despite occasional appearances. The Eyewitness We spoke to Trevor Doolittle, 52, of Stoke-on-Trent, who claims to have accidentally landed on the archived Alternative Right website while looking for discount strimmer parts on a Tuesday evening. "I was on there about six minutes," Trevor told us, sweating slightly into his second mug of Yorkshire. "By minute four I'd read the word 'civilisational' nine times. By minute five I was wondering if my strimmer needed a civilisational realignment. By minute six I closed the tab, ordered a Flymo off Argos, and watched Bargain Hunt like a normal Englishman." Trevor has not returned to the website. He has, however, returned to Argos. He calls this "voting with his feet, also his Nectar card." Final Thought That Sneaks Up on You The archived site feels less like a finished philosophy and more like a draft. A long, intense, occasionally poetic draft written by chaps who were absolutely certain they were onto something, and equally certain no one else understood it. The literary equivalent of a man at a wedding cornering you near the cheese board to explain his dream at considerable length. And perhaps that's the most human part of the whole business. Everybody thinks they're the one person in the room who sees clearly. The difference is, most people don't build a website about it. Most people just mutter at the news, dunk a digestive into their tea, and get on with their afternoon. Which is, frankly, a more sustainable civilisational strategy than anything in the archive. The treehouse is impressive. The ladder has been pulled up. Inside, the chaps are arguing about who gets to be king of the treehouse, and whether the king should wear a laurel wreath or a cravat. Outside, the rest of humanity is doing what humanity always does: starting small businesses, raising children, complaining about Southern Rail, and quietly, freely, refusing to be a column in anyone's spreadsheet. The branches creak. The chaps keep arguing. The lamp is still on. Somebody, somewhere in Stoke, is buying a Flymo. This piece is British satire, produced through a long-running collaboration between the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. No ideologies were harmed in the writing of this article, though several were gently asked to sit down and have a cup of tea. Fictional experts, polls, eyewitnesses, and memos are exactly that — fictional — and any resemblance to real institutes, strimmer owners, or sweating Trevors of Stoke-on-Trent is the kind of coincidence that keeps British satire in business. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! Read the full article
