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    “The Golden One,” a Metapolitical Influencer

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    Metapolitics in the discourse of “The Golden One” — or Marcus Follin, online fitness guru, entrepreneur and far-right YouTube personality — is dissimilar to the notion of metapolitics as expressed by Alain de Benoist. De Benoist’s metapolitics was grounded “in an ideological critique of the left and an methodological critique of the right.” It was a way to rethink the ideas and strategies of the true right — the conservative revolutionary right and to bring them into the 20th century.

    For Benoist, any “metapolitical action attempts, beyond political divisions and through a new synthesis, to renew a transversal mode of thought and, ultimately, to study all areas of knowledge in order to propose a coherent worldview.” First and foremost, metapolitics was about the production of theory and distancing oneself from violent activist groups. Secondly, it was about normalizing those ideas in order to fuel political change.

    Guillaume Faye, “The Golden One” and the Metapolitical Warrior

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    The Golden One’s version of metapolitics is not about highbrow intellectual theory or a new theoretical synthesis discussed in books and journals. The Golden One is emblematic of a new type of metapolitics — a metapoltics 2.0 — that is clearly intertwined with the digital infrastructures and digital culture. The Golden One is, in essence, a metapolitical influencer. What is Important to understand is that he does not just reproduce the ideas of others. This would entail that he is a neutral intermediary. By using digital media for metapolitical goals, Follin is producing new ideas, assembling existing concepts and repackaging them while communicating them to a new niche audience.

    Strategic Intimac

    The key to understanding his impact is analyzing his communication in the tradition of social media influencers. Just like most influencers, The Golden One not only produces a clear-cut persona but also mobilizes strategic authenticity and strategic intimacy to bind his audience. The difference is that his personal life is used in the service of metapolitical goals. After his first video in which he discussed what becoming a father meant to him, a whole series followed that touched on subjects like the war on fatherhood or how to raise daughters. Through those seemingly personal videos, The Golden One is promoting the traditional values and pan-European worldview that can be found in the works of Guillaume Faye, albeit in a different form.

    Like all influencers, The Golden One has crafted his own brand. He has created a very specific public persona — a sort of modern-day pastiche of a Nordic Viking-slash-bodybuilder — which he uses for metapolitical and economic goals. He combines fitness, nutrition and training videos with content dedicated to politics, far-right books and activists. He gets paid to give lectures, uses Patreon to get monthly funding (at the moment, he has over 750 patrons who donate each month). Follin also has his own clothing line, Legio Gloria, which he wears in his YouTube videos. He even has his own nutrition line. The Golden One’s success is not only metapolitical — it is also a small business venture.

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    The Golden One’s brand finances his metapolitics and vice versa. Through his online presence and his influencer technics, he manages to inspire far-right activists and youth around the world. It is in this uptake that we can assess the meaning of his work. One of those viewers and fans is the “Son of Europe.” The Son of Europe is a member of the far-right Flemish identitarian movement Schild & Vrienden. In a YouTube video titled “How I got red pilled” (the Son of Europe published the video in 2018 but has deactivated his account after Schild & Vrienden was exposed in a documentary as an extreme right, racist and anti-Semitic movement), he explained that finding The Golden One was a “pivotal moment” in his red-pilling process. He not only “started watching, binge watching actually, the Golden One’s videos,” but also started to exercise more and “go the gym more,” “doing research and also started reading more.” It is thus through the self-help, fitness and, eventually, the purely political content offered by The Golden One that the Son of Europe crafted his identity, set up an Instagram account and became politically active in the Flemish identitarian movement.

    Community Challenge

    The Golden One’s “Wild Hunt Challenge” would prove to be very influential in shaping the Son of Europe. It was as a result of this challenge “aimed at reinforcing positive behaviors in young men” that the Son of Europe created his Instagram account. The Golden One challenged young men to train at least five days a week, stop watching porn or at least masturbating to porn because he wanted them to be “aggressive and disciplined.” This is non-negotiable if you want to be part of his “legionnaires.” He also urged his followers to read an article every day and to post “a glorious picture of yourself … in the most epic place you know” and “upload it to Instagram with the tag #legiogloria.”

    It was through these posts, said the Son of Europe, that a community was born. This community not only created transnational ties among far-right activists. It also functioned as a learning environment. The Sone of Europe claims in his video that it was in this Legio Gloria that he learned everything about “the domination of cultural Marxism” and “the domination of certain groups in the banking world.” He even concludes by saying that this “formed my ideology as it is up to today.” Even more, he took up the role of a “metapolitical warrior” and started posting videos and pictures on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in the genre of The Golden One.

    The Golden One — as an influencer or micro-celebrity within the far-right niche — reentextualizes Faye’s discourse and brings it to a whole new audience. This new type of metapolitics in the digital age is not only about the circulation of ideas; it is also about digital literacy and digital culture. In order to stay integrated in this economy of virality and generate uptake, metapolitical influencers need to be media-literate. They need to develop specific strategies and make full use of the opportunities and algorithms offered by the different media to build an audience or a community. Not only is the knowledge of algorithmic imagination crucial to generating metapolitical impact in this digital ecology, but understanding and adjusting to the culture of the platform is at least as important.

    Guillaume Faye, “The Golden One” and the Metapolitical Legion

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    Metapolitics 2.0 is deeply weaved into the new media system. The impact and influence of The Golden One, and his role in the distribution of far-right ideology, cannot be reduced to his content alone. We have to understand it in relation to his online persona and also to the digital and algorithmic environments in which he uses his voice. Not only is the management of visibility but also avoiding non-visibility, as Taina Bucher stresses, a constant worry for all actors in this media system. Making yourself visible, drawing attention is of crucial importance for all ideological projects.

    The Golden One, in his long social media career, has proven a master at this game. On top of that, he was able to stay fully integrated into all major digital platforms — YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook — for almost a decade. Follin used all that those platforms have to offer and adopted classic influencer techniques to grow an audience, keep that audience hooked and build a community around him.

    The key to any contemporary metapolitical project is being and staying integrated with the culture of the platform and, more specifically, adjusting to its community rules. It is their integration in this new media ecology that allows actors to become so influential. Since the end of 2020, The Golden One has evidently struggled to stay integrated. His personal Instagram and Facebook accounts have been deleted. He is now using his existing mainstream accounts to make sure that his audience can move along to new platforms like GAB and Telegram.

    In ab attempt to keep himself on YouTube, he has announced to stop posting political videos on the platform. This desperate attempt to reinstate his Instagram and to maintain his YouTube presence shows us just how important mainstream digital media are for this metapolitical project.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Guillaume Faye, “The Golden One” and the Metapolitical Warrior

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      Within the global new right, Guillaume Faye is considered a genius and an intellectual prophet. After his death, the former figurehead of la nouvelle droite was praised as a visionary on social media by the former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen; the co-founder of the Pro-Afrikaanse Aksiegroep Dan Roodt; Arktos publisher Daniel Friberg; Counter-Currents publisher Greg Johnson; the editor-in-chief of American Renaissance Jared Taylor; Martin Lichtmesz from Sezession; alt-right star Richard Spencer; the Dutch new-right movement Erkenbrand; several diverse Generation Identity accounts; and the de facto leader of the pan-European identitarian movement, Martin Sellner. They all commemorated his death, hailing him as a key intellectual of the “true right.”

      Guillaume Faye, the “Golden One” and the Metapolitical Legion

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      “The Golden One” was one of those key figures of the new right who had praised Faye. The Golden One, or Marcus Follin, is a bodybuilder, online fitness guru, entrepreneur and a far-right YouTube personality. He started his YouTube channel in 2012 and has now amassed over 110K subscribers and over 12 million views. He has become one of the far-right influencers operating on a global scale. He has been invited to give lectures in the Netherlands for Erkenbrand, for Reconquista in Ukraine, Sweden’s the Scandza Forum, and has given collabs with many key figures and online shows in the far-right alternative influence networks like Millennial Woes or Red Ice TV.

      Why We Fight

      The condolence tweet was not the first time the blond Swedish YouTuber praised Faye. In 2015, Follin made a (now blocked) YouTube video praising Faye’s “Why we fight. Manifesto for a European Renaissance” as “one of the best books I have read.” The Golden One was certainly not the first or the only far-right figure who was inspired by and had praised the work. In 2017, Sellner published five videos on YouTube dedicated to this very book. (All videos were set on private after Sellner’s channel was reinstated after his ban in 2018).

      In those videos, he stressed the ideological and metapolitical importance of Faye. Metapolitics, Sellner argued, is a key concept for identitarians as they define themselves as a metapolitical movement. No wonder that Faye’s far-right publishing house Arktos pitches “Why We Fight” as “destined to become the key work for Twenty-first century identitarians.”

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      The Golden One recommends “Why We Fight” especially if you “are a beginner in the political or philosophical world or need ammunition to fight off or debate the leftists.” Note how he adopts metaphors of war in relation to the idea of political debate or philosophy. That is not a coincidence — “debate,” “philosophy” or “metapolitics” are not only used as synonyms, but his whole message argues that metapolitics is crucial in the fight for the future of Europe and the European people.

      These fighting metaphors also reflect the central motif in Faye’s book. Faye starts “Why We Fight” with the idea that “Europe today faces the greatest danger in her history, a danger threatening the very existence of her civilization. For she is at war and doesn’t know it.” Europe, and especially European culture, its people and identity are in danger of becoming extinct. This danger is brought upon us because our elites do not fight for their people and allow us to be colonized by migrants and, in particular, Muslims. The idea of the “great replacement” was already very much present in Faye’s earlier works.

      Even more, according to Faye, we should fight “for the cause of our own people’s destiny.” Faye describes the world in Schmittian terms as a struggle between ethnic peoples and civilizations for survival and domination. “The base of everything is biocultural identity and demographic renewal,” says Faye. The Golden One completely agrees: “Culture stems out of blood,” he says in the video.

      Biocultural Survival

      This fight for the survival of the biocultural identity of Europe or, in less metapolitical discourse, the European race, is, according to Faye, not only metapolitical. It is very much about the will to power, the will to become culturally, morally, economically and politically superior as a people. Faye’s stress on this struggle for dominance and superiority between Europeans and the Islamic colonizers is exactly the message that The Golden One puts forward on his channel. This idea, he says “resonates very well with the kind of aesthetics that I’m trying to portray with this channel, about strength and such virtues.”

      Just like Faye, Follin stresses the importance of the warrior virtues and halting what Faye calls “deviralization.” The Golden One sees himself as helping to construct a new legion of metapolitical warriors. In a lecture for the Ukrainian Azov movement and the ND-National Militia, The Golden One stressed the importance of combining real fighting and violence with the philosophical or the metapolitical. In essence, he calls for a fusion of metapolitics and the willingness to use violence in the idea of the “metapolitical soldier” or “metapolitical crusader.” In this lecture, he stressed that soldiers need to have a solid ideological worldview, while activists or politicians also need to be able to physically fight.

      This notion of the metapolitical crusader is central in the social media communication of The Golden One. All his online activity has been dedicated to the creation and education of that legion of far-right metapolitical crusaders.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Guillaume Faye, the “Golden One” and the Metapolitical Legion

      by

      March 7 marked two years since the death of Guillaume Faye, the former number two of the French nouvelle droite (new right). His death wasn’t big news in the media. In academic research, Faye exists mostly in the shadows of the so-called number one of the new right, Alain de Benoist.

      This lack of attention to his work contrasts with sharp uptake of his writings in contemporary far-right groups around the world. Faye’s critique of the metapolitics of the nouvelle droite has proved to be very influential.

      Debating the Intellectual Leader of the French New Right

      READ MORE

      In the first of a three-part series, I will zoom in on Faye’s conceptualization of metapolitics and the birth of what I call metapolitics 2.0. In the second part, I will show how “The Golden One,” a Swedish bodybuilder, YouTuber and new-right metapolitical influencer, is emblematic of this new metapolitical battle. In the final article, I will further reflect on the role of algorithmic knowledge in contemporary metapolitics.

      Guillaume Faye and Metapolitics 2.0

      In his book, “Archeofuturism,” Faye argued that the nouvelle droite “had simply overlooked the fact that the cultural battle [Antonio] Gramsci promoted was associated with the political and economic battle.” Metapolitics, according to Faye in his metapolitical dictionary, is not only about “the social diffusion of ideas and cultural values for the sake of provoking a long-term, political transformation.” Metapolitics, he argued, is an “indispensable complement to every direct form of political action, though in no case can it or should it replace such action.”

      Even more, in contemporary societies, Faye stressed, politics is a crucial scene for the metapolitical battle as politicians have privileged access to the media. Faye regretted, for instance, that the nouvelle droite never connected with the far-right National Front from Jean-Marie Le Pen onward. (Note that Faye explicitly stresses the importance of media and media attention in the context of metapolitics.)

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      Faye’s conception of metapolitics as necessarily connected to politics, activism and media was taken up by many key figures in the contemporary far right. For example, the white nationalist intellectual, publisher and editor-in-chief of Counter-Currents, Greg Johnson, reproduced Faye’s critique extensively in his 2012 reader devoted to the establishment of the “North American New Right,” as well as in his 2013 book, “New Right vs. Old Right” and in several blogs and essays on Counter-Currents.

      Johnson reentextualizes Faye’s work in a different, US context addressing American readers and making an abstraction of Faye’s anti-Americanism. He argues that the North American new right should take Faye’s lessons on board. He even made that explicit in his definition of the new right: “The North American New Right is an intellectual movement with a political agenda’ that because of its ‘aims to change the political landscape’ does not ‘enjoy the luxury of ignoring party and electoral politics.” Johnson thus fully subscribes and reproduces Faye’s assessment of the nouvelle droite and sees in it as a foundation to establish a North American new right.

      Faye’s understanding of metapolitics as more than just production of theory (and Johnson’s reentextualization of it) has been taken up by different websites and activists within the alt-right and the global new right. From the start, metapolitics had an important role within the alt-right. In the context of the liberal society, several key figures argue that metapolitics is at the heart of the new-right cultural construction of that future society.

      “Any political struggle must be preceded, legitimised, and supported by a metapolitical struggle,” says Arktos publisher Daniel Friberg. This metapolitical strategy is also visible in the classical metapolitical structures influenced by the nouvelle droite — think-tanks like Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute, congresses, books, papers and essays. But particularly in the US, it was also embedded in vlogs, memes and offline practices influenced by digital culture and in activism for former President Donald Trump.

      In the American uptake of metapolitics, not only did the goal change (a vitalistic reconstructing of American society), but the conceptualization of metapolitics did too. The “prosumer,” and thus not only the intellectual or politician, became a metapolitical actor. “[O]ne individual on an American college campus who tapes a sign reading ‘It’s OK to be White’ to a lamppost,” says the Arktos editor-in-chief, John Bruce Leonard, acts metapolitically because his action seeks “to shift or shatter” the political conventions. The intellectual, the politician, the activist and the prosumer are now all imagined as part of the new right metapolitical battle, all helping “to prepare the way for the regime which will supplant democracy. The deepest work of the metapolitician of the Right is therefore necessarily anti-democratic: he seeks to produce a society in which metapolitics, save in its conservative aspect.”

      Not Limited

      Contemporary new right metapolitics is not limited to a purely intellectual strategy. It encompasses every ideological intervention toward the construction of that future reborn society. It is this broad conception of metapolitics as embodied in meme warfare, offline activism, “influencer culture” and politics that is dominant in the alt-right and the global new right.

      Even more, just because the new right denounces parliamentary democracy, politicians are only understood within the logic of metapolitics. “Parliamentary efforts,” says Friberg, “can never be more than complements to broader cultural and political work. The results of elections are but products of how public opinion has been formed and how, what and in what manner information has been spread between these elections.”

      In the 21st century, it is Guillaume Faye’s broad conceptualization of metapolitics that was taken up and stretched to include digital activism.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      What WhatsApp Conversations Reveal About the Far Right’s Ideology

      by

      Forum for Democracy (FvD) is a political party on the rise in the Netherlands. Thierry Baudet, FvD’s conservative revolutionary leader, positions himself and his party as right-wing and as an acceptable ideological alternative to all other Dutch parties. All media controversies about his radical-right ideology are labeled by Baudet as the work of opponents trying to frame him and the party in a negative way. A careful analysis of WhatsApp messages shared between the youth divisions of the party, however, shows a different reality, namely that mass media reporting helps shape a metapolitical discourse without deradicalizing the core ideology. 

      Intimate Conversations

      Thierry Baudet likes to use controversy to normalize his ideology. This strategy can be seen in his victory speech following the 2019 election and his review of Michel Houellebecq’s book “Sérotonine” for American Affairs. The two interventions were in essence about what he calls the decline of the boreal (or “Northern”) civilization and what Baudet sees as the devastating impact of the party cartel in particular and the individualization and atomization of society since 18th-century Enlightenment in general.

      Such discourse is emblematic of Baudet’s ideological position. He regularly echoes anti-Enlightenment, conservative revolutionary and new right thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. All the classic tropes from these thinkers are present in his discourse: the decline of the nation, the demographic question, the loss of identity, traditional family and gender roles, and the devastating impact of globalization, liberalism and the French Revolution. And, as with any new right leader, he also loudly stresses the need for a national and civilizational rebirth. 

      Most notable, however, is that both his victory speech and his review became the object of intense media scrutiny. In Baudet’s victory speech, the use of the word “boreal” was read as an indication of his radical-right stance. In his review, it was the use of the word “suicide” in relation to abortion and his suggestion that women entering the workplace causes the decline of society that affirmed this profile. But despite all the classic ingredients of generic fascism being on full display, the Dutch media centered around some emblematic features without discussing the ideology that gives meaning to those excerpts.

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      This allowed Baudet to claim that the media was taking his words out of context and that it avoided the real debate on the issues that he was proposing. He constructed, as usual, the idea of an unfair witch hunt by fully exploiting the multilayered meanings attached to his words.

      In light of this public debate, the discussions in the party WhatsApp groups are revealing. WhatsApp groups have become important tools for political parties and for populists in particular. The groups are used to share political messages among young FvD militants and even to suggest a direct line between Baudet and his sympathizers. The closed spaces of those groups not only enable so-called echo chambers, but they also facilitate more intimate conversations among party members and sympathizers as well as functioning as a teaching environment for new recruits.

      As a result of the more informal and private nature of such groups, participants tend to lower their guard. Those conversations, when made public, can become highly explosive scandals. The FvD experienced this first-hand in April this year when a group of young party militants leaked a series of racist, radical-right memes and posts that were posted on the party’s official WhatsApp groups. They did this after their concerns remained unanswered by the leaders of the youth division and the party elite.

      The whistleblowers categorized the communication in those groups as “expressions that correspond to authoritarian, fascist and/or National Socialist ideas, including anti-Semitism, homophobia and racist imperialism.” In short, the posts showed the integration of the members in the global new right culture. The media backlash was substantial, but the party, even though it called the discourse “disgusting,” refused to apologize. 

      Surveillance Culture

      This summer, the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant asked this author to analyze another 900 WhatsApp messages of the FvD’s youth divisions. Those new chats were collected after the media storm caused by the first leak and illustrate the impact of earlier leaks. Concretely, we see how members of the WhatsApp group act as if they are being watched by mainstream media like de Volkskrant or the NRC. 

      Moderators help members to imagine surveillance and to self-surveil. Party member Iem Al Biyati, for instance, explains how members should interact in the WhatsApp group: “Place yourself in the position of a journalist before you post edgy memes. You know very well how everything can be framed, so don’t open up that space.” In the literature, this is called imagined surveillance: moderators imagine “the scrutiny that could take place … and may engender future risks” for the party and act accordingly. As a result, a culture of (self-)surveillance is installed within the group chat. Not only the moderators but also regular members intervene when somebody posts something that can create bad optics.

      Why is this important? The interventions and the non-interventions of moderators and members help us understand what the party and its members understand as acceptable discourse within both the party itself and society at large. It also allows us to understand the reception and appropriation of the discourse of the party elite by the militants and staffers. This is especially relevant when the party elite regularly claims to be misunderstood by the (left-wing) mass media and academia. And, lastly and maybe most importantly in the context of this article, it allows us to assess the impact of mass media hype on the discourse among party members.

      Moderation policies in the WhatsApp group affect those topics that can connect the party to national socialism, Nazism and, in particular, anti-Semitism. Explicit anti-Semitism, explicit racism or incitement to violence are (sometimes) moderated. Any association with those topics has the potential to destroy the metapolitical construction of the party and push it out of the Overton window. Despite this surveillance culture, we see that members are still very explicit in their aversion toward LGBTQ+ people, migrants and migration, and the left. The analysis that Dutch identity has been emptied and is now filled with “transgenderism” in an attempt to destroy the nation passes without moderation. The framing of criminals as mainly “non-boreals” is not moderated, indicating that the controversy the media has created around Baudet’s use of the term didn’t succeed in harming the party. 

      A similar pattern is visible after mainstream media claimed that Baudet questioned the role of working women, as well as the availability of euthanasia and abortion in his review of Houellebecq’s book. Baudet himself claimed that his words were taken out of context, but in the WhatsApp group, the members, including the moderators, were enthusiastic, responding with “It was about time,” “nice!,” “he is just a great thinker, who thinks things through and puts them up for debate. Very well done! Proud of Cherry.” These takes were not only similar to what the mainstream media read in Baudet’s interventions, but in many cases, this back-facing discourse was far more radical than what Baudet explicitly stated or what the media made of it. Mainstream media reporting didn’t have an impact on the reception of Baudet’s words among peers.

      Triggering Outsiders

      Already in the 1990s, J.B. Thompson stressed that the study of ideology should not only look at the original text, but also at the transmission, construction, reception and appropriation of ideological discourse. From the FvD’s WhatsApp messages, we see how the party’s ideology is shaped in the interaction between the members of the WhatsApp group, the official party discourse and mass media reporting. 

      The moderation policies in the WhatsApp groups are partially informed by previous media attention. An earlier WhatsApp scandal created a surveillance culture that steers the militants away from damaging scandals. But this surveillance culture is rarely legitimized in terms of the party and its ideology. The need for self-surveillance is advocated to avoid what the journalists, in the words of another moderator, can use it to “frame” the party. 

      The imagined surveillance does not seem to affect the uptake of Baudet’s discourse by the militants and staffers in the WhatsApp groups. Mass media hypes that avoid tackling the larger ideology of the party contribute to the metapolitical character of the discourse. They help to establish a radical discourse that avoids explicit connotations with neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism and fascism. At the same time, we see that mass media reporting hardly affects the ideological core conviction of its members. With the exception of explicit or so-called “ironic” racism, anti-Semitism and references to Nazism, militants and moderators in the Young Forum for Democracy WhatsApp groups amplify Baudet’s discourse even when they think that they are being watched.

      The word “boreal” has been used in over 100 WhatsApp messages. Baudet clearly has succeeded in introducing the term and establishing a strategic ambivalence concerning its meaning. The militants clearly understand the strategic potential of the ambivalent meaning, which now functions as an identity emblem in the group. It is clear that when media hypes fail to sketch the bigger ideological picture, the words and sentences that are extrapolated from of Thierry Baudet’s discourse become badges of honor because they have succeeded in triggering the outsiders without causing bad optics. 

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More