The Putin Option

Establishment cuckservative Rod Dreher has made a name for himself advocating the “Benedict Option” for social conservatives, which advocates a withdrawal from the mainstream and the creation of our own traditional counterculture. A close corollary to the Benedict Option for identitarians is the “Fifth Political Theory” or the NRx inspired concept of “Passivism” which, while both are different and unique in many ways, also eschew political activism and advocate some variation of disengagement from the system with a corresponding focus on creating our own society.

An extreme opposite of the Benedict Option would be the concept of secession accomplished through an armed uprising and the creation of a new ethnostate for our people. Southern Nationalists are mostly drawn to the latter in the context of a new Southern nation which closely follows what occurred before and during the War Between The States. White Nationalists long for something similar but based on White Identity, with such a thing being romanticized in writings such as Harold Convington’s Northwest Novels. I hate to be a wet blanket but there are many problems with this scenario.

If you ever look into the tactical capabilities of law enforcement, you will soon discover that even small police departments are equipped with the ability to crush almost any type of armed uprising. The further up the chain of law enforcement you go, the more overwhelming the arsenal becomes with the state and federal law enforcement agencies having capabilities which used to be reserved to large nation states. Libertarians might be completely useless in every conceivable way, but they were right about the militarization of the police. I’m not kidding when I write that the cops literally have tanks now. I know many in our movement don’t want to hear this but any attempt at an armed uprising would be a one-way bloodbath that would end almost as quickly as it started. I like to describe it with this analogy; you have a trained MMA fighter who has spent years and countless hours preparing for a fight versus some guy who watched a few YouTube clips and downloaded a PDF off the internet. Who do you think is going to win? The smart money is on the trained professional versus the rank amateur. Hopefully you’re starting to get my point.

Image result for armed police

But some will claim that small-scale insurgencies can last against a superpower and cite Iraq and Afghanistan as modern examples. What these people are forgetting are those conflicts included native populations which were hostile to the occupying (and foreign) army. We have no such advantage in the United States. A quick review of the aftermath of Charlottesville should remind you of how quickly family members and friends turned on people for simply appearing at a political rally! It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the “native population” of the U.S. would be much more opposed to any type of insurgency and would turn on anyone remotely associated with a vengeance.

Besides the obvious power mismatch between the two sides and other unfavorable conditions, any such action would be extremely disastrous for our cause politically. Our enemies are just dying for one of us to become violent so they can label us all as criminals and lock us up. You only have to look over to Britain to see a small glimpse of what would await us if this happened. People who have been in this movement for decades can tell you how much damage a patriotard did when he blew up a daycare center full of White toddlers in Oklahoma in the mid-nineties. And we can all agree that the media and the political establishment would relish the opportunity to label us as terrorists. Hell, the media and major political figures called a guy escaping a wild mob a “domestic terrorist” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. You can rest assured they’d treat any actual resistance as the worst terrorist threat in the history of the nation.

So all of this is why I want to introduce yet another option into this already crowded field of potential paths forward for our people. I advocate what I refer to as the Putin Option. Now I know mentioning Russian President Vladimir Putin by name causes cuckservatives like Senator Ben Sasse to soil their bed sheets, but I am calling my proposal this precisely because Putin’s rise to power can be viewed as a potential model for us. Putin was a former KGB officer for an atheist communist empire and, in just little over a decade, he had assumed almost total control of the country and began to set it on a course towards becoming a nationalist Christian nation. How did he accomplish such a thing?

Putin didn’t take up arms against the central government in the 1980s in some type of violent uprising and, surely if he had, he would have quickly been murdered in a violent suppression and most of us would not even know his name. If you accept the notion that Putin did not come to his pro-Christian and pro-nationalist views later in life, you can assume he concealed his true intentions as he rose through the ranks in the halls of power. The Soviet Empire, much like the present American Empire, was a paper tiger in many ways. It gave off the impression that it would last forever but then, in a relatively quick period of time, it simply ceased to exist. I too believe the American Empire will follow a similar path when the day comes that we are unable to pay our bills and our creditors finally call in our tab. This is when the United States will most likely “balkanize” due to our irreconcilable differences. Who will be there at that time to pick up the pieces? Who will be there to help create the Southern Nation that Southern Nationalists long for or the ethnostate that White Nationalists have been talking about for decades?

What us identitarians need most is not LARPy revolutionaries hopped up on the Turner Diaries but we instead need men ready to seize power when the opportunity presents itself as this obviously unsustainable, global, multicultural empire of neoliberal capitalism comes crashing down around our ears. Identitarians, be they Southern Nationalists, White Nationalists or some other variety need to work their way up through the system in politics, business and government while trying to influence things in our direction as best they can – while preparing, when the time is right and the opportunity presents itself, to seize control so that we can take our nation back. Vladimir Putin did it. Why can’t you?

-By Clayton Bishop

Clayton Bishop is an identitarian lawyer from the Deep South who you can follow on Twitter or Gab at @ClaytonBishop14


  1. This is a great piece and a great strategy. This is the exact method that sjws use to infiltrate and do a convergence as soon as they have the upper hand. It has proven highly effective.
