Why I Deleted Anglofuturist

Why I Walked Away From An Enviable Platform

Many people would think I was crazy.

The success I achieved by writing Anglofuturist Magazine was the envy of many, including those with far greater talent and work ethic than I.

It boasted, at its height, nearly 1,500 followers and earned me hundreds of pounds in income from paid subscribers and one-off donations from wealthy individuals.

I was a frequent guest on major podcasts within the ‘Dissident Right’ space like those of Walt Bismarck and Alex Kaschuta.

I got invited to exclusive elite social events run by the Pimlico Journal and J’accuse team in person, who were connected to the central nodes of economic and political power in Britain.

It was the most successful endeavour I had undertaken in my life.

As a young man who had spent the majority of his teenage years in special-ed school for his autism, I feared that my future was one of stigmatisation, pity, unemployment, and disgust from the opposite sex.

This sat uneasily with my fantasy delusions of grandeur, which were nothing more than pure, unfiltered ‘cope’ to escape the overwhelming feeling of personal failure I carried from the age of 14.

The newfound status I got as ‘John Arcto’ from ‘Anglofuturist Magazine’ was absolutely intoxicating.

It made me feel that, finally, I mattered, that my opinions mattered, that I was somebody who people no longer looked down on, but looked up to for guidance.

Dictator of the world? Maybe not. But certainly the next best thing.

Why would I give all that up, when this was my ‘great chance’?

For many reasons, but there is one overarching reason: a loss of certainty.

Loss of certainty about myself, loss of certainty about my political beliefs, loss of certainty about my anonymity, loss of certainty about who I could trust, and loss of certainty about whether I was morally righteous in what I was doing.

Gratitude to Followers of Anglofuturist Magazine

I appreciate everybody who followed Anglofuturist Magazine, and the generous donations they gave.

It helped me grow and develop as a person, as a writer, and as an intellectual; if it had not been for the success of this Substack, I would not have done a masters degree in journalism, and I would not, without hyperbole, be the same person.

Much of my current intellectual orientation, of which I am still learning and evolving, was the result of followers of mine, many of them very accomplished in their fields, who took the time to discuss and debate ideas with me, and made me reconsider some of my opinions.

For all who did so, people like Aristides and WP in particular but by no means exclusively; thank you.

I am sorry if I ‘let you down’ in any way, by deleting Anglofuturist. I’m sorry if articles that you liked are no longer available to be read, as I worked hard to scrub all traces of myself off the internet, to varying degrees of success. But I hope you can, with this article, appreciate the reasons why I did so.

There was one ‘dramatic event’ which settled it, partly a fear of doxing, partly a genuine change of heart (which had cycles of reversal and recovery over the events of this past year).

But the reasons were not exclusively to do with that event; rather, that event solidified my pre-existing doubts.

I will conclude this article with why I have decided to return. This is with the full understanding that my platform will likely be far more modest than the ‘bolt of lightning’ success I achieved with Anglofuturist Magazine, but that nevertheless, I wish to return to Substack for my own intellectual curiosity and peace of mind.

Imposter Syndrome

The large success and following that I got so quickly, despite articles that were filled with typos and rambled on, and admittedly being a content creator that changed my ‘camp’ or ‘sub-faction’ within the now totally defunct movement known as the ‘Dissident Right’ on a monthly basis, by early 2025 had given me imposter syndrome.

I saw how writers who were better than me in every way got a fraction of the following.

I noticed this most notably with Roger Ruin, a diamond in a haystack that I happened to come across, whose series I would recommend to absolutely anybody who is remotely curious about the history of the space I was a part of.

But when I came across it, I became wracked with guilt because I thought his series was superior to my own.

Feelings like this were heightened by certain comments.

There was a comment to a YouTube video featuring me saying something like ‘if somebody as mediocre as John Arcto can immediately get a following, I should do it too’.

I responded to that comment with humility and grace, telling him to ‘go for it’.

But that humility hid insecurity, that my writing was in fact, mediocre. Because success in a field is of limited supply, that comment unquestionably gave the impression that somebody less successful than me deserved that success more than I did.

And how could I disagree?

I think one of the differences between British culture and American culture, and ESPECIALLY if you come from a family like mine, is the importance of humility and modesty.

Nobody got successful on their own, nobody is an exceptional individual who came from nothing, and if you are successful, you should recognise your immense privilege, and do your utmost to give back to society and to others in your field, for those who have been less fortunate than yourself.

I think that this mindset is much more ‘moral’ than the American idea of the ‘self-made individual’ that appears to me smug, arrogant, and narcissistic; it also has the advantage of being factually true.

But the flipside is that it can make one feel they are an imposter, the classic ‘imposter syndrome’.

This is what I always felt as ‘John Arcto from the Anglofuturist’, forever fearful of being exposed as a half-baked, talentless fraud.

When one sees work that is of ‘higher quality’ to one’s own, like I did with Roger Ruin’s series, and yet gets a fraction of the success, one feels an overwhelming sense of guilt.

It’s true that had this been the only reason, I could have used my platform to help uplift these other creators. I think, even though I disappeared shortly afterwards, I did help Roger Ruin gain more followers by promoting his work.

But combined with other factors, it unquestionably contributed to my belief that ‘it was all crap anyway’ and therefore I would have lost nothing if I deleted it.

Ideological Confusion

I had won the jackpot in ‘algorithmic real estate’ when it came to the name ‘Anglofuturism’.

But what was ‘Anglofuturism’?

I had arguably opportunistically hijacked the word ‘Anglofuturist’ before it really took off into meaning what it does now.

But what it means now, and even by my time of deletion in 2025, is unquestionably what Neema Parvini says it means; a J’Accuse/Pimlico Journal ‘Tory Boy rebranding exercise’, with Robert Jenrick’s usage of the term utterly confirming this.

It’s true that people like Alexander d’Albini have written somewhat more sophisticated ideological outlines, but his ‘Five Pillars’ of Anglofuturism aren’t really very obviously derived from the aesthetic, even though ‘I’ happen to agree with them and appreciate his effort.

Back when I started in January 2024, ‘Anglofuturist’ was quite literally just something Aris Roussinos had invented in an UnHerd article.

It was a ‘blank slate’, ready to be claimed by anybody vaguely ‘not Woke’ and also, paradoxically to what it became, seeming to suggest a sort of ‘Developmentalist British Gaullism’, which appealed to my lingering ‘Old Left’ aesthetic sensibilities.

So ‘Anglofuturism’ was just the costume I used to express my true ideology, which was simply ‘anti-Wokeism’.

I tried to make it a ‘coherent political philosophy’. But all of this was elaborate disguise from the fact that, from the get-go, it was primarily a Live Action Role Play (LARP) that might as well have been a Polcompball Anarchy page (think Pokemon for political ideologies, but ten times the amount of autism, that’s the world of ‘Polcompball’) or an ideology for a Hearts of Iron IV mod.

I didn’t know this at the time. It is only once one has a self-awareness that they were LARPing in the past that they can name it as that.

But it’s why ‘Anglofuturist Magazine’ would sound sometimes libertarian-adjecent, sometimes ‘Vitalist’, sometimes Catholic Integralist, and countless other expressions of the ‘Dissident Right’ space, with little consistency to it.

‘Anglofuturism’ was the vehicle I used to tie my incoherent, apocalyptic rage at ‘Woke victory’ to something that looked like a ‘positive vision’.

And back in early 2025, I realised I opposed the ideology of those who had claimed the label of ‘Anglofuturism’.

It was and is either just a vehicle to the Peter Thiel and Marc Andressen ‘Techno-Optimism’ that wants to make us slaves to AI and Big Tech, or just Adam Smith Institute-working Tory Boy’s new costume to impress the large breasted goth girl who laughs about him behind his back.

Either way, the aesthetic and term is purposed for one thing: co-option.

Motivation of Resentment, Hate, and Paranoia

The only thing I passionately believed in was hating Wokeism.

I believed I was locked in a ‘last man standing’ battle against the smug ‘Right Side of History’ brigade’s taunts being ‘made true’ once again, internalising rhetoric from Wokeists from Reddit and Discord.

These cut so deeply because their ‘smugness’ was seemingly ‘backed up’ by social survey data, particularly on topics like rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage.

One reason why THAT ISSUE was one I went on about so frequently, was because it was the example that gave Woke activists the ammunition to say that the things they were pushing for now would also gain ‘rapid acceptance’ and that ‘resistance was futile’.

The social attitude surveys were confirmed by people like Eric Kaufmann, nominally somebody ‘on our side’. In his book ‘Taboo’ (2024) his calm and composed tone when presenting these apocalyptic survey results is almost ‘goading you to insert the overwhelming feeling of revanchist rage he holds back’.

I have learned that ‘social attitude surveys’ are self-reinforcing demoralisation and humiliation rituals, as demonstrated with the hyper-charged ‘data’ about the Christian ‘Quiet Revival’, flattening out individual experience and opinion. In light of this, I have stopped paying them any attention.

But, at the time, they fueled some deeply unpleasant impulses within me.

I know ‘hate’ is weaponised by Woke fanatics, to mean ‘any opinion they disagree with or offends their sacred minority groups’, but I am talking about ‘hate’ in a much more individual, personal sense as the key driver of Anglofuturist.

My entire personality was built around hating Wokeism.

The hatred was deeply personal because, during my teenage years, I had been a committed ‘Old Leftist’.

But whilst my ‘economic leftism’ was linked in my mind to an aesthetic of Stalinist socialist realism and New Deal-era Norman Rockwell paintings, by 2019, all ‘left-wing spaces’ made subscription to extreme deconstructionist cultural leftism the key litmus test.

I felt not only betrayed, but humiliated, by the fact that the ‘lame’, ‘pathetic’ identity politics-focused left ‘won’ the conflict between it and the ‘Bernie Bros’, and that I was banned from every ‘left’ or ‘socialist’ subreddit and Discord server for opposing transgenderism and being a ‘bigot’.

The bans were often after they had sneered that I would accept ‘non-binary’ as real eventually, because I accepted gay marriage. They argued that this showed ‘just how much they’d won’ that I felt I had no choice but to submit to an idea I unquestionably would have adamantly opposed 10 years ago, and once again shoving those social attitude surveys confirming mass support for cultural leftism.

Later on, I experienced such ostracism and humiliation in real life in my undergraduate university course. I had already stopped being on the left, but my undergraduate experience resulted in my views becoming far more extreme than they had been previously.

It led to my entire mental bandwidth being filled with frothing fantasies of revenge and unbridled indulgence of sadism at those ‘smug’ groups, their smugness convincing me such sadism was morally justified.

Many of my views were ‘performatively extreme’ for the simple reason that I wanted to prove that the ‘taunts and demoralisations’ ‘didn’t work on me’, and by being extreme, I was making ‘no concessions’ to the sacred milestones to the ‘Right Side of History’ teleology, and reasserting my agency over ‘history’.

But even those who might sympathise with the general outline of my views would probably agree that this level of anger and paranoia was so extreme it bordered on mental illness.

I don’t entirely repudiate the factual narrative outline expressed here. I remain anti-Woke.

However, having your intellectual energy entirely expended on this degree of hatred, over things you can’t directly control, is the road to misery.

And when writing Anglofuturist, miserable I was.

Not only does the source for your extreme anxiety, the social attitude surveys, rely on a quantitative epistemology that is self-reinforcing and marred with social approval bias, it creates no productive change.

It only makes yourself vulnerable to fall for the ‘Slop Right’ bait with the illusion of empowerment and ‘getting revenge’, whilst further and further compromising your principles and erasing any moral highground. ‘Your anger, their agenda’, to quote Neema Parvini, ‘their’ always being the likes of Peter Thiel, Zionists, and fossil fuel companies.

Abandoning this obsessive but ultimately powerless and self-harming hatred, with the help of the Christian tradition, has been nothing but liberating.

Lingering ‘Old Left’ Sympathy

The fact that I had been on the economic left made the hatred of Wokeism deeply personal.

So personal, in fact, that I was willing to betray pretty much every single other principle I held, being involved in spaces that involved dirty fossil fuel money bribing them to focus on denying climate change, and abandoning any residual economic leftism.

It was easier to imagine that the left had always been secretly Woke because it allowed me to integrate better in ‘right-wing spaces’ who were the only ones who tolerated and/or shared my seething contempt for Wokeism.

But the humanist romanticism of my ‘Old Left’ roots never truly left me.

That impulse always gave me the nagging feeling of ‘supporting blatant social villainy’ by which I meant ‘the hedge fund managers’ and ‘fossil fuel companies’. I unquestionably partook in spaces funded by those sources and pushing those narratives that helped their bottom line at the expense of humanity and the planet, for which I am remorseful.

And this was another reason why I was pushed towards deletion; lingering doubt about the alliances I made and whether I was being true to my authentic convictions, the convictions that were not those that I had when filled with anger, but those that I had during periods of tranquility and internal peace.

It turned out that Sohrab Ahmari had been right when he called even back in 2023 that the ‘New Right’ would ‘never be on the side of the workers’.

I was simply slower to realise that same lesson, finally learning it after witnessing the disappointment of Trump’s second term.

‘The Great Reveal’

But the big reason why I deleted Anglofuturist was that I discovered that everybody on my masters degree course had found out my pseudonym and I was at risk of getting doxxed, which I, of course, did.

My classmates on my masters degree course knew about it because I had apparently often been going on it in class, even though the timings didn’t match up because I was taking a long hiatus at the first part of my degree.

But, probably due to my natural autistic gullibility, they found out. My poor concentration in those two hour lectures was a reason why I finally accepted the need to take ADHD medication to have any hope of holding down a job.

But, despite all this, knowing the borderline criminal (in Britain) things that I had written, they treated me… fine.

I knew that many of them held Woke opinions, so I assumed that they had no idea about my online activity.

But on the final day of the course, after we had done a newspaper workshop, and I was at one of the people’s houses for a house party, the guy who was hosting mentioned ‘John Arcto’ when I was talking to them in a group

My blood just froze.

One of them then said ‘why did you think we didn’t know?’ as if I’m supposed to assume as an autistic person, you are so nakedly transparent that neurotypical people can read your every thought, even your darkest secrets.

And I replied ‘well, I thought if you knew, you’d treat me far worse than you did’.

And then one guy said

‘We’re the tolerant ones’.

Was he wrong?

You always assume ‘the left’ to be hypocritical, and then are left dumbfounded when they actually aren’t as malicious as you expect them to be.

After literally an hour at what was supposed to be a celebration in absolute shellshock, I felt… guilty.

Now, the emotional power of this moment, which I compared at the time to the priest in Victor Hugo’s Le Misérables letting Jean Valjean the silver that he stole, and that act of limitless compassion and love leading him to transform his life, has been somewhat blunted by the fact that I’m almost certain SOMEBODY in that class fed me to Hope Not Hate.

I deleted all of my online presence with the hope that, if I deleted it right then, the reputation of my real name could be saved.

Sadly, that was not to be.

However, at the time, I felt filled with ideological confusion, and genuine remorse for having upset people.

There was this nice girl, who I won’t mention the name of, who had always treated me kindly. She was the top of our class, and I often looked to her for advice with the coursework. She was so nice to me, ‘almost’ a friend, even though she had pronouns in bio and what have you, and so I assumed, despite outward civility, ‘if this person knew who you really were, she, and everyone, would work to destroy your life’.

The fact she was attractive, was, yes, probably also a factor in my dramatic ‘Road to Damascus’, but such is the brain of the human male.

So, when we were drunk and collapsed on the sofa after having drunk an extreme quantity of alcohol to numb the otherworldly feeling of feeling like the secret police are about to take you away, she expressed not anger, but resigned disappointment.

She said that ‘she was raised to treat everybody kindly’ and that because of that, she treated me kindly ‘even though she was queer and my mom is queer’. She talked about her struggles being a woman, and her self-esteem which went along with that, and I had no reason to think that she was ‘making it up’; she was speaking from the heart.

She said to me, after I had said ‘so you knew all along?’ that ‘yes, Aidan, but it didn’t change the way I treated you’.

It’s moments like that which change a person. That first olive branch, when you least expect it, when you expect the other side to be inhuman monsters who would relish in destroying your life (and don’t worry, I am not negating the experiences of so many, and myself prior to this, that saw people they believed to be friends behaving exactly like that).

I guess, one could argue, it’s a shame that ‘not trying to destroy your life’ has become ‘better than expected’ from certain types of people.

And yes, obviously at least one person in that class fed that information to the loathsome cretins of Hope Not Hate, but they all knew, so I couldn’t tell you which.

I very much doubt it was this girl in question, there were some other girls that gave me almost complete silent treatment, me not knowing why until this ‘great reveal’, and assuming it was just because of my autism and the fact girls just seem to ‘take against me’.

But with this one particular girl’s ‘disappointed acceptance’, I felt absolutely wracked with guilt.

If, at the house party I had felt like Jean Valjean when the priest let him keep the silver, the next few days made me like Javert singing the number ‘Stars’ in the musical of Le Miserables. His entire moral code, that he so rigidly stuck to, falling in front of his eyes, and leading him to of course commit suicide; that’s how I felt.

The Year Since

So, I deleted my Substack, and I deleted everything, even the articles on my Google Drive, and careful notes I had made on various writers in the ‘Dissident Right’ canon.

I fell into moral despair. I didn’t know what I believed anymore.

How could a ‘Woke’ person, not just one but, barring at least one or two, the majority of a class, not fit the stereotype? How could you be ‘Woke’ and be a good person?

I’ve never had that same certainty since.

I felt regret. The fact that I ‘wasn’t hated’ despite my online content made me think that, had it not been for that, could I have gotten a girlfriend amongst the girls there, and achieved my longstanding dreams of overcoming the limitations of a person who went to a special ed school?

I had wasted those opportunities, and the only thing I gained from it was this lesson…

But I have mostly learned from that lesson, or at least, tried to.

People don’t change overnight. The ‘big event’ can often begin a ‘trend’ towards a shift in thinking, and obviously there are times when you go back to your old patterns.

But if a change is genuine, the relapses become gradually shorter and less severe, and I think that, looking at the year in retrospect, they did.

After I graduated, I moved back home and joined a local church, exploring Christianity. This church was ‘socially conservative ENOUGH’ that I felt safe there.

But I found many of the sermons touched me, realising that I was judging others despite having similar flaws myself.

I judged people who define themselves as one or more letters in ‘LGBT’ for ‘not being able to control themselves’ and ‘choosing to be degenerate’, yet I also couldn’t control myself.

I had been addicted to pornography for the entire time I was writing Anglofuturist, often ‘acting out’ just after I had advocated for Catholic Integralism on Notes.

I was ‘casting the first stone’ when I was ‘filled with sin’.

With the Christian message of love allowing me to transcend preoccupation with the culture war, I was relieved of a great big burden. It turns out hating something or a group, almost 24/7, ultimately destroys you more than it destroys them.

I did the Alpha Course, which is a course for those interested in Christianity, and it described hate as ‘swallowing poison with the hope that the other person drinks it as well’.

That was me with Wokeism.

Am I a Sellout?

And yes, some part of me still wonders if by abandoning this paranoid hatred even slightly is ‘being a sell-out’ or ‘letting the Woke win’.

Dave Greene is always out there to scold ‘defectors’ because they refuse to endlessly fall for the online bait and stay on the MAGA plantation, Neema Parvini the latest example.

Most of my underlying positions have not changed, I just realise that the populist right and the online outrage cycle isn’t going to change anything; in fact, as with Trump in his second term, it can reinvigorate a backlash without truly crossing the rubicon.

Trump is even wobbly on the transgender issue, probably THE biggest source of my apocalyptic anxiety about Wokeism that they were ‘butchering teenage girls’.

This isn’t surprising given he normalised acceptance of gay marriage in the GOP and threw pro-lifers under the bus.

This is not to mention where I disagree with him from the left, his denial of climate change and a fiscal and regulatory policy that is no different from the GOP Old Guard.

I always had to hold my nose when supporting the MAGA movement for things like climate denial because ‘stopping Wokeism was so important’, and what we instead got was not really long-lasting action on that front (the Democrats will undo it all), and more foreign wars for Israel.

Trump sells the base a feeling of empowerment whilst quietly ensuring the cultural left’s previous victories become unquestioned precisely because he doesn’t question them.

But even on the things where I agree with Trump on, if Trump ended up getting scared, unable to break from the logic of the system that enabled constant backlash cycles despite the organisation of Project 2025 and a ‘counter-elite’ lined up, then Reform UK in this country, or Restore Britain for that matter, have no chance in hell.

This was the ‘Dissident’s Right’ great chance, that its ‘Caesarist’ footing against Wokeism, the apocalyptic rage and ‘calls for blood’ from the likes of Auron MacIntyre reminding you that ‘they are mutilating your kids and laughing about how you are powerless to stop them’, would lead to anything approaching a long-term victory.

With the Democrats scheduled to win the next US election, not having moderated an inch on social issues, it’s clear that it didn’t work.

Trump splashed around in the rubicon, but his ego, lack of clear principles, and sycophantic and unprincipled advisors with a totally different agenda to what the ‘Dissident Right’ thought it was voting for, stopped him from crossing it.

Why should I care when the leaders, the ‘counter-elite’ (of Peter Thiel puppets and Zionists, good grief was ‘Elite Theory’ a clever trick to get people to accept elite co-option when it was staring us in the face), have either totally failed, or were never on our side in the first place?

Why should I care when the most effective force for immigration control is the left, Keir Starmer cutting immigration by almost 70% and the Danish Social Democrats ending the mass immigration experiment entirely?

The ‘right’ seems only designed to negatively polarise the left back to their worst impulses, instead of their pragmatic need to govern.

So I don’t care. I stopped. I found new interests, and focused on learning rather than claiming to have the answers.

Why I Decided to Come Back

Because I still have ideas I want to share.

One sad side effect of the end of Anglofuturist is that I became extremely addicted to AI chatbots. I believe AI is an extremely destructive thing, that is gradually draining away our capacity for imaginative and creative thought, and I was an example.

ChatGPT in particular also gives you a horrible dry mouth of blandness, always repeating the utterly obnoxious establishment managerialism, ‘quantitative studies’, ‘evidence-based policy’, that flattens out all disagreement as ‘the experts disagree’ when not treating you as a genius, and disorientingly floating between those two demeanors to maximally brainwash you.

I realised I don’t want to have my mind flattened out by AI, I want to return to writing my own thoughts, to real people, to anybody who wants to listen.

A lot of this new Substack won’t be about politics, least of all the claim to have invented a new ‘political movement’. I also want to discuss aesthetics, culture, philosophy, and theology.

When I do discuss politics, I am no longer interested in ‘fitting in with the right-wing faction’, and will not be afraid to make my left-wing positions known, of which there are a fair few.

I am an unapologetic economic leftist and environmentalist, and won’t go along with ‘X slop outrage cycles and crazes’. I don’t think that ‘immigration is so important that all other issues should be dismissed’, I care more about other issues.

I don’t care if what are genuinely my authentic opinions are accused of being ‘attempts at getting respectability from the left’, because they aren’t. I don’t want to be preoccupied with getting ‘respectability on the right’ by swallowing wholeheartedly their free market dogma, anti-vax stupidity, and climate change denial either.

I still hate Wokeism, on various social issues I still have the opinions I had, though with a more holistic context and less susceptibility to ‘fall for the bait’.

But I don’t want hating Wokeism to be my sole personality anymore.

As for what I ‘do’ believe, I am still working it out, and I suspect I will be for the rest of my life.

I want the opportunity to explore ideas, and I intend to do just that.

Thank you for reading.