For years, Jared Taylor has led the move towards the politics of respectability for hardcore racists. With his Northeastern aristocratic twang and salt-n-pepper sideburns, he has made it his job for the last twenty years to spit out well-rehearsed talking points, making allegations about race and IQ, crime, and sexual “control.” With the creation of American Renaissance and the New Century Foundation, he has created the largest white nationalist meeting ground in the country, all based on a more middle-class and college-educated racist crowd.
While racist organizations of the past may have always been steeped in backwoods rumors and conspiracy theories, Taylor attempted to create a “straight line” for racist thinking. He attempted to validate guttural bigotry and stereotypes with trumped up “data,” taking every vile anti-black comment made through history and attempting to find some marginal study that could have results twisted to justify it. In this world it was “scientific thinking” that drove his movement, not just the myths and traditions of the fascist past.
The main evidence of this he could point to was that he, and his organization, were Jew-inclusive. Almost uniformly, racialist and white nationalist organizations are fiercely anti-Semitic. While the modern racist thinking has tried to use the language of evolutionary psychology, genetics, and criminal justice to support their vile ideas, the anti-Semitic rhetoric was a mysticism all its own. Based largely on bizarre conspiracy theories and misreadings of history, anti-Semitism was one of the key areas that signified an individual racist’s allegiance to a tradition of white supremacy.
Right from the first conference in 1994, Taylor invited Jewish racist speakers to present their own vision of racial nationalism. Tenured CUNY Professor
Michael Levin, author of Why Race Matters, presented silly arguments about black mental inferiority, while Orthodox Rabbi Mayer Schiller talked about the need for racial nationalism and to oppose democracy and equality. Though few in numbers, there were almost always Jews in attendance at American Renaissance. This even resulted in confrontations with famous anti-Semites like David Duke, who were asked not to return after pressing speakers on the “Jewish Question.”
Taylor usually simplified the issue by saying that Jews “look white to me.” As American Renaissance became the center of the growing Alt Right, and they hosted the leading anti-Semitic writer today, Kevin McDonald, it seems that Jared Taylor has begun to open up about the anti-Semitism he avoided being associated with.
In a recent interview with the podcast The Darwin Digest, which is a podcast on the Right Stuff/the Daily Shoah “podcast network (It’s not a network, more of a collection of badly recorded banter),” Jared Taylor did his usual shtick about diversity, “racial differences,” and other well rehearsed distractions. While this was all down the line for Taylor, one line did stand out. When he was asked how the racial situation got to where it was, he finally admitted to the anti-Semitism that many have suspected was close under the surface.
A strong case can be made the extent to which Jewish intellectuals have undermined white racial consciousness, and I think there’s not doubt that a certain number of elite Jews have been very energetic in coming up with reasons to somehow denigrate any kind of white racial homogeneity or sense of integrity in European countries.
He also compared it to the suggestion that the universality of Christianity is “responsible” for the decline of “white racial consciousness.” That is also a common talking point among the anti-Christian sectors of the fascist Alt Right, which say that Christianity is a Jewish disease that destroys “ethnic religions” like Nordic paganism. He also plays on the notion, borrowed from Kevin McDonald, that white people have an inherent sense of egalitarian and “pathological altruism” baked into them through evolution. There is, like most of these claims, not evidence for this.
While Taylor may not be ready to “blame the Jews” for all of these issues, he is certainly stepping out in that direction in a way he never has before. White nationalists have often said that Taylor must be aware of the “Jewish question” and have chosen to avoid it for the benefit of American Renaissance. What it does prove, unequivocally, is that his own logic does not just come from “the science” but instead from a white nationalist and neo-Nazi narrative that fuels his worldview. It is not evidence that he draws on, but a script of racial struggle.
Phillippe Rushton, a race and IQ scientist who was largely disgraced in his field, is someone Taylor is often compared to. Rushton is, besides Richard Lynn, the most cited of the race researchers, and often tried to meekly pretend that it wasn’t racism, but just honest science. Off record, however, he often spoke about the Jews and their role in “undermining Western civilization,” a notion that certainly wasn’t embedded in his twin studies. Instead, it shows that his line of thinking has less to do with “uncomfortable truths” in science and more the reverse: he manipulates very minor data to fit in line with an ideology he believes very deeply in.
Taylor fits this bill as well, and we can expect to see him submit further and further to the anti-Semitic script as the Alt Right attempts to mainstream its hatred of Jews.
For Richard Spencer, the Republican National Convention was a return to relevance, a coming out party for those who had been out for years before anyone cared.
This was not the first Republican event for Spencer, who spent his early professional years following the small paleoconservative niches blazed by people like Pat Buchannan and Taki Theodoracopulos.After penning a defense of the student Lacrosse players at Duke University who were accused of sexually assaulting a sex worker of color for the William Taft society, he was brought on as an Assistant Editor of arts at the American Conservative.The magazine made a name for itself through Scott McConnell’s attempt to channel Old Right politics into a world disgusted by most of the excess of Neoconservative foreign policy, coming out against the Iraq War while few on the right were.
McConnell eventually helped Spencer to land a job further to the right at Taki’s Magazine, which keeps the overflow of racists let go from places like Forbes and The National Review.As Peter Brimelow left behind his career attacking teacher’s unions for white nationalism and anti-immigrant extremism with his website VDare and John Derbyshire decided to go public with his with race and IQ arguments, Taki’s Magazine became a place where they could continue to rant to an audience that was almost relevant to beltway Conservatism.
It was here that Spencer decided to make a final transition to the fringes based on the community that he was seeing take shape out of the ashes of paleoconservatism.Greg Johnson, the editor of the neo-fascist publishing house Counter Currents described the early days of Alternative Right, which Spencer founded as a “big tent” for these dissident right-wing movements, as a place for ideas often conflicting to find a common ground.
[Alternative Right] will attract the brightest ‘young’ conservatives and libertarians and expose them to far broader intellectual horizons, including race realism, White Nationalism, the European New Right, the Conservative Revolution, Traditionalism, neo-paganism, agrarianism, Third Positionism, anti-feminism, and right-wing anti-capitalists, ecologists, bioregionalists, and small-is-beautiful types.
Though it has gone through several iterations, the Alt Right is the most recent stage of the process started by Spencer several years ago.Together, it makes up an ideological fascist kernel of ideas, ones that drive the political movement of the racialist right.While it is largely undefined, it can loosely be thought to encompass anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, elitist, racialist, anti-feminist, and other forms of anti-equality thinking that make up its ideological core.Whether these are arguments to restore the monarchy, to return to the “Ethnic religions” of pre-Christian Europe, or simply proclamations that people of color are more prone to crime or have lower innate IQs, it is the ideological position in favor of hierarchy that drives its ranks, from the white nationalists to the Men’s Rights activists.
While they often mock the neo-Nazis, Klansman, and old guard of the insurrectionary racist movement, they share the same ideological ideas even if the Alt Right are more upper middle class and concerned with a different strategic orientation.
An Intellectual Tradition?
As Spencer walked the streets surrounding the convention in Cleveland he held above him a sign that said “Want to talk to a “racist?”This is a strategic move for Spencer, who wants to reframe “racism” as simply a preference for one’s own “identity” and “tribe.”He attempts to liken himself to Latino organizations looking to advance what he calls “ethnic interests,” or Black Nationalists looking to retain a culture that was robbed during colonial slavery.
His arguments, while ignored for years, have finally found an audience in the mainstream press who are trying to make sense of the ideological current that has been associated with the rise of Donald Trump.HBO, shooting a documentary looking at racialist groups in the U.S., was following him around, and even set up a conversation between him and news anchor Jorge Ramos.While this may seem like cheap controversy baiting, and it is, Spencer was presented as a reasonable point of debate with Ramos.Instead of just a spectacle, the message has been sent that Spencer represents a growing point of view that must be considered in the debate.Previously his ethnic nationalist message would have been considered so obviously repulsive as not to be considered relevant for inclusion, but these are apparently the times we live in.
The Alt Right has pushed itself into the discourse through a few convenient openings.The first, and most obvious, is the self-destruction of the Conservative Movement.As Spencer has discussed, at length, the Conservative Movement as we know it today is more of an invention of William Buckley and the National Review as a Cold War ideology.Here it mixed Christian social conservatism, hawkish foreign policy, and free market economics into something that appeared as a coherent ideology for decades.Right-wing scholar Paul Gottfried, who consorts with Spencer and company often, calls this ideological pairing “idea clusters,” where the ideas themselves are not necessarily ideologically related yet are put into a bunch and labeled as “conservative.”
As demographics change, capitalism heads into permanent crisis, and the culture shift dramatically, Buckley’s idea cluster is failing to resonate.It is in this space that alternatives have been tried, with libertarianism being the ideological position popular in the younger areas of the GOP for the last few years.This headed into decline as Ron Paul faded from view and places like Reason Magazine and the Caito Institute lost power or uniqueness.
Now, in the search for an identity, many of the edgier “dissidents” allied with American Conservatism have found Brietbart, post-Tea Party racial anger, and Donald Trump.
Now That’s What I Call Edgy
When mixed with the second key factor for the Alt Right, the horizontal nature of social media, you can see why the edgy “Shitlords” found a voice.In an attempt to out offend each other, the culture of the Alt Right was formed on 4Chan, Reddit, and Twitter, where the need to find uniqueness and to rebel against what they believe orthodoxy to be (in this case it is “political correctness”), they united with old-fashioned white supremacy to form a semi-coherent white nationalism that is based in ironic catch phrases, internal jargon, trolling, and unrestrained anger.
With Twitter they can cut through to mainstream discourse by trending hashtags like #Cuckservative, using every media mention as a way to slowly seep in Nazi talking points with kitschy memes and constant trolling.Gone are the days of concerted organizing around crossover topics like immigration and affirmative action, now it is better to dominate comments sections on articles and post blogs arguing in favor of slavery and Holocaust Denial.
This is perfectly fine with Spencer, who was always looking to foment a fascist cultural movement more than a political one.As he often proselytizes, he is not a materialist, he is an idealist in the German tradition.He believes the change starts in the minds and the culture, and “politics are a lagging indicator.”This is why his movement starts with a tweet, not with a sign, and you will not see concrete goals listed as how to get to the Ethnostate he envisions on the North American continent.
It is all of these peculiarities and contradictions that lead to why the Alt Right is failing before it ever really begins.
What drew out Alternative Right and its successor, the Radix Journal, as well as the entire sphere of neo-fascist publications and publishers was its ability to create a philosophical foundation to the racialist and neo-fascist movement.It was not just its congenial style, we have had suit and tie racists before (see David Duke wearing suits at Klan meetings), but what Alternative Right attempted to do was do have a real set of philosophical, academic, and new religious interventions.This was a smart white nationalism, one that was attempting to find some coherence.As you would expect, this has had mixed results as those with credentials and ideas are few and far between inside of the far right, as is art, music, and literature.
Radical Traditionalist and esoteric fascist, Julius Evola.
In their pursuit a few key threads came out, from celebrating paganism to the Radical Traditionalism of Julius Evola, Spencer and his ilk worked hard to carry on the legacy of people like Alain de Benoit and Guilluime Faye.This was to make fascism just as much of a philosophic project as Marxism and anarchism, and one that they hoped to decouple from the more obvious forms of violence and ugly racism that it usually resorts to.While those on the anti-fascist left will usually point out that this is merely an act, and it is, there is often a deeper process here.What they are searching for is to give reason and purpose to the bigotry that they feel, and they want to prove that it is not hatred but deep philosophical ideas and socio-biological identity that is driving them.Spencer has constructed a culture that looks as much as possible like the academic left, using jargon and rhetoric that feels more like the Frankfurt School than like the National Alliance.Oswald Spangler, Ernst Junger, and Carl Schmidt were pulled off the shelf, mixed with misreadings of Nietzsche, and an “intellectual” fascist tradition was continued in the few conferences the Alt Right had the money to muster.
With the innocuously named National Policy Institute, Spencer hosted conferences that were overpriced and set in posh venues, all with the idea of gaining legitimacy.With Washington Summit Publishers, the NPI book publishing wing, he basically republished books by scientific racists of the past like Madison Grant as well as “new school” race and IQ ideologues like Richard Lynn and Kevin McDonald, all with names like the “Global Bell Curve” that both try to ride the wave of popular right-wing books in the mainstream and to sound as if they could blend into the world of scientific publishing.Going further, with the launch of the Radix Journal website, Spencer created a Radix imprint for Washington Summit Publishers to print books that were more cultural.Here they published a slick journal with themes like “The Great Erasure,” looking at the “global delegitimization of the white man.”They republished crossover authors like Samuel Francis, who has the strange achievement of being published regularly in the Washington Times as well as for white nationalist publications like the Occidental Observer, American Renaissance, and the Citizen Informer, the newsletter of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Similarly, Greg Johnson of Counter Currents has tried to create an academic tone with his publishing, mixing in the pseudo-spirituality of Heathens like Stephen McNallen, the racial mysticism of Savitri Devi, and tribalists like Jack Donovan.Going even further, publishers like Arktos Media have tried to build a culture on republishing Julius Evola and French New Right thinkers as well as neofolk records, all with the idea that they can create a far-right wing culture of art and philosophy.
All of this together brought a certain tone that, while masking the guttural racial hatred and genocidal justifications, was meant to make arguments for their position in a world disgusted by racism, sexism, and homophobia.
It wasn’t this culture, however, that gave the Alt Right the name it has today.
Blind Ideology, White Anger
The current state of the Alt Right is one that is based on a certain online cruelty, a culture built almost entirely on the insult.This did not start with The Right Stuff and their headline podcast The Daily Shoah, but it certainly was popularized with it.The Daily Shoah was created by a group of former libertarians who had turned towards white nationalism and wanted to create an Opie and Anthony styled radio show for their crew.As they had built most of their ideological foundations on message boards rather than in political situations out in the real world, they had developed a caustic online culture of racial epithets and angry misogyny.Uniting the worlds of white nationalism, Men’s Rights Activism, anti-disability blame-rage, and other indulgences of reactionary toxicity, they used the Alt Right philosophical underpinnings as a foundation for their anger.They hate black people, and call them the N-word and other creative insults, and then pick at “Human Biological Diversity” terminology to justify their anger.Kevin McDonald’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories fuel their bizarre belief that everything in the culture that pulls progressive or against systemic white supremacy is done by Jews, who conspire in their genes to undermine “Western Civilization.”They bring on other Nazis and right-wingers to indulge in esoteric Hitlerism, strange Euro-paganism, and the intermix of Christian orthodoxy, paleolibertarianism, and secular authoritarianism with their own angry racism to create a culture of Internet trolling rather than political organizing.
Through The Right Stuff, the Daily Stormer, and a slew of blogs and podcasts, we have seen the two cultures, the pseudo-academic and the vulgar anger, unite into one “Alt Right,” with a single soul and two dramatically different faces.
As Spencer walked in circles around the Quicken Loans Arena he tried to turn “stereotypes” about racists on their head, fighting to shake Jorge Ramos’ hand.In an earlier interview, Ramos had a conversation with a KKK member who refused to lock palms with him, and Spencer wanted to show that he, in fact, respected Ramos.In their conversation, Spencer wanted to prove that Ramos was an “Identitarian” just like Spencer, fighting for his people.This is a common talking point among white nationalist who try to argue that they are fighting for white interests just like the NAACP fights for “black interests” and La Raza fights for “Latino interests.”This is context denial, a term that the Alt Right loves to use, in that they do not like to admit that when it comes to Black Nationalism, it is an attempt to reclaim a stolen culture and identity, while white nationalism actually obliterates European history in an attempt to reconstruct formal white supremacy. One is organizing against verifiable oppression, and the other is the reactionary anger of a group who is having their privilege eroded by progress.
That evening Spencer was invited to Milo Yiannopoulos’ evening party, where he lived out one of the most profound paradoxes of the Alt Right and their participation at the RNC.Milo has made a name for himself as the most high profile people donning the Alt Right label, though his version is the most watered down by most Alt Right standards.Many on the Alt Right denounce Milo because he is a gay man with a Jewish ancestry; though the more savvy of the crowd like that he is mainstreaming their iconoclastic views at Breitbart.Milo was there to lead the anti-Islamic charge, claiming that it Islam was not only irreconcilable with queerness, but incompatible with Western Civilization as a whole.LGBTrump founder Chris Barron continued this rhetoric during the evening, which echoed the angry scapegoating of Jewish immigrants in 1920s Germany.While comparisons to Nazi Germany are often obvious and overwrought, this situation seemed obvious as the contempt towards Muslims was explicit and there were open calls for their forced expulsion.
Matt Forney (Middle)
While Spencer was softening the blows of his racism, Milo was riding the wave of this own offensiveness, all the way to being banned on Twitter.Spencer was one of many Alt Right people at Milo’s events, including MRA clown Matt Forney reporting for Red Ice.The party was an RNC associated event that openly invited people who argue that Black people should be forcefully returned to Africa in a “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”If this doesn’t reveal the current orientation of the GOP, nothing does.
After the first couple days of the party, Spencer joined Jazz Hands McFeels at Fash the Nation, one of the other most popular white nationalist podcasts on the growing Right Stuff podcast network.After telling Jorge Ramos that he respected all races and cultures, he used racial slurs to refer to black people and laughed along at comparisons between people of color and animals.Fash the Nation enjoys using the n-word, calling black people “feral” and various types of apes, and laughs about killing Jews.This is what has spiked its numbers, as its Alt Right Twitter army laughs with glee as they are given permission to revel in the darkest parts of their reactionary bigotry.
Appearance vs. Reality
It is here that the contradiction in the Alt Right has grown to proportions it cannot ignore: it wants to be both an inoffensive political and ideological movement while also being an angry and virulently offensive brand of political theater.While Spencer previously found racial slurs offensive and idiotic, he dropped his standards once it was those qualities that gave the Alt Right legs.While he was developing an “ideological” movement built on intellectual credibility, it was words like Dindu, Triggered, Echoes, and Merchant that gave it the culture to grow.
As it hits its zenith, many on the inside of these circles are beginning to realize that you cannot have both.You cannot have an inoffensive “identitarianism” on one side, that argues that is simply wants its own identity and is not reveling in hatred of “the other” while also indulging in angry insults at people of color and mocking their suffering.
Holocaust Denial has come in waves as a sort of “crossover” topic for white nationalists, one that is intended to find some converts in conspiracy theory circles.In the early 1990s it saw a peak with organizations like the Institute for Historical Review and the Barnes Review trying to legitimize “Holocaust Revisionism” as just another form of historical inquiry.They argued that it was simply about uncovering truth and had no social or political agenda besides finding out what really happened.
If this was true, why was it that most of those involved in the revisionism were also involved in racial nationalist projects?Why were the same people questioning the existence of gas chambers also presenting race and IQ arguments?Could it be simply that they were repackaging the racial hatred of the past in new pseudo-intellectual arguments?This became such an obvious sham that places like the IHR shut their doors, and Holocaust Denial became (until recently) an almost forgotten task left to basement dwellers on BlogSpot.
Mark Weber
They attempted to say that their arguments were disconnected from all of the aspects that society finds repulsive: insulting racism, racial violence, genocide, persecution, and oppression.Instead, they could not cover their tracks well enough, and it took only the briefest look to reveal them for who they were.Mark Weber, the most well known front-man for the IHR (after wrestling it away from ignominious racist Willis Carto) often donned a suit and tie and used academic jargon when stating his case for reimagining the second World War.If he really was just another historian who stumbled on this “inconvenient truth,” then how come he had been a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance since he was a teenager?
A similar situation marks the two-storied history of American Renaissance (AmRen), one of the largest and most established white nationalist projects in the country.AmRen began in the late 1980s as a newsletter from Jared Taylor as a pseudo-intellectual white nationalist voice, intending to be an alternative to the toxic influence of neo-Nazi organizations that engaged in murderous fits of violence over the 1980s.Taylor focused in on race and IQ arguments mainly, riding the wave of The Bell Curve and the candidacies of people like David Duke and Pat Buchanan, creating a “high brow” culture for their conferences.Over the years they have hosted every scientist who has made arguments about the differences between races, often arguing that the organization is simply dedicated to getting out a clearer view of science, heredity, and biological difference.
Donald Templar, speaking at American Renaissance.
If this were true, then their list of speakers would not be a “who’s who” of nationalist far-right political organizations, ranging from fascist organizations to ones with a history of racial terror.If it was simply an organization for the scientific study of race, then you would not have “academics” like Donald Templar stepping to the podium to yell about how tired he is of black people “complaining” and how they need to be worked 60-hour weeks in prison so they will stop “giving aids to each other.”If you listen to a large cross section of American Renaissance speeches, or read their newsletter, the only connective tissue is anger towards non-white people and the value-laden language meant to disparage anyone without pure Aryan ancestry.All of the “difference” that they outline puts black and brown people in a negative light, and most of the terms and categories used are either antiquated or non-scientific in orientation. Plainly put, American Renaissance is an organization dedicated towards developing white nationalism through the denigration of people of color, and the “science” is piecemeal, out of context, and almost always discredited.
Why American Renaissance has dropped its scientific veneer in recent years is that it did not work.They attempted to gain credibility for its beliefs on the one hand, yet empowered a sub-intellectual culture of racial slurs, anger, and insults.
Spencer has spent years disassociating himself with the KKK and neo-Nazis of the world, but that is a surface act at best.In his most recent podcast, Spencer interview former KKK leader David Duke about his upcoming big for the Louisiana legislature.He often has Kevin McDonald, the sort of Karl Marx of anti-Semitism, who was on the board of the skinhead-associated American Freedom Party, a place where Spencer has also been interviewed.He often joins The Daily Shoah, or invites them on his own show, where they do not skimp on the denigrations against Jews, transgender people, and all non-white people.Spencer may play his rhetorical game, but the only difference between him and a KKK member is that his house is worth almost $4 million.When it comes to every ideological point, from the “subhuman” nature of black people to the secret power structure of Jews, Spencer is identical to all of the neo-Nazis that the general public finds so repulsive.When it comes to rhetoric, he is of the same circles as those calling Black people “Dindus,” making monkey sounds during Black History month, and applauding the murder of Mike Brown.
As Donald Trump publicly implodes going into the general election, he is continuing to drum up an “anti-PC” culture of racial animosity and fighting words.This peak has given the Alt Right a place in the public discourse, but it has discredited all legitimacy it had hoped to gain.While they main gain converts through their toxic discourse and rhetoric, they have undermined all ability to actually have an influence on even the broader American right wing.While trying to take on both faces, that of the academy and of the bully, they have failed to actually benefit from either, and now they are seeing peak influence.Even if Donald Trump was to pull a Hail Mary and win in the general election, their rhetoric will continue to fade as Trump’s administration heads to a socially conservative platform, bought into the same neoliberal interests that he has been tied to throughout his career as a bourgeois inheritance baby.The Alt Right has played all of its cards, and its limited contributions to discourse will not withstand its self-destruction.
For anti-fascists going forward, the biggest lesson is that the Alt Right has rebranded the far right, and will make up the cultural touchstones of fascist organization for years to come.Broad nationalism, Internet trolling, and silly jargon are what neo-Nazis are today, which gives a great sign of what to look for.As far as influence, they have created a cap that they will never be able to move past.
Since 1990, American Renaissance (AmRen) has been a leader in the “suit and tie” racist crowd that was forming during that period. Preferring a congenial conference atmosphere to a cross burning, Jared Taylor created an institution that would use an academic tone to argue for racial differences in biology and intelligence, against diversity, and for white identity. Though it has become slightly more radical over the years, it has generally been a meeting point for a certain segment of the white nationalist movement that wants to see a level of respectability, and even mainstream crossover, for its ideas.
What it is best known for, even within its small subculture, is the particular focus it has given on largely disproven Race and IQ arguments, building on the work of disgraced and marginalized professors like J. Philippe Rushton, Donald Templar, and Richard Lynn to argue that there is a global “Bell Curve” in intelligence. They then tie in qualities like criminality, sexual restraint, and “time-preference” to this, putting whites near the top just below East Asians (Jews are actually at the top, which takes them to a whole other disgraceful set of accusations.). The notion here is that there is a general racial hierarchy, and that it is gene markers that actually drive much of behavior rather than “nurture,” social systems, or culture. This is not where the mainstream of science is, no matter what branch, and the AmRen crowd seems well aware that they are against the tide.
Over the last couple of years, as the Alt Right has formed, the new intellectual internet culture of white nationalism, AmRen has continued to be one of the primary meeting points for a certain department of the movement (the other leader being the National Policy Institute). Here speakers have shifted somewhat from the pseudoacademic prose that has defined most of its history, and instead political nationalism, identitarianism, and crossover social issues have defined its last couple of hears. Human Biological Diversity, the modern term for Race Realism, has gained them quite a following for Internet hate-mongers, but it hasn’t had the organizing results they had hoped for. While they have pivoted the rhetoric a bit, they still return to race and IQ arguments whenever possible.
The most recent AmRen conference that happened on May 27th was held at Montgomery Bell State Park outside Nashville, Tennessee. It has been housed here the last several years after the conference was shut down by organized pressure on hotel managers. Taylor believed that having it at a government venue would provide them a certain level of protection, and this has proven true, as officials have done what they could to protect the racists gathering inside. This track record is one reason that many in the movement are advocating for using government services more as they believe they do not have the same influence from the public, and therefore anti-fascist organizers cannot get the event shut down. The 2010 and 2011 conferences were both shut down when pressure was put on the hotel, and one speaker at the canceled conference even attempted suing the One People’s Project and other activists in an effort to keep them away from the conference.
The 2016 line-up was a mix of known faces and foreign guests, many of which seemed like surprising choices since the growing Alt Right has provided them with enough domestic celebrities that they wouldn’t need to turn to European nationalists. The choice to include them seems like a very clear ideological choice for Taylor, whose vision of politicizing their meta-politics is to follow European nationalist parties and movements. In recent speeches he has discussed returning to the populist model of people like David Duke, and he was an early supporter of the Donald Trump campaign.
James Edwards
At the Podium
James Edwards made up one of the more well known faces whose toothy-grins make him the kind of “aww schucks” Southern white-nationalist who attempts to “dumb down” AmRen for the more “hometown” racists. He wears his racism on his sleeve, yet, even in this speech, he uses the cover of paleoconservatism to really act as though he simply represents the edge of Old Right traditional American conservatism. Edwards himself is ideologically aligned with the New Right/Alt Right wing that sides with traditionalism, ethno-nationalism, and hard-right anti-equality views. He is on the board for both the American Freedom Party and the Council of Conservative Citizens, which he got a great deal of media heat for after church-shooter Dylan Roof revealed to be a fan of the CofCC. Edwards is not as well traveled on the conference circuit, but he does have more of a reach than many might realize.
While his radio show, the Political Cesspool, has been denounced openly as a white nationalist “go to” spot, he has been able to acquire a number of semi-well known guests from libertarianism and paleoconservatism. This peaked when he welcomed former GOP Presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan, who Edwards volunteered for during his final Presidential run in 1999. Buchanan, for many years, was the furthest edge of the GOP that was still acceptable, and his 1992 campaign was well known for taking many of the strategic points from the David Duke campaign a year before (Duke is also a frequent guest on the Political Cesspool). Buchanan has often argued for a sort of American nationalism, suggesting that America should have stayed out of WWII, postured in favor of segregation, was against affirmative action and about all progressive racial policies, and adamantly opposed to all things queer. The only strange relief from this hard right politic is that he is strangely in favor of animal rights (to a degree), and PETA even awarded his magazine, the American Conservative, an award for an expose they ran on the meat industry. It was Buchanan’s appearance that lent Edwards’ show mainstream credibility, which led Edwards to appearing on major news outlets not only as a speaker for the hard-right, but actually as a commentator in regular debate segments at places like CNN.
James Edwards speaking on CNN as a regular guest discussing politics, where refrain from mentioning he is a white supremacist.
Edwards got even more attention recently when he hosted Anthony Cumia of the radio show Opie and Anthony after Cumia was fired for racially loaded comments on the air. Edwards and Cumia ranted for an hour about the “problems in the black community,” and the only breaks in this discussion were for advertisements for survivalist companies and racist community groups.
Edwards usually sticks to his regular trough of neo-fascist ideologues, which often includes AmRen founder Jared Taylor. His discussion at AmRen 2016 was a familiar story to AmRen crowds: the sacrifices he has made to be a racist, the times he refused to apologize, and the extensive work he has done that should be respected. His rhetoric was noticeably behind much of the rest of the crowd, which is a testament to the fact that his lack of social media skills and well-read mannerisms is starting to push him out of the center of the Alt Right. While he still may be popular with people like the League of the South, the Daily Shoah and the rest of the vulgar Internet trolls are the ones that are defining the movement that lingers at AmRen.
His most recent act of media buffoonery came when the Donald Trump campaign gave him full press credentials and he was allowed to interview the candidate’s son, Donald Trump Jr. The story was picked up in dozens of publications, listing him as a “pro-slavery” radio host. As he went on discussing how many places the incident was mentioned, it became clear that this was an attempt to impress the crowd and prove his relevance. This included bragging about marrying a model and appearing in a reality show.
Fernando Cortes(left) standing with John Friend, racialist and anti-Semitic host of the Realist Report.
Fernando Cortes was a prime speaker who was given extra room, used as an example that AmRen wasn’t just vulgar racism for white people: it was racism for everyone. Cortes is a well-known Mexican nationalist who advocates for a far right politic that is friendly to white nationalism over the border. During the questions and answer session Richard Spencer of the Radix Journal and the National Policy Institute asked what the Mexican nationalist movement thought of American fascists, which led Cortes to gush and promise that it is only American Mexicans who want to “take back” the American Southwest.
He went after NAFTA, sharing a certain critique with left-wing anti-globalization advocates, though his prescription and core ideas are the anti-thesis of the anarchist project.
NAFTA was a deathblow for Mexican farming, since without protection from imports; Mexico cannot even grow its own corn and beans.
He thanked white people for being so generous and kind even though they were under “racial attack.” Cortes is known for his Identitarian Congress that hosted famous anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers like Ernst Zundel and David Duke. Cortes even appeared on Duke’s radio show, where he again said that American whites were “under attack.”
We [Mexican nationalists] understand the attack and the genocide that is trying to be done with the European and white Americans and we are against it. … The people in the United States, they believe that we want massive immigration, that we think it’s a good thing, that we’re taking advantage. We understand perfectly that it erodes the fabric of your society, that it’s toxic for your nation. It’s also toxic for our nation.
Peter Brimelow
To those outside of the racialist world, the real superstar would have been Peter Brimelow. That name rings a bell for anyone that has followed anti-immigration politics over the last decade. The author of Alien Nation and the founder of VDare, the anti-immigration web magazine, Brimelow has slowly moved from being a beltway conservative writer to an open racialist. He still has a great deal of pool in those edge areas of mainstream conservatism, with people like Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh often crediting his work for informing their views on immigration.
RamZPaul (Paul Ramsy)
RamZPaul did the dinner speech once again, just as he had at the last couple of AmRen conferences. RamZPaul has made a name for himself doing rambling YouTube videos where he tells racist jokes into the camera. His speeches at AmRen are often to explain a right-wing phenomenon, with the last one being “What is the Dark Enlightenment.” This year’s was “What is the Alt Right,” which outlined the main trajectory for the Alt Right starting with paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, Samuel Francis and Paul Gottfried. He traced it through the founding of the website Alternative Right by Richard Spencer, who Paul showered with affection. He went through the basic political ideas, the mobilization behind Donald Trump, and the validation by “mainstream” sources like Milo Yiannapoulos and Breitbart. His rendition, which is supposed to be something of a stand-up comedy routine, was mainly old jokes thrown awkwardly to intersect with nationalist themes. He started his speech with the “unveiled” video by Alt Right parody artist UnCuck the Right called “We Didn’t Start the Movement,” which is a cheesy song naming different right wing allies and has Jared Taylor in a brimmed hat and Hawaiian shirt singing along out of key. At the end of Paul’s speech they played an even more embarrassing video, “Dildoween,” which was a voiced over parody of the opening song in The Nightmare Before Christmas. This was even more embarrassing than the first, mainly just mashing together slang from the Daily Shoah into a barely rhyming string of insults and racial slurs. This was a low point even for AmRen, which they have always attempted to brand as an intellectual gathering rather than just an attempt for Nazis and Klansman to wear a bow tie.
Anke van Dermeesh
Going Euro
Anke van Dermeesh, a Belgian nationalist Senator, came mainly to talk about the “perils” of Muslim immigration and her work doing Islamophobic organizing in Europe. She claimed that “third world immigration” was a battle for the very soul of Europe, comparable to the Greek battle against the Troy invaders. It was Europe’s own materialism and individualism, however, which made it vulnerable, so Europeans needed to reclaim their racial spirit. Her organization, Women Against Islam, is ugly enough on its own, but what is even more frightening is that she has held several major elected offices in Belgium.
The multicultural ideology assumes that different civilization levels can live peacefully with each other on the same territory. However, history has already proven that this leads to bloody clashes. After which one culture, the dominant culture, gets the upper hand over the weakest. Pointing out historical facts, and referring to the theory, like the one of Charles Darwin, is an act of racism in Europe….The multicultural society will never exist. Many human lives have already been destroyed and still people’s races, civilizations, and cultures collide.
Van Dermesh mentions the American cities where she says that these clashes are still happening, where black people with their “lower level” of civilization cannot handle sophisticated white societies. She said that regular “folk” identity has been criminalized, and that the influx of immigrants are undermining a sense of identity, authority, law, order, and moral astuteness that will lead to degeneracy of their great European people. While she attempts to throw these ideas into abstractions, they are the same ideological core that you would find with hard-core neo-Nazi organizations around Europe. Her ideas indicate the notion that there is an essential racial soul to whites that is being destroyed by modern science and logic, and that we need to attack rationality, give in to violent reactions to the “other,” and try to reinstate an anti-democratic order of racial supremacy.
Ruuben Kaalep
Ruuben Kaalep brought a similarly international experience from the Conservative Party of Estonia, a country from which AmRen enjoys pulling its racialists. At only 22, he is a leader in the six-year-old party that is making nationalism a major player in Estonian party politics. Kaalpe seemed to be even radical by their standards, and talked about bringing Europeans, and Estonians specifically, back to their “12,000 years of roots.” Kaalep could not explain these ideas in genetic terms since there is no coherent genetic history that Estonians can trace back 12,000 years as specific people because that is not not how genetic histories work, nor do isolated genes have any real influence on the development of culture. Nationalism is a social construct, not an idea embedded in biology, so the call to the past 12,000 years is just as arbitrary as going back to the reformation or the French Revolution. Neither one brings that back to an era of racial identity and purity because that period did not exist in history. Likewise, most of the AmRen speakers likely would not have joined in with Kaalep’s Estonian nationalism since they prefer a pan-European white nationalism. While the statements are not based in research, science, or historical facts, it does make good rhetoric for a crowd looking to class up their racist impulses.
On the evening plenary before AmRen, Red Ice Radio asked Kaalep what he was going to be talking about at the conference.
I will encourage the young people in America to start a movement, and to act against what they see is happening around the world in white countries. To do it just as we have done it in Estonia with our youth movement. Because it is very important, even as human beings it is very important that we have an identity. A living identity that connects us with the people around us and the places that we live.
This was Kaalep’s first time out of Europe, and he said that it was a culture shock since he was coming from “Europe’s last white country.” He spent some time bragging about how many blondes there were in Estonia.
Filip Dewinter also spoke about his position in the European Parliament for the Vlaams Belang, and did the standard speech about non-white immigration and its threat to a white Europe.
Jared Taylor
Benediction for Racists
Jared Taylor always speaks at American Renaissance, and this year was no exception. His talk was intended to be on why progressive whites “lie,” to themselves and to others, and he goes down the line: they lie about Black victimization by police, lie about the science proving black intellectual inferiority, and lie about race and crime. He tapped into well-known Alt Right talking points, rehashing the Cologne attacks, which the far right tries to use to “prove” that Islamic refugees are systemically raping white European women. Their idea is then that political correctness is a “religion” so powerful that it makes authorities neglect rape and violence so as to not be called racist. Never mind that the statistics do not support what he says, nor was the Cologne attacks universally Muslim refugees. There is no statistical threat of sexual assault posed uniquely by Muslim immigration, but Taylor’s entire purpose is to twist statistics to drum up a fear narrative. With the same aristocratic drawl that has become a meme on the Alt Right, Jared Taylor states that the “ludicrous” notion of racial equality has no real world basis.
During his Question and Answers section he is asked about the Jews, and he convenes to the idea that some “elite Jews” have been very “destructive” to their interests. He then points out that many Jews have been on the nationalist side of the argument, but that racialists should “have their eyes open” about the Jews. He says that the Jews may have been the “hand pushing at the door” of the ‘Death of the West,’ but “that door was rotting from within” already.
This really marks a change for Jared Taylor on the Jewish Question as he used to be vigorously opposed to anti-Semitism at AmRen. Not only were there Jewish scholars at AmRen conferences like Byron Roth, even David Duke was asked not to return to the conference because of his rabid anti-Semitism. While Taylor was not willing to go fully into blaming Jewish people, he certainly did not admonish anti-Semitism, and seems to be warming up to these ideas. This also shows the persistence that anti-Semitism has had on the Alt Right/New Right and the fact that it is going to continue to play a major role in American racialism.
Sam Dickson
Sam Dickson did his regular “Benediction for Heretics,” which is often a rambling set of remembrances and accolades to racists of the past. As usual, Dickson tempered his language and used a sort of “liberals are the real racist” argument to say that people who do not want racial separation are actually manipulating people of color and attempting to “solve the problem of black people.” For someone who does not immediately appear as being particularly sophisticated, his use of left-wing rhetoric and warm personalities is masterful, which is probably why he has continued to be a staple of the Alt Right while many of the Southern racist organizations have drifted into irrelevance.
Dickson carried on the theme that the left and the media lie about them to put the racist movement in disfavor, mentioning the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on Dickson that he characterized as saying he was a “financial swindler.” The story, which has been well sourced and proven, shows that Dickson makes his money by manipulating poor homeowners in the South through predatory property purchases.
Since 2001, Dickson, a 59-year-old former Klan attorney and active veteran of numerous extreme-right causes and groups, has built a multi-million dollar business in the niche field of tax lien and title acquisition. His success has depended in no small part on keeping his otherwise well-known racism concealed from his targets, many of which are poor and black. According to those who have observed and worked with Dickson, his profits have been earned through a combination of bullying, stealth, and legal pretzel-making in the arcane world of tax lien purchases, redemptions and foreclosures. When contacted, Dickson declined to comment on the charges.
Many in the story mentioned how Dickson was casually racist, often saying that people on the phone couldn’t be black because they were “too smart” to have that skin tone. Dickson, of course, takes issue with this characterization of him as a predator and low-class racist, especially since he likes to call himself an Identitarian and says that he has the best interests of people of color at heart. Though Dickson went on and on about sacrifice, he has become a millionaire despite being in the racialist movement for almost 50 years.
Dickson recommended that the young racists in the crowd get themselves some degree of financial stability since the “struggle”(their racist struggle) is ongoing, and will not just be victorious with the election of Donald Trump. While he seemed optimistic by the billionaire buffoon’s casual racism, he is still one of the strongest voices against investing in reformist political moves. A couple of years ago, Richard Spencer and Dickson debated John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow about the possibilities of reform. Brimelow and Derbyshire discussed how they thought that the American political system could be used, even though unlikely, to “fix the race problem.” Spencer and Dickson took the more radical view that America was beyond fixing, largely because it is still an enlightenment, propositional project that has invested in phrases like “all men are created equal.” Dickson was brash in the past, saying, “no man, in the history of the world, was created equal.”
One of the more “unofficial personalities” of AmRen 2016 was Richard Spencer, who could not help but pontificate on the microphone during Question and Answer sessions. Spencer has often been the debatable leader of the intellectual wing of the Alt Right, defining the term itself and bringing together disparate elements of the far right into an intellectual current to build a movement on traditionalist, racialist, and hierarchical lines. Spencer has often been a divisive figure, often finding opponents inside of religious and working-class racist circles. This was made clear when he banned Trad Youth’s Matt Heimbach from NPI’s 2015 conference for his homophobia, which Spencer is offended by because it would leave out masculanist writers like Jack Donovan.
Spencer’s presence was heavy this year as he holds onto the growing Alt Right, and this comes, in part, because he was able to reconcile the intellectual elitism of his publication and non-profit with the vulgar racist populism of places like the Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation. This has given him a new life, and one where he is able to maintain his crown as an aristocrat of racialist philosophy and pseudo-science.
Patting Themselves on the Back
Jared Taylor has declared that this AmRen conference was their largest effort, which he attributes to Donald Trump and the wave of Internet followers.
There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s candidacy has given our movement a boost, but the continuing slide towards chaos–riots in Ferguson and Baltimore; the immigration invasion of Europe–are rousing unprecedented numbers of whites from complacency.
Red Ice Radio’s Lana and Henrik interview Jared Taylor in a streaming broadcast.
Both the Political Cesspool and Red Ice Radio made AmRen a streaming media event as well, which helps to circle their own internal media landscape around AmRen as a centerpiece. Nathan Damigo of Identity Europa was Red Ice’s first guest, where he basically acted starstruck by all the celebrity racists and discussed campus activism. A Pakistani-American engineer, a bi-racial man who identified as a “racial realist”, followed him up. He went on about how Pakistanis could do better to maintain their nation’s IQ by avoiding cousin marriage and irrigating water better. He explained race realism in much the same way J. Philippe Rushton did, that white people evolved in “harsher” conditions in Europe, giving them a higher IQ. He basically provided a “we’re different, so what?” perspective, but said that IQ was the important thing and that society needed to stop subsidizing low IQ people or civilization will die. This was an interesting development for a conference like AmRen, but it also shows how HBD and neo-eugenic rhetoric has worked its way into Asian and Middle Eastern communities online as well.
Counter-Currents Publishing, the neo-fascist publishing house from the infamous Greg Johnson, covered the conference in a review from Michael Polignano. He noted the “celebratory mood” in the room and the several “Make America Great Again” hats dotted around the tables. He also noted the “diversity” and young age of the attendants, which is new for a white nationalist movement that was almost universally composed of older white men. As he went down the line he seemed especially drawn to Dan Roodt’s speech, and South Africa is always a topical favorite for this crowd since they have so well embedded the lie of “white genocide” in the country that they use it repeatedly as an example of “what happens” when white relinquish hegemonic control over a country.
Since African IQ is insufficiently high to sustain the civilization that Afrikaners built from scratch and sustained for centuries up until the end of the apartheid era, Pakistanis and Chinese have raced to filled many positions of power and responsibility held by whites. What can be done? In the short run, all white South Africans can do is either flee or try to hold on. to(sic) survive, they need to increase their physical and economic security. Physical security measures include bodyguards, security guards, and private police, neighborhood crime watches and increasing ownership. Economic security measures include networking and mutual aid to keep wealth within the pro-white segment of the white South African community.
South Africa has long been a centerpiece of the “white genocide” narrative, where the rural “farm murders” has given them a rhetorical strategy for conjuring up images of racial revenge. In reality, the rural Boer murders that they cite are statistically lower than the regular murders in South Africa broadly, and are much more a testament to the brutality with which wealthy farm owners have historically treated their farm hands with.
In general, Polignano said that the conference was a “triumph,” that showed the future of the movement. What he still does not seem to grasp is what a “movement” actually means, and what is to happen when they come to grips with the fact that they are vastly outmatched by the anti-fascist left and that they have no concept of what real organizing actually means.
Photo from inside AmRen
Anti-Fascism Has Localized
AmRen has always been a strategic meeting point for the racialist movement, and generally has been in a state of flux. When their movement moves towards HBD, it shifts its speakers. When it is looking towards electrical politics, it brings in political nationalists from Europe. What it has always acted as is more of a meeting point than anything else, and while this is larger than in years past, it is also made up of people less willing to be open about their politics. This means that simply by shining a light on who these people are and the reality of what they are saying, we can help to challenge any growth they will have.
There was an organized Antifa presence this year, as there always has been, yet much of the energy has grown locally as organizers challenge Donald Trump appearances instead of focusing on conferences like AmRen. This is a good sign as anti-fascism is becoming a strategic orientation for community defense, and just as Donald Trump has emboldened the Alt Right, it has made anti-fascist organizers a central piece of building intersecting local movements.
The white nationalists in the U.S. need AmRen because they lack the fellowship and community that the left has always built, and they will continue to lack coordination and organizing ability as their focus will always be on their racial idealism. Why they congratulate themselves under the protection of U.S. state authorities, we are building a movement against the rising tide of nationalism.
The American Freedom Party made recent news rounds by funding robocalls in Iowa urging Republican primary voters to support Donald Trump. The calls, many of which were voiced by American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, mentioned that the U.S. should be inviting in “white people” rather than Syrian refugees. The party, which was formed as a political extension of the Golden State Skinheads, has shifted slightly as we head into the actual primary elections. Now they are running their own candidate for office on a third-party bid. This is not new for them as they ran former filmmaker Merlin Miller back in 2012, when they were going by the American Third Position Party. Miller, who did not even know what “Third Position” actually meant, regularly embarrassed himself in interviews, having a difficult time keeping up with basic political questions. He eventually went on international media outlets and declared that Israel was responsible for 9/11, which made the A3P even less relevant than it already was.
Now the AFP is attempting to provide a nationalist alternative to the two main parties by running Bob Whitaker, someone who is relatively well known for those who have been involved in far-right American politics over the decades. Whitaker’s primary campaign tagline, similar to Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” is “Diversity is a Code Word for White Genocide.” Though this is not the most catchy line for a bumper sticker, the AFP seems to want to get those who will be upset with Trump’s eventual loss to Ted Cruz and want to double down on their anti-immigrant racism.
Whitaker has had a career that has defined what it means to “Walk the Line” between Beltway conservative politics and the racist far-right. These edges have been known for years by the institutions he has worked with, so it is not exactly a “well kept secret” to those who knew him. At the University of Virginia he was denied his PhD in Economics after his work came in with questionable themes. He went on to work at the National Review with what was later called an effort to turn former Barry Goldwater supporters into Ronald Reagan Republicans. He was an early Reagan appointee, though only dealt with minor things like staffing clearances. He eventually went off the deep end, descending into the world of paranoid racial conspiracy theories.
His tagline may seem a little strange, except for the fact it is what he is known for best today. Called “the Mantra,” the tagline is a shorter version of his prose passage about diversity that is often repeated at length by fellow white nationalists, similar to David Lane’s “14 Words.”
The Mantra reads:
ASIA FOR THE ASIANS, AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR EVERYBODY!Everybody says there is this RACE problem. Everybody says this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.
The Netherlands and Belgium are just as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them.
Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for EVERY white country and ONLY white countries to “assimilate,” i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites.
What if I said there was this RACE problem and this RACE problem would be solved only if hundreds of millions of non-blacks were brought into EVERY black country and ONLY into black countries?
How long would it take anyone to realize I’m not talking about a RACE problem. I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?
And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn’t object to this?
But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.(SIC)
They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.
Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.
Whitaker has not actually worked in politics since 1985, but since he is one of the few people in their camp with some political experience he stands out as an option for running for office. His Platform is even simpler than most the AFP has put forward, though reflects their nativism and focus on immigration as key issues. Anything beyond this seems to be ignored, and they often fill in the gaps with protectionist foreign policy and paleolibertarian economic ideas.
“At my inauguration, I will take the oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.”
The Preamble to the Constitution is the only statement of the purpose of the United States:
To “secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Having so sworn, I will, as Commander in Chief begin the orderly process of withdrawing all American forces from foreign soil.
The only purpose of the American armed forces is to protect American soil.
The Constitution instituted America as an independent nation. An independent nation does not enforce its notions, be they equality or anything else, on other independent nations.
To declare itself a “nation of immigrants” a country must demand sovereignty over every potential immigrant on earth.
We are a people with many political points of view. A government which uses force to collect taxes and then gives that money to groups or persons to promote their own political agenda are committing a criminal act.
It is the duty of the Executive Branch to prosecute such people.
And to receive the people’s funds.
Congress has become the means of doing what the people do not want done.
Technology has given us the means of going directly to the people and asking them what actions will fulfill the Preamble.
In his “Goals” section the only thing that is listed is “exposing white genocide,” which is introduced earlier by comparing the AFP to the “Prohibition Party” and himself to “Herbert Hoover.” On their own track record, the AFP/Whitaker campaign lists its main success as creating “viral memes,” maintaining the trend from people like The Right Stuff of using internet trolling as their only political outlet. This does beg the question as to why the AFP is even running a candidate since they do not have any explicit political program to propose and instead seem content to running a very primitive propaganda campaign. They state that they are taking advantage of campaign laws that give them special allowances, even though they are likely to only be on the ballot in a handful of states at the most.
Federal campaign laws give us certain advantages in spreading our message. Media outlets are required to air our messages complete and unaltered, and they must give political candidates the lowest possible rates.
The Merlin Miller campaign had almost no reach, and was an almost complete tactical waste of time and money for the AFP. Bob Whitaker seems even less able to speak to contemporary political issues, and his ability to write an internet meme seems to be mistaken for the ability to actually edge American racism into an organized form of nationalism. Their website certainly celebrates every piece of media that Bob does get, including a short interview on CNN in June of 2015 and a couple billboards in Alabama and Arkansas that says the Mantra(but does not mention Whitaker and were not actually a part of the campaign.). Most of the mentions were simply using the “Diversity is a codeword for White Genocide” or “Diversity=White Genocide” line in banner holds or written in public places with sidewalk chalk, which shows exactly the level of propaganda that the AFP is operating with.
The AFP has had little reach even within the white nationalist community. In earlier years, something like Willis Carto’s Populist Party could get hundreds of thousands involved in both their white racialism and economic right populism. The Council of Conservative Citizens, the League of the South, and various KKK and other regional rural racialist organizations may have rallied behind something like the AFP in previous generations. Today, however, the racist right wants less and less connection to any of these propped up political parties. Institutions like The National Policy Institute, as well as anti-system politics like National Anarchism and racist Heathenry, want to completely de-legitimize the American system of government as well as to reject many traditional American values. The AFP has to play on the relationship between extreme patriotism and ultra-nationalism, which means making their own white nationalism an extension of a conservative “Americanist” analysis. To do this you have to reinforce traditional American mythologies about “freedom,” “democracy,” and “the Constitution.” Without this it lacks any cross-over, yet with it you lose the hip core of the Alt Right.
There will likely be many who will back Whitaker, such as the old core of the CofCC who is disaffected after the Dylan Roof fiasco basically demolished their organization. Places that have relied heavily on the Mantra, like the podcast Horus The Avenger, will likely use his candidacy as a talking point for months. Stormfront, and their podcast hosted by founder Don Black, will likely present him as a thoughtful and responsible candidate, but that also lends to their lack of an intellectual core. It would be surprising then to see him survive more than a few months of this, but there are still donors who will keep the AFP afloat as they run straw candidates such as this. If you are in the south or the midwest you may start to see some signs and bumper stickers, perhaps even a billboard. Gun shows, right-wing events, Christian evangelical meet-ups, and militia meetings will all be prime areas for AFP engagement, so these can be areas that anti-racists can begin to counter organize, but it will be likely that Whitaker support will not become a mass mobilizing factor outside of trying to radicalize the edges of rural conservatism. What is surprising is that they are not attempting to brand the party to pick up more on the militia supporters who have risen in ranks recently with the Bundy siege in Oregon. It may also be a reminder that this brand of American nationalism is being pushed back to the recesses of the internet as Donald Trump slowly fades from view, but that does not mean the reactionary violence that fueled his meteoric rise has gone away for good.
The modern racialist movement is defined by American Renaissance. It bridges both the organized racism of the past and the contemporary Alt Right, Human BioDiversity, Neoreaction, and other movements who believe themselves superior to the KKK. AmRen began in the early 1990s by Jared Taylor, a former West Coast editor for PC magazine and consultant to companies dealing with Japan. Taylor, raised in Japan before going to Yale and then to France for graduate school, is a very literate and well spoken man. His enunciation is important to him, so much so that he has developed an elitist accent that is just as artificial as his conference’s attempts at pedigree. He formed AmRen to give intellectual credibility to his growing racist ideas. He had already been making waves on the racist right when AmRen came into existence, publishing the book Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. Getting good reviews from people like Pat Buchanan, he launched AmRen as a conference and newsletter that would further disseminate racist views using pseudoacademics and reviving old bio-racial rhetoric.
Beginning in 1990, AmRen brought together a couple hundred racists to talk about…well…racism. What defined AmRen right from the beginning was really marginal ideas on bioscience that justified the notion that black people were inferior. Speakers often try to replicate academic discourse, yet their ideas are simply that black people have lower IQs, are prone to criminality, and all races have trouble trusting one another for biologically deterministic reasons. These conferences are also notable in the white nationalist community for its lack of anti-Semitism, though most of the conference attendees are only putting on a face for this event. Several Jewish speakers have been seen at AmRen, including the ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Mayer Schiller and Mark Levin. Both of them have been known for writing about IQ gaps and the need for traditional, racially static communities.
Over the years there have been speeches by controversial academics like J. Phillip Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Donald Templer, all of which quickly drop their veneer of respectable scholarship so that they can insult and degrade people of color. This is all in line with what in “Human BioDiversity” circles is often called the “Yellow Hypothesis.” This essentially revives a racial taxonomy and hierarchy, but one that shifts the dynamics slightly. In this view, according to their theories on innate IQ, Asians have the highest IQs, whites just below them, then Latinos far below that and African descended people scraping the bottom of the list along with Australian aborigines. This is what they use to refuse the label of “white supremacist,” but the dynamic is to suggest that Asians actually lack other qualities because of their high level IQs and therefore whites are essentially “just right.” Jews, according to this, actually have higher IQs than Asians, but the AmRen crowd usually save that part of their analysis until the conference is over. What some attendees, such as Professor Emeritus Kevin McDonald, suggest is that the high verbal intelligence that this crowd ascribes to Jews has actually made them a parasite that uses their intellect to manipulate Western men away from their ethnic interests. Though the general line-up of AmRen is certainly prone to conspiracy theories, this is a step too far for Taylor.
The focus on pseudoscience has really defined AmRen for almost two decades, yet in recent years there has been a shift. Over the last few renditions of the conference, all of which have been at the Montgomery Bell State Park outside of Nashville, they have shifted away from arguments about racial difference in biology and more in the direction of politics and culture. They have included many speakers from nationalist parties internationally, as well as many from the Alt Right that talk in vague platitudes in an attempt to revive racial Idealism and Romanticism. This change is largely because they did not see the resurgence in “white racial consciousness” that they were hoping for from their previous discourse about perceived racial difference. Taylor has been a bit slow off the mark, and because of the new focus on social media and streaming content, as well as the lower brow focus of modern post-Trump Alt Right, he has been the old man of the community. While others are trying to maximize this Trump moment, Taylor continues to drivel on about black crime with barely-coded insults to movements like Black Lives Matter.
The coming 2016 conference, which will be held on May 20-22(which is actually longer than most AmRen conferences), replicates this new trend in their programming, as well as returning to attempts at respectability. Similar to what you see in white nationalist conferences and organizations like the H.L. Mencken Club and the Council of Conservative Citizens, they always try to host speakers who are just on the edge of respectability. This was the case with people like the late Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, who were both on the edges of the beltway Conservative Movement.
The 2016 conference’s “headliner,” so to speak, is Peter Brimelow, who is exactly the kind of crossover point that AmRen uses to make itself relevant. Brimelow was a former writer for Forbes and a number of conservative publications, really known for writing about education and the “problem” of the teacher’s unions up through the 1990s. In 1995 he published his “magnum opus,” Alien Nation, a book that rallied against immigration and the need to tighten the borders. Brimelow himself was foreign born, a British immigrant, a point that is often lost on his supporters. He then founded the web publication VDare, which has become a meeting point for the far right who want to focus on immigration as their primary issue. He has slowly shifted out of the broad GOP crowd and into a racially focused community, speaking at other racist conferences like the H.L. Mencken Club and the National Policy Institute. His talk brings the conference back to one of their real forces of excitement: Donald Trump. Titled “The Trump Tsunami and the Future of the Historic American Nation,” Brimelow will continue the fawning appreciation for the billionaire just as most in the AmRen scene have. Jared Taylor recently voiced a robocall for Trump support in Iowa, funded by the neo-fascist American Freedom Party.
James Edwards is also on the line-up, a person who has not been as prominent over the last year or so of the growing white nationalist movement. He hosts the Political Cesspool, a white nationalist/populist radio show that is actually on a few AM stations beyond its large internet following. He is on the board for both the Council of Conservative Citizens and the American Freedom Party, and he spoke up in defense of the CofCC after the Dylan Roof shooting. The murderer mentioned the CofCC’s website, which obsessively focuses on what they falsely say are differences in black and white crime rates. He represents a lower-brow sensibility for the AmRen community, which is really summed up by his book Racism Schmacism.
Flemish nationalist Filip Dewinter will rant about the “Islamisation” of Europe, Ruuben Kaalep will give a plea for Estonian nationalist, and Dan Roodt will talk about “white survival” in post-Apartheid South Africa. This is part and parcel of the new AmRen: trying to create unity between white racist internationally. Here they often try to find common cause with white nationalist talking points in Europe, focusing largely on Syrian refugees and Islamic immigration.
RamZPaul will join the AmRen crowd, which he has in recent years, where he does a sort of “stand up routine.” This mainly consists of awkwardly timed jokes coming straight out of his popular YouTube videos. His comedic style is telling and has helped groups like The Right Stuff to focus on humor in their racism. He will discuss the Alt Right, which has been seeing a surge of media attention in recent months because of the entryism that Donald Trump has provided for them. This theme will be compounded with the inclusion of Uncuck the Right, a new YouTube “sensation” who does racist parody songs in the vein of The Right Stuff. “Uncuck” is a reference to the Cuckservative meme that the Alt Right recently popularized, referencing the idea that mainstream conservatives do not act in their own racial interests in terms of immigration. This also really shows AmRen begging to keep themselves relevant in the internet-only “shitlord” movement of angry white men.
Both Taylor and Sam Dickson will be speaking about “identitarianism,” Dickson giving the same “Benediction for Heretics” that he has done every year since 1990s premiere of the conference.
Montgomery Bell facility where AmRen 2016 will be held.
Over the last several years of the conference, protesters have always been present. In 2010 the conference was effectively shut down when pressure was put on the Four Points Sheraton at the Manassas Battlefield to cancel their reservation. The following year, he attempted to hold it in a secret location, yet when the location was revealed to be the Airport Sheraton organizers were successfully able to shut it down again. This later inspired lawsuits from David Yeagley, a self-described “American Indian” who the One People’s Project have revealed is actually Italian and consorts with white nationalists. He tried to sue, among others, Daryle Lamont Jenkins, but the suits were ultimately unsuccessful before Yeagley passed away. Now the conference has been moved semi-permanently to Montgomery Bell State Park, a government run facility that has been less responsive to organizing.
In 2013 organizers again clashed with conference attendees, this time out in Nashville. After the primary conference, attendees including the Traditional Youth’s Network’s Matthew Heimbach and Scott Terry, RamZPaul, and several people from the CofCC and the League of the South all headed to a local par where Antifa organizers were also present. A scuffle ensued where anti-racist organizers ended up being forced out of the bar, and the staff allowed the fascist parties to stay.
For 2016, research is being done about the attendees and location, and you can expect that the opposition to this festival of white self-congratulation will not be able to continue unchallenged. If you are in the area, this is going to be one of the prime places to confront the dangerous white nationalist movement.
People may have noticed an aggressive shift in Republican Party politics with the inclusion of Donald Trump, and we aren’t talking about the Sarah Palin endorsement. Iowa voters recently got a series of “robocalls” telling them to vote trump. The calls featured the voice of Jared Taylor of the white nationalist organization, American Renaissance.
“I’m Jared Taylor with American Renaissance,” Taylor says. “I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America. We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”
It also uses the Christian pedigree of Reverend Ronald Tan, the controversial Christian radio host.
‘My name is Reverend Ronald Tan, host of the Christian radio talk show program For God and Country. First Corinthians states: God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise and God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong. For the Iowa caucuses, please support Donald Trump. He is courageous and he speaks his mind. God Bless.’
The Super PAC that has been going after swing-state voters with a call for “white unity” is funded by the American Freedom Party founder, William Johnson. Johnson founded the AFP originally as the American Third Position party, referencing the “anti-communist, anti-capitalist” trend of fascism that rose in popularity in the 1980s. His brand of white nationalism was less in line with these esoteric anti-capitalist fascist traditions and more American and “constitutionalist,” so they changed the name to gain broader appeal. The Board of Directors of the AFP is a cast of the usual suspects of the far right. Included are famed anti-Semite Kevin McDonald, anti-immigrant radical Virginia Abernathy, white nationalist radio-host James Edwards, and pseudo-academic nationalist Tomislav Sunic(strangely an immigrant himself). They ran a presidential candidate in 2012 with Merlin Miller, a former filmmaker who became just beside himself with non-whites in Hollywood and the influence of “Jewish Cultural Marxism.” The party itself was actually founded through the Golden State Skinheads, Southern California skinhead gangs, who wanted to take their politics in a more “legitimate” direction.
William Johnson himself was not new to white racialist politics. When using the pseudonym James O. Pace he wrote a book that advocated what became known as the “Pace Amendment.” This would repeal the 14th and 15th amendments and institutionalize deportations for all non-whites, except Native Americans and Hawaiians who would be allowed regulated reservations. Johnson then used his own name to found the League of Pace Amendment Advocates to advocate for this man James O. Pace and his ideas. He ran for public office in 1989, 2006, and 2008 on a white nationalist platform, scarcely even being mentioned in the results. This poor showing inspired him to form what would become the AFP in 2010 as its only chairman. His ideas have been part and parcel of the Americanist wing of the white nationalist movement, allied largely with the militia movement and general racial politics. The only difference is his general support for Israel, which is certainly not shared by most in his party.
Donald Trump was pressed to denounce the robocalls from Media Matters, which he finally did with great reluctance.
BURNETT: Mr. Trump, when you hear that, does that shock you? Do you denounce that?
TRUMP: Nothing in this country shocks me. I would disavow it, but nothing in this country shocks me. People are angry. They’re angry at what’s going on. They’re angry at the border. They’re angry at the crime. They’re angry at people coming in and shooting Kate in the back in California and San Francisco. They’re angry when Jamiel Shaw shot in the face by an illegal immigrant. They’re angry when the woman, the veteran, 65 years old is raped, sodomized, and killed by an illegal immigrant. And, they’re very angry about it, and — by the way, thousands of other cases like that. They’re very angry about it. So, I would disavow that, but I will tell you people are extremely angry.
BURNETT: People are extremely angry, but to be clear, when he says, “We need smart, well-educated white people to assimilate to our culture, vote Trump,” you’re saying you disavow that. You do denounce that?
TRUMP: Well, you just heard me. I said it. How many times do you want me to say it?
BURNETT: A third would be good.
TRUMP: I said I disavow.
This no doubt upset Johnson to a degree, but is not going to stop the support. He went on the Political Cesspool, the racialist radio program hosted by the AFP board member James Edwards, to discuss the issue.
JOHNSON: Donald Trump’s response when he was asked to address it was just a wonderful response. He disavowed us, but he explained why there is so much anger in America that I couldn’t have asked for a better approach from him.
EDWARDS: I was going to ask you about that. So, you know, of course I saw that. In a perfect world he would say, “You know what? These guys are right. What are you going to do about it?” But understandably there is still a political reality. I think fundamentally, as I say on this show time and time again, most middle American, middle class whites agree with us fundamentally on the issues. But he’s operating in a different world than that — I think it was certainly better than to be expected. And I thought too it was quite good, as you did Bill, so this was something that you can live with in terms of a response from the Trump campaign and of course from there it’s over. You know, the news cycle is over, if he’s asked about it again he’s already gone on record, he is the Teflon Don. He’s the Teflon candidate. This wasn’t of course made to hurt him, I don’t know how much it hurt or helped him. Ultimately I don’t think it did much of either — it might have marginally helped him. It certainly didn’t hurt him. And so his response is something that you greet with a level of respect, am I right?
JOHNSON: Oh yeah I do, I like it very much. And also the response that I got — I put my own cell phone number out there. And I got, oh, a hundred calls regarding it. Most of the calls were hang-ups. They wanted to know if it was a real phone number. So they’d either hang up or say, “Oh I’m sorry, wrong number.” But there were a majority of calls who were opposed to it but there were a minority of calls who approved of it, and liked it. So that was encouraging also. And that is a new phenomenon. Before we would have gotten no one who would be willing to come out and say that so these little things incrementally help raise awareness of the issues and help change public opinion.
The same response basically came from Jared Taylor as well, who went on to answer what he thought of the Trump “denouncement.”
Yes, he was, you know, for days everybody was calling him up, calling up his campaign saying, “What do you think of these horrible people? Denounce them, denounce them.” And he didn’t. You know, he just maintained a dignified silence as he’s capable of doing. And then finally when CNN’s Erin Burnett really forced him to say, “Well, I would disavow it.” But she asked him, “are you shocked by this? Will you denounce this?” “I’m not shocked by anything in America.” I thought that was a great line. He’s so quick on his feet. And then he goes to say, “I would disavow it” but then he goes on to explain why people are so angry. In effect, he’s saying, “Yeah, yeah, if you want me to denounce it I will, but I understand exactly what these guys are saying, they’re furious, and they’re right to be furious.” So if he disavowed us, he did it, I thought, in the nicest possible way.
The way that Trump handled this was similar to the response he had to the David Duke endorsement, where he basically took it in stride.
Johnson’s new Super PAC will be running the robocalls in Iowa until the beginning of February, which have already cost around $9,000. Jared Taylor, who is lending his white nationalist “celebrity” to the calls, will be hosting his American Renaissance conference in Tennessee on May 20-22. Anti-fascist organizers are planning counter demonstrations to confront what will likely be one of the largest racist events of the year.
As many people saw, a quick blog was posted less than a week ago covering the recent #cuckservative hashtag. The goal of this was really just to provide a little context for those who are not up on the clashes between GOP traditionalists and the far-right. The main focus of this was The Right Stuff and their podcast, The Daily Shoah. This quickly got to the attention of the neoreaction themselves, and was shared widely amongst The Right Stuff supporters. This allowed us a night of entertainment where pop up messages came accusing us of being “dirty Jews” and having a strange chain of the regular alt-right comment types. The strange thing we noticed about these comments were so many of them seemed to want to make friends with us, and a lot of them seemed to believe that things like “you are the real fascists” and “how can white supremacy exist if all the leaders are Jews” were substantive intellectual fodder. The comments were relatively the same on The Right Stuff’s own forum, except they mixed in videos of black face, mentions of the Third Reich, and the kind of vicious racial hatred and language that deserves a brick, not a response.
This then led to The Daily Shoah dedicating us a full fifteen minutes on their podcast, a period that was apparently too long to refrain from using the n-word. We appreciate the promotion, and we wanted to go ahead and both address some of the things mentioned and to shine a light on what it really means to be a “shitlord.”
One thing that they picked up almost immediately is a couple mistakes we made, which we will gladly correct. First we mentioned that they referred to black men as “Dingos,” which is actually “Dindus.” This was something that was incredibly important to them, and was even in the glossary of silly words that they use to “class up” their podcast. I also referred to their host as Goy, and their main hosts are actually Seventh Son and Enoch (though the person I did refer to now goes by Goy, not sure if that is because he wants our fandom).
They then went on a rant about the article and all the mistakes, though we really do beg them to mention any mistakes that were beyond things like who the main host was and word mistakes. The key issue in the article was not about whether or not the alt-right is racist, that is clear from the get go, but exactly what the motivation is. As you go through Radix, Counter-Currents, American Renaissance, Traditionalist Youth Network, Council of Conservative Citizens, and oh so many more there is their own type of coded language. Unlike traditional conservatives that try to use “dog whistle” racialism to signal their base while accusing the left of “real racism,” the alt-right conventionally hides behind a similarly obvious series of symbols and easy-outs.
Let’s start with a few phrases that are common on the alt-right (though, for reasons I’ll get to later, not common on TRS or TDS). Ethnopluraism, ethnonationalism, pan-Europeanism, and many others that essentially have similar etymology. What most of these idea represent is the notion that racial nationalism, or even more specific ethnic nationalism, is the main function of a radical alt-right movement. The argument goes then that ethnic nationalism is the right of all peoples, and it literally has nothing to do with the inferiority of or hatred towards people of color. The Human Biological Diversity issues brought up in places like American Renaissance are often couched as “group differences” as a way of saying that perceived difference in IQ or criminality is only an example that black people (or whoever the target racial minority is that week) need their own homeland because their genetic make-up doesn’t allow them to fit correctly in white culture. Many of these groups go even further than this, often times even using language that celebrates minority cultural organizations, and anti-Semitism is often on the back-burner of most of these websites and justified using very marginal ideas in evolutionary psychology. On the majority of these websites you will never see a Klan robe, swastika, 14:88, holocaust denial, and other hallmarks of the vanguardist far-right. Even Stormfront bans racial slurs and swastikas at this point. These are the politics of respectability, and they really are making an argument for racial nationalism as being separate from the racial violence we saw for centuries with colonialism, genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, etc.
Then there is The Right Stuff.
On their podcast you will hear open racial slurs, incredibly vile racial insults, jokes about the holocaust (as well as what appears to be denial, though that is not a main target of discussion), deep hatred of Jews, discussion about how women manipulate men and make false rape accusations, and basically reinforce white supremacist orthodoxy that many of these alt-right sources would say are a caricature of nationalist that no longer exists.
So then, we could easily say that these are two separate movements, two different ideological positions. Except they aren’t.
As they acknowledged when playing fanboy to our website, their members have gone on Radix Journal podcast. They do host Greg Johnson from Radix. They do attend American Renaissance, and they are generally tied to the broader pseudo-intellectual racist movement. Their ideas are functionally the same while the value judgments and crass nature are different. They actually do think that people of color, especially people of African decent, are inferior. They actually do think that Jews control the world and deserve the violence that has been inflicted upon them. They actually do think that people of color benefited from colonialism because they cannot govern their own affairs. (Or have agency, as they like to say)
They even lamented the fact that the infamous /r/CoonTown subreddit network was taken off of Reddit. This is where you had forums to share videos of black people being murdered and to discuss general hatred against African Americans.
You say that we did not do our homework, but we actually have listened to your entire first season of The Daily Shoah, so maybe we are actually your most committed followers.
The real question that they raise, however, is about the functioning of Anti-Fascist Action. While throwing out the same ad hominem that the far-right likes to do that it is a middle class movement (it has predominantly been the British working class left that founded antifa), that we are Marxists (it is predominantly an anarchist-driven movement), they went after their very core argument: that we are the “militant” wing of the “system.”
This is one that antifascists usually ignore because, on its face, it is completely meaningless. Our decisions to be opposed to or inside “the system” has little to do with anti-racist and antifascist inclinations. Likewise, there is this notion that we side with the police. Antifascist Action has traditionally used “physical resistance” to confront and eliminate fascist organizing, which is inherently illegal. Likewise, those organizing with Antifa are, usually, of a political organization opposed to the state. That said, the final intention of antifascist organizing is to stop fascists. Period. There is no moral function here since the decisions about why we want to eliminate fascist organizing was made before entering into discussions of tactics. We will feel absolutely nothing about police smashing up a fascist gathering and suppressing your speech because you are seen as an enemy. Period.
This does, however, present a real concrete issue for antifascist organizers who do not actually want to empower the police in general. The alternative that is presented is to create a militant community response that, whenever possible, does not engage with the police. The majority of large racist rallies in the U.S. have police protection because of the inflammatory nature. Look at recent rallies by Traditionalist Youth Network, the KKK, League of the South, and many others all rely on police protection to be able to speak. Likewise, recent statistical research from the FBI show a higher than average percentage of racialist organizational members inside the police force. Not much of a shocker there. We do not care what the police’s intentions or goals are with busting up fascist organizing because they have little connection to our own. We do not care about your illegality, about your silly gang culture, or if you are running drugs. We confront you because you are violent blast from the past, the direct inverse of radical organizing.
The argument then that we are on the side of the “status quo” is one that is actually true to a degree. We do stand with the vast majority of working class people that see we have much more to gain by coming together in solidarity than we do by dividing ourselves by arbitrary phenotypes. There is nothing that bonds a white person biologically to another white person over a person of color, and to say that there is has been one of the most long-standing misreading of science by those with racial anger and fear as their motivation. While we see that conscious racism is no longer a dominant paradigm, due directly to the long-working anti-racist organizing of the last 200 years, institutional racism is still alive in well. The antifascist movement, however, is only targeting a specific subset of the reactionary white population who is desperately trying to hold onto the illusionary benefits of white privilege. Anytime you see a revolution happening that challenges the hierarchy that the ruling class benefits from, you will see some try to hold onto the meager superiority they have. This is true white white nationalists, as well as Men’s Rights Activists in regards to gender equality, the Religious Right in regards to queer rights, and so on. In a period of social upheaval, there will always be a vanguard of the fascist movement, and as working-class organizers that is one of the greatest enemies of mass social transformation in the direction of democracy and equality. In a funny way, we assume you would agree with this.
At the same time, what is the status quo? For most of American history there has been a mass white on color genocide and enslavement. Millions of Native Americans murdered, black people turned into livestock, and, today, literally locking up an entire generation of African Americans. What is the status quo here? Those working to eliminate the most glaring examples of conscious racism, or those wanting to reinforce the implicit racism that defines American institutions? We are aware that from your standing point you are oppressed by multiculturalism. I’m wondering if a black man being lynched by the Klan would agree that you are oppressed because you might be reprimanded at work for using the n-word. Yeah, you certainly are a victim class.
So what is the threat of fascism? This is actually something we have answered on this website at length. We will direct you to the first two articles in a series that explains why we oppose fascism, which includes the variants you prefer such as New Right, Alt Right, neoreaction, Dark Enlightenment, etc.(What is the Real Threat of Fascist Organizing? and Anarchism vs Fascism) The third will be out shortly dealing with the lone-wolf violence that your rhetoric inspires, and we will gladly send it over. These fascist ideas, rooted in traditionalism, racialism, and hierarchy, are the functional opposite of what drives our organizing. You could say that we literally have nothing in common.
You were right about one thing, however, you did drive a ton of traffic to the website! This website and Facebook page are literally just a couple weeks old, so it is still getting moving. The reason we will continue to talk about you is, for one, you are the plainest and simple example of your ideas. There is no nuance here. You say exactly what you mean, and so you make counter-organizing that much easier.
So thank you TRS, keep up the work. We’ll be listening.
Council of Conservative Citizens tabling next to the American Freedom Party, a neo-fascist “third positionist” political party advocating white nationalism.
The recently deceased Gordon Baum founded the Council of Conservative Citizens in the 1980s to try and resurrect the goals and principles of the White Citizens Councils. Baum was a former staff organizer with the original Citizens Councils of America attempting to stop integration in the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement. After his failure he decided to begin working towards attacking social integration by creating an organization that focused on racial issues while remaining tied to the political mainstream.
What stands out as unique about the CofCC is that it maintains continuity to the past. For most groups on the political radical edge, both on the right and the left, it is difficult to maintain the original group structure for decades. Instead, groups that are successful in some historical period become a brand name that has power rather than being able to continue its original structure. A great example of this is the various generations of the Ku Klux Klan. Veterans of the Confederate Army founded the first Klan in Tennessee in 1865. The goal of this was to essentially create a paramilitary force that could overthrow the Republican, Reconstructionist state and re-establish Chattel White Supremacy. It declined and then restarted in 1915, then hitting incredible size by the 1920s. This is generally the KKK that people think of that forced waves of massive lynching of people of color all through the south, but also maintaining political power by getting Governors and Senators elected around the country. At its peak it had 4-5 million members, which was, at that time, about 15% of the eligible population. The third wave of the class started during the Civil Rights movement and were much more subcultural and fragmented, engaging in acts of violence throughout the south. Today the third wave somewhat maintains while dozens of different groups continue to say that they are the true tradition of the Klan, and it has had minimal success mainstreaming with figures like Don Black and David Duke. Each generation of the Klan has no organizational connection to the previous generation. The only connection is essentially the brand, even organizational structures and organizing goals change. The sheets stay the same.
The CofCC on the other hand actually does maintain continuity, to some degree, to the White Citizens Councils. Baum created the CofCC off of the original mailing list, so it was able to re-engage the members of the original councils that maintained their racist anger about the ongoing integration process.
It is from this formation in 1988 that the next complication begins to surface: its connection to mainstream conservatism. Organizations that deal with white nationalism do, in general, rebuke the political system of the U.S. because of its ongoing attempt towards progress, however piecemeal and “in name only.” It is hard for open white nationalist organizations to maintain any connections to mainstream politicians at this point because of the political liability that they maintain. The White Citizens Councils themselves were made up of segregationist conservatives that were a part of the mainstream political conversation of their time, and so when transferred to the CofCC there is still much of the political coherence. This was especially true in the Deep South where being associated with the White Citizens Councils is actually a political benefit even today. Their Statement of Principles included that this is a Christian country, that the United States are for European people, that the U.S. is a sovereign nation, that traditional family is central, and that they support racial integrity.
For years the CofCC participated in the Conservative Political Action Conference, a mainstream political conference that hosts all major Republican candidates of the period. They maintained a table with a large Confederate Battle flag. The late Sam Francis, one of the few paleoconservative white nationalists that somehow maintained a connection to mainstream conservative media outlets, edited their newsletter, the Citizen Informer. Their website and newsletter focuses on political issues that can tie directly to race, like racially components in crime, education, welfare, affirmative action, “forced bussing,” and others.
A lot has been made recently of their connections to mainstream Republicans, from hosting them at their conference to the $65,000 that their founder contributed to contemporary Republican candidates. This main seem like a certain amount of excessive attention, but the connection here is much more elaborate than people might understand. Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was an early supporter of the CofCC and spoke at their conference in 1993. In 1998, Republican Congressman Bob Bar provided the keynote address at the CofCC’s conference, while former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott spoke to them five times. As recent as the period from 2000 to 2005, 38 elected officials attended CofCC events. These are not flukes, but really key elements of the CofCC that draws people into their events and conferences. The founding of the CofCC also included former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox and later Louisiana Congressmen John Rarick. In 2009, Republican Mississippi State Senator Lydia Chassaniol addressed the group with an appropriately titles speech “Cultural Heritage in Mississippi” where she made offensive claims about African Americans. She later confirmed that she is a member.
The CofCC has often been tied to this unofficial network of pseudo-political racialist groups internationally, even sending people to the Front National event in France. The members even presented nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen with a Confederate Battle Flag.
So then what kind of demographic makes of the rest of the CofCC? Jared Taylor, a proponent of Race and IQ debates and founder of the white nationalist American Renaissance organization, acts as one of their most prominent spokespeople. James Edwards, host of the racialist Political Cesspool radio program, sits on their Board of Directors. They have members of skinhead gangs like Volksfront, Hammerskin Nation, and Blood and Honour, in their membership, and often hosts discussions about racial inferiority, the innate criminality of black people, neo-Confederate revisionism, and even hosted a “historian” who’s “orthodox Christian” view of slavery is that it was a beautiful relationship between slave and master. Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Youth Network even gave a speech recently calling for white revolution towards an “ethno-state.”
So the curiosity of the Council of Conservative Citizens is how they have straddled the line between open white supremacist vanguard and semi-mainstream conservative activism. As mentioned, their board member James Edwards hosts a radio show that regularly brings on white nationalists, holocaust deniers, klansmen, and others from the “pro-white” movement. This show is hosted by the Christian Liberty News Network, which carries it on regular radio stations beyond its Internet presence. Their radio ads feature a number of conspiracy theory, white racialist, and alternative medicine ads, which also includes one for the CofCC. Here, among its various principles, its says “The CofCC supports racial purity, which is a part of God’s law.” How is this allowed on a relatively mainstream Christian radio network? How can politicians continue to claim that they were unaware of the CofCC’s agenda when it is shown so blatantly and publicly?
Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, speaking at the CofCC conference. Taylor is a public advocate of white nationalism and race and IQ claims.
A large part of this answer is the importance it plays in southern politics even today. As with any institution that represents a vocal minority, politicians will have to pander to be elected. The Council of Conservative Citizens, by many counts, is the largest organization of its type in the country. It is certainly the largest that maintains an aesthetic and structure that blends into similar conservative and Tea Party groups, yet has a very committed membership. This allows for them to be the acceptable wing of the far right for politicians to continue to pander to. At the same time, they continue to represent a Southern Nationalism that is of critical cultural importance to many in the south. Similar to Southern Nationalist organizations like the League of the South they are allowed to have a dual politic by many of the people who look to them for leadership. They provide a revolutionary vision of a white southern state while also providing options for people to engage in contemporary politics. The bottom line is that this open racial rhetoric still plays in parts of the south and Midwest, where as coded racial language often drives whites in the rest of the country.
The CofCC also is allowed to blend into the panorama of American conservative organizations where race baiting, homophobia, and violent nationalism are still acceptable form of rhetoric. On a quick look at the CofCC website it would appear indistinguishable from most Tea Party, Paleoconservative, or Constitutionalist websites. If we are to be honest, many of their ideas are simply more openly articulated versions of many of these “dog whistle” right wing political organizations.
This is not a new type of politic and, because of controversies in recent years; the CofCC is being pushed further to the right as conventional politicians all but shun them. The CofCC is one of many groups that have maintained a bridge between the fringe and the edges of the mainstream. VDare, an anti-immigration website ran by former National Review writer Peter Brimelow, has hosted white nationalists regularly since its founding, but also is a meeting spot for mainstream Republican politicians and anti-immigration activists. The anti-tax movement of the 1980s and 90s was one of the best example of these where the Ron Paul movement was often matched by open neo-Nazis and militiamen, though in the 2000s we began seeing a left-cultural oriented libertarian movement that separated it from its right wing past. In the early 1990s, David Duke represented this crossover point very publicly where a former neo-Nazi and Klan leader, who never rejected his racism and anti-Semitism, almost won by a Senatorial position and Governor of Louisiana. He did with a state legislative seat, which he used to try and push bills to sterilize women receiving welfare. Pat Buchanan also mainstreamed these nationalist ideas in the 1992 Republican primary, though this has more well coded language that the rest. Today, a number of organizations continue to maintain this bridge from a number of locations. Traditionalist Catholics, neo-confederates, paleoconservatives, and other right wing groups have ties that go both ways, that makes them acceptable in both camps.
The far right does fundamentally break from the Republican mainstream in that their value system rejects equality and democracy. Republicans may have a very distorted understanding of this, but many of them will agree in the fundamental equality of peoples on some level. This is not a universalized value by any means, and we see that there are still crossover points that we thought were long closed. The issue here is not that these right wing politicians will crossover to white nationalist organizations, but that their racial ideas will influence contemporary political discourse. Dozens of politicians have been associated with the CofCC, and you can certainly see where their politics of racial fear and separation have been allowed to seep into regional politics.
On the other end, the CofCC has seen a huge influx of press because Dylann Roof, the shooter in Charleston, cited it. In a recent NPR interview, a former FBI Terrorism investigator, who spent the late 1980s and early 1990s going undercover in neo-Nazi groups, mentioned that, while ideologically disgusting, not all of these groups are at risk for violence. He mentioned that it is important to look at the patterns of violence themselves rather than the underlying ideology. There is certainly some truth in this logic in that some people are predisposed to this violent behavior and many people would never engage in this type of violence no matter what ideological foundations they were provided. The problem with this, however, is that the white nationalist ideology and justifications maintain violence as implicit. The CofCC justifies their ideas of racial separation by making pseudoscientific arguments about genetics that make blacks appear as qualitatively inferior to whites. They manipulate news stories to make it appear as though blacks are attacking whites at a genocidal rate, raping white women and attacking children. These ideas create a sense of urgency, as well as separate people of color from the same humanity as fellow white people. This dehumanization fundamentally makes it easier to make them the target of violence, as well as give the sense that violent targeting of people of color as being socially responsible. This is also true in terms of the anti-Semitic attacks where by Jews are seen as essentially demonic cabals controlling and destroying white people. The ideas here are statistically much more likely to lead to acts of violence than almost any other. This is especially true as the SPLC’s recent reports that right wing terrorism has been almost twice as frequent as Muslim terrorism since September 11th, 2001. While the CofCC does not advocate violence, has condemned the attacks, and probably honestly thinks that these acts are counter-productive, the violence is built into their narrative. It feeds into anger and disorientation of many people on the edge, and is built to push them into murderous acts.The CofCC is no doubt in its period of decline, and this recent association with extreme violence will be the final nail in the coffin in terms of their political connections. Gordon Lee Baum died in March of 2015 and his son has proved incompetent in taking the organization forward. Their existence was based on their ability to straddle the fence between open white supremacy and regular politics, but this last push will no longer allow them into the open political sphere. In recent days people like Jared Taylor and James Edwards have begun doing interviews to defend the council, but they continue to go on and on about black crime rates rather than just stand against the murders. The CofCC has slowly become just another meeting place for organized white nationalists, usually with a southern flare, and the kinds of people we are seeing surround the organization now shows that it has finally taken a full plunge into the underground. They, along with the associated League of the South, will likely join in on the coming fight to keep the Confederate Battle Flag up in southern states, but their association with the issue could only help the opposition.
The question really comes to whether or not white nationalists will maintain organizations that can tie themselves to the mainstream. To the right of the CofCC are groups like the American Freedom Party, which was originally the neo-fascist American Third Position Party. The AFP is roundly denounced for its open racial rhetoric, association with Golden State Skinheads, and for essentially being a meeting place of other white nationalist organizations. The CofCC membership that does want to maintain ties may just flood over to constitutionalist and libertarian parties, groups working on border issues like immigration and affirmative action, or they may focus specifically on overturning the recent marriage equality decision. On the other hand, this may be what is needed to push them further into the radical sphere, which could result in even more acts of isolated ‘lone wolf’ violence. What is clear is that a light has been shown on organizations that were previously able to go under the radar through their ability to mimic the mainstream American conservative movement. What will serve people who want to organize against this type of racism best is to really look at the politics of the CofCC and to be aware of it when it pops up with different aesthetics.
No matter how the particular far right and neo-fascist movement sees itself, mass killings in the name of their racial agenda is always going to be bad news. Aryan Nations was a meeting spot for neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Christian Identity Adherents, and racist militia movements, and was completely undone after a passing family was attacked in front of their compound. White Aryan Resistance was financially undercut after associated skinheads murdered Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw in Portland, Oregon. Charges are often brought against associated organizations, and even if they are not formally indicted they certainly are put under the federal looking glass. This is the current state of the Council of Conservative Citizens who is having the FBI going through their materials with a fine toothcomb.
Beyond the hope that other ‘lone wolves’ will be inspired by the violence in a sort of “propaganda of the deed” dynamic, it undercuts their messaging in serious ways. While insurrectionary and vanguardist racial groups certainly exist, even they tend to want to argue philosophical ideas around their racial perspectives and engage in movement building. The modern racialist movement has been heavily influenced by internet-fed pseudo intellectualism, is returning to fascist roots in philosophical movements like the Conservative Revolution and French New Right, and are trying to create a semi-coherent set of ideas that can feed their endgame. In general, the uniting point here is the advocacy of a white ethnostate, though the specifics are particular to the political faction at the microphone.
When instances of violence come up it is difficult to present themselves and thoughtful and peaceful ‘activists.’ The Council of Conservative Citizens is a specifically good example of this in that they existed as a fully aboveground white nationalist organization that maintained ties to the mainstream GOP. It is now clear from his writing that Dylann Roof was inspired to action by the reports of racial differences and ‘black on white crime’ as reported on the CofCC’s website. There you will find pseudoscience about race and intelligence, trumped up reports on racial crime, and other types of ultra conservative and nationalist rants. What you will not find, however, are calls for Racial Holy War. That being said, their publication and their rhetoric, even as mild as it is for their movement, still resulted in violence. This is the kind of association that will rattle their movement to the core, and will likely completely demolish the Council.
The action itself has ramped up a debate that has come in and out of fashion: the remove of the Confederate Battle Flag from public spaces in the south. For many of these groups that are associated with neo-Confederacy as a part of their racial mythology, this could be a bridge to far. Unfortunately for them, any credibility that they had in the popular media market has been stunted by their association with nine dead parishioners in a famed black church in South Carolina.
So how are white nationalists reacting to this situation?
This has been incredibly variable, especially in the CofCC. Many of the people who are deeper in the leadership of the CofCC have rebuked any media contact, but several of their members who are associated with a number of racialist organizations have decided to step up in its defense. Jared Taylor, best known for the white nationalist and scientific-racist organization American Renaissance, has gone on media interviews defending the CofCC. While he continues the line that they are not responsible for the crime, which they have openly condemned, the information cited is still real and legitimate.
“He did not get inspiration from the Council’s website, he got information. And the reason the information was so disturbing to him is because the facts, the reality, of the overwhelmingly “black on white” nature of interracial crime is something that is almost never reported. It’s, in fact, deliberately concealed.”
He continued to return to the racial demographics of crime from several different, unrelated questions. This has been the pattern for Taylor’s interaction with the media; especially debates he tries to get in any forum that will have him. Taylor does go on to say that he and the Council absolutely condemns the shooting.
James Edwards, who sits on the board of both the CofCC and the white nationalist American Freedom Party, hosts his regular radio show The Political Cesspool where he ranted and raved in the usual confusing manor. Though he certainly denounced the shooting, he also praised what he said was the clarity and “intelligence” of his manifesto (which was riddled with racial slurs and writing errors). He doubted the “official story” that has come out and indulged in conspiracy theories about how he could be a government plant, the shooting could have been a result of the medication the shooter was taking, and that the manifesto was created after the fact. He used this as an opportunity to support Roof’s assertions about things like “black on white rape,” which has been a favorite racist talking point since the days of slavery. When going on Richard Spencer’s Radix Podcast to discuss this, he went on about how this was going to be used to strip the South of its “heritage.” In response, Spencer actually spent a great deal of time trying to remind us that we need to begin targeting those with mental illness for the removal from polite society.
In an attempt to act as an unofficial “spokesperson” for the Council, Edwards released a statement to the press that read:
“I unequivocally condemn Dylann Roof’s murderous actions, but in no way was there a legitimate “link” between the alleged shooter and the Council of Conservative Citizens. To say that there is a “link” because he once visited the website reeks of Soviet-era smear tactics. The C of CC cannot reasonably be held accountable for the psychotic reaction this deranged individual had in response to reading truthful statements regarding interracial crime.
According to the Department of Justice, every year there are approximately 500,000 violent, interracial crimes (completed or attempted / threatened). Of these, nearly 83 percent are committed by blacks against whites.
Every year, there are some 20,000 rapes or sexual assaults (including threats) of white women by blacks, but crimes of this sort by white men against black women are so unusual, they scarcely appear in crime statistics.
My prayers go out to the families of the victims in Charleston. After the healing begins to occur it is my sincere hope that mature Americans can finally begin to have an honest conversation about race, rather than being subjected to a one-sided lecture.”
In Richard Spencer’s article on the shooting at Radix Journal he began by noting, without any sense of irony, that this is a tragedy that is going to be used by others as a political tool. He takes it back to the brewing controversy over the Confederate flag where he works hard to ignore the obvious associations between a history of institutional violence against African Americans and the symbol of the Antebellum South.
“As I write, it appears that the shooting has become the tipping point in this decades-long controversy. Roof’s crime, of course, had nothing at all to do with the Confederacy, or how best to honor those who died in a lost cause. That so many have justified removing the flag on the basis of the shooting demonstrates the power of symbolism and narrative over history and fact.
Moreover, it is necessary for us to talk about the meaning of this event, and its political after-effects, for the reason that it was not a “senseless act of violence,” much like John Hinckley Jr. apparently shot Ronald Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster.”
While he does continue to tow the line of apologism for the act itself, he moves into a kind of meta-commentary where he begins to question whether or not political violence in this way should really be that condemnable.
“Whether political violence is considered to be legitimate and necessary—or illegitimate “terrorism”—is determined by its success and symbolic impact. We forget that the vaunted “Founding Fathers” could have, so easily, been remembered as dangerous eccentrics, who rebelled against their rightful (and quite liberal) monarch out of personal ambition or avarice. In turn, the Confederacy could have been remembered as a just, Jeffersonian order, if it had achieved military victory.”
Counter-Currents Publishing, which has made a name for itself in trying to create a philosophically backed fascist movement modeled on European right-wing intellectuals, joined right in with the usual vile rhetoric that they revel in. Not only were several articles on the subject published, while also being distracted by the recent marriage equality ruling, they also published Roof’s manifesto in an unabridged and annotated version. This will likely not be the last time that this brief blog post driven by homicidal racial rage is republished as the work of some sort of “visionary.” Writing at Counter-Currents website, Brian Tobin laments that these acts of extreme violence are simply the result of an integrated society that is deteriorating because of its multiracial character.
“ How much longer will the majority of whites in America — the ones who can not afford to live in any area other than the “culturally enriched” — be pushed around by policy makers who use them as lab rats in their “cultural” experiment for “public” good? How long will they sit and watch their neighborhoods turn into Third World, crime-ridden slums, right before their eyes, and say nothing? How long will it take for the “backpack of white privilege” to weigh so heavily that it begins to send its wearers into great rage, anger, and frustration?
And isn’t history supposed to be our greatest teacher? Yet no one wants to admit that Dylan Roof is now part of our collective history and memory. The only way to avoid another Dylan Roof episode from airing on network TV is if we finally start learning from (y)our mistakes.
I honestly believe that Dylan Roof’s actions should be heeded as a warning. A warning to the current establishment; a warning to those who wish to maintain the status quo.
What warning is that, you ask? Either embrace the truth and put an end to your relentless critique and attack on White Americans, their history, and their culture, or feel the backlash of those with backpacks becoming to heavy to carry without complaint. To either grant white Americans the same privileges that are afforded to minorities of all stripes, or accept the consequences of which history has written, and the television narrated.”
Though many of the smaller blogs and message boards have erupted in outrage over being associated with such a person and that the flag would be the after target, those associated with the neo-Confederate movement have been somewhat muted. The League of the South, which was created by nationalists coming out of the preservationist Sons of Confederate Veterans, has been having website issues, so they don’t really have the ability to make much of a public episode over it. The Traditionalist Youth Network, which was best known for their campus White Student Union projects, has deep ties to Southern Nationalism and the symbols there in. Matt Parrot, one of the least sensational of the crowd, noted that it would be impossible for people to differentiate between their work and that of the shooter.
“We’ve consistently renounced and rejected violence and hatred at every opportunity, but it honestly doesn’t matter. The American government, media, and academia refuse to distinguish between ourselves and Dylann Roof. For them, the fact that he had ideas similar to our own confirms that our ideas are evil and must be stamped out at all costs. America will willfully disregard the fact that terrorist violence knows no ideology. There are environmental terrorists, socialist terrorists, anarchist terrorists, religious terrorists, anti-religious terrorists, and an impressive list of anti-racist and anti-white terrorists in recent memory.
Dylann Roof falsely believed the lie that the ideology underlying White Advocacy necessarily entails violence. This is a lie which permeates our society, the belief that to be pro-white must necessarily entail being vehemently–even murderously–anti-minority. It doesn’t, but the ADL, the SPLC, the mainstream media, and the federal government have invested millions and millions in crystallizing this falsehood in the collective American mind; that the only way to promote White interests is with violence. A small minority of White Nationalists, many of them outright cranks and many of them surely government assets operating honeypots, also repeat this lie.
It is a lie, and it needs to be put to rest before more lives are lost.”
Matthew Heimbach, the more vocal Southern identitarian of the group, has been notably absent from this discourse, which may give evidence of person problems taking predominance.
It has been pretty well understood that the battle over the Confederate flag is one that has already been won in the minds of most Americans. For white nationalists, this would be a poor way to maintain their goals and a bad place to dig in their heels. But with those who have grave ties to Southern heritage, it is the only historical continuity that gives their sense of racial separatism any American legitimacy.
League of the South members with a microprotest.
The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of the many disaffiliated organizations trying to build themselves in the image of the 1920s Klan, has announced that they will be marching on the South Carolina statehouse in July. After stating that the flag is the wrong target and is a part of “white people’s culture” they set the date for July 18th where they will be calling for other white nationalists to join them in support. This is a unique stand, and one that is fitting for the kind of irrational, emotion-laden organizing the Klan is known for, and it will be difficult to image they get more than a couple dozen people out. And very few without their bed sheets.
Occidental Dissent, which does argue militant white revolution from a Southern Nationalist perspective, lists eight different rallies that have taken place. The Virginia/Maryland chapter of the League of the South did have a “rally” in support of the flag, though it looks like there were only a small handful of people. There are also micro actions in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, but with usually only a carload of Southern supporters, it is hard to think how they would look against the crowds ripping the flag off its pole.
For the rest of the crowd, they will certainly be flying the flag when tied to the South, but there will likely be a more quiet response. For the “alt right” and Dark Enlightenment crowd, American symbols are something to wholesale reject. For places like the CofCC, they know very clearly that they have much more to lose by jumping into the fight. What you can expect is massive Anti-Fascists actions at any even associated with this as the numbers are swelling against them. What could be a nice turn, and something we are seeing painted over monuments to Confederate generals, is that the Black Lives Matter branding and organizing will link up here and provide a lasting analysis of white supremacy in America. While these white nationalists are on the vanguard of restoring white privilege to its glory days, it is institutional racism that affects most People of Color’s lives on a daily basis. If the two issues can be united then this can be a powerful step in a movement to undo a history of white domination.
