Recent congressional candidate Paul Nehlen, who unsuccessfully tried to unseat Paul Ryan on a recent run, has opened up about his Alt Right affiliation and racialist ideas. He appeared on the most popular Alt Right podcast on the Right Stuff podcast network, Fash the Nation, to talk about these ideas. This comes after doing a Reddit AMA where he again confirmed his Alt Right connections.
Ryan had pushed back on Nehlen’s racism in April when Nehlen went on a radio show to say that he would deport Muslims who are advocating for Shariah Law. Nehlen has kept up his Islamophobia on his own website where he puts trollbait articles claiming that Muslims are responsible for just about every act of violent crime. He went further to suggest that all Muslim mosques should be under observation to see if they are cultivating terrorists.
Nehlen had gone on Breitbart’s Steve Bannon’s Sirius XM satellite radio show, where they often discussed his battle against Paul Ryan. This helps to cement Bannon’s relationship with the Alt Right, as well as Nehlen’s own appearance on the right.
Fash the Nation, which saw unprecedented popularity on SoundCloud before being banned, is one of the hardest edged podcast in white nationalism. Often using racial slurs in their discussion of popular politics, its hosts make up a corner of the Right Stuff podcast network that are popularizing the Internet jargon of the Alt Right. Nehlen’s interview was standard fair for the former politician, and Fash the Nation host Jazz Hands McFeels played a little softer than he normally does. What this shows, more than anything, is that the crossover point between the Alt Right and Republican politics has grown, even though the Alt Right associations are becoming increasingly toxic.
One of the key ways the Alt Right attempts to make its way into the culture is by sliding itself into casual discourse by normalizing racist jokes that have a very serious fascist undercurrent. This was exactly the intent with the Coincidence Detector, the Google Chrome-Plugin that put parenthesis around the last names that they think are Jewish. This “echo” is meant to make people think about all of these Jewish last names and think that is “can’t be a coincidence,” even though they are arbitrarily assigning Jewishness to some names, lumping them into groups, and then assuming some coordinated conspiracy to do a whole range of “degeneracies.”
They have done this largely through their meme culture of slang words and goofy parody songs laced with incredibly offensive racist language. They repeatedly make jokes about “1488,” which is a neo-Nazi meme that they appropriate in a way to make fun of their more “LARPy” ideological counterparts. They have taken their memes a step further in different gifts they give to the donors to their show, starting with the oven mitts. During their run, when a donor gave $14.88 they were sent a Daily Shoah oven mitt. This is supposed to reference the ovens used to incinerate Jewish bodies during the Holocaust, which is a Holocaust they do not believe happened and intend to mock. They use “ovened” in casual conversation as a way to say something deserves to be destroyed, or simply to awkwardly insult something simply for rhyming(such as the “oven middle class” instead of Upper Middle Class).
Their newest attempt at bringing the memes into the community is with their different shirts. Their “standard” shirt, which says Standard Pool Party, is a reference to their “standard pool parties,” which is just their meet-ups for Alt Right fans. Their Fash the Nation shirts were simply to promote their political show, and when the issue came forward with the coincidence Detector they came up with another one. This simply included the triple parenthesis around the world “Coincidence,” which is a coded reference to the “Jewish Question.”
As the story about the Coincidence Detector went viral, people got wise to the t-shirt that was up on their Tee-Spring page and reported it for hate speech. The shirt was promptly pulled down, angering many in the Right Stuff forums and annoying the hosts. The other shirts still stay up, most of which are pretty vague in terms of racial references. Instead, the shirts are more just a reference to the Daily Shoah and, by relationship, to racial nationalism. There are, however, shirts with helicopters, referencing the helicopter murders by Pinochet’s army against dissidents. The 616 Degrees shirt is also a reference to the concentration camp ovens used to incinerate bodies. These would both also violate the Tee-Spring Terms of Service.
That was, however, until the TRS Merch page on Tee-Spring was pulled of all of its shirts. Since Tee-Spring campaigns for shirt sales are temporary, it could just be that their sale ended and will returns soon. This requires keeping an eye out to see if they return.
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.
For all its claims of discernment and elitism, the Alt Right will take just about anyone it can get.
We have covered the infamous D-list reality celebrity Tila Tequila in the past. Several years ago, Tequila seemed to go off the deep end on her own website where she started posting Holocaust Denial rants, admiration for Hitler, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claiming that the Jews of today are actually the parasitic Khazar race and not the Israelites of the Bible. This is one of the more “out there” conspiratorial claims usually made by Christian Identity extremists, and for some reason this bi-sexual Asian woman is now allying herself with the furthest reaches of Nazism.
Her strange love for Hitler has garnered the most attention, with her beginning by posting a picture of herself dressed as a Nazi. She has posted articles and comments discussing her celebration of Hitler, and as recent as Hitler’s birthday (4/20) this year(2016) she went to Twitter to say that Hitler was the “true king,” her soul mate, that he was the second coming of Christ, and that she was Hitler in a past life. She went as far as to Photoshop herself into a picture sitting next to Hitler.
In the past she turned her own personal website into a troll farm for far-right Jew bashing, where any criticism was met with the vilest racial slurs straight out of Stormfront. An example of this would be what she said of reality TV director James Marcus Howe, where she hurled the kind of insults you never would have expected.
GOD SEE’S(sic) YOU DIRTY FUCKING KIKES WORKING FOR THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN AND I HAVE RETURNED AS HIS MESSENGER! TAKE HEED NOW BITCHES!
She often responded by calling people Jews and Kikes when commenters said she was being racist or attempted to point out that Hitler would admonish her for her bi-racial background. She was eventually dropped from the reality show Big Brother in 2015 because of her pro-Hitler politics.
Over the years it has not gotten much better for Tequila as she desperately raises money online to pay rent and takes almost any appearance job she can get. She came back into the news recently as she went on Twitter to say she also does not believe the earth is round, and that she joined rapper B.O.B. in calling NASA “globalist shills.” The idea here is that NASA are a part of the anti-nationalist “new world order” that is destroying our racial and cultural identities with lies like the spherical Earth. She has also roundly endorsed Donald Trump, which is an endorsement even the Trump campaign was not likely looking for.
Her anti-black racism has also garnered gossip recently as she continues to go on Twitter and say vulgar racist things about black people. She has said that “blacks” pray to their “fried chicken God,” that the “coloreds” shop at Wal-Mart, and various other mockeries of having “affirmative action friends.” It didn’t help when Radar Online revealed a text message she sent to the father of her child that read “Your daughter Briana is dating a n***er…why is this so prevalent in your family?” She spends much of her time on Twitter tweeting at black artists asking why she isn’t allowed to use the N-word.
In an effort to one up herself, she has now appeared on one of the most popular white nationalist podcasts in the world. Fash the Nation is the political podcast from The Right Stuff, the parent website of the Daily Shoah podcast. It has now eclipsed the Daily Shoah in popularity, mainly because it spends three hours pretending they have a good grasp on American politics. The podcast mainly discusses Donald Trump’s candidacy, but the hosts usually devolve into racist name calling and Trump worship, and it is clear that they are out of their league when it comes to even the most basic political analysis.
They occasionally have guests, and even an interview once in a while, and that is where Tila Tequila came in.
Many people might say that she would not know exactly what Fash the Nation was exactly, but right from the start it became clear that she not only knew what it and the Alt Right were, but she was also sympathetic. While she labeled herself as Conservative, she said she was moving in the direct of the Alt Right. She said that she was previously unaware of what was “really going on,” and then left Hollywood for Texas and began “trolling” online with conspiracy theorists. She met Alt Right people online and then found that her community in Houston were reflecting what Alt Righters said, where non-white immigration had turned her neighborhood into an “unsafe ghetto.”
It seriously looks like a third world country out here. And its not fair because my parents actually worked really hard to become, you know, middle class people…crime has really shot up, and it has turned really ghetto. I can’t even take my daughter out anywhere without worry about, and then I have to think about, ‘ok, what areas can I migrate to to take her to a safer area.’ We shouldn’t be kicked out of our neighborhoods.
They avoided the fact that she was from an immigrant family, just like the immigrants she was blaming. In reality, crime has not risen dramatically in the immigrant areas of Houston and the increases in crime rate that do happen are directly correlative to income inequality.
Tila quickly, and on her own, began moving into the Alt Right’s narrative about public housing vouchers and how the government is actually destroying white neighborhoods by “moving in” poor people of color. She agreed that people of color shouldn’t be moved into white neighborhoods because they would destroy them.
It’s like they have taken Section 8 housing people and spread them into nice neighborhoods, to be equal, or whatever. And its not cool because, sure, everyone deserves a chance to have a good life, or whatever, but its just not safe to mix certain types of—
She stopped herself in the middle of saying Mexican, which is again, strange given her own non-white ethnic background. She repeatedly talked about how she was often the only “light skinned” person in these dangerous neighborhoods, and how she worries for her daughter’s safety anytime she was near dark skinned members of the community. Most of this came with stuttering rants, barely coherent in their embarrassing fragments. For an Alt Right community that celebrates elitism, this has to be the bottom of their own barrel.
They spent a great deal of time talking Donald Trump, where she supported the candidate’s plan to build a wall since “there are a bunch of invaders coming into our country.” Her and the Fash the Nation hosts discussed the allyship between whites and Asians, who white nationalists often consider to be “second to whites” because of a perceived high natural intelligence. They still say they don’t want a great deal of Asian immigration, which Tila agrees, saying “we didn’t come over here [to the U.S.] to bring the third world with us.” The hosts do their best to keep Tila on their racist track, moving to international refugee policy.
While it may seem confusing for a neo-fascist podcast like Fash the Nation to have someone like Tila Tequila as a guest, especially since she is non-white, non-heterosexual, and having worked as a sex worker, it is part of their program. What it shows more than anything is that these ideas are not just isolated t0 a white core, but can have allies throughout the culture. It also shows the willingness by people on the Alt Right to pull any celebrity in that could possibly connect to their racialism, even if they are barely literate reality stars who think the Earth is flat.
Note: It should be noted clearly that we think there is nothing shameful about sex work, and believe that it is both “real work” and something that should be respected and defended. The irony, however, is that those at The Right Stuff, the Daily Shoah, and Fash the Nation do not agree, and instead see sex work as decadent degeneracy.
The radical right has always needed a stop over point on its way to middle American conservatism. For years, the Libertarian Party and its various “economic” projects were this, from the anti-tax movement of California to the mainstreaming of their ideas with the Tea Party. Libertarianism has headed into the Beltway as one of the last popular coherent philosophies for the new GOP, mired in mainstream liberal values mixed with cut-through capitalism. In this move to the mainstream it has shed much of its racialist and white nationalist connections, leaving the growing Alt Right looking for its new crossover point. They have found that friend in Brietbart.
Brietbart News began with the now-deceased perpetual yell of Andrew Breitbart, which brought a young and confrontational style to the Tea Party. From “exposing” Acorn with edited videos that took low-wage organizing workers’ statements out of context to asking for “video proof” that Congressmen John Lewis was called the N-word at a public Tea Party event, Breitbart, and its various web staples such as the embarrassing BigGovernment.com, has made a name for itself for standing to the right of Fox News and engaging in the kind of silly click-bait that allows it to compete in an angry Twitter-verse.
The Alt Right, meaning the newest incarnation of the “intellectual” and Internet-driven white nationalist movement, has needed some friends in the the world of Beltway Conservative Inc., and Breitbart has proven that it can act as the middle point between their lair and the Brooks Brothers and “fiscal conservatism” of D.C.’s Republican establishment.
This relationship has been cemented with Breitbart’s recent fawning feature, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” The article begins by immediately drawing the comparison between the Alt Right’s role in conservatism to the role of Marxism to the contemporary left by saying “A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the ‘alternative right.;” The main thrust of the article is a large-scale defense of the Alt Right against allegations of racism, bigotry, and ideological violence. Their defense begins with the perceived intelligence of the Alt Right in comparison to the caricatures of Klansman, which says nothing of their ideological orientations. They go on to quote male-tribalist Jack Donovan, who one of the authors of the article, Milo Yiannopoulos, is friends with online. This is not surprising as Donovan is known for being a sort of “anti-gay gay author” whose basic ideology is that queer men should abandon the gay identity because it is associated with feminism, effeminacy, and leftist politics. Yiannopoulos, for his part, is publicly a gay man, which led to many of the reasons that the Alt Right had mixed reactions to this work (we will get into this later on).
This opening section mentions the ideological framework for the Alt Right as being diverse, and including Oswald Spengler, H.L. Mencken, Julius Evola, Sam Francis, and the French New Right, as well as having a relationship to the paleoconservative movement of the 1980s-90s. This is meant to insulate it from accusations of extreme racism supposedly, and he goes on to mention more modern incarnations of this ideological current such as Steve Sailer’s HBD blog, the anti-immigration web publication VDARE, and the current center of “race realism”: American Renaissance.
When you cut through their ironic abstractions, what they are indicating is class rather than ideology. They are noting that the Alt Right has a more middle-class and educated character, not that they do not hold the ideological foundations that have always driven neo-fascist movements. The assumption here is that skinheads and KKK members lack a strong ideological foundation, yet there has always been an intellectual side to the far-right. Oswald Spengler’s anti-Semitic racial nationalism has been key for decades, and Julius Evola has become the defining far-right philosopher both for intellectual Pagan racists and for street-level skinheads. His work was key to the violent right-wing terrorism of people like Ordine Nuovo or contemporary Ultra movements in Rome, and his alleged “anti-fascism” only came from his view that fascism needed to move further to the right to install an aristocratic racialist society built on authority, hierarchy, and violence. The assumptions implicit in Breitbart’s article is that the criticisms of fascism today come from its association with “lone wolf” violence rather than the possibility of a violent political theology of enforce inequality, which misses a thorough understanding of the diversity and history of fascism since its interwar inception.
Milo does something useful in this place, however, in that he rightly identifies the more web-board intellectual Neoreactionary movement(NRx), the HBD networks, and the manosphere as part of this broad “Alt Right.” As much as these movements want to self-identify with their own “unique” ideology, especially the culture of Men’s Rights Activism and “game” blogs, they are a part of the anti-egalitarian Alt Right current that essentializes biology and roots for the oppressor.
What they spend a great deal of time on is this notion of “Natural Conservatives,” which is the position they seem to agree with the most (This is not actually a popular idea used on the far-right.). This comes from the idea that some people are just built for conservatism in some kind of bio-psychological way (R-K Selection Theory may be the best example of this). Much of this rhetoric comes in pieces from the Alt Right, who are attempting to draw out some kind of scientific framework to argue that different views are driven by biological difference. This logic has an insidious underpinning as it is intended to be an “essentialist” view of behavior and nature as coming from the body rather than from environment. In this way they can argue that there are essential racial, gender, and regional biological differences that influence ideology, and therefore the defining character of a society is demographic rather than its ideas. This is why they can then argue that “Western” society is going to fall apart because it is now less-white, which means it has few of the people from which its character was developed from. This logic has been echoed, however discreetly, in the work of establishment conservatives like Charles Murray, whose The Bell Curve took on the notion that IQ was biologically fixed and determined your level of socio-economic success.
They co-opt the notion from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that there is “an instinct keenly felt by a huge watche of the political population: the conservative instinct.”
The conservative instinct, as described by Haidt, includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism. Their instinctive wariness of the foreign and the unfamiliar is an instinct that we all share – an evolutionary safeguard against excessive, potentially perilous curiosity – but natural conservatives feel it with more intensity. They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions.
It should be noted that Haidt is an incredibly marginal voice, and this notion of biologically driven conservatism is not actually held by most of the psychological scientific community.
The prime purpose here is for Breitbart to go on through what are essentially nativist, nationalist, and racialist behaviors and explain them as being “natural and normal,” the kind of talking point that the Alt Right usually uses to explain itself.
The alt-right do not hold a utopian view of the human condition: just as they are inclined to prioritise the interests of their tribe, they recognise that other groups – Mexicans, African-Americans or Muslims – are likely to do the same. As communities become comprised of different peoples, the culture and politics of those communities become an expression of their constituent peoples.
You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to blows. In short, they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful in the “kumbaya” sense. Border walls are a much safer option.
The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved. A Mosque next to an English street full of houses bearing the flag of St. George, according to alt-righters, is neither an English street nor a Muslim street — separation is necessary for distinctiveness.
Here they are not proving that the Alt Right has been mischaracterized, but instead attempting to say that their logic is sound and respectable even if it is not always shared amongst establishment types. They want to allege that these talking points are fundamentally different from those of the neo-Nazi crowd, but they are almost completely synonymous with what people like David Duke, Tom Metzger, or the National Socialist Movement will say publicly. The “suit and tie” rhetoric has dominated amongst racist groups for decades, and the only difference between the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Alt Right’s “identitarianism” is vocabulary, not ideology.
What has led to many in the Alt Right actually denouncing this article is actually the starkest problem with it from the anti-fascist left-wing point of view as well. In the section titled “The Meme Team,” they go into the Twitter troll phenomenon, lead by The Right Stuff, along with the offensive memes that call conventional conservatives “Cucks,” deny and mock the Holocaust, and are cruelly racist. Bokhari and Yiannopoulos allege that the people behind this wing of the movement essentially do not believe what they are saying, but instead are libertarians attempting to offend people and behave as iconoclasts. There is no evidence of this and instead the vocal centers of this wing of the Alt Right have been incredibly clear about their resurrection of conventional angry anti-Semitism, their belief that non-whites are subhuman “mud” races, and that we literally need a fascist revolution. To deny the reality of “the meme team” is to be purposely blind, which seems partially the ironic way that many in the hipster side of Breitbart see the Alt Right. Bokhari comes from a middle-eastern ethnic origin and Yiannopoulos is openly gay, two things that make them openly targets of ridicule from the same people they are venerating here. Yiannopoulos has even used the term Alt Right to describe himself, yet he seems to lack a clear understanding of the actual depth and intensity of its fascist politic.
The Daily Shoah picked up on this dynamic almost immediately, thinking that instead of simply getting the meme section dead wrong, Yiannopoulos actually is trying to make the Alt Right more palatable to his editors and audience.
He might be saying that in order to get it through an editor and make his own relative acceptance of the Alt Right acceptable and keep his job. He could really think it. He could be fooling himself, I don’t know. But I think that there’s a tactical presentation going on there.
In a strange way, it is his own disbelief in the Alt Right (at least in its entirety) that has led to the fetishization of it. In a recent episode of the Right Stuff podcast Fash the Nation, which is meant to mainly cover Trump’s political battles, they had on one of the founders of the infamous “Coon Town” Reddit channel. There they had such classic sub-Reddits like “N*****s Dying” where people posted videos of black men being murdered or executed to the glee of the commentators. Generally, it was the most extreme edges of guttural racism, where black people were openly called degenerate animals, slavery was celebrated, genocide was discussed with a certain admiration, and it marked the hallmark of insipid internet bigotry. The hosts of Fash the Nation, including the aptly named Marcus Halberstram, joked with and complimented the guest, who was going by the pseudonym of GreatApeNiggy. On this episode they casually talked about how people of color have innately lower IQs and were degenerate “jungle people,” how Jews are secretly destroying the West through race mixing, how LGBTQ people were filthy AIDs receptacles, and that some form of nationalist fascism was the answer. Their language, which included open racial slurs, was politically and rhetorically more extreme than most neo-Nazis and KKK members of today. For Breitbart, who knows full well that Fash the Nation and the Right Stuff is a signature part of the Alt Right since they linked to their blog, to say that they are somehow ideologically removed from the neo-Nazi revolutionary white supremacist crowd is for them to engage in intentional self-deception.
Yiannopoulos has defended the Alt Right before, going on Dave Rubin’s podcast to show allegiance to the Alt Right and protect it against allegations of anti-Semitism (Sort of.).
Generation Trump, the alt right people, the people who like me, they’re not anti-Semites. They don’t care about Jews. I mean, they may have some assumptions about things, how the Jews run everything; well, we do. How the Jews run the banks; well, we do. How the Jews run the media; well, we do. They’re right about all that stuff…It’s a fact, this is not in debate. It’s a statistical fact….Jews are vastly disproportionately represented in all of these professions. It’s just a fact. It’s not anti-Semitic to point out statistics….The anti-Semitism on the internet, which is really important, I want people to understand this because nobody seems to, when Jonah Goldberg of National Review is bombarded with these memes, and anti-Semitic “take a hike, kike” stuff, it’s not because there’s a spontaneous outpouring of anti-Semitism from 22-year-olds in this country. What it is is it’s a mischievous, dissident, trolly generation who do it because it gets a reaction. Right? That’s been the case for young people for generations….They can get to people in positions of power, and people in positions of power and keep biting, they keep taking the bait….It’s a direct response to the language policing, it’s a direct response to being told they can’t say things.
They go on to mock, as the Alt Righters do, the “1488” crowd, which essentially means those that use Hitler iconography unironically. This would make up essentially the “old guard” of racist organizing, the pre-AmRen network of Christian Identity followers, Klansman, and the like who are too wrapped up in figures of the past. They quote RamZPaul in making fun of them, yet he is really the tip of the iceberg. The Daily Shoah has made that a staple of their program, where they ask listeners to donate $14.88, a tongue in cheek reference. Yiannopoulos uses this disregard for that wing of the white nationalist movement as a sign that they are not ideologically similar, but that misses the thing that they actually admonish the neo-Nazis for. Instead of decrying their genocidal racism and anti-Semitism, it is the “LARPing” that they find ridiculous. As the Daily Shoah and the Neoreactionary Ascending the Tower have often said, they support the 14 from the “1488.” This refers to the 14-word line by Order member David Lane, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The 88 refers to HH, Heil Hitler, which they see as being too focused on the past. It is not so much that they reject Hitler as a political ideologue, some do and some don’t, but it is the useless political role-playing that they are attacking when rejecting the “1488.” They certainly do not seem to support the seemingly random violence as well, they regularly laud those who attack refugee centers, but that is not the foundation of their break from the past. Instead, it has a much more classed component, where they simply see the “low class” neo-Nazis and KKK members not living up to their own high-brow version of fascist racism.
The Daily Shoah picked up on Yiannopoulos’ claims about the unseriousness of the meme culture immediately, calling him a “flaming, Jewish f****t.” Mike Enoch said that he has had private message conversations with him on Twitter, though he did not know that he was actually the host of the Daily Shoah at the time. This section of the article was roundly insulted as absurd, and Breitbart itself mocked thoroughly, even though they generally thought it was a fine representation of their movement and were happy to have the coverage. Fash the Nation also mentioned it, saying that it was a sign that the term Alt Right was starting to be well known and that their views were a semi-respectable part of acceptable discourse.
There certainly was an anger coming from some of the annals of the Alt Right, with the Daily Stormer being the best example. Andrew Anglin, the voice behind the Stormer, is sort of the meeting point between the “1488 crowd” and the rest of the Alt Right. His work is more in line with the Right Stuff, but he also has offloaded his work to places like Radio Aryan, which is better known for reviving neo-Nazi speeches by people like the National Alliance founder William Pierce. Anglin’s article about Breitbart’s treatment, titled “Breitbart’s Alt Right Analysis is the Product of a Degenerate Homosexual and an Ethnic Mongrel.” He notes immediately that one of the authors(Bokhari) is “half Paki,” and that Yiannopoulos is both Jewish and gay. Anglin is likely correct in his main allegation against Brietbart: they are coopting the energy of the Alt Right. His main points of contention here are that they do not give the Daily Stormer the due he feels is deserved, and, second, they don’t talk about the Jews.
Anglin continues his regular diatribes, calling the Bosnian genocide a joke and the authors cucks. He goes through the article almost paragraph by paragraph with a Live-Tweet transcript of self-indulgence, something the Daily Stormer does in its tired frenzy to stay relevant among its angry racist subculture. He also picks up that seem to think that the Alt Right is actually queer and Jewish friendly, and that the jokes are, well, just jokes.
Well, let me go ahead and explain something which the authors of this piece are already aware of: the people who invite homos and Pakis to their conferences are a totally separate group than the people who are joking about the Holocaust. As I said above, what this article attempts to do is force the entire alt-right movement under the banner of a tiny minority who no one actually cares about and who get virtually zero traffic on their pro-Jew, pro-homo websites.
This article attempts to create confusion where there isn’t any.
Also, I don’t know what a non-satirical Holocaust joke would look like, exactly, but no one who jokes about the Holocaust believes it actually happened.
The reception to the Breitbart piece from the mainstream press has been mixed, with places like Daily Wire taking a sort of “respectful disagreement” stance. They note that the Alt Right gives “cover to actual anti-Semites and racists.” This in and of itself still plays into Breitbart’s point, which is that the Alt Right is not just openly the newest branding of neo-fascism. The Alt Right provides no cover: it is what racists, anti-Semites, misogynists, and neo-fascist are today. Milo has stated publicly that the Alt Right and the Trump phenomenon are direct responses to the left, in that the anti-PC nature of it is for show and a response to allegations of racism. This is the voice of someone who either cannot simply believe the level of racism he is associating with, or who thinks that he can use ironic ugliness to slide nationalism into the internet substream.
“There’s no hatefulness, racism, sexism, homophobia left in this country,” Milo said in a televised discussion with Dave Rubin. This came directly after saying that many stereotypes turn out to by right before shifting into the idea that differences and prejudices may exist yet should be tolerated as long as they were not violent or intrusive. This is not only a grade-school attempt at analyzing social structures, but it is a G-rated version of the “identitarianism” peddled by most of the Alt Right. Milo has clearly been walking this line for some time now, coming to prominence first for siding with the Men’s Rights Activists during the “Gamergate” non-controversy.
It may end up being unfair to single Milo and his co-author out since it is Breitbart at large that has been a crossover point for the far-right, at least in terms of racialism, immigration restriction, homophobia, and rape apologism.
The relationship between the Alt Right and Breitbart has not always been an easy one, however. Richard Spencer, the person who coined the term Alternative Right and now runs the National Policy Institute and the Radix Journal, covered the firing of John Derbyshire from the National Review heavily in 2012. Derbyshire was let go after a column he wrote for Taki’s Magazine was released called The Talk: The Non-Black Version. The article was a sort-of parody of the talk that many black families have to have with their sons to explain racial targeting by the police. Derbyshire’s family talk, on the other hand, was to warn his children to stay away from black people. Shortly after his firing, and before he spoke at the American Renaissance conference that year, he was roundly denounced by publications around the country. Breitbart was vicious in their condemnation, but, as Spencer pointed out, Breitbart is part of a new conservative media that based their entire existence on subliminal race-baiting.
Glenn Beck and the late Andrew Breitbart are (and were) Grand Mastersof(sic) the race-baiting game. Breitbart rose to national awareness publishing videos of James O’Keefe, dressed as a ‘70s Black pimp, entering a Black-run ACORN office in search of government funding for his “ho.” Breitbart later warned conservatives of the dangers of Black Nationalists in the Department of Agriculture. His posthumous coup (which ultimately fell flat) was to hint that the President himself isn’t what he seems . . . . He’s no liberal backed by Wall Street, no; he’s a closet Black Nationalist!
…
The Blaze and Breitbart (Beck’s and Breitbart’s answers to the Huffington Post) have filled their webpages with salacious stories of various flash-mob attacks and general Black misbehavior. As I write (Sunday, April 8), the top story on The Blaze is about the New Black Panther Party’s call for a “race war.” On the same night that Breitbart declared John Derbyshire to be a non-person for talking about the dangers of Blacks, its best-read story was one on a unsuspecting White Man who ventured into Black Baltimore and was attacked and stripped of all clothes and possession by a feral gang.
When Andrew Breitbart explicitly talked about his political philosophy, one got the impression that it was some kind of universalistic libertarianism; Beck outdid him in genuflecting to the myth of Martin Luther King. But what they sold to their readers is quite different. It was never about race, but about “principles” and “fair play.”
Breitbart and Glenn Beck have made white tensions the foundation of their popularity, playing the populist game on a direct route to Donald Trump. Breitbart columnists have made names for themselves trying to attack liberals, publicly using “dog whistle” racial language, and trying their best to instill fears of demographic replacement and non-white crime in aging Caucasian Baby Boomers.
The animosity between the Alt Right and Breitbart slowly dissipated, and by 2015 there began to be a certain amount of cross-over in the same way that Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter have had tacit flirtations with the movement as well. The #Cuckservative meme was the beginning of major topical crossovers, with Breitbart reporters using the phrase popularized by the Right Stuff and Twitter personalities like Ricky Vaughn to describe Beltway conservatives they felt were making poor immigration choices. In “’Cuckservative’ is a Gloriously Effective Insult That Should Not Be Slurred, Demonised, or Ridiculed,” Milo Yiannopoulos had already defended the 4Chan white nationalist community by bringing Breitbart to their side unequivocally.
But we don’t cry “racist” whenever someone says any of these words. That would be stupid. That would be playing the sort of dumb, disingenuous game that liberal race-baiters do. Right?
Thus, “cuckservative” can mean many things. It could mean conservatives who are afraid of social exclusion and kowtow to the liberal media establishment. It could mean conservatives who play the left’s game of identity politics, accusing their internal opponents, such as Donald Trump, of being racist or sexist or rapey for spurious or opportunistic reasons.
This support moved to their “edgy” backing of Donald Trump, though they still have a coin in the race for Ted Cruz. People like Milo seem to have a strong voice inside of Breitbart’s political presence, where he is seen as the hip new face of conservatism. This may be why they will continue to allow him to use their popularity as a gateway for white nationalism since they generally see this as just another “young” political phenomenon they do not understand. Best trust Milo on this one.
Their focus on racism may only have intensified in the last year as they really are carrying on Andrew Breitbart’s effort to bait the left. In articles like “Racism: ‘White Men Must be Stopped’ Says Salon Magazine,” they attempt to undermine real reporting on issues of racism so as to take out the legs of an effective anti-racist movement. In the above mentioned article, Lee Stranahan goes almost line by line through a Salon article, tries to minimize how cruel chattel slavery was, and cherry-picks evidence to make slavery in America nothing too “unique.” In a world where, as they accuse, mainstream conservatives are continuing to slide away from open racism, Breitbart and its constituency are doubling down (And if you view Breitbart’s comments section, that might be tripling down.).
Milo may not be making the kind of friends he hoped he had, but the Alt Right is happy for the continued exposure. The far-right needs stop over points so that they can manipulate the moments of populism that the GOP can still muster. Donald Trump is mainstreaming their views, and Breitbart, among others, is actually giving their name a bit of credibility among the fragmenting parts of the disheveled Republican Party. Breitbart is one of the devices that conservatives are looking to rebrand and identify themselves now that the conservative movement invented by William Buckley as a Cold War tool is dead, a mantle also being taken up by places like Reason Magazine and other libertarian vessels. The moment when it seemed clear that the libertarians were going to hold the keys for the future of conservatism is over, as can be see very obviously by the fate of people like Rand Paul. Now it seems that nationalism is the key to winning the populist wave, something that could not have been predicted to cross over in this way before Trump turned off-the-cuff racism into a winning strategy.
Milo is attempting to recruit this racism, put it in skinny jeans, and make it the outlier constituency of the Breitbart defined American conservative. It will likely not take place the way he is hoping, but it can easily be a tool to recruit and further build the white nationalist movement that is seeing a new kind of Renaissance. In this way, it is important to identify exactly what they are doing and saying, and to make Breitbart accountable for being a mouthpiece of the far right. They enjoy the battle with the liberal left, but what about the actual radical left?
When it comes to the recent Chicago shut down of Donald Trump and the growing Antifa presence, there are some avenues to show Breitbart that their snarky racism can be shut down. Real fast.
On a recent episode of the cleverly titled Fash the Nation, another podcast project of the Right Stuff, they opined about Trump’s big failure in Iowa. To join the regular hosts Jazz Hands McFeels and Marcus Halberstram they invited Raiden, a Twitter “sensation” who bragged about how good he is at trolling. He proudly declared that he keeps “hate facts” in his bookmarks so he is ready to “Red Pill” people on social media, a term used originally by the Men’s Rights crowd and means to reveal the truth(which actually means to be racist). He went on, at length, about how great he was at harassing people on Twitter, so much that he often gets banned. The hosts egged him on, also congratulating him for this major “achievement.”
The new Alt Right is being tactically informed by people like the Right Stuff and the Daily Shoah who think that internet trolling, using infectious memes, and arguing with people in web forums is the same thing as political organizing. Their project relies on this since they usually do not come from a history of political engagement, but instead from the recesses of extreme ideology that remote web forums often inspire. While this is embarrassing right off the bat, it is not without its avenues. They have successfully disseminated things like the Cuckservative, Alt Right, and Facts Aren’t Racist hashtags, they have created a groundswell of reactionary internet support for Trump, and they are feeding the vanguard of the racist movement to commit acts of violence and eventually join the kind of political organizations that we are seeing all over Europe.
We at Anti-Fascist News have also been pretty consistently “trolled” and blogged about from the far-right, where they are just begging to get a mention. The Daily Shoah has devoted segments of several of their shows to us, and their forum will link to us so many times that we quickly become the top Google search results(good strategy guys). Attack the System, the website run by Keith Preston and best known for pushing National Anarchism, has run a full six articles about us, desperately trying to pull us into a debate. We actually did counter a couple of their claims, only because they have occasionally moved their arguments into anarchist circles and so we need to develop a good rhetorical foundation to unhinge their ‘pan-secessionist” rhetoric. Occidental Dissent, the Traditionalist Youth Network, the National Anarchist Network of Texas, Jack Donovan, and others have made us the target of their attention in recent months, hoping that they can get a word in on our conversation. Daily we get hate comments, often with racial slurs, and usually they believe that we are going to allow their comments to be posted so that they can, again, troll. On Twitter they will tag us so as to draw us into an “internet feud” so they can fuel their blog diarrhea, especially since their lack of relevance can stop them from having appealing content.
Our policy is to completely refuse to discuss things, allow them to link to us, or to even provide access to our social media. We regularly block fascists if they tag us on Facebook or Twitter, which happens a couple times a week. We will work to break the links when they link directly to our website, and we never, ever allow racist or right-wing comments to post on our website. We aim to be a useful resource for anti-fascist and anti-racist organizing, so we prioritize the goals of organizing above all else. Complete radio silence and removing them as regularly as you can will be the best way to regularly segregate them from important conversations. We prefer if our boosts in traffic comes from anti-racists looking to find out what is happening inside of the racist community, not just out of a lurid curiosity, but because we need this information to inform strategy.
As long as we continue, we expect to get followed closely by these groups as they look for any avenue to get coverage. Instead, in our discussions about them we refuse to link to them or provide them an open platform of any type.
The movement against the police, their excesses and abuses, has, in the last two years, really melded with what became Black Lives Matter. Much of this has come by stacking up the violent attacks by police, mainly on people of color, for seeming mild behavior that no one would estimate warranted moments of extreme police violence. Much of this movement has come from the ability of everyone to take reasonably good video on their cell phones and the use of social media news feeds, which allow the stories of police abuses to come one after another. On social media, Cop Block has become one of the most popular of these, gaining more than a million and a half followers on Facebook and having a full website and podcast to support it. For most of its fans it seems to be a place that is helping to feed the consciousness of police authoritarianism, and with its slant towards the police violence against people of color it has become a go-to source on the left.
Cop Block’s history is actually more complicated then just a leftist anti-cop outlet, and that history has come back as a flash just recently.
As most people will notice if they go just beyond the Facebook page, Cop Block is much more of a libertarian publication than one of general left-wing values. Amid click-bait articles about different police excesses, you will find points that actually stray from the regular anti-police narrative such as railing against DUI laws. In their recommended reading you are going to find tomes like For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, and their podcast is hosted by the libertarian Free Talk Live and sponsored by the Free State Project.
Libertarian elements often meet points with the left, whether it is with drug legalization or the anti-war movement, and this is a completely normal part of mass movement building. In this case, Cop Block seems to mainly be a part of “left libertarian” strains that are opposed to racism openly. That doesn’t make up the entirety of who Cop Block has been, however.
Christopher Cantwell was a former contributor to Cop Block who wrote awkward and violent tracts against the government and police, eventually being kicked out as a contributor and from the Free State Project for publishing an article talking about the joy people should feel about killing police. The editorial collective of Cop Block then published a response distancing themselves from Cantwell and committing themselves to the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle. Cantwell is known for his own podcast “Radical Agenda” and positioning himself with different “Alt Right” and racialist projects. His website lists himself as an “Anarchist, Atheist, Realist.” The anarchism he is talking about is hard-right anarcho-capitalism, and the realism is directly in relation to race. He delves heavily into race issues, siding with “race realists” in believing that people of color have lower IQs, are more prone to criminality, that we need to ban all immigration, that Muslims are sub-humans, and that the Jews are over represented in positions of power. His own website and twice-weekly live video broadcasts are filled with racial slurs, conspiracy theories, and mixing of American right-wing populism with the new “hip” fascism. He has joined the Right Stuff’s podcasts twice in the last two weeks, first going on the flagship The Daily Shoah and later joining Fash the Nation. On both he railed against people of color, yelling about how they were “dumb n—-rs,” “spooks,” and calling Muslim people “Kababs.” He also spent quite a bit of time ranting about how he “schooled” members of Cop Block on a recent podcast episode he joined them on. He enjoyed calling them Cuck Block, a reference to the #Cuckservative meme that The Right Stuff and others on the Alt Right have been using to say that traditional conservatives are working for the benefit of non-white groups instead of themselves.
Since Cantwell was a contributor at Cop Block previously, he was invited back to explain why he was, as a libertarian, supporting Donald Trump’s presidential bid. This was also a video episode, where Cantwell was poised in front of an anarcho-capitalist half-gold, half-black flag with a coiled snake and the “Don’t Tread on Me” line. They come out almost immediately to see if he actually believes that “to get freedom back” we need to get rid of liberals and leftists. He goes on to use Alt Right buzz points, or “hate facts” as he refers to them, such as R-K Selection Theory, Race and IQ psuedoscience, and bizarre references to evolutionary psychology. Cantwell shifts towards criticizing Cop Block for using leftist news sources like Counter-Currents News(not to be confused with the white nationalist Counter-Currents Publishing), which the co-hosts do apologize for, and for “teaming up with liberals.”
“If you think that people are just blank slate, everybody’s equal, then that’s absolute nonsense,” said Cantwell. “One things that’s wrong with Cop Block and the other Race Pimp outfits that you have teamed up with is that…you jump on board with the Black Lives Matter thing. If black people are 13% of the population and 30% of those killed by police, thus police are racist. Well that’s nonsense, you know, what’s actually happening is black people are responsible for more than 50% of the crime in America, and that is an objectively observable thing that is actually happening. And so if you are getting in trouble with law enforcement, you are getting killed by law enforcement while you are out committing a vastly disproportionate amount of crime in a country, then it makes sense that you would end up in that position.”
This is a regular white nationalist talking point, well known in crowds like American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens, where race and crime reporting statistics are overtly manipulated to make arguments that there are some type of biologically driven criminality in black people. These statistics are intentionally taken out of context, and they refuse to look at the vastly different representation of people of color in accordance to actual rates of “criminal” behavior. An example of this is with drug use, which from individual surveying is shown to be equal across races, though black and Latino people are much more represented in drug possession convictions. Crimes are most correlated to socio-economic status, and due to historic oppression and racism have tied communities of color with poverty, and therefore there is a common sense way to read the evidence. Instead, “race realists” intend to use these statistics to make really vulgar statements that there are literally differences in black and white brains that make black people driven towards “criminality,” which is an unscientific way of dividing up pre-conscious motivations and brain functions. Criminal behaviors are designated by a society and its property laws, which are not a set of “timeless principles” that some types of people are just more prone to violate. Much of early race science addressed class in the same way, using meritocratic arguments to say that people of low socio-economic class, as well as race, are in the situation they are in because they are prone to criminal behavior and low intelligence. Good breeding, a coded phrase for Eugenics, was supposed to breed out these people by using rich whites as a model for genetic superiority. People like Cantwell are resurrecting these kind of pseudoscientific embarrassments, this time focusing just on race to separate people of color from the white working class.
The Cop Block podcast hosts do their best to challenge Cantwell on these points, but, as Cantwell railed about with glee, they were not prepared to challenge rehearsed white nationalist talking points. The reality is that most people are not on guard to defend against things that are generally known to be false, such as roundly discredited race and IQ or race and crime arguments.
After Cantwell left the show, another member of the Cop Block spoke up to defend him as “having a point,” while another member, Severin Freeman, stated that they do not support the Black Lives Matter movement.
At a certain point, in 2013, Cop Block began to shift to be more conscious of the violence from “non-state actors” because of interpersonal oppression. This meant consciously addressing white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forms of oppression. This has not been monolithically successful, especially when people noticed some posts from Cop Block that downplayed the significance of street harassment against women. Even with those moments, there was an intentional turn to be aware of intersecting oppression and move away from a right-wing value set in their anti-police political orientation. As Peaceful Streets notes, when some founding members began to stand up to some racist and sexist responses, the far-right segment of the anti-police movement came out in droves to attack them.
This brought out vicious attacks from many who were at the intersection of some or all of the following groups: Cop Block, anarchocapitalists, Men’s Rights Movement, and Neoconfederates. One semi-popular libertarian blogger named Christopher Cantwell led the charge against the “White Knight,” “Social Justice Warriors” who dared to take offense at overt forms of bigotry. Soon, [Antonio] Buehler had hundreds of racist and sexist people attacking him for taking a stand against racism and sexism. Buehler responded by disassociating with everyone who was willing to associate with Cantwell, and this included Cop Block founder Ademo Freeman and many other members of Cop Block.
Today, Cop Block is generally set to focusing largely on cop-on-black violence, really lending to ground the Black Lives Matter narratives in the constant stream of police brutality cases. Since the shooting in San Bernadino, they have continued to perpetuate the conspiracy theory that it was actually white “crisis actors.” While these types of conspiracy theories are obviously problematic, they do shift away from the right-libertarian trend to believe that the government is “anti-white” and would never fake an attack by a Muslim.
The libertarian tradition, and by that we mean the American libertarian tradition specifically, has always sat on the fringes of the extreme right. After Murray Rothbard was kicked out of the National Review in the 1960s he briefly associated with the left-wing cultural elements that began lingering around the libertarian movement before falling into a distinctly reactionary place and began producing the Rothbard-Rockwell Report with Lew Rockwell. Anarcho-capitalism, which draws a completely different historical trajectory than anarchism as it is commonly understood, has always rubbed shoulders of neo-fascist movements in their respect for hierarchy and inequality. The Ludwig Von Mises Institute used to hold a message on its opening page listing that property means the right to “refuse service” to people or groups the owner determines. Throughout the life of libertarianism, which really does not gain steam until the 1980s, you saw a close consortium between libertarian and various intersectional movements on the far-right. The most obvious of these were the milita movement who was built on a conspiracy theology about the invading “left-wing” government. During the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas 1994, milita people, conspiracy theorists, and libertarians joined the onlookers in outrage, and it radicalized people like Alex Jones and Timothy McVeigh.
The bridge points into mainstream politics, with the anti-war politics of Lew Rockwell to the Ron Paul newsletters, allowed for far-right positions to become semi-acceptable under the auspices of paleoconservatism and paleolibertarianism. Throughout the 1990s, much of the open white power movement, including various neo-Nazi and Klan organizations, found their way into the generic “anti-tax” movement, of which people like Ron Paul were also a part. These movements later crystalized in response to changing demographics and an American President of color, and came front and center with the Tea Party.
Libertarianism itself has been a stepping stone for many in white nationalism because the mechanisms of the welfare state are associated with people of color. As the Ron Paul campaign of the mid-2000s brought libertarianism back amongst a newer generation of young people, the left-leaning cultural elements found a space again and were popularized by places like Reason Magazine and the Caito Institute. As libertarianism in this vein began to abandon its far-right cultural elements, it no longer became a safe space for various fringe right-wing ideologies. Today, you see organizations like the white nationalist The Right Stuff, the American Freedom Party, and the Traditionalist Youth Network coming out of former Ron Paul supporters, and even today institutions like the Property and Freedom Foundation and the Ludwig Von Mises Institute continue to be safe spaces for “race realists” and others in the open racialist movement.
Today’s libertarianism has distinctly different wings that are broken up more by values than by politics. This is what really separates people like Cop Block and Christopher Cantwell: a sense of what their social values are rather than what the type of political and social tools they prefer. This does not, however, mean that there is a clean break between them since they still share a certain analysis and background. Many of the people still involved with Cop Block, and some of what they publish, show a mixed consciousness about political issues. At the same time, Cop Block has made huge moves to separate themselves from many of the racist traditions that parallel libertarianism, as well as create distance between them and open racists that used to contribute to them.
Cop Block’s controversies are mainly reserved for the founder’s, Aderno Freeman, alleged wiretapping or the South Carolina’s Republican Chairperson’s “liking” of one of their posts. The foundation of their work is always going to be based on a libertarian suspicion of the government, which is founded on the idea that the state interferes with “sovereignty” and property rights. This is much different than the anarchist analysis as the state as a tool for the ruling class, which means that those on the left looking to use Cop Block as a resource need to do so with a sense of distance. What this says more than anything is that the anti-police narrative needs to be better enunciated by those on the radical left, especially taking the analysis away from reactionary minarchist politics and bringing them back to revolutionary anti-oppression praxis.
