Get some popcorn, because its time to watch the Alt Right implode.
After what some are jokingly calling “Hailgate,” where participants at the recent Alt Right/white nationalist National Policy Institute conference “Seig Heiling” as Richard Spencer yelled “Hail Trump, Hail our people, Hail Victory,” the Alt Right has begun to break apart under pressure and internal dissent. The Atlantic had been working on a documentary on Spencer for their website and were allowed in the hall even after the official press conference was ended, though they were asked to blur out the faces of conference goers who did not agree to be filmed. They then saw Spencer give a deeply racist and anti-Semitic speech, after which several people rose up in “jubiliation” and shoved their hand forward in a Roman Salute, cementing the reality of their movement as one of Nazis and white supremacists.
Since then, the anger has ensued. Andrew Anglin, the mentally disturbed Nazi who runs the Daily Stormer, was also a bit angry because their were a few Jews in the audience, one of which was photographed the day before giving the Nazi salute with Richard Spencer.
I’m not even against throwing up Roman salutes at these conferences, and in fact find it hilarious. What I am against is having a Jew Ratface (and an Asian pornstar) as the face of the face of neo-Nazism.
If Spencer is now going to be a representative of the neo-Nazi agenda, he needs to tighten-up his ship. The last thing we need is the world believing that neo-Nazis are just a bunch of kikes and gooks.
Alt Lite personality Mike Cernovich was less forgiving and declared that Richard Spencer was “controlled opposition” sent likely by the government to infiltrate and destroy the Alt Right. He then suggested that Spencer would lead in ATF agents and that there will be arrests and Ruby Ridge style events. Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars agreed with Cernovich, basically saying that this is the end of the Alt Right since “radicals” like Spencer are ruining it for everyone else and continued to revel in conspiracies. Vox Day, the Alt Right game designer and writer behind the Sad Puppies phenomenon at the Hugo Awards, also spoke out, decrying Spencer for what happened at the conference.
Video blogger and former NPI and American Renaissance conference speaker RamZPaul said that Spencer destroyed the image of the Alt Right with this behavior and he is now refusing to use the term to describe himself, instead now referring to himself as a “man of the right.”
Picking up on a long feud between the two, Greg Johnson of the Alt Right/white nationalist publishing house and blog Counter Currents did an essay and audio post stating that Spencer has destroyed the “Alt Right” brand.
Spencer has damaged the Alt Right brand — perhaps irreparably — by associating it with Nazism. The Alternative Right began as a particular brand, the name of Spencer’s webzine. But it quickly became a generic umbrella term encompassing a range of different alternatives to mainstream Republicans and conservatives.
But from its start, the Alternative Right webzine was an entryist tool for White Nationalists. It was a platform for outreach and conversion of people who are closer to the mainstream. It created a safe space where “normie” conservatives could encounter human biodiversity, ethnic nationalism, the Jewish question, paleomasculinity, etc. without having to adopt stigmatizing labels like “Nazism.” But after Spencer’s NPI speech, there is good reason to think that will no longer work.
Peter Brimelow, who spoke at the conference and has helped Spencer a great deal with the recent attention the Alt Right has received, also thought that it was “juvenile bravado” and refused to support the behavior. F Roger Devlin, fellow speaker and often race realist and MRA writer, agreed with Brimelow and denounced the Nazi behavior. Fellow speaker Matt Tait joined them and thought it was “undoing what is good about the Alt Right.” Colin Liddell, the editor at the New Alternative Right and Richard Spencer’s former podcast co-host, agreed with Matt Tait and was not a fan of Spencer’s behavior.
This rejection of Spencer inside of the Alt Right happened at the same time as the media set him up for roasting as dozens of stories exposed him for what he is: a fascist. Major news outlets around the country qualified him for exactly what he is, and he is now being refused the ability to lie about his perspective. We continue to use the term Alt Right, but we qualify it as fascist and white supremacist, something that Spencer did not want. This NPI behavior has now severed his ability to set the media’s agenda, which caused him to throw a tantrum. He went on NewsOne to try and defend himself, and after he was unable he then took to insulting and insulting the host. This has become his go-to since he is unable to maintain the appearance of respectability he desperately hoped for.
On Spencer’s side has been the Right Stuff and the Daily Shoah, where they basically ran extended spots on Mike Cernovich, calling him a cuck, a liar, and everything else. Mike Enoch declared their former friend Vox Day persona non grata, and there has begun a war inside of their camp virulently attacking each other. The cohesion of their movement is beginning to fall apart, and as the Trump camp continues to try and distance themselves from them they are losing everything else they had.
Richard Spencer did a recent video for Radix Journal where he basically admitted that Trump is not turning out the way that he wanted. He is giving in to Neoconservative foreign policy, he is basically “maintaining the swamp” by empowering wealthy elites and lobbyists, and backseating all of his “reformist policies.”
What this needs on the anti-fascist end is to continue to put heavy pressure on every element of this movement, confronting them wherever they crop up and continuing to expose and marginalize their voices. They were confronted very heavily at NPI, which inspired weeks of whining from them, and now they are threatening revenge. We need to continue to build numbers and movements that have the ability to shut out fascist voices and defend communities, and bring safety and solidarity back into our multicultural neighborhoods. Their movement is one of racial hate and violence, ours is to continue the egalitarian project of building a new world.
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.
Richard Spencer, the National Policy Institute(NPI), and the rest of the Alt Right hid behind the security of the government backed Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. on March 5th. Every year NPI, who is the definition of suit-and-tie white nationalism, holds two conferences. This spring conference is the shorter of the two, usually just taking up just an evening and having three speakers rather than a full line-up. This conference was called Identity Politics, which is a play on the identify politics that have permeated leftist space. Since their “identitarianism” is all about advocating for “white identity,” they often attempt to claim that they are just like feminists, black advocates, or LGBT people, advocating for their “own interests.” The event could easily have just been Donald Trump themed as that is what the promotional material, and all the speeches, consisted of.
For years, NPI and its associated Radix Journal, have pushed a more pseudo-intellectual and radical direction, focusing on anti-political figures, philosophers, and revolutionaries. Their goal was to create a radical right intellectual counter-culture, that was until Donald Trump’s guttural racism taught them it was better to just dumb it down and troll on Twitter. Now the NPI conference has forgone its diversity of racist voices and instead just find different ways to say “vote for Trump.”
The three speakers were well traveled, starting with NPI’s president and the founder of the Radix Journal and, formerly, Alternative Right, Richard Spencer. Spencer has become a leader of this American version of the New Right, now called Alt Right after the term he coined for the various forms of dissident right-wing strands of thought. Spencer has become a leading voice mainly because he controls the platform, where he gives very similar whimsical speeches that are devoid of strategy and tactics. That was essentially what was at play this evening as Spencer rapped poetic about Trump, elevating him towards their intellectual tradition while ignoring the fact that Donald Trump’s racial politics are a form of primitive populism rather than the elitist right-wing philosophy they advocate.
RamZPaul did a version of his regular sort-of-stand-up, this time explaining what the Alt Right is in a speech ironically called “The Alternative Right and Masturbating to Anime.” This was a reference to a recent Republican commentator Rick Wilson who said on MSNBC that Donald Trump supporters had “Hitler iconography on their Twitter accounts” and “masturbated to Anime.” This speech seems sort of like child’s play for Paul, yet he usually does this type of comedic exposition, with previous ones for topics like the Dark Enlightenment. RamZPaul became an internet sensation with his racist and anti-modern comedy routines, which are bare-bones, talk-into-the-camera fare. This seemed to have some relevance when he was the only person doing a funny act inside of the Alt Right, but now that the Right Stuff and their various skit-makers have come along, RamZPaul seems as though he has become obsolete. This was extra apparent on the 5th as he bumbled along his speech, missing most joke opportunities and showing obvious how limited his knowledge was beyond Alt Right talking points.
The largest attraction of the three seems to be Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Long Beach Professor Kevin McDonald. We have covered McDonald at length in the past as he is the most prominent and persuasive anti-Semite of the last fifty years. His Culture of Critique book series declares Judaism to be a “group evolutionary strategy” that Jews use to compete with Gentiles for resources. They use their ethnocentrism, high “verbal intelligence,” and cripsis to undermine Western values like nationalism, identity, and masculinity. They do this by creating pseudoscience that are meant to actually disrupt society, such as Boesian Anthropology, Freudian Psychology, and Frankfurt School Marxism. His conspiracy thinking now says that Cultural Marxism (a term they invented), started by Jews like Leon Trotsky and Theodor Adorno, injected the egalitarian values of Marxism into the social sphere, where they undermine national identity and natural hierarchies. He has been able to create a veneer of science over a unified theory of anti-Semitism, which white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and their ilk have rallied around in an effort to try and explain their anti-Semitism. He has been open (since receiving tenure, at least) about his racial nationalism, editing the white nationalist web-publication The Occidental Observer and the journal the Occidental Quarterly. Most recently, McDonald has been working on a book on the history of the “white race,” which uses outdated ideas such as Nordicism and eugenic understandings of racial differences to try and construct a narrative about Aryans.
Instead of going into most of that trite, he went back to the favorite recent subject of the other two speakers: Donald Trump. He could not get far beyond his admiration for Donald, though even he could not seem to justify Donald’s spastic buffoonery by caking it in “identitarian” terms. He went on to say that the GOP had not lived up to their demographic base, namely helping out white men.
The crowd was noticeably smaller than October’s gathering, closer to 150 people, which was in part because it was a smaller event and because it had been less promoted. The major difference was that the anti-fascist presence outside was both larger and more confrontational, a turn that shows how the relevance of the Donald Trump candidacy is also bringing out Antifa supporters to get involved in counter-organizing. Effigies of speakers like RamZPaul were hung out, and photos of participants taken so as to lift the veil that many of these internet focused race trolls tend to hide behind.
This included an official participation from the Party for Socialism and Liberation(PSL), who has signs reading “SHUT IT DOWN! National Policy Institute = Racist White Supremacists.” This was an incredible turn as anti-fascist organizing is often perceived as being exclusively an anarchist movement, and this kind of unity is going to be crucial now that we are up against an increasing threat of Alt Right white nationalism. From the racists’ own accounts, there were two guarded elevators in which to enter and some were able to evade the growing crowd of several dozen anti-fascist protesters, which gives Antifa a tactical advantage at NPI’s coming Fall event. Covering these entrances provides them the opportunity to take photos that can later be used to identify participants, many of which (especially in the Daily Shoah and My Posting Career crowd), are hiding behind their podcast microphones and Twitter handles.
Events like this are now explicitly using Donald Trump as a rallying cry as the event was more or less a universal declaration of Trump love. Richard Spencer did caution against believing that Donald Trump himself was Alt Right, but instead noting that they both have a common trajectory and that Donald Trump is mainstreaming their positions of ethnic nationalism, enforced hierarchy, and racial hatred. This should mobilize anti-fascists to replay what happened in Chicago at other Donald Trump events, where their numbers can easily overwhelm the silly tough-persona of the proposed Lion’s Guard. It also shows that this Donald Trump mobilization can be used reflexively to go after explicit white nationalists, and that an anti-fascist movement is only growing.
In an effort to double up their popular conferences, The National Policy Institute is going to be having a conference only a few short months after their Halloween event. Set to coincide with the Conservative Political Action Conference, which makes sense with their use of the Alt Right branding, the event will bring together “shitlords” and white nationalists from the growing recesses of the internet-focused racialist movement. The evening event, on March 5th, is going to be smaller than NPI’s regular conference event, which usually spans an entire day. This conference, called Identity Politics, will bring together Richard Spencer, the NPI president, Kevin McDonald and RamZPaul.
Richard Spencer has been one of the people at the center of the recent upsurge in this particular wing of the white nationalist movement. Focused on social media, podcasting, and YouTube conversation videos, the new Alt Right has evolved beyond what it had been previously. Spencer coined the term in 2010 with his website Alternative Right, which was meant to bring together “dissident” right wing ideologues that were leftovers from paleoconservatism, libertarianism, the Old Right, traditionalism, and all the other “edge” philosophies that were leading in a neo-fascist direction.
This was a “big tent” approach that was meant to associate these disparate forces with each other, but he moved on from this approach when joining NPI and forming the Radix Journal. The term Alt Right, however, stayed, and it became synonamous with a white nationalist movement that had little connection to the silly costumes of the KKK and neo-Nazis. Instead, this group formed an ideology that was a hodgepodge of the new scientific racism of Human BioDiversity, the strange “critiques” of democracy from Neoraction, the general attack on egalitarianism, a focus on the spirituality of ethnic Heathenry, the traditionalism of Julius Evola, and a great deal of misrepresented scraps of the social sciences to justify “identitarian” focus on ethnic identity as well as classic racial hatred and anti-Semitism. These people see themselves as a break from the racism of the past, yet they simply repackaged it for a different audience.
The new shift was largely from association with The Right Stuff and their cohorts, which focus on internet trolling, using internal jargon, repeating offensive jokes, and using social media and blogs as their primary vessel rather than any kind of organizing. You would expect that this would change the speaking demographics of the NPI conference, but most of the people associated with this side of the movement do not use their real names and would not let their faces be seen lest anti-fascists identify and doxx them. The main exceptions to this was Mike Enoch from the Daily Shoah’s appearance on the NPI conference podcast, though he wore sunglasses during the panel to try and conceal his identity. UnCuck the Right, an internet sensation that does the same embarrassing parody songs that The Right Stuff is famous for, is presenting at American Renaissance as well, which is again a surprise for a grouping who hides behind avatars.
Instead, Spencer will be joined by former University of California at Long Beach professor Kevin McDonald. McDonald is known for creating a “unified theory of anti-Semitism” which his Culture of Critique series. Here he states that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” where Jews use ethnocentrism and high verbal IQ to outcompete Gentiles for resources. He identifies things like Marxism, Freudianism, contemporary anthropology, Frankfurt School philosophy, and other movements as pseudoscience created by Jews to destroy Western identity and therefore come out on top. McDonald was a well regarded evolutionary psychology academic before going off the deep end, and now writes for various white nationalist publications like the Occidental Quarterly on the need to reclaim ethnic nationalism and avoid what he calls “white altruism.” Over the last year he has been doing speeches and interviews about the “origins of the white man,” which he did both at last year’s NPI event and at the Stormfront Smokey Mountain Summit. He is working on a book on this theme, where he butchers anthropology in an effort to create a “history” of white people as a monolithic and distinct history. Here he resurrects a strict racial taxonomy, one that has literally no place in contemporary biology or anthropology, as well as distinct categories from the early 20th century like “nordics.”
RamZPaul will join the two, who does actually come in similar to the silly format set by The Right Stuff. He does popular YouTube videos where he decries liberalism, multiculturalism, and “the modern world,” usually with a penchant for bad stand-up comedy. Over the last couple of AmRen and NPI conferences he has taken on a specific topic to sort of “explain,” though they usually show that he does not have a clear grasp on the concepts himself. In his recent AmRen talk on the “Dark Enlightenment” he went on to briefly explain critiques of democracy and equality as well as the preference for monarchy, but with all of the platitudes and generalizations it became obvious that he had not been able to understand Nick Land’s work and was generally out of touch with the science and philosophy that movement claims as its own. At the March event RamZPaul will try to explain what the Alt Right is, which may actually creates some dissonance in the crowd since he is not a strict white nationalist.
Spencer’s talk will likely be one of his usually “if you dream it we can built it” rants, where he talks vaguely about “ideas” and “passion,” yet clearly does not have a political program to support it. It may be simply to support Donald Trump, who is fawningly supported by the Alt Right. Spencer himself really pushes a sort of “right Idealism” where by he thinks these sorts of expensive conferences and constant blog diarrhea are comparable to building a movement. This provides Antifa its greatest opportunity to challenge their existence since all they want, literally, is a platform. They have no other strategic elements to the movement, and they are hoping that the groundswell from the Donald Trump primary bid will be enough to move to the next stage in their fascist project.
Confrontation at the NPI conference is often difficult since it is usually held in The Ronald Reagan Building in The Rotunda of Washington D.C. They have been resistant to organizers asking them to cancel the event, and strict security keeps protesters relatively far from the entrance. What has been seen recently is that the swell of young people has come primarily from people who do not want their identity’s released, so photos and videos of conference attendees is an important operation. Pressure can be put on the operations of the Ronald Reagan building year round so that when it comes time for NPI to sign its contract, there is already a show that the community will not accept that. This could be a long-term organizing project for those in the area, but really any organization nationally could take up this campaign to show national discontent for what is happening there.
Below is the contact information for the Reagan Building if you want to make your voice heard about their hosting, but it may make sense to use this information to develop a long-term escalation campaign where community phone blasts, emails, and general mobilization can be done on a multi-month calendar.
Over the months, as the Donald Trump campaign has shifted from bumbling loudspeaker-style racist quips to copy-and-paste fascist political programs, the media response has moved from mockery, to horror, and, finally, to click-bait. Trump’s campaign has rode this wave, which was a “shock/response” model, and the left-leaning media outlets that use a social media business model have been central to its ability to spread through the culture. The “outrage machine” has been very real in that, from identifying a room full of Jewish Republicans as “deal makers” to banning and registering Muslims, his politics have only made their way up the ladder of offense and guttural bigotry. The echo chamber, which has led his message and created the offense-racket that has made him popular with reactionary sectors of middle America, has been driven by this, and it has given his voice the kind of reach that he simply couldn’t have achieved with his own appearances and the standard political news machine.
Trump himself has created an entire media model of exploiting the disbelief in leftist coverage, but he has also been the gate-keeper to mainstreaming an entire narrative that has been developed over the last five years in the annals of web forums and news sites. The Alternative Right, Neoreaction, Dark Enlightenment, and all the other variants of internet-focused and pseudo-academic neo-fascism has been developing a new language for speaking and “critiquing” society that breaks from the two sided coin of neo-Nazis and the Klan. Now they return to race and IQ talking points, critiques of contemporary democracy, attacks on the idea of equality, rejection of modernity, and a range of other simple ideas repackaged in the aesthetics of Continental Philosophy. Backed by the ideas of European New Right intellectuals, much of this resurrects previously fringe ideologues like Julius Evola or the Conservative Revolution, looking to build a strictly hierarchical society and the idea of ethnically defined societies. This is not the posturing that Donald Trump has gained his popularity on, but it is much of the long-term vision that his seemingly casual comments have as their end game. Just as there are “dog whistle” words that use economic rhetoric to signal racial tensions, neo-fascist supporters hope that his reactionary remarks are a “dog whistle” to an open fascist political program.
What the “Donald Trump phenomenon” has done, even more than just Trump himself, is to open the door to the voices of this reactionary movement in that they have a direct lineage between the two. Buzzfeed began publicizing the use of “alt right” as a hashtag on Twitter, which has been used for years up to this point, giving extended interviews to people like Richard Spencer, RamZPaul, and Jared Taylor. Rosie Gray, the Buzzfeed reporter who did the article on white nationalism and the Trump campaign, got pulled into an even more difficult situation when RamZPaul gave one condition to doing the interview: that he could film and broadcast it. What resulted is another one of Paul’s well-known videos, this time where he talks to an understandably timid Gray over an iPhone speaker. While Paul’s rhetoric in the video is confusing and rambling, it still gave him the perfect opportunity to actually draw some of the Buzzfeed crowd to an unedited piece of his own racial nationalist script.
Richard Spencer got extended time in Vice’s recent “We Asked a White Supremacist What He Thinks About Donald Trump,” which followed a similarly vapid premise as their “We Asked a Fascism Expert About Trump.” Here, again, Spencer’s ideas were given an open platform, not because he is an expert on the Trump campaign, but simply because his politics have now become a relevant part of the discourse. Spencer was additionally interviewed in the New York Times for an article that placed him alongside David Duke and Stormfront founder Don Black, which angered him enough to do a response on the Radix Journal website going through the references to him point by point and discussing how he was misrepresented. This shows a particular character of these internet-focused racialists, who exist in word vomit where they constantly have to ramble at length and can never give up the last word.
These articles are small snippets of dozens of articles in recent months that have shown that white nationalists from David Duke to the Traditionalist Youth Network’s Matthew Heimbach. When interviewed, all parties are allowed a platform to explain very clearly their key points, why we should support trump, and what kind of vision they hold.
The problematic nature of this coverage often comes directly from its intention to reveal something very real about the Trump phenomenon and its growing far-right affiliations. What these articles are intending to show is that Trump is, first, associated with these types of characters and, by association, tarnish his name. But this does not end up being a straight line since, as much of the neo-fascist rebranding has done purposefully, the alt right bloggers are often prepared to muddy the discussion so as to avoid conventional critiques of white supremacist politics. Reports in places like Gawker and Alternet are then not prepared to counter them, instead simply offering them an open platform that they could never have dreamed of on their own sites. The intended effect, for these people to hang themselves on their own words, is often ineffective.
The issue that liberal anti-racist activists often clash with radical anti-fascists over is free speech. The liberal notion of free speech is to defend even the most vile and erroneous forms, which, in essence, the protections are there for. Antifa organizers then have to propose a counter view, which is not to actually argue for state intervention to criminalize certain forms of speech, but instead to mobilize direct action to stop it cold. The distinction here is based around the use of the state and whether or not empowering its infrastructure will have a long-term positive effect. When the organs of political power shift they could very easily use the same rhetoric and repression used in hate speech laws against us on the radical left, and it is also less than appropriate to further empower a state that is designed to maintain capital and ruling class interests. The “no platform” concept in Antifa organizing is to show the community’s resistance to all the methods by which fascist organizing attempts to gain a foothold. The direct result of every racialist project is violence, inequality, and authoritarianism, either politically or socially, and therefore stopping it at the root is critical. People are free to have any ideas they want, but we are also free to mobilize to stop violence and oppression from becoming an unstoppable wave in our community.
It is difficult, then, to figure out exactly what “no platform” will always mean. An example of this difficulty is with someone like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor. Taylor has made a name for himself arguing points on the fringes of acceptable discourse, such as concepts like racial difference in IQ, racial disparity in crime, and the “inherent” problems and conflicts in multicultural diversity. Taylor then uses any oppottunity, whether it is being brought by controversial student groups to campuses or going on liberal talk shows that use him as an oddity, to pitch his well choreographed lines. His discourse is not meant to outline a clear point, it is to inspire doubt in the listeners. People are generally not up on all the ways that race and IQ correlations have been disproven, or the very well documented explanations for racial disparity in the judicial system. Taylor then uses this as a break through opportunity to then shift a small segment of the viewers into their whole world of “research,” explanations, and narratives.
This presents a conflict, which is often seen in how people respond to him. One could be to simply ignore his work, refuse to debate or comment on it lest actually give it more exposure. This has been successfully done in many Holocaust Denial situations, which is the pattern offered up by people like Deborah Lipstadt and in her book, Denying the Holocaust. This is often the best course of action, but what if the ideas are already starting to spread because an effective counter to them has not been made? This is often while people like Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine debated Mark Weber from the Holocaust denying Institute for Historical Review, or when anti-racist author Tim Wise has debated Jared Taylor on several instances. The concept here is that the ideas actually are beginning to grow as the only available narrative is the one provided by the fascist right, and it is important to expose and disprove them.
The answer is actually situational, but if a “debate” or disproval of sorts is going to be in effect, the people have to be prepared to do it. It is not that Jared Taylor is an expert on the sociology of race or intelligence and genetics, in fact he consistently embarrasses himself anytime he moves beyond platitudes to try and actually discuss these topics, but he is completely prepared to debate in sound bites. This is really the entire front edge of the racialist movement, especially in the U.S., which means that those who are attempting to engage them as a means of attack have to be prepared to effectively counter their stylized argumentation. Instead, Buzzfeed and related outlets, who clearly believe that exposure will generally lead to enlightened society expelling the Nazis, have not done due diligence and instead are providing them a platform completely open and uncontested.
The second real purpose, at least from an activist standpoint, would be to educate people about these movements and ideas so as to effectively understand and resist them. This, again, has been a problem for reasons that parallel our own, yet miss the mark. The conversations with Richard Spencer in the New York Times, Vice, Buzzfeed, and CBS are especially telling examples of this. He was allowed to put out points of propaganda, very attractive soundbites that are how he thinks people should first engage with his ideas. They did not, however, actually deconstruct those ideas, provide much history, correctly correlate them to their more obvious neo-Nazi counterparts, and discuss what the real threat of them are. This comes, partially, because they do not care what the details are because he is a racist and that is good enough. On a certain level, we certainly agree. Fascists of all stripes think that their specific narratives and sub-ideologies are incredibly important and unique. In reality, to us and for our purposes, they are all really just branches of fascism, an ideology of nationalism, inequality, and anti-democracy. The problem is, however, that we still have to understand them to effectively counter organize, and even to just have a better understanding of philosophy and politics. In this way, we are provided with literally nothing by these articles, which instead provide a platform for fascist organizers while providing us no useful information and engaging in no concrete refutation.
Publicity of any sort can be useful to a fascist fringe, yet it can be on us to continue to create a strong counter narrative. In a certain sense, Donald Trump has actually done this by boiling down the “alt right’s” pseudo-academic drivel to offensive racial sound bites. Creating a strong counter-narrative is the real work that people on the radical left can do in this regard as the mainstream media can and will do what it knows and not what is best suited to anti-racist struggle. This means confronting claims directly, continuing to be open about about the how and why of revolutionary projects, and shutting down public organizing and presence of the radical right in every available opportunity.
Trump and the Alt Right echo chamber provides us with a couple of opportunities, the primary one being the ability to counter organize and openly refute the outright lies. If we cannot expect conventional media outlets to do this effectively, the torch is passed to us, though this can be done without providing any additional power to the voice of the racists. The greatest weapon against their reactionary ideas of race and social divisions is to actually uproot white supremacy in our communities, and this is a project that goes far beyond the fascist framing. As we grow anti-racist struggle, their voices will become angrier, yet we will continue to set the narrative agenda. When Donald Trump makes claims about undocumented peoples, it provides an opportunity to undermine that false narrative and to organize a movement to stand with immigrant rights no matter who the opposition is.
When thinking further about “no platform,” the most important lesson to take into media and propaganda is to not let the racialist fringe set the conversation. Anti-fascists around the world are growing alongside the opposition, and we can together make confronting racial oppression a priority and not just a response to the reactionaries. Avoid sharing their lines, do not link to their blogs, block their Tweets, and generally make unavailable their rantings, while also confronting any of the lies and memes that they are successfully getting into the general culture. It is by walking this line that we are able to undercut the only power they have while eliminating any crossover points they have.
The media is going to continue to use white nationalists as an oddity, but if we know how to approach these daily case studies we can use it to continue to silence and step over their violent impulses.
