The Nationalist Front is a new confederation of neo-Nazi, KKK, and Alt Right groups that is trying to capitalize on a Trump presidency. Made up of some of the more obvious sectors of the white nationalist movement like the National Socialist Movement, the groups who, until recently, was well known for emblazoning a swastika over the America flag. The Traditionalist Workers Party, the political wing of Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Youth Network, is one of the most well-known groups in the new confederation, and they have been successful at pulling both from the Alt Right community and the more traditional rural white supremacist organizations like the White Knights. Matthew Heimbach and TWP recently presented at the Right Stuff planned Atlanta Forum, which was coordinated as a Southern Nationalist event by the people behind the Rebel Yell podcast.
TWP and those in the Nationalist Front are known for their street actions, and now that Trump is threatening to lower federal scrutiny on white supremacist organizations in favor of targeting Muslims, they now think that they can make a show of strength in the South. They recently announced a rally for April 29th in Pikeville, Kentucky, a town with scarcely over 6,000 people. This is historically the kind of area where they hope to recruit from, but only if they are able to reframe the narrative on their own terms and come without opposition. They are messaging the event as taking a “stand for white working families,” part of the fascist populism that TWP is known for, arguing that they stand for the white working class against leftist immigration, free trade, and internationalism.
This action by TWP is not going unchallenged as a counter rally has already being organized and it is going to need the support of antifascists around the country. That rally meets at Pikeville Park on Main Street, and we are linking to the Facebook event below.
Recently a supporter emailed us to let us know something a little strange happening at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. Among the Lovecraftian horror authors, R’lyeh themed t-shirt vendors, and various international films, the organizers had invited someone a touch more eccentric. Diabolus Rex is an occultist from the area who spends his time building the Ragnarok Engine, which is a large metal ship that is meant to generate occult energy. Speaking in a mix of prophetic End Times jargon, conspiracy prose, and pan-esoteric mashups, he says that this will fuel a black magic enterprise, possibly bringing the end of the world.
Though on first glance Rex is likely to appear as an oddity that an H.P. Lovecraft fanfest would enjoy a peek at, but that is really only without delving deeper. Rex was featured on Jack Donovan’s podcast Start the World. People will know Donovan as a part of the controversial Wolves of Vinland folkish heathen group, and for speaking at white nationalist conferences like American Renaissance and writing for publications like the Radix Journal. Know for his Queer Fascism, Jack writes about “male tribalism” and the need for men to think only about their in-group and to reclaim a culture of violence.
This was not Rex’s only connection to the Alt Right as on his Facebook he shares links from the esoteric-loving white nationalist publisher Counter Currents and rants about blocking Muslim immigration. More than this, he focuses on a “will to power” reading of left-hand path mysticism where he believes in creating a culture of hierarchy based in the domination of others, which includes human sacrifice. He even includes Julius Evola, the fascist mystic, as one of his key influences, as well as seeming to draw on Aryan esoteric and rune magic. He makes snide comments about Jews, and especially about “socialists” and those who want “equality.”
The question of whether Rex is a fascist is dubious; he seems to straddle a line in some ways, and may or may not actually fall firmly into that category. The burden of his meta-politics does not fall on the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (even though they were notified ahead of time of his connection), but it presents a clear problem that happens in spaces from left to right, from the arts to the social sciences.
Anti-fascist researcher and author Alexander Reid Ross made this process the key idea for his upcoming book from AK Press, Against the Fascist Creep. In it he chronicles the neo-fascist project since World War II and the shifting, often contradictory strategies that fascist movements take. Using ideas and patterns from the left, fascist movements attempt to co-opt struggles, transform radical movements, and adopt elements of the left while maintaining a far-right meta-politics. This means that areas that are not normally associated with racialist and nationalist politics, such as the pop arts, environmentalism, or anti-colonialism, have become places they believe they can make inroads.
To gain popularity, fascists develop and adapt syncretic ideologies to meet and manipulate leftists and radical activists. Their motivations are often concealed through the rhetoric of the “right to difference” and “racial diferentialism.” It is important to see through and reject the rhetoric of fascism in order to garner a better understanding of its general adherence to inequality, elitism, and hate. (AFC, pg. 7)
While most people subscribing to Left Hand Path traditions would find fascist politics and racism disgusting, there are those who see it as a way to developing an imperial power. People may reject the notion that ideologues like Rex have a creeping fascist politics because of the sexual libertine ideas and animal rights adherence, but these are just pieces of what is a larger philosophy of power and domination.
The fascist entryism into areas associated with the left is both conscious and unconscious, and those on the far right often see these crossover movements as legitimately a part of their struggle.
***
Quite a while ago, bioregionalists in Oregon were putting on a conference about their ecological movement. There is a push to look at the bioregion of the Pacific Northwest, sometimes divided up into being the western side of Oregon and Washington, as a distinct ecological “bioregion.” While there are nationalist movements that want to redefine state boundaries, bioregionalism is generally a project of the left and sees itself as a progressive notion for protecting environmental areas. Because of its creation of borders and boundaries, as well as because of right-wing intervention into environmental movements, it has also attracted those from the more questionable elements of the right.
Among the various invitees for the conference was also Vince Rinehart, a tribal member of the Tlingit people and an editor with the National Anarchist website Attack the System. AtS is well known for allying with white nationalists and racialists, developing their own “pan-secessionist” ideology that calls for anarchists uniting with fascists to attack “the empire.” Keith Preston, the founder of the website, often speaks at neo-fascist conferences like the National Policy Institute. Rinehart himself supports a strong tribal nationalism, one where racial groups could get their own exclusive tribal communities.
After the public learned that Rinehart was included in the conference there was an understandable uproar, and many in the more questionable areas of the bioregionalist community tried to defend Rinehart’s inclusion. There was an aspect of agreement with Rinehart: it took opposing ideologies coming together to defend the bioregion. This is exactly the “creeping fascism” that those on the right want, to undermine coherent politics and to gain entry into revolutionary movements for their own philosophical bent.
This showed up in an especially embarrassing blog post by Casey Bryan Corcoran after Rose City Antifa refused to participate. Here Corcoran admitted to both understanding Attack the System’s fascist roots and to doing a recorded interview with them.
I want to be clear that I am not denying Fascism’s unsavory past and present. I will also not deny the unsavory past and present of the Left. I am hopeful that Bioregionalism can be formulated in a way that opposes both toxic ideologies, and I see both the Left and the Right as his-stories not to be repeated. I also reject both the Trojan Horse of ‘Third Position’ racialism, and the re-colonizing impositions and racial animosities that thrive in Leftist subcultures. However, attacking everyone I don’t see eye-to-eye with has proven a terrible way to build a community, and I have engaged in dialogue with a good handful of people expressing remarkably problematic ideas about life, taking my fair share of flack for this in the process. I feel this risk is worth it, as I feel no human being is motivated by pure evil intentions. Pardon my optimism if you must. I have also observed peoples ideas change over time, mostly as the result of relationships with other people who are not quick to judge.
Here he goes into the defining characteristic of creeping fascism, the ability to “move beyond right and left” to something new. This is Third Positionism crystalized, the refusal to see fascism for what it is in an effort to “move beyond the failures of the past.” He continues on to use ad hominem attacks, to dance around the clear far-right associations, and to defend Rinehart’s racialist politics.
Rinehart was eventually removed from his panel against his own protest, though he still spoke at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Oregon at the University of Oregon. The conference is known for including controversial speakers like Lierre Keith, the transphobic founder of Deep Green Resistance. Rinehart spoke on a panel with members of Occupied Cascadia and Portland State University Cascadia chapter.
Rinehart went on Jack Donovan’s podcast as well to defend himself, as well as to re-commit himself to solidarity with ethnic nationalism. Though at the time Rinehart was already known for his problematic views, this was only the tip of the iceberg and many in the Cascadia bioregionalist movement seemed fine with flirting with the most reviled ideas imaginable. There was something of a reckoning and the left wing of the bioregionalist movement is much more conscious of this type of entryism today, but it is something that continues in left spaces regardless.
***
Recently the Brooklyn Commons turned a few heads when they hosted Christopher Bollyn, a 9/11 Truther who has entered crossover politics from his deep anti-Semitism. Bollyn was formerly a staff member at the Liberty Lobby, which published Spotlight. The Liberty Lobby was the organization founded by Willis Carto, and was the leading white nationalist organization for decades. Though it is less known than organizations like the National Alliance, it was arguably even more influential, starting off in the 1960s with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and riding a wave of anti-Communism and anti-integrationist fervor on the right into influence in the halls of power. They eventually became open about their racialist politics, believing that Jews secretly run the world, that black people have lower IQs than whites, and that people of color are more prone to crime. They founded the Holocaust Denial organization The Institute for Historical Review, and after that organization was wrestled away from Carto by some previous employees he went on to found the Barnes Review to do the same thing.
Bollyn was on the staff of the Liberty Lobby between 2000 and 2006, when the Spotlight was renamed the American Free Press. Bollyn, with his penchant for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, claims that Jews themselves were behind all U.S. government decisions, that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is real, and that Jews actually did the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Bollyn has been incredibly public about what he thinks about Jews, not usually even hiding behind anti-Semitic “dog whistle” language. Below are a few quotes compiled by anti-fascist writer Spencer Sunshine.
“Great nations, like the United States, France, and Germany, once had anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic political parties that acted to challenge the pernicious influence of secret Masonic and Jewish organizations. Today we no longer have such political parties to counter these secret networks and find ourselves ruled by B’nai B’rith and Jewish Freemasons.”
“The ‘false flag’ terrorism of 9–11 is a monstrous Jewish-Zionist crime of our time. The true culprits of this heinous crime are clearly being protected by a gang of like-minded Jewish Zionists in the highest positions of the U.S. government.”
“It seems like being a Jew is a lot like being a wolf.”
He openly cites the Protocols line that: “Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control.”
“I suspect that Arlen Specter is a high-level agent of the B’nai B’rith, the secret organization of Jewish Freemasons which I consider to be the real Elders of Zion.”
After the Commons booked Bollyn there was a near revolt by many of the organizations and projects that use the place, including Jacobin Magazine, the Right to the City Alliance, and the Marxist Education Project. They wrote a letter to the Commons listing their disdain in a quick statement.
As organizations that work out of the Brooklyn Commons, we reject the antisemitic politics of Christopher Bollyn. We do not have any say in event booking and management at the Commons but agree that such politics should have no place in leftist spaces.
The event was allowed to continue by the space’s owner, Melissa Ennen, who is a 9/11 Truther herself. In her own statement she said that there should be space for hateful people to speak because it can also be enlightening.
I never intended for The Commons to be a safe space at all times. Nor was it designed to be a cozy cocoon for intramural debate among leftists. From the beginning my goal has been to foster discussion among disparate groups across a wide political spectrum.
This is clearly a cherry-picked decision since usually the Commons would not normally allow a speaker with openly racist views, even though they represent “a wide political spectrum.” Instead, she wants to make it a left-specific space, except in that they allow anti-Semites.
Once the event did take place there was a small, yet understandably angry, contingent outside protesting the event. Those who tried to go inside were assaulted by security, and other people associated with the Commons attacked opposition in different situations. Some Antifa organizations have now called for a boycott on the Commons, which is a boycott we are joining in to send a message that anti-Semitism will not be tolerated.
***
In all of these situations, what happens is a break in left-oriented politics allows for some of the most abhorrent examples of far-right politics to work their way in. Though they are often challenged in the end, this has allowed many of these movements to flourish in ways that a concerted opposition would eliminate. This comes, in part, from the fact that education about fascism and its interlocking tentacles is not well done even in radical spaces, and it is important to understand the depths of the nationalist project and how it tries to seek crossover into, and cover from, the left. It also feeds on the unchecked acts of bigotry and oppression inside of leftist spaces, where racism, sexual assault, and abuse still happen even though the rhetoric and ideas are intended to challenge it.
This is an ongoing project, one that does not end in one project or confrontation. Instead, as the fascist movement shifts and changes, we need to be virulent and learn about how it is attempting to adapt. Radical environmentalism, anti-imperialist movements, animal rights, Palestinian solidarity, anti-globalization, pagan religious communities, and many iconoclastic arts projects all have a special place in this because they are areas that Nazis have attempted to stake their claim. A clear idea of what the threat is, a coherent politic in opposition, and the ability to shift and adapt is what will help to ensure that creeping fascism is crushed at entry.
Many people are familiar with the Good Night White Pride logo – a silhouette image of an anti-racist kicking a neo-nazi in the head. But few people know that the image comes from a photo taken at a 1998 counterprotest of a KKK rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Last year, we ran an article detailing the history of the GNWP photo, but we weren’t able to find out who the anti-racist in the famous photo was.
Then a few weeks ago, when we were contacted by the gentleman introducing his foot to a KKK supporter’s head in the photo. Here is what Harlon Jones told us:
Antifa International: Who were you in ‘98?
Harlon Jones: In 1998, I was 18, and was working at this store on-campus. Two years before some people I went to school with had shut down the Klan when they tried to do the same thing. One of my good friends was arrested at that event. So then, in ‘98, I would see the posters all around campus “come out on Saturday, we’re going to fight against the KKK.” So naturally I was telling all my friends that we needed to get down there and get into it and see what’s going on. Everyone was always sitting around talking about how they feel about stuff and we’d always say that we could sit around and be as conscious or informed as we want to about a situation but as long as it was just us sitting here, then that’s going absolutely nowhere.
AI: So you saw a disconnect between being conscious and taking action?
HJ: Absolutely. Especially now, when it’s so easy for people to just post something and then forget about the whole issue. Back then it was more imperative to be out there physically. To me, it just seemed like something that I had to be a part of.
AI: Had you ever been at anything like that counter-protest before?
HJ: I used to do non-profit work with my uncle in California. And we used to do different stuff in the city, where my father and my aunties used to try to make sure that we were aware of what was going on around us. But as far as that kind of confrontation – that was kind of new to me. But when I saw the posters, I said to myself “I gotta be there!”
The beautiful thing about the demo was all the different faces and different races that came out. I’ll always remember this really small college girl – I think she was Latina maybe – screaming at the top of her lungs with her fist in the air. And that’s what it was – people who really believed in what they were doing were right there, all together!
So I go down to the union building on-campus and they’re handing out blue bandanas and lawyers are handing out their cards, telling us they’ll defend us for free if we’re arrested. From there, we all starting marching downtown. I remember us chanting “KKK! COME TO OUR TOWN? WHAT DO WE DO? SHUT ‘EM DOWN!” Then we got to city hall there was all the riot police with their shields, and fences with barbed wire on top all set up. This was the first time I had seen that level of police activity.
Then there were these people called the “peace keepers.” They had yellow jackets and they wanted us to calm down and go somewhere else and sing “Kumbaya” and shit.
AI: How’d that go over with people?
HJ: Really not well. People were shunning them, telling them to get the hell out of there. But at this time, there’s really nothing going on. People are standing around. And I’m like “where’s the action?” And people are trying to figure out where the KKK are at.
Then all of a sudden, I saw people running in the other direction, so I ran that way and there’s like five people chasing the guy you see in the picture, his friend, and one of their girlfriends. One of them had been approached and asked if they were KKK and he said yes. So we were kinda chasing them and the smaller guy and his girl got away but the other, bigger guy – it just felt like everybody backed up for one millisecond and I just came in and kicked him.
And I’ll never forget that right after that someone came up to me and said “Yo! They’re taking pictures of you man! Change hats with me!” So for the rest of the day, I didn’t even have the same hat.
But to me that was a small incidental part of the day. Even though the image is what it is. After that, we all went back to the thing and it was amazing how the crowd just starting communicating with each other. The crowd was like “we’re going to get up to the gate and we’re going to take it down!” So you just saw people moving in small groups towards the gate and we attempted to take the gate down. And the peace keepers were literally on their hands and knees under the gates, trying to keep us from taking the gate down.
And then, just like before, the crowd started talking, saying that there was a second, smaller gate behind city hall. So we started moving over there in small groups of twos and threes. The police tried to come from the inside but it was a much smaller gate. There was a rock garden across the street. Everybody just went over there and grabbed rocks and hurled them at the cops. It was the best scene I’ve ever seen in my life – the cops retreating! I swear to God, I’ve never seen anything more fulfilling than the cops running away like that.
So we rip down the gate and we’re passing it through the crowd and cheering and then the cops come back shooting tear gas, but shooting them at people. Like my boy Michael took one right in the chest. When it was all over, we marched back down the street, kind of in victory, you know? So me and Michael and a couple of people hung out and had some beers and talked about the day – everybody’s adrenaline was so high, you know? The goal was to have the KKK never come back to Ann Arbor again. And we achieved that.
I didn’t even think about that one incident until the next day, when people started calling me about the photo. I was getting ready for work when a friend of mine from work called me and said “yeah, you’re on the front page of the paper!” And I was like “get the hell out of here!” but she said “I’m dead serious, bro!” So I rushed down to work and get there I see that I am on the front page. So instantly I grab one of the razors off the shelf and head down to the bathroom and shave all the hair off my face and stuff. Because all the police used to come in the store every day and they all knew me. They knew that was me, everyone knew it was me! And the crazy part about that was that they were so scared to prosecute me and have all this negative press on the university itself, they didn’t even pursue me. Not at all.
AI: That’s weird, because the cops went after people pretty hard after the fact.
HJ: But they saw me on a daily basis and didn’t pursue me. You gotta understand, at the time the university had a real problem with race relations and I feel like arresting me was a war they didn’t want to fight. I was literally the easiest person to find and they did nothing.
AI: How did other people react to the photo?
HJ: I mean, everybody loves me, you know? To this day, I have friends that are so proud of that whole situation that they have me come over and tell the story to their kids at dinner, just so they know that they don’t have to be scared to go out there and do something.
AI: What do you think about people that would say you were wrong for doing what you did that day?
HJ: You have to be very comfortable with the decisions that you make. So for someone to tell me what I did was wrong, I would ask them, whatever they believe in, when was the last time they did anything besides have a conversation about it?
In the community, people sit around and talk about the hot topic, and I’m always like, “well, if you’re not going to do anything about it, how can you claim to be so passionate about it, something you’re not even willing to sacrifice something for?”
HJ: This came to my attention when a friend saw some post about which U.S. state hates blacks the most, and the illustration was a photo of this nazi with three patches on his back. One of the patches was that Good Night Left Side logo.
So my homeboy took a screen shot and sent me the photo and was like “Yo! What the fuck is this? Nazis is rocking your shit?” And he posted it on facebook and he was like “Tell me that’s not Harlon kicking a nazi in the teeth!” Everyone was tripping out about this. So when I got it I had to google it to find out what this was about. And finding out that they were using it to try to counteract antifa, that’s how I came to find out about you guys and stuff.”
AI: So you didn’t know about GNWP until you saw the photo of the nazi with the logo on his back?
HJ: Absolutely. My best friend was like “you should really reach out to these people and tell them your story because there’s a lot of people out there that do the work that went behind that image, you know!” And I was hella humbled, you know, like you never expect anything like that. I mean, from a situation that I thought was so isolated in my eyes, and it’s going on twenty years now. So I was just so humbled. It felt so amazing.
AI: You weren’t aware that the photo had been turned into one of the most famous anti-racist logos out there?
HJ: Absolutely not.
AI: Now you’ve seen the neo-nazis’ version. What did you think about that?
HJ: I thought it was hilarious. Just the irony of it – you can’t make that up. We actually checked out some hate forums and people were actually bringing up that maybe they should know where the photo comes from. And they don’t give a shit – you know, ignorance is bliss. But I thought it was crazy how somebody could be promoting this image and be so ignorant about where it came from. And they wear it with pride! But I was really glad to know that it originated from the right place, from people doing the right thing.
AI: Any long-term blowback for you over the last eighteen years?
HJ: Not really, no. I do a lot of non-profit work with young men and sometimes I use it to talk about focusing anger people might have over things or to give someone the confidence to know that no matter what goes on, if you’re fighting for right, you go out and do that shit!
AI: A lot of people around the world have been really inspired by that image to take up the fight against fascism and racism where they live. Is there anything that you’d want to say to them?
HJ: It makes me feel so humbled. It almost brings me to tears just thinking about it! More than any dream I could ever have in my life, it would be to have that kind of impact – not just on one person, but on a group of people worldwide! That’s so humbling because I’m just like them! No matter where we are or if we speak the same language – I’m just like them. And if seeing that is what it takes to get them to be ready to fight, physically or mentally, for the right thing?
Man, I salute everybody that’s out there rocking it; everybody that’s out there going and doing something behind that. I salute that and I support that and I will physically come and support that, any organization that’s out there fighting for right!
After Sunday’s mass action and the number of anti-fascist protesters who needed medical care, the call to support those who were on the ground has echoed through anti-fascist organizations internationally. Antifa Sacramento, one of the organizations who organized the event to confront the Traditionalist Youth Network and the neo-Nazi skinheads in Sacramento, has a fundraiser intended to go support those who have medical expenses. The treatment they are receiving can end up incredibly costly, and this is a way to give a strong show of support to those who were attacked in Sacramento.
Today in Sacramento, Anti-Fascist Action in conjunction with hundreds of fellow Anti-Fascists from near and far successfully shut down the Traditionalist Worker’s Party (TWP) attempt to hold a white supremacist rally on the capitol. Protestors took and held the west steps, preventing the fascists from being able to reach their rally destination.
TWP chairman Matthew Heimbach skipped out on the rally despite making previous plans to attend, opting instead to send his footmen out to do his dirty-work. Two lone bigots briefly made their way to an adjacent side, where one of them sieg heiled on the Capitol steps. Despite the circumstances, the fascist thugs celebrate their poorly coordinated and executed “mobilization” of around 20 people as a victory, solely on the grounds that they injured more people than their opposition did.
Our victory did not come without consequence, and several have been hurt. So far we know of 8 comrades who have been injured to a degree that required hospitalization. Our next step is to provide support for those who sustained injuries during the shutdown, as well as legal support as needed. If you want to help the brave souls who put their well-being on the line today to keep neo-Nazis and white supremacists out of our streets, we ask that you make a donation to our support fund
One of the biggest components of anti-fascist organizing is supporting folks after events, especially if they have any legal or medical issues. Click the link below to donate to their fund, and you can also organize fundraisers in your local area. An example of this is the fundraiser event that Rose City Antifa is doing in Portland, Oregon, where several anti-fascist bands are playing a benefit show. If your organization is going to do a unique fundraising event, let us know about it, and we can help to promote it!
After the Traditionalist Youth Network, Traditionalist Workers Party, the Golden State Skinheads, and various KKK members and neo-Nazis rallied in front of the California Capitol Building on Sunday, the anti-fascists in the crowd swarmed them in ways they couldn’t have imagined. Before they were even confronted directly, one of the Nazis stabbed an elderly woman who was doing nothing more than yelling. As they were shut down and had their members humiliated, they began stabbing anti-fascist protesters, sending several to the hospital.
Yep, this is the future of Western Civilization.
Even though their members almost all left broken and bruised, and their meeting was not allowed to happen, the Traditionalist Youth Network are continuing to “claim victory” for stabbing people. Matthew Heimbach, their leader, often prided himself on “fighting fair,” yet this act of stabbing protesters and then hiding is one of the most shameful in their sordid history.
Using this rhetoric, the Traditionalist Workers Party/Traditionalist Youth Network is using this act of putrid disgrace to fundraise for their nationalist aims. Alleging, still, that they are a “peaceful” ethnic nationalism, TradYouth is asking that supporters use this opportunity to send money to their PayPal account.
We delivered the message we intended to deliver today; We will not be intimidated. We will not stand down. Our event was a victory by all metrics. We won the physical fight. We provoked the leftists into showing their true colors. The national media story about our event is becoming a conversation about how our attempt to peacefully demonstrate was viciously attacked by the leftist mob.
Christians, pagans, and skeptics marched as one today, fighting and winning as one. Workers of all professions battled side-by-side. High school dropouts and the college educated stood their ground against what was the single greatest show of anti-white force ever organized in America…and won! Today was not only a victory against the forces of the Left who wish to exterminate our people, but against the voices on the Right who would divide our cause up by religion, class, and background.
No clever “metapolitics” can work around the fact that our enemies want us dead. While blog posts and social media debates are excellent work for our cause, they’re not a replacement for men who are willing to risk injury or even death to guarantee that our message is heard and our voices are not silenced or marginalized. I was not out there today and neither was Matthew Heimbach. We fully trusted the leadership of our California chapter and GSS to host a successful event, and they succeeded against staggering odds. We all owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude.
But we also owe them a real financial debt, as well.
The fact that PayPal is still allowing them to do business, even though they are technically an LLC, is surprising. PayPal has shut down funding to a number of nationalist organizations, such as the Daily Shoah podcast and National Youth Front, the organization that was later rebranded by Nathan Damigo as Identity Europa. Neither of those groups, as disgraceful as they are, have ever engaged in the type of racist violence that Trad Youth has now displayed, yet Matthew Heimbach is continuing to raise money using PayPal.
The Donation link on their page takes you to pay directly to the Traditionalist Youth Network, LLC, which does not have the protections of a non-profit organization. It is time to let PayPal know that Trad Youth is using their service to fund a violent terrorist movement, one that stabs protesters when their event gets shut down.
We need to contact PayPal’s Customer Service center collectively and let them know that a violent neo-Nazi organization, which is easily provable with public information, is trying to use PayPal to raise money. You can either email the report in at aupviolations@paypal.com, or you can go to their Customer Service center here to do a direct email or a phone call. We recommend doing both if you have the time.
When looking back at the event, it is delusional that they are claiming victory today. They were not able to recruit, almost all of their organizers were chased out with force, and they were made to look like the degenerate fools that they are. This is attempt at spin will not work simply because the KKK and neo-Nazis skinheads have so destroyed any public media game they could have had with their persistent and cartoonish violent racism.
What the action in Sacramento really displays is that anti-fascists are growing in numbers and increasing in militancy. This has come in response to the growing threat the Alt Right and the rest of the neo-fascist movement presents, and is one that has to be shut down at every chance.
If sending an email, feel free to send along a link to some of the articles below to give them a better idea of who this group is and what they have done.
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.
For most of its post-WWII history, white nationalists have not exactly been on the cutting edge of technology. What they have done, however, has had mixed results, with some of their outreach efforts becoming massive operations.
Willis Carto turned the Liberty Lobby and its paper, The Spotlight, into a business with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, creating the platform for the Populist Party and making Carto a very wealthy man. This even lead to the Institute of Historical Review, an “academic institute” whose only function was to deny the Holocaust, which Carto lost and then battled with IHR members like Mark Weber for years over endowments. Tom Metzger tried to draw out a niche for the White Aryan Resistance by bringing it down into the gutter by producing what they labeled as “the most racist newspaper on earth.” As his operation and outreach to racist skinheads like Hammerskins and Volksfront grew, he lost his house and everything he owned after Mulugeta Seraw was murdered by WAR affiliated skinheads in Portland, Oregon. The lawsuit that followed destroyed WAR, and set a new precedent of responsibility for these “behind the scenes” racist organizers.
The real step forward for the white nationalist movement was the development of Stormfront, a white nationalist web-forum developed by Klansman Don Black out of Florida. Even now, Stormfront has a special place in the world of internet hate, growing month after month. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s The Year in Hate and Extremism 2015 outlined how their growth has been steady.
The total of registered users is just shy of 300,000, a fairly astounding number for a site run by an ex-felon and former Alabama Klan leader. And that doesn’t include thousands of visitors who never register as users. At press time, Stormfront ranked as the Internet’s 13,648th most popular site, while the NAACP site, by comparison, ranked 32,640th.
Their number of registered users has now broken that 300,000 mark, and they have had to update their servers recently just to be able to match the increase in traffic that has come from people discussing Donald Trump.
All of these different communications methods, as successful as some have been for them, are still fossils. They are relics of the past, both in their distribution format and in their cultural affiliations, rhetoric, and philosophical starting points. Movements like the Alternative Right, Neoreaction/Dark Enlightenment, Human BioDiversity, Radical Traditionalism, and all related “identiatrians” have almost no cultural connection to many of these more KKK/neo-Nazi derivative formations, even if their ideas are cut and paste from them.
Instead, these movements were New Media bound right from the start, circling around internet blogs like Alternative Right or hidden forums on places like 4Chan. Today, their outreach has only grown, and the foundation of this outreach strategy has become podcasting.
A real vanguard of this, so to speak, was Richard Spencer and Vanguard Radio. As we have written before, Richard Spencer began his website Alternative Right in 2010 to bring together all the disparate edges of the conservative movement that were no longer a part of the GOP. Paleoconservatives, race realists, neoreactionaries, radical traditionalist catholics, ethnic pagans, Evolian traditionalists, nationalists, identitarians, Men’s Rights activists, and so many more were all drawn into this movement. The real center of this was Vanguard Radio, which was the podcast that was used both as an interview show and, for a time, a regular chat segment with Spencer talking to co-hosts Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell. The end of 2013 had a traumatic break from Alternative Right for Spencer who, after stepping down as editor, continued to be associated with the website in the press. After Rachel Maddow did an expose on Spencer and Alt Right after the Jason Richwine scandal at the Heritage Foundation, Spencer became increasingly upset with Alternative Right continuing. On Christmas of 2013 he pulled the plug on the website, angering the Nowicki and Liddell, who had become the current editors. He moved Vanguard Radio over to his new project, the National Policy Institute affiliated Radix Journal, and renamed it the Radix Journal podcast. Over its years it has interviewed names from the far-right movement, such as anti-semitic psychology academic Kevin McDonald, the male-tribalist Jack Donovan, Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson, American Freedom Party Presidential Candidate Merlin Miller, the Traditionalist Youth Network’s Matthew Heimbach, and Pat Buchanan, among dozens of others. He has included a series looking at films by Stanley Kubrick, James Bond books and movies, and a range of other television and films, all of which intending to bring a sort of artistic intellectualism back to the racist right.
Greg Johnson followed suit, using his podcast stream to host talks that he gave on Plato, speeches by nationalists like Johnatahn Bowden, interviews and panel commentaries on white nationalist topics, and to sync together disparate podcasts like Robert Stark’s the Stark Truth. Matthew Heimbach went on to host episodes at Counter-Currents, help out on the briefly lived Kinest racialist Christian podcast Tribal Theocrat, and to do the occasional Traditionalist Youth Hour. The podcast field was eventually swamped with white nationalist content, with places like the White Voice, the Nationalist Network, and White Rabbit Radio. All of these tended to ally with the conspiracy world, often devolving into White Genocide and Zionist Occupied Government narratives. The very popular Daily Stormer website attempted to bridge the gap between the more bizarre and “old school” factions of the white nationalist scene with the smarter and more contemporary crowd, but they eventually moved their show over to Aryan Radio to be alongside speeches by the neo-Nazi William Pierce.
The internet has been critical for outreach of these groups, and it has been since the mid-1990s, so the fact that there are entire podcast networks dedicated to their work is not surprising. What is disturbing, however, is the popularity that many of them have gotten. Radix Journal Podcast and The Daily Shoah, especially, are seeing a renaissance in terms of listeners. The Daily Shoah, which is the podcast project of The Right Stuff, has only been around since early August 2014 but has already soared in popularity. This has come mainly from their “Opie and Anthony” approach to politics where they have vulgar skits targeting Jews, people of color, and LGBT people in the most disgusting language possible. Their popularity has led for them to develop a podcast network of their own coming out of their own crowd, all of which are complete with their own jargon and code-names. This includes Free Radio Skyrim, Fash Britannia, and Fash the Nation, where two hosts banter mainly about how Donald Trump is the savior of the white race and that Bernie Sanders is just a Jew.
The tools that have allowed their successful outreach are the same ones that have aided the general public in creating the podcasting revolution. Soundcloud and iTunes are just as accessible for amateur podcasters as they are to NPR, which means that they have incredibly mainstream access points for their streams. Soundcloud will flag certain types of content, and just a few weeks ago it banned The Daily Shoah for violating its terms of use. TRS obviously made a joke of this, but it slowed them down as they briefly had to host over at the clunky Archive.org. They wanted to just host on their own website, but at the point at which they post their show there are literally thousands of downloads. On every weekly episode they read donations, which account to hundreds of dollars a week, coming from listener donations.
The Radix Journal podcast itself has maintained the popularity immensely, and you can see that on their Soundcloud listings there are between 3,000 and 20,000 full listens even on shows that have not been available for very long. Spencer has done this all in an incredibly smart way as he utilizes his iTunes streams effectively. He uses multiple channels, one for the regular podcast, one for the audio of speeches at his conferences, and one for the older conversations he had with Jonathan Bowden several years ago. All of the podcast stream in iTunes with an RSS feed, which is the same deal with The Daily Shoah, Counter-Currents, Tribal Theocrat, American Renaissance, and several others. Even for less specific far-right projects, like Jack Donovan’s Start the World or The Pressure Project, subscribers are in the thousands, and only increasing. As places like The Daily Shoah helped to increase the number of white nationalists active in these online publications and forums, Radix took off as well. In 2015, Spencer increased his podcasting to about once a week, and the listenership tripled. He has now publicly committed to doing a once a week podcast, a once a week video(which will also be streamed on the podcast), and also doing a monthly Google Hangout on YouTube, which is a format that has become popular for The Daily Shoah contributor, Millenial Woes. What this amounts to, when looking at the entire Alt Right network of media, is an almost constant stream of content who is increasing more rapidly than anyone would have expected. Spencer says that he expects to, conservatively, double his reach in 2016, and he just might be right.
Stormfront itself has created a podcast of its own, a five day a week operation where Don Black babbles incoherently, showing both that he is out of touch with the world and even his own movement. This feed has failed to become anywhere near as popular as his successors, which generally shows how different that movement of today has become and how it has left the old-guard racialist groups in the dust. Even leaving out this radical fringe of the fringe, the numbers are staggering when you simply look at just how many people are listening to the vast majority of these shows on an almost daily basis.
People assume that a huge part of this increase is the candidacy of Donald Trump, and it certainly is, as well as white reaction to changing demographics, refugee immigration, recent crimes from Islamic participants, and Black Lives Matter. The real issue, however, is less that there is just a “spark” that has caused it, and rather than this new generation of the radical right is just more effective at targeting and growing their base. They have crafted a message that is more effective than the KKK ever had, and now they have grown to a point that their community has an echo chamber through social media that allows them to continue growing their reach. In this way, it is less that new converts are being made through events and arguments, and instead that the already-racist are simply being “activated.”
For anti-fascists, this presents an incredible challenge, which means effectively targeting their outlets when possible while continuing to shine a light on the way that they code their messages. An example of this is their use of iTunes is almost monolithic, and Soundcloud has already proved that it is not going to accept open racialist content. What anti-fascists and anti-racists cannot do is continue to ignore this faction of the racist community, assuming that they are only an irrelevant fringe. Instead, their growth signals a real shift in the thinking, and it is going to be critical to grow anti-racist work, confront their organizing directly, and to develop strategies that go far beyond liberal anti-racists narratives so that the very structures of racial inequality can be dismantled. “No Platform” is critical in this context, and now we are heading to the digital world of confrontation as well as meeting them in the streets.
So as followers of this blog will note, we have stayed closely to the more fringe elements of white nationalism and the far right. This means looking towards various Third Positionist movements, National Anarchism, racial paganism, and, of course, neo-folk and related musical genres. We would never claim that the entire genre is fascist in nature, really only a small subset of bands are in the grand scheme of things, but they have been influential in the aesthetics, lyrical content, and style of the movement.
The harbringer of this turn is the seminal neo-folk band, Death in June. People will note them for their extensive use of Nazi and fascist imagery, which people try to claim is either ironic, non-racial pagan, shock value, or some other apologetic notion. Douglas Pearce, the masked front man of DiJ, has repeatedly countered this view with his open racist comments, support for Third Positionist/Strasserite National Socialism, and his racialized Nordic Odinism. This is a point that has been outlined in many, many places before, so instead of retreading the evidence for the band’s racist positions and connections, we will simply post a reading list below with links to articles that expand on this. DoJ makes up a racialist undercurrent of bands that all intertwine, including Sol Invictus, Blood Axis, Boyd Rice, and many other neo-folk, martial industrial, pagan metal, and black metal bands.
DiJ and its cohorts are destructive parasites on music culture, where they have infected goth and industrial musical subculture with nationalist notions. Pearce has continued, and will continue when confronted, to hide behind the fact that he is an open gay man and has worked in Jews, but this is only a complexity that is built on a much more deeply running idea of racial folkish nationalism. Even though he may not share every aspect of victimizing fascist ideologies, he certainly pairs the Might is Right, racial separatism, and cult of violence that makes up the genocidal nationalist project. More importantly, he creates a space for a “rainbow” assortment of those on the far right, and almost none of their concerts pass without participation from local white nationalists, skinheads, neo-Nazis, Odinists, Men’s Rights Activists, and others on the racist “Alternative Right.” Plainly put: Death in June is a “hip” meet-up point for those who want to dethrone equality and democracy and institute a brutal hierarchical order built on racial, gender, and sexual divisions. Whether the followers use fancy terms like “anarcho-Monarchist” or “Dark Enlightenment,” they share the same philosophical trend that makes up our direct opposition.
Death in June is heading out on tour for the end of November and all of December. Antifa has seen some of their biggest successes in shutting down Death in June events, which can sometimes be the largest white power event in a city all year. The “no platform” principle of Antifa organizing is incredibly important here, where the first organizing strategy can be to pressure the venue to cancel the show. Most venues do not even know who they are offering the space to, and certainly do not want to invite the kind of conflict or characters that are insured at a DiJ show. If they double down, as they have in many instances, then this means confronting the event as it is happening and doing what is possible to stop DiJ from having a space to operate. In these instances, we can draw heavily from the community, to have a groundswell that is not going to tolerate old-fashioned racist ideas under the guise of hipster irony and nature worship. DiJ actions have been especially successful from the participation of anti-racist pagans and music fans who are tired of being associated with a vile racist undercurrent.
They will also be touring with a band Spiritual Front, which is more up front about their white nationalism than even Death in June.
Below, we are listing all of the Death in June concert dates and location, including the venues. You can choose the venue link or the Facebook to get the phone number and email, both of which are good for contact. It is also a good idea to try posting messages on the venue’s Facebook page, but expect DiJ fans to begin insulting you. Locally, groups should begin to organize counter actions, as well and having “call ins” in coordinating blasts to show the venues that the community will not tolerate this kind of racialist music in their city.
Today, Anonymous finally released the Ku Klux Klan membership names and info that they had promised for weeks. A few days ago there was a false alarm, which named a number of national politicians as members. Now the complete list has come in and is showing just how “diverse” the KKK rolls are today, and how many Klan organizations and locals there really are.
The list itself is actually more work than we had anticipated, with a lot of explanation of how many Klan organizations there actually are, what city and state each are in, and links to private social media and internet groups. The list itself seems pretty well supported and is unlike the previous “leak,” with many of the people on here being known from public racist actions and violent crimes. Anonymous activists state that the investigation itself took eleven months and took on both their hacking operations as well as journalistic sources like public records, interviews, and surveillance. They especially note the crossover between Klan and neo-Nazi groups, as well as connections to more mainstream radical right organizations. They have gone to great lengths to investigate and include aliases, including things like Reddit usernames(many of which are so ugly and vile that they placed a Trigger Warning before the list). In terms of details, there are a lot, including personal information about where members went to school and who their close relatives and associates are.
This list will likely be the targeted roster for people doing ongoing anti-fascist and anti-racist work to start and remove this type of racialist movement from their community. Let’s hope that organizers move past just going after obvious targets like the KKK, and we move to collectively target racism as it occurs in most communities.
