The Alt Right is, fundamentally, a social media phenomenon. The concept of the Alt Right has been around since 2010, a specific confluence of white nationalism influenced by various strands of thought including Neoreaction, Paleoconservatism, the European New Right, and so on. The phenomonon of the Alt Right, as we know it today, is that of the popularization of those ideas, turning their racialism into Twitter trolls, snarky blogs, and annoying podcasts. They have relied on Web 2.0 platforms like Twitter for publicity and SoundCloud for podcast hosting because it puts them on an equal footing with the giants of media opinion.
The only problem is that their racism violates every rule the platform has, giving them a finite life. Over the last year many of their leaders have been banned from Twitter. First, Milo Yiannoupoulos of Breitbart was shuttered for leading a racist harassment raid on actress Leslie Jones. Later Ricky Vaughn was kicked off, and then Richard Spencer and many others. Likewise, SoundCloud began dropping white nationalist podcasts like the Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation, and PayPal severed their funding. Though many of them are trying to make new platforms like Gab their home, they just aren’t going to happen in the public consciousness.
On Saturday, February 4th, Twitter just went through on a huge banning campaign. They shut down Charles Johnson (AKA Reactionary Tree), the account for the newly form AltRight.com, Dr. Joyce, Murdoch/ Murdoch, and several dozen other Alt Right figures were dropped from Twitter. This is the only way for them to break into the mainstream even a little bit, which is a huge hit to a movement that needs this trolling platform to find a place for itself. Cuckservative gave it a boost, #AltRight gave it a name, and its ability to take racism viral is what made it relevant, and without platforms like Twitter it is almost as though it will cease to be.
At the same time, Reddit has begun the purge of Alt Right subreddits that have become a home for the ugliest racism on the Internet. R/AltRight and R/AlternativeRight has been banned from the site, with R/The_Donald likely to be next. What this shows clearly is that they are banning them based on ideological grounds, understanding that Alt Right online forums are where plans for doxing and harassment begin.
While the Alt Right is still larger than we ever could have imagined a few years ago, the last six months have been a brutal social attack on them, and they are reeling.
Among the crowd of well-dressed white nationalists that made up the now infamous National Policy Institute conference in November 2016, he certainly stood out. In a purple t-shirt, an unkempt man with a thick Scottish accent took to grand metaphor and shocking allegations to keep across a message of white separatism. Millennial Woes, the pseudonym for Colin Robertson, has become an Alt Right star in the caustic cauldron that was 2016. His strange YouTube videos, often long-winded Google Hangouts with other Alt Right celebrities, are so numerous that in the world of constant racist podcast streams and talking-head webcams, he has stood out.
Colin Robertson – Millenial Woes
While his face has been well seen over the last two years, he has attempted to remain completely anonymous. The expectation was that his name, address, and personal information would remain his own, hidden from the media, all while his face and voice became ubiquitous, easily accessible in a search engine. When British tabloids finally revealed who he was several weeks ago, the only person that seemed surprised that this occurred was Robertson.
The Alt Right, as it exists today, has relied on anonymity as the key to its growth. White nationalism has been personally toxic for decades, and someone’s associations with open racism and anti-Semitism often making it difficult for them to keep a job or a hold down relationship. The ability for people to interact in a meaningful way while remaining anonymous to the general public has been exactly what the Alt Right needed to get a large base of educated Middle Class racists, exactly the crowd who would not be willing to give up their comfortable life in the way that many public KKK members and neo-Nazis have. They have been able to have their cake and eat it too: they keep their bourgeois lives in tact while also continuing to contribute to a revolutionary fascist movement.
The step beyond being a Twitter “shitlord” was to start blogging and, later, podcasting, where people could hear your racial slurs without ever seeing the face of the person on the other end of the microphone. This became popular as pseudoanonymous Alt Right ideologues became well known, from the crowd at The Right Stuff podcast network to people like Paul Kersey and his blog Things Black People Don’t Like. The number of people living under false names yet joining weekly web radio shows is growing, all with the idea that their anonymity could be maintained for the long-term. As they make the next step towards in-person organizing, this step is even more difficult, making it impossible to remain in obscurity for long.
Emily Youcis
2016’s National Policy Institute conference was the largest white nationalist event of the year, a place where the Alt Right could get together to pat each other on the back after a year of media validation and the arrival of the Trump Train. In the crowd were scores of these Alt Right media celebrities, both “out” and still under the radar. Emily Youcis has recently made a name for herself for her surrealist Alt Right cartoons and vicious racist remarks, and she stormed out of the building to tangle with the protesters out front. After the aggressive confrontation and heavy media saturation of the event, Youcis was fired from her job selling pistachios for the Philadelphia Phillies. She has since then gone on the Alt Right blogosphere and Twitter to make appeals for donations since she now lacks an income to make her bills. Youcis had not hidden her face or name from the public, and so retribution from her employer was a matter of time. For others, they have worked hard to keep their images out of photos and hide information so as to avoid recognition.
Cooper Ward – Ghoul
The Daily Shoah has been the center of this effort, becoming a popular podcast that streams to thousands of listeners who tune in every week to hear their “Opie and Anthony for white nationalists” brand of angry racial epithets. The hosts Mike Enoch, Seventh Son, Ghoul, and, off and on, Bulbasaur, rant about weekly political issues, inventing their own racial slurs, talking about “Jewish domination,” and pining for a “white Ethnostate.” After Ghoul began doing a video series without a mask and publicizing his image, activists quickly identified him as Cooper Ward, a talkative philosophy student at the University of Nebraska. He was quickly identified as an organizer with the white nationalist American Vanguard, though he has denied this when questioned by It’s Going Down. After Red Ice Radio hosted a show with a “reactionary Jew” who was asking if fascist Jews could be a part of the Alt Right, something akin to a meltdown occurred on the Right Stuff message boards. The hosts of the Daily Shoah were accused of being Jews and homosexual sympathizers; funny since they have been some of the most virulently anti-Semitic and homophobic people imaginable.
Van Bryant II – Bubasaur
After some prodding on both sides, Bulbasaur and Seventh Son were doxed by their former fans, revealing them to be Van Bryant II and Jesse Craig Dunstan, respectively. While they have discussed the desire to go public for quite some time, the fact that this could have ramifications for their careers is something they could not abide. Enoch, their talkative leader, was a software developer making a six-figure salary in Manhattan, and he took special accommodations to avoid being identified in his personal life while skyrocketing to fame in the white nationalist circuit.
Just a few days later people started hearing rumblings that Enoch was about to be revealed after someone traced an article he mentioned on Red Ice Radio to a post on The Mises Institute website from years before, and then used an old PayPal address to find his real name: Mike Peinovich. The internet came apart at the seams at this point as Mike Peinovich was revealed to be one of the most well known white nationalists in the country. He was immediately fired from his job at the tech startup Pronoun, where he was a front-end developer. His family reportedly then disowned him, except for this wife.
It was at this point that the Peinovich saga took an even more bizarre turn as it was then revealed that his wife, Ames Friedman, a PR executive in New York, was Jewish. This made the neo-Nazi wing of the Alt Right lose their mind and declare that Enoch was a “Jewish spy,” and Enoch conceded that he had hid this. He went on Rebel Yell to apologize profusely for what he has done, and it was even suggested that he was leaving his wife. It does appear now that they will stay together, though he continues to believe that Jews are subversive agents out to destroy the white race. Without a job and having lost everything, Enoch is vowing to continue to push the Right Stuff and the Daily Shoah forward, though he has been “rent seeking” for money to pay his bills while he waits to start his media empire.
While these revelations are fresh, it is clear that the fallout has been dramatic, and several have started hiding from the limelight. First, Cooper Ward left The Daily Shoah, and later so did Van Bryant, also pulling all of his social media from the Internet. Jess Dunstan has not gone into complete hiding, and even put a song by his own band on a co-hosted episode of Fash the Nation, which many are interpreting to mean that he is comfortable with taking the next step into doing this work in real life. He later began saying his name on the air, refusing to hide like his “comrades” did. This is likely because he is self-employed, though the fallout is likely to continue in this regard.
The real results of this kind of revelation can be seen as newspapers arrived at the home of Colin Robertson, asking to speak with the man behind Millennial Woes. They were instead met with the police as Robertson cowered inside, refusing to allow the press to see his face. In a statement put up on his YouTube channel he said he had left the country and is being supported by a network of his supporters. His YouTube channel has become one of the dominant institutions on the Alt Right, with over five hundred videos and 23,000 subscribers. He put out a public statement saying that he has had to go into hiding in another country and that this may be the end of his anonymous career, one built on such a tenuous grasp on reality that he actually believed he could go under the radar while putting his face on camera.
The growth of the Alt Right has rested solely on the ability to have a voice while remaining anonymous. The Right Stuff, Millennial Woes, and more blogs and podcasts than we can count have been built on this principle, with podcasts like the Neoreaction Ascending the Tower or The Fatherland being open about what would happen if they were doxed. If their identities were revealed then lucrative careers would be shattered, marriages and families torn apart, and social outcast status imposed. Part of what has kept white nationalism to the fringes and the participation of only the edges of acceptable society is that there are consequences for participation, and this rash of Internet participation has tried to blow this open. Now, a series of doxings is closing this window back up.
Some on the Alt Right are trying to push back on this and create a network of support for those being revealed. Part of this is white nationalist attorney Kyle Bristow’s Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, an organization founded to “promote the United States Constitution and to oppose people who and organizations which strive to usurp the freedoms it guarantees.” Bristow, who gained much of his experience consulting National Alliance projects, hopes to fund those who are losing their careers for white nationalist participation, namely though some form of crowd funding.
What they want, more than anything, is to create negative consequences for those who do the doxing. They had a small victory when a Salon editor was fired after posting Richard Spencer’s address on Facebook with a line about how his grandparents “took baseball bats to Bund meetings.” While they thought this was a step in the right direction, as the punching of Richard Spencer shows clearly, the culture has shifted even further into an antifascist mindset. Trump’s election put a sense of urgency around a general disgust with the far right, and now more and more people are willing to stand up and take a militant approach to organizing. At the same time, even the centrist and moderate left public is unwilling to let the Alt Right pass in their midst, which means it is still just as toxic as it ever was to be an open white nationalist.
While the Alt Right wanted to create consequences for those doxing them, journalists are continuing to reveal their information. Fash the Nation, which was the most popular podcast in the Right Stuff podcast network, went off the air and took down its website when they got wind that they were about to be doxed. Their information will still likely come out shortly, and there is little they can do as their work has been mirrored all over the internet. At the same time, their toxic internal culture threatens to dox them daily, and there is little reason to believe that the structure of anonymity will continue more than a few more months. The Alt Right now has a choice: go big or go home. The answer for many of the middle class young adherents will be to choose a family and a career over a failed revolutionary tract.
The question will be if those that are going out in the open will find enough to sustain themselves, and most will quickly see that the future for people like Mike Peinovich are less than rosy. Few people can get the family and investment funds that Richard Spencer has achieved, and therefore life as an open racist is going to be difficult. For antifascists, it will be important to institutionalize this information as much as possible; to follow up when the information is revealed and make sure everyone in their life is aware. It will also mean replicating this over and over again, therefore robbing them of the sense that they can hold down a normal existence while actively contributing to that movement. It will also mean confronting their platform hosting, distribution companies, and financial tools to sever their access to the culture and their ability to raise funds. Without this, a life out of the closet is even less viable.
This end result was inevitable for a movement who never reconciled the fact that they went full fascist with ugly racism without developing a professional infrastructure. What the Daily Shoah did was create a fandom off of the most disgusting kinds of racist humor imaginable, all of which was not slow enough to bring the culture with it. This is to our benefit since we know that they lack the ability to propagandize society and since they couldn’t insulate their vanguard from consequences, they will lose them as well. All the pieces are here for antifascist organizations; all it requires now is to use them thoughtfully and effectively.
The Daily Shoah has been one of the most popular Alt Right podcasts for the last three years, redefining the Alt Right culture with its internal jargon and snarky online troll behavior. They have stayed on the air and expanded by the regular donations of users. They had a PayPal account that they would receive donations from and, for some reason, they would read out the donations by name every week. This was starting to amount to several hundred dollars a week, that was until PayPal got wind of what they were doing.
Since their hate speech was a violation of PayPal’s Terms of Service, they banned them from using the service. This shuddered the Daily Shoah’s income source immediately and sent them scrambling, using strange libertarian services in other countries to basically receive and pay for things with BitCoin. They eventually just gave in and created another PayPal account, this time not listing it publicly and only telling its supporters and donors privately.
That PayPal account is done in violation of those Terms of Service, and is now servicing hundreds of donations a week, bringing them to one of the most well supported white nationalists publications around.
If you want to let PayPal know exactly what the Daily Shoah is doing, that they have been banned before and are continuing to try to fund their white nationalist operation through PayPal, you can do this below.
Contact aupviolations@paypal.comto report the Daily Shoah and their violation of the Terms of Service.
It is well known that white nationalists/Alt Right are some of the worst organizers on the planet. In general, just successfully getting a meme or poster into the public is considered a win for them, while their left wing opponents are carrying out complex organizing campaigns with thousands of participants.
Flyer from UM Campus.
The Daily Shoah, and its website The Right Stuff, is not calling for an “agit prop” attempt at propaganda the weekend after the election. Following Alt Right posterings at the University of Michigan and the Iowa State University, who most assume the Daily Shoah was behind even though they persist they were not, they are calling for posters to be put up at major universities after the election. If Trump is to win, then it will gloat, if he does not, then it will scale up the revolutionary call for “white identity.”
Flyer from UM campus.
Mike Enoch and Seventh Son (Sven) from the Daily Shoah cite the multi-million dollar to commitment the University of Michigan made after the Alt Right posters showed up as a victory. In response to the racialist content they university extended a huge investment in diversity training and inclusionary policy developments, something that the Alt Right is claiming victory on even though anti-racist organizers have been campaigning for it for years. Since, statistically, these diversity trainings actually lower community feelings of bigotry, equalize educational outcomes, and generally work against white nationalist interests, we are going to allow them to continue their “victorious campaign” by inspiring more universities to confront racism.
What is likely to occur is many college-aged Daily Shoah insiders are going to go on campus with these posters during that weekend, attempting to get them up in the cover of night. The Daily Shoah has worked hard to develop a community around their message boards, and that is spilling out into actual community groups like the Houston Goylers in Houston, Texas, the New York Forum, in New York City, and groups in Dallas, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, and other cities. They have given the Alt Right a huge organizational boon, and they seem to have a great deal of crossover with Identity Europa.
Many of the flyers that will be used are found on Alt Right and Right Stuff commentator Reactionary Tree’s, A.K.A. Charles Lyons, website. Here he has been putting up some racially charged propaganda.
Identity Europa poster from a San Francisco suburb.
For those who want to confront this behavior on campuses, then groups of students and anti-fascist supporters could do late night campus patrols looking to capture these people on camera. Since they thrive on anonymity for their racism, exposure will shut down their attempts at organizing. This is likely to take place on campuses that have seen this behavior before, especially where Identity Europa propaganda posters have appeared.
Some potential schools are (Based on where Alt Right and Identity Europa materials have recently appeared.):
Many of us were horrified when Alt Right staple podcast Fash the Nation, the most popular podcast in the Right Stuff white nationalist podcast network, hit the top spot in one of the political subcategories at SoundCloud. Like most Alt Right podcasts, Fash the Nation relies on platforms like SoundCloud to meet most of their audience since these reach the largest listening audience. They are also violating the Terms of Service given their pervasive use of racial slurs, arguments that people of color have lower IQs than whites, Holocaust Denial, and other forms of racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and generally disgusting banter.
After many anti-fascists, including Anti-Fascist News, began a campaign to let SoundCloud know exactly what Fash the Nation, the Daily Shoah, and other white nationalist podcasts were using SoundCloud for, they were officially banned and removed from the podcast platform. After being let know that they were “dedicated to violating the Terms of Service,” their shows were all removed from their hosting and they were prohibited from posting new shows. As the largest and most popular white nationalist podcast in the country, this is a major blow to their effort. This comes after the Daily Shoah was banned on SoundCloud, then used another name to get back on. They were banned once again along with Fash the Nation after anti-fascists let SoundCloud know that they were attempting to go under the radar.
While this is a victory, there are still several dozen other white nationalist podcasts that are still using SoundCloud. They have to continue to be exposed and removed, disallowing these racists a platform for their violent rhetoric. They are attempting to build their own platform for hosting and podcasting currently, and we hope they do as it will further marginalize them and shrink their echo chamber. They require social media and broad hosting platforms to mainstream their message, and if they slowly are banned from these services they will only be accessible to their ideological core.
Below we are including the contact information to report these podcasts to SoundCloud, as well as a list of open white nationalist Alt Right podcasts that are using SoundCloud to extend their reach of violence. Write and call in and let them know that you do not support these voices of racial nationalism and reactionary force on SoundCloud!
Here you can report the above podcasts for hate speech, which all of them openly violate. TRS Radio especially violates this as they are broadcasting a podcast that was already banned explicitly.
Twitter has been the place that the Alt Right really came into their own. Lax rules mixed with a culture of anonymity let the Alt Right expand beyond their publishing ideologues and into the snarky culture of memes, hash tags, and trolling. While this is where their numbers have ballooned, one of their archetypes is complete in Ricky Vaughn. Named after the character in the movie Major League, Vaughn epitomizes the Alt Right troll, harassing Jewish commentators and people of color and taking Alt Right arguments and crystalizing them down to snarky bite-sized bits. After Vaughn amassed 60,000 followers with his “edgelord” harassment, Twitter finally banned him for violating behavior.
Vaughn’s ideas are as basic as can be, which has lent to his success. When he describes his political evolution he says things like “I tried liberalism, then I tried conservatism” boiling down complex political positions to the most simplistic ideologies that is surprising he is able to put together coherent political points. This may be why he has limited his commentary to 140 characters rather than any substantial articles. After getting his start on the controversial My Posting Career, he went onto Twitter with RickyVaughn99 in an attempt to bridge mainstream Trump supporters with Alt Right talking points, gaining popularity after Gamergate. Here he mixed his criticism against non-white immigration with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of people like Kevin MacDonald. He was cited often as one of the conversation influencers on Twitter, especially with Alt Right hashtags like #whitegenocide, and was followed by three Trump staffers.
Though he may be arguing that it was his “Free Speech” being violated, Twitter only bans users for harassing behavior and for things that are deemed incitements to violence. Alt Lite commentator Milo Yiannoupolos was also recently banned on Twitter after he incited followers to racially terrorize Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. This is a major blow to the Alt Right since they rely on this trolling culture, and it seems like Twitter and other social media outlets are starting to refuse to participate. They recently had to soften their language to racist “codewords” since open racial slurs are getting them banned.
There is a difficult side to this as well since Twitter could, theoretically, start banning people for other reasons as well. What we can focus on, however, is their behavior and how we can set standards for conduct in these social media spaces that do not allow for racist harassment. Going after the Alt Right where it lives, the Internet, allows us to cut it off at the source, and win in the only arena that they have ever had any real success in.
In a recent episode of Fash the Nation, the most popular podcast on the Right Stuff Alt Right podcast network, hosts Jazz Hands McFeels and Marcus Halberstram joked with glee that their podcast had hit #1 on SoundCloud. Though this may be shocking, it is actually only the top spot among conservative political podcasts, though this is still a frightening development. Podcasting has been a central tool of Alt Right white nationalism, with early adopters like Richard Spencer of Radix Journal really making it a key point of outreach. The model was further popularized by The Right Stuff, who took an “Opie and Anthony” styled talk show format with Alt Right themes, complete with their own Chan type jargon and aggressive use of racial slurs and incendiary rhetoric.
In recent months the content has been made obvious on many platforms, with the Radix Journal podcast and Red Ice Radio being dropped from iTunes and the Daily Shoah being let loose from SoundCloud. This shuddering, however, seems to be short lived as the growing Right Stuff podcast network, of which the Daily Shoah is the flagship, has made SoundCloud a key broadcasting and outreach platform.
The Daily Shoah itself has found a way to get back onto SoundCloud by going under their radar, being aware that their name is likely what brought attention on them in the first place. There are multiple streams and accounts at play for the various Right Stuff podcasts, including shows like the Weekly Narrative and the Darwin Digest. The Daily Shoah is now included in their complete stream, just called TRS Radio, and streamed with the name “TDS” and then the episode number. This is essentially a way to trick SoundCloud into allowing them to broadcast even though they have been banned.
Following the Right Stuff’s example, other fascist organizations are using SoundCloud to start their podcast outreach. Nathan Damigo and Identity Europa are now broadcasting under the name On the Front, while there are also accounts for white supremacist troll Weev, the Radix Journal, the New Alternative Right, Red Ice Radio, Radio ThreeFourtheen, and many others.
SoundCloud has already shown that they are not going to tolerate openly racist podcasting on their platform, so it begs the question as to why it is continuing. The primary reason is that the issue itself just has not been raised. What this means is that anti-racists internationally need to contact them and let them know exactly what is going on here and what podcasts are broadcasting a message of hate.
Below we are including the contact information to report these podcasts to SoundCloud, as well as a list of open white nationalist Alt Right podcasts that are using SoundCloud to extend their reach of violence. Write and call in and let them know that you do not support these voices of racial nationalism and reactionary force on SoundCloud!
Here you can report the above podcasts for hate speech, which all of them openly violate. TRS Radio especially violates this as they are broadcasting a podcast that was already banned explicitly.
In the ramp up to Hillary Clinton’s Alt Right speech and in the aftermath the Alt Right headed into the public media consciousness. Drawing together the appointment of Stephen Bannon with the conspiracy popularity of Infowars and the racist crew of Twitter trolls, she has allowed a layer of media scrutiny to somewhat misrepresent the Alt Right. Her speech was generally a positive move and none of us expected her to get all the details right. As profiles came from every major news outlet, few actually got the characterization of the Alt Right correct.
What this allowed for, and what was already happening as the Alt Right label became popular over the past few months, is received a layer of commentators and angry white voices have begun calling themselves Alt Right without holding the real ideological foundations. Breitbart, the Donald Trump campaign, Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannapoulos, and a whole range of Twitter commentators and Trump supporters have been labeled as Alt Right, either by the media externally or in a sort of self-imposed Edgelord identity.
This phenomenon has been labeled by those in the Alt Right as the Alt Lite, and while it has presented them with a huge boost in exposure, it has also created a problem for their ideological consistency.
The Alt Lite mainstreams most of the Alt Right’s most public and middle ground political positions. Immigration restriction, anti-political correctness, Islamophobic policies, anti-feminism, and other Trump-like proposals. These are all superstructural positions, manifestations of an underlying politic that many in the Alt Lite do not share. While places like Breitbart are helping to fight the Alt Right’s war on immigration and demonizing voices of color, they are not necessarily centered on their white nationalism, race and IQ beliefs, and vicious anti-Semitism
A recent story released by the Forward written by Josh Seidel called “I’m a Jews, and I’m A Member of the Alt Right” was the most cited of these, and likely the one that made the most Alt Right members angry. Here he pronounces a politically incorrect, Trump supporting opinion, one that is void of almost all the features that those of us who track far-right groups would actually ascribe to the Alt Right. He was one of the many commentators who have taken on the label, using the trendy term Alt Right to simply describe their own mildly controversial views, ones that are inconsistent among these voices and not set in the ideological roots that all actual Alt Right publications agree on.
Richard Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute and the Radix Journal, is one of the centers of the Alt Right, and has been generally positive about this development. He calls himself “pro-Alt Lite,” but does say that they need to maintain ideological consistency and watch out for entryism. There is not likely to be actual conservative entryism into the Alt Right, but he is right that those with more middle ground views who simply want to appear “edgy” will help to moderate their movement.
The Right Stuff and its signature podcast, the Daily Shoah, was less happy when looking at this phenomenon, especially Jews calling themselves Alt Right. In an article called “I’m a Jews and I’m Party of the Alt Right, Trust Me Goy!” they provided an ironic commentary suggesting that conspiratorial Jews are trying to destroy the Alt Right from the inside. Here they outlined four key parts of the Alt Right that must be observed, including:
Opposing Illegal Immigration
No Globalist Elites
Natural gender roles
Anti-Semitism
The last was incredibly important to them, and one that they stress in this article that jokingly takes on a “Jewish” voice.
Unfortunately, as I said earlier there is a very vocal minority of people who claim to be part of the Alt-Right who spread anti-Semitic memes all across the Internet. They share pictures of Jews being shoved into ovens like it’s nothing. If you ask them about their disrespect they claim the Holocaust never even happened. Can you believe that? In the Current Year people still believe that the 6 million were not gassed and ovened. I got so angry one day that I asked one of these Alt-Right pretenders where they got the idea that the Holocaust never happened. The pompous brat rattled off some gibberish about there “not being any paperwork explicitly calling for the extermination of the Jews.” He even showed me a stupid coin that had a swastika (OY VEY) on one side and a Star of David on the other. As if that’s supposed to mean anything! Then he had the gall to link me to some despic–uh, I mean, confused gentile pastor who babbled on about high tech ovens and asked a funeral director about cremation times. These people are loco, amigo! So, to summarize my feelings on the matter, I don’t really care. American children are told the truth about the Holocaust and the 6 million from age 5 onward. They’re made to read Night at least 3 times and told about Hitler’s sexual derangement due to having one testicle (He was probably into butt stuff too, goys.) They’re taken on field trips to one of a dozen or so handsomely funded Holocaust Museums at least once in their school careers. A vocal minority on Twitter doesn’t scare me; although, those parentheses got real old, real fast.
The most popular podcast on the Alt Right, Fash the Nation, also stressed that Jews cannot be a part of the Alt Right since the Alt Right itself is anti-Jew. What they say very clearly, and what is echoed on almost the entire core Alt Right publications from Counter Currents to the New Alternative Right, is that Jews are responsible for undermining Western identity through globalism, immigration, feminism, queerness, and other “degeneracies” that stop White men from running a nation “in their interests.” Fash the Nation actually sites another Alt Right commentator, Lawrence Murray (a joking Semitic pseudonym) and their “principles” of what makes up the Alt Right.
(We are shortening these obviously, they clearly think that their LONG definitions are important, but you will get the drift.)
People are different.
Our world is tribal.
Our tribe is being suppressed
Men are not women and women are not men.
Freedom is a responsibility and not a right.
If we must be a democratic society, the franchise should be limited.
Jewish elites are opposed to our entire program.
While they try to have a conversational and inoffensive tone, the politic here is clear. This is ideologically in line with almost all neo-fascist programs, one that see the traditional gender roles as necessary, that racial groups are unequal, that democracy should only be for the racial “in group,” that freedom needs to be subsumed to only certain caste levels, and that Jews are the enemy. They go on to cite people like Kevin MacDonald, the anti-Semitic psychology professor who has made it his life’s work to prove that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” to confuse Gentiles and undermine their nations.
Greg Johnson, the esoteric white supremacist founder of the Alt Right publishing house Counter Currents, posted an article that sums up a sentiment that we actually agree with completely. Called “The Alt Right Means White Nationalism…or Nothing at All” he outlines what the Alt Right is versus what the Alt Lite wants it to be.
Like paleoconservatism, the Alternative Right was simply a way that timid, status-conscious conservatives could flirt with racism and even anti-Semitism while maintaining some sort of pretense of mainstream credibility.
But when Richard Spencer started the Alternative Right webzine in 2010, the principal funders and writers regarded it simply as a vehicle for White Nationalist entryism, and they would have blown it up rather than see it become anything else. Today’s White Nationalists need to take the same strongly proprietary attitude toward the Alternative Right. It is a vehicle of White Nationalism, and we will give it the Howard Roark treatment if it is hijacked from us. Full stop
Johnson is not as sympathetic to the Alt Lite phenomon as others are because he notes that Counter Currents has not really seen a traffic bump through the search terms after the Clinton speech. This kind of analysis is a good metric for the development, one that Johnson has always been pretty apt at reading. Johnson’s work is ideologically consistent, one that shows the clear connection between the Alt Right and the esoteric mysticism, Germanic neopaganism, and occultism that many associate with the spiritual ideas that run parallel to fascist movements. While associating with the surface level of Alt Right “Shitlords” on popular websites and Twitter handles, Counter Currents continues to publish books by people like Savitri Devi, a white Hindu woman who believed that Hitler was a divine avatar and that the caste system should be enforced through authoritarian violence. While many on the Alt Right associate more with a atheist “race realist” perspective, there is still a reverence for these more occult and spiritual positions echoing through all Alt Right institutions, with some, like Neoreactionaries and the Radix Journal, being more explicit about the “spiritual” foundations for their racism.
Andy Nowicki, a writer who was popularized as a co-host of Vanguard Radio, the original podcast of Alternative Right, is now the editor of the New Alternative Right website (the original was deleted by Richard Spencer amid protest by Nowicki). In his article “What the Alt Right Means to Me (Hillary Clinton Remix),” echoes this sentiment, even though Nowicki himself is not a strict White Nationalist.
In general, places like American Renaissance, Red Ice Radio, and the vlogger Millennial Woes have all created “intro videos” for the Alt Right to help orient Alt Liters, all of which are explicit about their racism, anti-Semitism, and opposition to democracy and equality.
While the Alt Lite phenomenon may be difficult for those on the Alt Right, it also presents challenges for anti-fascists. If the Alt Right is dumbed down to just means iconoclastic American conservatism, it is harder to make the connections that their public ideas, like immigration restriction and Trump success, is rooted in white nationalism. That is the source of this politic even if some recent “converts” are using the Alt Right label without accepting all of its dirty laundry. What the Alt Right will do over the next several weeks is to double down on its more unsavory connections, something that will reverberate through the Alt Lite as it becomes more and more apparent what the phrase, and the ideology, really means.
For those on the anti-fascist left it means continuing to name names when it comes to the Alt Right, and to not let their silly arguments about crime, immigrations, and politically correct speech be the end of the conversation. Instead, we should help the Alt Right tell the truth, so to speak, so that they can consistently reveal who they are.
We need to call the Alt Right what it is: fascist.
Hillary’s speech from August 25th was rumored for days in advance, with the fact that she was addressing the Alt Right well known. This sent many in the press running to get this phenomenon figured out, while at the same time the Alt Righters were waiting to hit their moment of peak visibility. With their media savvy, their ability to dominate social media, and their focus on well-packaged talking points, it was quite possible that they were going to be able to set the conversation after Hillary spoke in vague platitudes.
Except this time Hillary was prepped well, and named the fascist. Her speech identified the Alt Right as one element of the racist right wing that is giving Donald Trump his surging popularity. She mentioned Twitter accounts like White Genocide, went after the KKK members that support Trump openly, and even lamented the ludicrous conspiracy theorizing of Alex Jones and Infowars. She took on Breitbart, reading aloud some of the more offensive recent article titles where they showed their hate for women, minorities, and LGBT people.
Hillary’s endgame here is simple: to scare you into voting for her. For our side of things, we recognize that both the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign are representing the interests of capital. They made up a middle-ground of establishment financial politics, ones steeped in Neoconservative foreign policy, international commercial interests, and environmental ruin. Donald Trump shares this position in politics, and laughs about the deregulated markets he attempts to foist on an already drained working class. Together, they make up what we have always expected from American politics: the choice between members of the capitalist class.
As we listened to Hillary’s speech, we knew that she had scored herself a campaign point. She also scored one for us, just not the one she wants.
We will never support the Clinton campaign, or the campaign of any bourgeois politician (this includes Jill Stein). Instead we think that the power of the working class is in movements from the ground up, and in today’s climate that includes organized anti-fascism. What Hillary’s speech did was accurately describe the phenomenon(to a point), named some of the key players, and then tied them directly to their support of Donald Trump.
Over the last couple of weeks, and especially in the last two days, we have seen a number of major news outlets clamor to make sense of the Alt Right. Anti-Fascist News was founded just over a year ago specifically with the idea that we wanted to focus in on the Alt Right from an anti-fascist perspective. Some major media coverage of the Alt Right has been better than others, but many miss the key factors at play with this movement. The recent segments from Fox News painted the Alt Right as synonymous with Donald Trump’s working class white, Middle American base. This confuses the situation and lacks the key lineage that the Alt Right comes from.
Drawing on the racialist organizations of the past, the European neo-fascist organizations, the history of fascist philosophy and spirituality, and various interlocking “traditionalist” and “identitarian” movements, the Alt Right is the latest and most popular confederation of what we would clearly label as fascist. This word is thrown around a lot, often used to mean authoritarian or violent. Instead, the word means a political movement founded in inequality, elitism, “essential” identity such as race or gender, hierarchy, “traditional values,” and a romantic view of the past. While this has some common historical forms, it can creep up with a variety of different political structures and programs. National anarchists, radical traditionalists, the Dark Enlightenment, paleoconservatism, “race realism,” racial paganism, identitarianism, and many other self-important philosophies fit under this broader fascist ideological banner, and all of them make up the various wings of the Alt Right. Together they are founded on the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence and “criminality,” that Jews are secretly in control of the government and the media, that feminism is eroding the true structures of man, and that we need to return to the identity and authority of our ancestors.
While Breitbart, Milo, and Donald Trump may only be the “diet” version of the Alt Right, they are taking their most palatable points and putting them out into bite sizes morsels. The Alt Right has taken the key fascist ideas built over a century of violence and attempts at power and turned them into “fashy memes,” jokes told on 4chan and celebrated at My Posting Career.
In short: the Alt Right has made fascism tweetable. And we are here to shut them down.
With Hillary Clinton’s most recent campaign ad and the direction spoken of in her speech, she has simply helped to mainstream the anti-fascist messaging in the same way that Donald Trump added a loudspeaker to the Alt Right. That does not make her our ally, she never will be. Instead, her speech helped to make the Alt Right known as a racist caricature of itself; a violent movement of vile racism bent on attacking communities of color, putting women in their place, and locking up trans people. While places like the Radix Journal and the Daily Shoah were celebrating the attention, and Alt Right vloggers like Millenial Woes were using it as an opportunity to create a racially-charged promotional video, we get more out of this mention than they could ever hope to.
Now our task is to take her rhetoric much further, and to put the logic of it into practice. It is not enough to name a fascist on the Internet; we need movements capable of undermining them when they show up.
For Richard Spencer, the Republican National Convention was a return to relevance, a coming out party for those who had been out for years before anyone cared.
This was not the first Republican event for Spencer, who spent his early professional years following the small paleoconservative niches blazed by people like Pat Buchannan and Taki Theodoracopulos.After penning a defense of the student Lacrosse players at Duke University who were accused of sexually assaulting a sex worker of color for the William Taft society, he was brought on as an Assistant Editor of arts at the American Conservative.The magazine made a name for itself through Scott McConnell’s attempt to channel Old Right politics into a world disgusted by most of the excess of Neoconservative foreign policy, coming out against the Iraq War while few on the right were.
McConnell eventually helped Spencer to land a job further to the right at Taki’s Magazine, which keeps the overflow of racists let go from places like Forbes and The National Review.As Peter Brimelow left behind his career attacking teacher’s unions for white nationalism and anti-immigrant extremism with his website VDare and John Derbyshire decided to go public with his with race and IQ arguments, Taki’s Magazine became a place where they could continue to rant to an audience that was almost relevant to beltway Conservatism.
It was here that Spencer decided to make a final transition to the fringes based on the community that he was seeing take shape out of the ashes of paleoconservatism.Greg Johnson, the editor of the neo-fascist publishing house Counter Currents described the early days of Alternative Right, which Spencer founded as a “big tent” for these dissident right-wing movements, as a place for ideas often conflicting to find a common ground.
[Alternative Right] will attract the brightest ‘young’ conservatives and libertarians and expose them to far broader intellectual horizons, including race realism, White Nationalism, the European New Right, the Conservative Revolution, Traditionalism, neo-paganism, agrarianism, Third Positionism, anti-feminism, and right-wing anti-capitalists, ecologists, bioregionalists, and small-is-beautiful types.
Though it has gone through several iterations, the Alt Right is the most recent stage of the process started by Spencer several years ago.Together, it makes up an ideological fascist kernel of ideas, ones that drive the political movement of the racialist right.While it is largely undefined, it can loosely be thought to encompass anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, elitist, racialist, anti-feminist, and other forms of anti-equality thinking that make up its ideological core.Whether these are arguments to restore the monarchy, to return to the “Ethnic religions” of pre-Christian Europe, or simply proclamations that people of color are more prone to crime or have lower innate IQs, it is the ideological position in favor of hierarchy that drives its ranks, from the white nationalists to the Men’s Rights activists.
While they often mock the neo-Nazis, Klansman, and old guard of the insurrectionary racist movement, they share the same ideological ideas even if the Alt Right are more upper middle class and concerned with a different strategic orientation.
An Intellectual Tradition?
As Spencer walked the streets surrounding the convention in Cleveland he held above him a sign that said “Want to talk to a “racist?”This is a strategic move for Spencer, who wants to reframe “racism” as simply a preference for one’s own “identity” and “tribe.”He attempts to liken himself to Latino organizations looking to advance what he calls “ethnic interests,” or Black Nationalists looking to retain a culture that was robbed during colonial slavery.
His arguments, while ignored for years, have finally found an audience in the mainstream press who are trying to make sense of the ideological current that has been associated with the rise of Donald Trump.HBO, shooting a documentary looking at racialist groups in the U.S., was following him around, and even set up a conversation between him and news anchor Jorge Ramos.While this may seem like cheap controversy baiting, and it is, Spencer was presented as a reasonable point of debate with Ramos.Instead of just a spectacle, the message has been sent that Spencer represents a growing point of view that must be considered in the debate.Previously his ethnic nationalist message would have been considered so obviously repulsive as not to be considered relevant for inclusion, but these are apparently the times we live in.
The Alt Right has pushed itself into the discourse through a few convenient openings.The first, and most obvious, is the self-destruction of the Conservative Movement.As Spencer has discussed, at length, the Conservative Movement as we know it today is more of an invention of William Buckley and the National Review as a Cold War ideology.Here it mixed Christian social conservatism, hawkish foreign policy, and free market economics into something that appeared as a coherent ideology for decades.Right-wing scholar Paul Gottfried, who consorts with Spencer and company often, calls this ideological pairing “idea clusters,” where the ideas themselves are not necessarily ideologically related yet are put into a bunch and labeled as “conservative.”
As demographics change, capitalism heads into permanent crisis, and the culture shift dramatically, Buckley’s idea cluster is failing to resonate.It is in this space that alternatives have been tried, with libertarianism being the ideological position popular in the younger areas of the GOP for the last few years.This headed into decline as Ron Paul faded from view and places like Reason Magazine and the Caito Institute lost power or uniqueness.
Now, in the search for an identity, many of the edgier “dissidents” allied with American Conservatism have found Brietbart, post-Tea Party racial anger, and Donald Trump.
Now That’s What I Call Edgy
When mixed with the second key factor for the Alt Right, the horizontal nature of social media, you can see why the edgy “Shitlords” found a voice.In an attempt to out offend each other, the culture of the Alt Right was formed on 4Chan, Reddit, and Twitter, where the need to find uniqueness and to rebel against what they believe orthodoxy to be (in this case it is “political correctness”), they united with old-fashioned white supremacy to form a semi-coherent white nationalism that is based in ironic catch phrases, internal jargon, trolling, and unrestrained anger.
With Twitter they can cut through to mainstream discourse by trending hashtags like #Cuckservative, using every media mention as a way to slowly seep in Nazi talking points with kitschy memes and constant trolling.Gone are the days of concerted organizing around crossover topics like immigration and affirmative action, now it is better to dominate comments sections on articles and post blogs arguing in favor of slavery and Holocaust Denial.
This is perfectly fine with Spencer, who was always looking to foment a fascist cultural movement more than a political one.As he often proselytizes, he is not a materialist, he is an idealist in the German tradition.He believes the change starts in the minds and the culture, and “politics are a lagging indicator.”This is why his movement starts with a tweet, not with a sign, and you will not see concrete goals listed as how to get to the Ethnostate he envisions on the North American continent.
It is all of these peculiarities and contradictions that lead to why the Alt Right is failing before it ever really begins.
What drew out Alternative Right and its successor, the Radix Journal, as well as the entire sphere of neo-fascist publications and publishers was its ability to create a philosophical foundation to the racialist and neo-fascist movement.It was not just its congenial style, we have had suit and tie racists before (see David Duke wearing suits at Klan meetings), but what Alternative Right attempted to do was do have a real set of philosophical, academic, and new religious interventions.This was a smart white nationalism, one that was attempting to find some coherence.As you would expect, this has had mixed results as those with credentials and ideas are few and far between inside of the far right, as is art, music, and literature.
Radical Traditionalist and esoteric fascist, Julius Evola.
In their pursuit a few key threads came out, from celebrating paganism to the Radical Traditionalism of Julius Evola, Spencer and his ilk worked hard to carry on the legacy of people like Alain de Benoit and Guilluime Faye.This was to make fascism just as much of a philosophic project as Marxism and anarchism, and one that they hoped to decouple from the more obvious forms of violence and ugly racism that it usually resorts to.While those on the anti-fascist left will usually point out that this is merely an act, and it is, there is often a deeper process here.What they are searching for is to give reason and purpose to the bigotry that they feel, and they want to prove that it is not hatred but deep philosophical ideas and socio-biological identity that is driving them.Spencer has constructed a culture that looks as much as possible like the academic left, using jargon and rhetoric that feels more like the Frankfurt School than like the National Alliance.Oswald Spangler, Ernst Junger, and Carl Schmidt were pulled off the shelf, mixed with misreadings of Nietzsche, and an “intellectual” fascist tradition was continued in the few conferences the Alt Right had the money to muster.
With the innocuously named National Policy Institute, Spencer hosted conferences that were overpriced and set in posh venues, all with the idea of gaining legitimacy.With Washington Summit Publishers, the NPI book publishing wing, he basically republished books by scientific racists of the past like Madison Grant as well as “new school” race and IQ ideologues like Richard Lynn and Kevin McDonald, all with names like the “Global Bell Curve” that both try to ride the wave of popular right-wing books in the mainstream and to sound as if they could blend into the world of scientific publishing.Going further, with the launch of the Radix Journal website, Spencer created a Radix imprint for Washington Summit Publishers to print books that were more cultural.Here they published a slick journal with themes like “The Great Erasure,” looking at the “global delegitimization of the white man.”They republished crossover authors like Samuel Francis, who has the strange achievement of being published regularly in the Washington Times as well as for white nationalist publications like the Occidental Observer, American Renaissance, and the Citizen Informer, the newsletter of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Similarly, Greg Johnson of Counter Currents has tried to create an academic tone with his publishing, mixing in the pseudo-spirituality of Heathens like Stephen McNallen, the racial mysticism of Savitri Devi, and tribalists like Jack Donovan.Going even further, publishers like Arktos Media have tried to build a culture on republishing Julius Evola and French New Right thinkers as well as neofolk records, all with the idea that they can create a far-right wing culture of art and philosophy.
All of this together brought a certain tone that, while masking the guttural racial hatred and genocidal justifications, was meant to make arguments for their position in a world disgusted by racism, sexism, and homophobia.
It wasn’t this culture, however, that gave the Alt Right the name it has today.
Blind Ideology, White Anger
The current state of the Alt Right is one that is based on a certain online cruelty, a culture built almost entirely on the insult.This did not start with The Right Stuff and their headline podcast The Daily Shoah, but it certainly was popularized with it.The Daily Shoah was created by a group of former libertarians who had turned towards white nationalism and wanted to create an Opie and Anthony styled radio show for their crew.As they had built most of their ideological foundations on message boards rather than in political situations out in the real world, they had developed a caustic online culture of racial epithets and angry misogyny.Uniting the worlds of white nationalism, Men’s Rights Activism, anti-disability blame-rage, and other indulgences of reactionary toxicity, they used the Alt Right philosophical underpinnings as a foundation for their anger.They hate black people, and call them the N-word and other creative insults, and then pick at “Human Biological Diversity” terminology to justify their anger.Kevin McDonald’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories fuel their bizarre belief that everything in the culture that pulls progressive or against systemic white supremacy is done by Jews, who conspire in their genes to undermine “Western Civilization.”They bring on other Nazis and right-wingers to indulge in esoteric Hitlerism, strange Euro-paganism, and the intermix of Christian orthodoxy, paleolibertarianism, and secular authoritarianism with their own angry racism to create a culture of Internet trolling rather than political organizing.
Through The Right Stuff, the Daily Stormer, and a slew of blogs and podcasts, we have seen the two cultures, the pseudo-academic and the vulgar anger, unite into one “Alt Right,” with a single soul and two dramatically different faces.
As Spencer walked in circles around the Quicken Loans Arena he tried to turn “stereotypes” about racists on their head, fighting to shake Jorge Ramos’ hand.In an earlier interview, Ramos had a conversation with a KKK member who refused to lock palms with him, and Spencer wanted to show that he, in fact, respected Ramos.In their conversation, Spencer wanted to prove that Ramos was an “Identitarian” just like Spencer, fighting for his people.This is a common talking point among white nationalist who try to argue that they are fighting for white interests just like the NAACP fights for “black interests” and La Raza fights for “Latino interests.”This is context denial, a term that the Alt Right loves to use, in that they do not like to admit that when it comes to Black Nationalism, it is an attempt to reclaim a stolen culture and identity, while white nationalism actually obliterates European history in an attempt to reconstruct formal white supremacy. One is organizing against verifiable oppression, and the other is the reactionary anger of a group who is having their privilege eroded by progress.
That evening Spencer was invited to Milo Yiannopoulos’ evening party, where he lived out one of the most profound paradoxes of the Alt Right and their participation at the RNC.Milo has made a name for himself as the most high profile people donning the Alt Right label, though his version is the most watered down by most Alt Right standards.Many on the Alt Right denounce Milo because he is a gay man with a Jewish ancestry; though the more savvy of the crowd like that he is mainstreaming their iconoclastic views at Breitbart.Milo was there to lead the anti-Islamic charge, claiming that it Islam was not only irreconcilable with queerness, but incompatible with Western Civilization as a whole.LGBTrump founder Chris Barron continued this rhetoric during the evening, which echoed the angry scapegoating of Jewish immigrants in 1920s Germany.While comparisons to Nazi Germany are often obvious and overwrought, this situation seemed obvious as the contempt towards Muslims was explicit and there were open calls for their forced expulsion.
Matt Forney (Middle)
While Spencer was softening the blows of his racism, Milo was riding the wave of this own offensiveness, all the way to being banned on Twitter.Spencer was one of many Alt Right people at Milo’s events, including MRA clown Matt Forney reporting for Red Ice.The party was an RNC associated event that openly invited people who argue that Black people should be forcefully returned to Africa in a “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”If this doesn’t reveal the current orientation of the GOP, nothing does.
After the first couple days of the party, Spencer joined Jazz Hands McFeels at Fash the Nation, one of the other most popular white nationalist podcasts on the growing Right Stuff podcast network.After telling Jorge Ramos that he respected all races and cultures, he used racial slurs to refer to black people and laughed along at comparisons between people of color and animals.Fash the Nation enjoys using the n-word, calling black people “feral” and various types of apes, and laughs about killing Jews.This is what has spiked its numbers, as its Alt Right Twitter army laughs with glee as they are given permission to revel in the darkest parts of their reactionary bigotry.
Appearance vs. Reality
It is here that the contradiction in the Alt Right has grown to proportions it cannot ignore: it wants to be both an inoffensive political and ideological movement while also being an angry and virulently offensive brand of political theater.While Spencer previously found racial slurs offensive and idiotic, he dropped his standards once it was those qualities that gave the Alt Right legs.While he was developing an “ideological” movement built on intellectual credibility, it was words like Dindu, Triggered, Echoes, and Merchant that gave it the culture to grow.
As it hits its zenith, many on the inside of these circles are beginning to realize that you cannot have both.You cannot have an inoffensive “identitarianism” on one side, that argues that is simply wants its own identity and is not reveling in hatred of “the other” while also indulging in angry insults at people of color and mocking their suffering.
Holocaust Denial has come in waves as a sort of “crossover” topic for white nationalists, one that is intended to find some converts in conspiracy theory circles.In the early 1990s it saw a peak with organizations like the Institute for Historical Review and the Barnes Review trying to legitimize “Holocaust Revisionism” as just another form of historical inquiry.They argued that it was simply about uncovering truth and had no social or political agenda besides finding out what really happened.
If this was true, why was it that most of those involved in the revisionism were also involved in racial nationalist projects?Why were the same people questioning the existence of gas chambers also presenting race and IQ arguments?Could it be simply that they were repackaging the racial hatred of the past in new pseudo-intellectual arguments?This became such an obvious sham that places like the IHR shut their doors, and Holocaust Denial became (until recently) an almost forgotten task left to basement dwellers on BlogSpot.
Mark Weber
They attempted to say that their arguments were disconnected from all of the aspects that society finds repulsive: insulting racism, racial violence, genocide, persecution, and oppression.Instead, they could not cover their tracks well enough, and it took only the briefest look to reveal them for who they were.Mark Weber, the most well known front-man for the IHR (after wrestling it away from ignominious racist Willis Carto) often donned a suit and tie and used academic jargon when stating his case for reimagining the second World War.If he really was just another historian who stumbled on this “inconvenient truth,” then how come he had been a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance since he was a teenager?
A similar situation marks the two-storied history of American Renaissance (AmRen), one of the largest and most established white nationalist projects in the country.AmRen began in the late 1980s as a newsletter from Jared Taylor as a pseudo-intellectual white nationalist voice, intending to be an alternative to the toxic influence of neo-Nazi organizations that engaged in murderous fits of violence over the 1980s.Taylor focused in on race and IQ arguments mainly, riding the wave of The Bell Curve and the candidacies of people like David Duke and Pat Buchanan, creating a “high brow” culture for their conferences.Over the years they have hosted every scientist who has made arguments about the differences between races, often arguing that the organization is simply dedicated to getting out a clearer view of science, heredity, and biological difference.
Donald Templar, speaking at American Renaissance.
If this were true, then their list of speakers would not be a “who’s who” of nationalist far-right political organizations, ranging from fascist organizations to ones with a history of racial terror.If it was simply an organization for the scientific study of race, then you would not have “academics” like Donald Templar stepping to the podium to yell about how tired he is of black people “complaining” and how they need to be worked 60-hour weeks in prison so they will stop “giving aids to each other.”If you listen to a large cross section of American Renaissance speeches, or read their newsletter, the only connective tissue is anger towards non-white people and the value-laden language meant to disparage anyone without pure Aryan ancestry.All of the “difference” that they outline puts black and brown people in a negative light, and most of the terms and categories used are either antiquated or non-scientific in orientation. Plainly put, American Renaissance is an organization dedicated towards developing white nationalism through the denigration of people of color, and the “science” is piecemeal, out of context, and almost always discredited.
Why American Renaissance has dropped its scientific veneer in recent years is that it did not work.They attempted to gain credibility for its beliefs on the one hand, yet empowered a sub-intellectual culture of racial slurs, anger, and insults.
Spencer has spent years disassociating himself with the KKK and neo-Nazis of the world, but that is a surface act at best.In his most recent podcast, Spencer interview former KKK leader David Duke about his upcoming big for the Louisiana legislature.He often has Kevin McDonald, the sort of Karl Marx of anti-Semitism, who was on the board of the skinhead-associated American Freedom Party, a place where Spencer has also been interviewed.He often joins The Daily Shoah, or invites them on his own show, where they do not skimp on the denigrations against Jews, transgender people, and all non-white people.Spencer may play his rhetorical game, but the only difference between him and a KKK member is that his house is worth almost $4 million.When it comes to every ideological point, from the “subhuman” nature of black people to the secret power structure of Jews, Spencer is identical to all of the neo-Nazis that the general public finds so repulsive.When it comes to rhetoric, he is of the same circles as those calling Black people “Dindus,” making monkey sounds during Black History month, and applauding the murder of Mike Brown.
As Donald Trump publicly implodes going into the general election, he is continuing to drum up an “anti-PC” culture of racial animosity and fighting words.This peak has given the Alt Right a place in the public discourse, but it has discredited all legitimacy it had hoped to gain.While they main gain converts through their toxic discourse and rhetoric, they have undermined all ability to actually have an influence on even the broader American right wing.While trying to take on both faces, that of the academy and of the bully, they have failed to actually benefit from either, and now they are seeing peak influence.Even if Donald Trump was to pull a Hail Mary and win in the general election, their rhetoric will continue to fade as Trump’s administration heads to a socially conservative platform, bought into the same neoliberal interests that he has been tied to throughout his career as a bourgeois inheritance baby.The Alt Right has played all of its cards, and its limited contributions to discourse will not withstand its self-destruction.
For anti-fascists going forward, the biggest lesson is that the Alt Right has rebranded the far right, and will make up the cultural touchstones of fascist organization for years to come.Broad nationalism, Internet trolling, and silly jargon are what neo-Nazis are today, which gives a great sign of what to look for.As far as influence, they have created a cap that they will never be able to move past.