Category Archives: Alternative Right

Alternative Right, Internet Racism, National Anarchism

Twitter Warriors: How Do Deal With White Nationalist Trolls

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On a recent episode of the cleverly titled Fash the Nation, another podcast project of the Right Stuff, they opined about Trump’s big failure in Iowa. To join the regular hosts Jazz Hands McFeels and Marcus Halberstram they invited Raiden, a Twitter “sensation” who bragged about how good he is at trolling.  He proudly declared that he keeps “hate facts” in his bookmarks so he is ready to “Red Pill” people on social media, a term used originally by the Men’s Rights crowd and means to reveal the truth(which actually means to be racist).  He went on, at length, about how great he was at harassing people on Twitter, so much that he often gets banned.  The hosts egged him on, also congratulating him for this major “achievement.”

The new Alt Right is being tactically informed by people like the Right Stuff and the Daily Shoah who think that internet trolling, using infectious memes, and arguing with people in web forums is the same thing as political organizing.  Their project relies on this since they usually do not come from a history of political engagement, but instead from the recesses of extreme ideology that remote web forums often inspire.  While this is embarrassing right off the bat, it is not without its avenues.  They have successfully disseminated things like the Cuckservative, Alt Right, and Facts Aren’t Racist hashtags, they have created a groundswell of reactionary internet support for Trump, and they are feeding the vanguard of the racist movement to commit acts of violence and eventually join the kind of political organizations that we are seeing all over Europe.

We at Anti-Fascist News have also been pretty consistently “trolled” and blogged about from the far-right, where they are just begging to get a mention.  The Daily Shoah has devoted segments of several of their shows to us, and their forum will link to us so many times that we quickly become the top Google search results(good strategy guys).  Attack the System, the website run by Keith Preston and best known for pushing National Anarchism, has run a full six articles about us, desperately trying to pull us into a debate.  We actually did counter a couple of their claims, only because they have occasionally moved their arguments into anarchist circles and so we need to develop a good rhetorical foundation to unhinge their ‘pan-secessionist” rhetoric.  Occidental Dissent, the Traditionalist Youth Network, the National Anarchist Network of Texas, Jack Donovan, and others have made us the target of their attention in recent months, hoping that they can get a word in on our conversation.  Daily we get hate comments, often with racial slurs, and usually they believe that we are going to allow their comments to be posted so that they can, again, troll.  On Twitter they will tag us so as to draw us into an “internet feud” so they can fuel their blog diarrhea, especially since their lack of relevance can stop them from having appealing content.

Our policy is to completely refuse to discuss things, allow them to link to us, or to even provide access to our social media.  We regularly block fascists if they tag us on Facebook or Twitter, which happens a couple times a week.  We will work to break the links when they link directly to our website, and we never, ever allow racist or right-wing comments to post on our website.  We aim to be a useful resource for anti-fascist and anti-racist organizing, so we prioritize the goals of organizing above all else.  Complete radio silence and removing them as regularly as you can will be the best way to regularly segregate them from important conversations.  We prefer if our boosts in traffic comes from anti-racists looking to find out what is happening inside of the racist community, not just out of a lurid curiosity, but because we need this information to inform strategy.

As long as we continue, we expect to get followed closely by these groups as they look for any avenue to get coverage.  Instead, in our discussions about them we refuse to link to them or provide them an open platform of any type.

Alternative Right, Anti-Fascism, Neo-Nazi

Crack in the Facade: How Splits in the White Nationalist Movement Can Help Anti-Fascists

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For anyone who has been on the ideological radical left, especially in Marxist or anarchist organizations, they know exactly what it is like to get caught up in petty disagreements and insular political arguments.  It is what has led to the trend towards “splitting” in communist organizations, and what keeps many of these politically centered parties and groups from growing beyond a couple hundred members.  Much of this has led to high profile infighting, where disagreements that are unintelligible to those outside an ideological cadre are unable to even understand what the two parties are so passionate about.

For those organizing against institutions of capital and the state, there is certainly a need to create strong bonds on points of agreement and to save disagreements over tactics and strategy to internal discussions.  The primary reason for this is that the opposition looks for points of weakness, cracks in our structure that they can exploit to weaken us in critical ways.  This “divide and conquer” strategy has been primary to the way that bosses weaken labor battles, landlords destroy tenant unity, and how the ruling class generally fractures any kind of working-class identity that is needed to combat forces that have the money and the state-supported power.

On the flip side, those on the reactionary edges of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, and other parts of an intersectional neo-fascist movement, are also subject to the same forces.  In the recent years many of these voices have rebranded and adapted to a new generation of white nationalists who are coming from middle-class, tech-friendly jobs and families.  There has been a great call for unity that was often impossible in the earlier days of the KKK or neo-Nazi skinheads, all of which were subject to tribal gang fights over non-political issues.  This new core has intellectual backgrounds and are using philosophy and pseudo-science as the foundation of a new nationalism, and by keeping strategy and tactics vague they have been able to create bonds that were less easy to break.

Yet, as is always the case on the far right, their egos remain unchecked and, eventually, they do begin to crack.  It is at these points that anti-fascists can exploit these breaks in solidarity between them, and find ways to weaken and destroy their movements by isolating them from each other.  Over the last couple years it has been easy to see where the points of contention between these people are since they are often along the lines of those who have developed a following.

When thinking about where the fractures are in the Alt Right, one person comes up as a point of rupture: Richard Spencer.  Spencer is known for coining the term Alternative Right from his former webzine, which was created to bring together different dissident reactionary forces that were coming together around 2010.  He has eventually helped to bring together a vague collection of white nationalists, post-libertarians, traditionalists, Men’s Rights dissidents, identitarians, racial pagans, and others, into a general new white nationalism.

He also popularized podcasts as being a primary way to outreach to the rest of the movement since reading is not always their strong suit.  Vanguard Radio was his first attempt at this, starting by interviewing people like the American Freedom Party’s Merlin Miller, Youth for Western Civilization’s Kevin Deanna, and techno-futurist and neo-reactionary Rachel Haywire.  He also brought on fellow racists Colin Liddell and Andy Nowicki to co-host a rambling version of the podcast.  Both of them had been contributors, and later editors, at Alternative Right.  At one point Spencer decided to leave Alternative Right as an editor, yet he continued the podcast and blogging at the website.  Andy and Colin stepped up as the primary editors, and when Spencer told them in private that he kind of wanted the website to come down so he could move on, they insisted that it stay.  After an incident happened with Jason Richwine, the Rachel Maddow Show at MSNBC did a story about Alternative Right and the National Policy Institute, which Spencer had taken over at this time.  Here they identified a story by Colin Liddell where he essentially denies the Holocaust and mocks the Jews who died.  He did not like being associated with this since he did not have any editorial control over what was published.  On Christmas Day of 2013 he took down Alternative Right and made the URL link to his new web magazine, Radix Journal.

Andy and Colin were understandably enraged, and Colin went on social media rants calling Spencer a “Dick-tator.”  They reformed a new website called the “New Alternative Right,” and started their own podcast.  In one early episode dedicated to Spencer’s decision, Colin spoke about Spencer’s behavior and penchant for talking over his guests.

In 2014 Spencer tried to have a “pan-European” conference in Budapest, Hungary.  This was going to bring white nationalists from around Europe, America, and Russia to come together and talk about “European unity.”  The docket was to include people like Alexander Dugin and Jared Taylor.  The Hungarian government, under pressure from the socialist party, declared that the conference would not happen, moving all the way up to the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.  Spencer decided he would not listen to the government’s order and would go anyway, even though the government canceled their hotel bookings.  At a private dinner of conference attendees, the police showed up and arrested Spencer.  They deported him, banning him from European nations.  The conference ended up just happening in private at the dinner location, with Tomislav Sunic and Jared Taylor as its only speakers.

It was this situation that actually mended the relationship between Liddell and Nowicki with Spencer.  He went on their podcast shortly there after, and even though Liddell used this opportunity to talk over Spencer and throw insulting jokes at him, it seemed as though they would make it through.  Liddell ended up going on Spencer’s new podcast, the Radix Journal Podcast, several times to talk about the Scottish Independence vote and on a series they did on James Bond.

The situation in Hungary did, however, stoke problems that were forming between Greg Johnson and Richard Spencer.  Johnson is the founder and editor of Counter-Currents Publishing, which publishes a lot of racist and traditionalist books by people like Savitri Devi and Jonathan Bowden.  They are known for their blog and pocast, which attempts to be even more high brown than Radix while also being more offensively racist.  When Spencer still called for people to fly into Hungary even though hotels were being canceled by the state and they were having calls for deportation, Johnson became incensed.  He took to Twitter to insult Spencer and state that he owes all conference attendees a “complete refund.”  He went on to make insulting comments about Spencer’s wife, saying he was controlled by her and referring to her as “Nina Nogoodnick.”  This stopped the growing relationship between the two flat.  Spencer had recently had him on several podcasts to discuss movies and Johnson had hosted Spencer discussing what had happened with the shut down of Alternative Right.  The irony here was that Johnson went on, at length, about how this type of public infighting is just useless and antithetical to their cause.  Their relationship was never really patched up, and they were both known to make passive jokes about each other in interviews and podcasts.  They were eventually both on a round table podcast at Red Ice Radio with RamZPaul, John Morgan of Arktos Publishing, and Daniel Frieberg.  The discussion moved to the debate over pan-European unity versus regional European nationalism.  Spencer is known for calling for a new “white empire” that gets over “petty nationalisms.”  Johnson discussed the importance of having these regional states, telling Spencer that “reality had vetoed his dream.”  They got incredibly heated insulting one another while the host desperately tried to get things on track.

These differences and arguments seem silly to us, and they are.  Yet to the neo-fascists who are trying to move from their basements and into the political sphere, they are incredibly meaningful.  In knowing where their fractures are we can begin to develop a strategy that plays on this as a weakness.  Greg Johnson and Richard Spencer are both “intellectual” leaders of the Alt Right, and their strong personalities have the ability both to create leadership and to turn their followers off.  To confront this we can find ways to further split their connections apart by highlighting the differences between them, and trying to stoke their infighting into public displays of disunity.  What if, when shutting down one of their events, anti-fascists also go onto internal forums and place blame on other parties?  This can have the effect of shrinking any cadre that they have with a common purpose, which also diminishes its effectiveness.

By highlighting their splits we can also help to communicate to those who may see them as an attractive dissenting force, show that they actually lack any ideological clarity or ability to force political programs.  They are ineffective as organizing agents, which is clear since they rarely have any organizational plans, but if we continue to exploit their fragments we can show them for the impotent forces that they are.  Using messaging on our end that not only confronts the bigots directly, but also creates dissent and infighting in their ranks can be an effective tool for destroying their mobilization.

Infighting around Richard Spencer has been happening for well over a year now beyond just the skirmishes mentioned.  His dismissal of Orthodox Christianity has made him persona non grata in some of the more neo-Confederate, Kinist, and religious communities associated with the Traditionalist Youth Network, the League of the South, and others.  He recently banned Trad Youth’s Matthew Heimbach for his recent comments about same-sex relationships where he claimed that queer people are intentionally spreading HIV.  This brought offense to the NPI participants, one of which is the “andriophile” Jack Donovan.

By highlighting their own infighting we can continue to show their weak points, disable their ability to create compelling narrative or fronts, and maintain their position on the fringes.  Part of this is allowing them to walk themselves into corners, which they often do through their own bizarre political ideas and their ability to attract those with political egos.  In the case of Heimbach, we can continue to highlight his homophobia in an effort to not only alert the public to his disgusting ideas, but also to call the attention his fellow fascists.  The more they clash internally, the weaker they will be.  For anti-fascist organizing, this is always going to weaken the opposition and make those white nationalists that do creep up even easier to marginalize.

Occidental Dissent, another one of the more offensive racist websites, actually has publicized these arguments between bigots.  In a post from 2014 they outlined a big list of “who hates who.”  Though it is a little old, it seems to be more or less accurate even today.

Get your popcorn.

Check out this partial list of ongoing current beefs:

  • Greg Johnson vs. Daily Stormer

  • Greg Johnson vs. Richard Spencer

  • Alternative Right vs. Daily Stormer

  • Alex Linder vs. Jared Taylor

  • Alex Linder vs. Greg Johnson

  • Ramzpaul vs. Robert Ransdell

  • Daily Stormer vs. Ramzpaul

  • Greg Johnson vs. Matt Parrott

  • Bob Whitaker vs. Stormfront

  • Alex Linder vs. Bob Whitaker

  • Sebastian Ronin vs. Countless People

  • My Picks For Most Intense Beef

  • Hadding vs. Harold Covington

  • Will Williams vs. Harold Covington

  • Axis Sally vs. Harold Covington

Their movement is based entirely on the subjugation and oppression of “the other,” a notion that drives their ideological core.  They do not have the same foundation in thought and ideas you see in the radical left opposition, which makes it even easier to unravel when put under a magnifying glass.  At times, the ludicrous nature of their own racism will do it on its own.  The coup attempt in Leith, North Dakota a couple of years ago lays out a clear exampele of this.  Craig Cobb, a well known fringe neo-Nazi even by their own standards, began buying up property for next to nothing in a remote North Dakotan town.  Leith had a population of 26 people, and his plan was to overrun the town with fellow neo-Nazis so as to take control of the Town Council.  He deeded property over to members of the National Socialist Movement and former White Aryan Resistance organizer, Tom Metzger.  The town put up an incredible show of counter-organizing, with great support from local First Nations tribal leaders and anti-racists.  A confrontation was put forward to Cobb to do a DNA test that would prove his racial ancestry.  He accepted this challenge, and when it came back proving that he was 14% Sub-Saharan African he saw a great deal of his support dry up.  This came from the internal contradictions inside of his Creativity Movement, which is the most militant side of the white nationalist movement demanding racial purity.  In reality, almost no person appearing white has only European genetic ancestry, so it is literally a contest that they cannot win.  By leaving themselves open it provided anti-racists an opportunity to confront them, not only to dismiss their message publicly, but to create a backlash internally as his fellow skinhead supporters began demanding him out of his own white community.

Because we do not want to ever provide them a platform, and because we organize to defend our communities from them, we often do not have the resources to attempt to exploit these cracks in their ranks.  With their influx of public media and loud voices we now have more information about high-profile racists than ever before, which means that we can integrate these strategies into our more general messaging.

Let’s continue to show the world who these people are and the fallacies that their calls for “white revolution” depend on!

Alternative Right, Donald Trump, Internet Racism, White Nationalism

Edgelords: The National Policy Institute Holding Washington D.C. Conference in March

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In an effort to double up their popular conferences, The National Policy Institute is going to be having a conference only a few short months after their Halloween event.  Set to coincide with the Conservative Political Action Conference, which makes sense with their use of the Alt Right branding, the event will bring together “shitlords” and white nationalists from the growing recesses of the internet-focused racialist movement.  The evening event, on March 5th, is going to be smaller than NPI’s regular conference event, which usually spans an entire day.  This conference, called Identity Politics, will bring together Richard Spencer, the NPI president, Kevin McDonald and RamZPaul.

Richard Spencer has been one of the people at the center of the recent upsurge in this particular wing of the white nationalist movement.  Focused on social media, podcasting, and YouTube conversation videos, the new Alt Right has evolved beyond what it had been previously.  Spencer coined the term in 2010 with his website Alternative Right, which was meant to bring together “dissident” right wing ideologues that were leftovers from paleoconservatism, libertarianism, the Old Right, traditionalism, and all the other “edge” philosophies that were leading in a neo-fascist direction.

This was a “big tent” approach that was meant to associate these disparate forces with each other, but he moved on from this approach when joining NPI and forming the Radix Journal.  The term Alt Right, however, stayed, and it became synonamous with a white nationalist movement that had little connection to the silly costumes of the KKK and neo-Nazis.  Instead, this group formed an ideology that was a hodgepodge of the new scientific racism of Human BioDiversity, the strange “critiques” of democracy from Neoraction, the general attack on egalitarianism, a focus on the spirituality of ethnic Heathenry, the traditionalism of Julius Evola, and a great deal of misrepresented scraps of the social sciences to justify “identitarian” focus on ethnic identity as well as classic racial hatred and anti-Semitism.  These people see themselves as a break from the racism of the past, yet they simply repackaged it for a different audience.

The new shift was largely from association with The Right Stuff and their cohorts, which focus on internet trolling, using internal jargon, repeating offensive jokes, and using social media and blogs as their primary vessel rather than any kind of organizing.  You would expect that this would change the speaking demographics of the NPI conference, but most of the people associated with this side of the movement do not use their real names and would not let their faces be seen lest anti-fascists identify and doxx them.  The main exceptions to this was Mike Enoch from the Daily Shoah’s appearance on the NPI conference podcast, though he wore sunglasses during the panel to try and conceal his identity.  UnCuck the Right, an internet sensation that does the same embarrassing parody songs that The Right Stuff is famous for, is presenting at American Renaissance as well, which is again a surprise for a grouping who hides behind avatars.

Instead, Spencer will be joined by former University of California at Long Beach professor Kevin McDonald.  McDonald is known for creating a “unified theory of anti-Semitism” which his Culture of Critique series.  Here he states that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” where Jews use ethnocentrism and high verbal IQ to outcompete Gentiles for resources.  He identifies things like Marxism, Freudianism, contemporary anthropology, Frankfurt School philosophy, and other movements as pseudoscience created by Jews to destroy Western identity and therefore come out on top.  McDonald was a well regarded evolutionary psychology academic before going off the deep end, and now writes for various white nationalist publications like the Occidental Quarterly on the need to reclaim ethnic nationalism and avoid what he calls “white altruism.”  Over the last year he has been doing speeches and interviews about the “origins of the white man,” which he did both at last year’s NPI event and at the Stormfront Smokey Mountain Summit.  He is working on a book on this theme, where he butchers anthropology in an effort to create a “history” of white people as a monolithic and distinct history.  Here he resurrects a strict racial taxonomy, one that has literally no place in contemporary biology or anthropology, as well as distinct categories from the early 20th century like “nordics.”

RamZPaul will join the two, who does actually come in similar to the silly format set by The Right Stuff.  He does popular YouTube videos where he decries liberalism, multiculturalism, and “the modern world,” usually with a penchant for bad stand-up comedy.  Over the last couple of AmRen and NPI conferences he has taken on a specific topic to sort of “explain,” though they usually show that he does not have a clear grasp on the concepts himself.  In his recent AmRen talk on the “Dark Enlightenment” he went on to briefly explain critiques of democracy and equality as well as the preference for monarchy, but with all of the platitudes and generalizations it became obvious that he had not been able to understand Nick Land’s work and was generally out of touch with the science and philosophy that movement claims as its own.  At the March event RamZPaul will try to explain what the Alt Right is, which may actually creates some dissonance in the crowd since he is not a strict white nationalist.

Spencer’s talk will likely be one of his usually “if you dream it we can built it” rants, where he talks vaguely about “ideas” and “passion,” yet clearly does not have a political program to support it.  It may be simply to support Donald Trump, who is fawningly supported by the Alt Right.  Spencer himself really pushes a sort of “right Idealism” where by he thinks these sorts of expensive conferences and constant blog diarrhea are comparable to building a movement.  This provides Antifa its greatest opportunity to challenge their existence since all they want, literally, is a platform.  They have no other strategic elements to the movement, and they are hoping that the groundswell from the Donald Trump primary bid will be enough to move to the next stage in their fascist project.

Confrontation at the NPI conference is often difficult since it is usually held in The Ronald Reagan Building in The Rotunda of Washington D.C.  They have been resistant to organizers asking them to cancel the event, and strict security keeps protesters relatively far from the entrance.  What has been seen recently is that the swell of young people has come primarily from people who do not want their identity’s released, so photos and videos of conference attendees is an important operation.  Pressure can be put on the operations of the Ronald Reagan building year round so that when it comes time for NPI to sign its contract, there is already a show that the community will not accept that.  This could be a long-term organizing project for those in the area, but really any organization nationally could take up this campaign to show national discontent for what is happening there.

Below is the contact information for the Reagan Building if you want to make your voice heard about their hosting, but it may make sense to use this information to develop a long-term escalation campaign where community phone blasts, emails, and general mobilization can be done on a multi-month calendar.

Screen Shot 2016-01-31 at 11.08.12 AM

 

Academic Racism, Alternative Right, Internet Racism, Neo-Confederate

Well Dressed Racism: American Renaissance Returns to Tennessee

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The modern racialist movement is defined by American Renaissance.  It bridges both the organized racism of the past and the contemporary Alt Right, Human BioDiversity, Neoreaction, and other movements who believe themselves superior to the KKK.  AmRen began in the early 1990s by Jared Taylor, a former West Coast editor for PC magazine and consultant to companies dealing with Japan.  Taylor, raised in Japan before going to Yale and then to France for graduate school, is a very literate and well spoken man.  His enunciation is important to him, so much so that he has developed an elitist accent that is just as artificial as his conference’s attempts at pedigree.  He formed AmRen to give intellectual credibility to his growing racist ideas.  He had already been making waves on the racist right when AmRen came into existence, publishing the book Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America.  Getting good reviews from people like Pat Buchanan, he launched AmRen as a conference and newsletter that would further disseminate racist views using pseudoacademics and reviving old bio-racial rhetoric.

Beginning in 1990, AmRen brought together a couple hundred racists to talk about…well…racism.  What defined AmRen right from the beginning was really marginal ideas on bioscience that justified the notion that black people were inferior.  Speakers often try to replicate academic discourse, yet their ideas are simply that black people have lower IQs, are prone to criminality, and all races have trouble trusting one another for biologically deterministic reasons.  These conferences are also notable in the white nationalist community for its lack of anti-Semitism, though most of the conference attendees are only putting on a face for this event.  Several Jewish speakers have been seen at AmRen, including the ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Mayer Schiller and Mark Levin.  Both of them have been known for writing about IQ gaps and the need for traditional, racially static communities.

Over the years there have been speeches by controversial academics like J. Phillip Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Donald Templer, all of which quickly drop their veneer of respectable scholarship so that they can insult and degrade people of color.  This is all in line with what in “Human BioDiversity” circles is often called the “Yellow Hypothesis.”  This essentially revives a racial taxonomy and hierarchy, but one that shifts the dynamics slightly.  In this view, according to their theories on innate IQ, Asians have the highest IQs, whites just below them, then Latinos far below that and African descended people scraping the bottom of the list along with Australian aborigines.  This is what they use to refuse the label of “white supremacist,” but the dynamic is to suggest that Asians actually lack other qualities because of their high level IQs and therefore whites are essentially “just right.”  Jews, according to this, actually have higher IQs than Asians, but the AmRen crowd usually save that part of their analysis until the conference is over.  What some attendees, such as Professor Emeritus Kevin McDonald, suggest is that the high verbal intelligence that this crowd ascribes to Jews has actually made them a parasite that uses their intellect to manipulate Western men away from their ethnic interests.  Though the general line-up of AmRen is certainly prone to conspiracy theories, this is a step too far for Taylor.

The focus on pseudoscience has really defined AmRen for almost two decades, yet in recent years there has been a shift.  Over the last few renditions of the conference, all of which have been at the Montgomery Bell State Park outside of Nashville, they have shifted away from arguments about racial difference in biology and more in the direction of politics and culture.  They have included many speakers from nationalist parties internationally, as well as many from the Alt Right that talk in vague platitudes in an attempt to revive racial Idealism and Romanticism.  This change is largely because they did not see the resurgence in “white racial consciousness” that they were hoping for from their previous discourse about perceived racial difference.  Taylor has been a bit slow off the mark, and because of the new focus on social media and streaming content, as well as the lower brow focus of modern post-Trump Alt Right, he has been the old man of the community.  While others are trying to maximize this Trump moment, Taylor continues to drivel on about black crime with barely-coded insults to movements like Black Lives Matter.

The coming 2016 conference, which will be held on May 20-22(which is actually longer than most AmRen conferences), replicates this new trend in their programming, as well as returning to attempts at respectability.  Similar to what you see in white nationalist conferences and organizations like the H.L. Mencken Club and the Council of Conservative Citizens, they always try to host speakers who are just on the edge of respectability.  This was the case with people like the late Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, who were both on the edges of the beltway Conservative Movement.

The 2016 conference’s “headliner,” so to speak, is Peter Brimelow, who is exactly the kind of crossover point that AmRen uses to make itself relevant.  Brimelow was a former writer for Forbes and a number of conservative publications, really known for writing about education and the “problem” of the teacher’s unions up through the 1990s.  In 1995 he published his “magnum opus,” Alien Nation, a book that rallied against immigration and the need to tighten the borders.  Brimelow himself was foreign born, a British immigrant, a point that is often lost on his supporters.  He then founded the web publication VDare, which has become a meeting point for the far right who want to focus on immigration as their primary issue.  He has slowly shifted out of the broad GOP crowd and into a racially focused community, speaking at other racist conferences like the H.L. Mencken Club and the National Policy Institute.  His talk brings the conference back to one of their real forces of excitement: Donald Trump.  Titled “The Trump Tsunami and the Future of the Historic American Nation,” Brimelow will continue the fawning appreciation for the billionaire just as most in the AmRen scene have.  Jared Taylor recently voiced a robocall for Trump support in Iowa, funded by the neo-fascist American Freedom Party.

James Edwards is also on the line-up, a person who has not been as prominent over the last year or so of the growing white nationalist movement.  He hosts the Political Cesspool, a white nationalist/populist radio show that is actually on a few AM stations beyond its large internet following.  He is on the board for both the Council of Conservative Citizens and the American Freedom Party, and he spoke up in defense of the CofCC after the Dylan Roof shooting.  The murderer mentioned the CofCC’s website, which obsessively focuses on what they falsely say are differences in black and white crime rates.  He represents a lower-brow sensibility for the AmRen community, which is really summed up by his book Racism Schmacism.  

Flemish nationalist Filip Dewinter will rant about the “Islamisation” of Europe, Ruuben Kaalep will give a plea for Estonian nationalist, and Dan Roodt will talk about “white survival” in post-Apartheid South Africa.  This is part and parcel of the new AmRen: trying to create unity between white racist internationally.  Here they often try to find common cause with white nationalist talking points in Europe, focusing largely on Syrian refugees and Islamic immigration.

RamZPaul will join the AmRen crowd, which he has in recent years, where he does a sort of “stand up routine.”  This mainly consists of awkwardly timed jokes coming straight out of his popular YouTube videos.  His comedic style is telling and has helped groups like The Right Stuff to focus on humor in their racism.  He will discuss the Alt Right, which has been seeing a surge of media attention in recent months because of the entryism that Donald Trump has provided for them.  This theme will be compounded with the inclusion of Uncuck the Right, a new YouTube “sensation” who does racist parody songs in the vein of The Right Stuff.  “Uncuck” is a reference to the Cuckservative meme that the Alt Right recently popularized, referencing the idea that mainstream conservatives do not act in their own racial interests in terms of immigration.  This also really shows AmRen begging to keep themselves relevant in the internet-only “shitlord” movement of angry white men.

Both Taylor and Sam Dickson will be speaking about “identitarianism,” Dickson giving the same “Benediction for Heretics” that he has done every year since 1990s premiere of the conference.

MontgomeryBell
Montgomery Bell facility where AmRen 2016 will be held.

Over the last several years of the conference, protesters have always been present.  In 2010 the conference was effectively shut down when pressure was put on the Four Points Sheraton at the Manassas Battlefield to cancel their reservation.  The following year, he attempted to hold it in a secret location, yet when the location was revealed to be the Airport Sheraton organizers were successfully able to shut it down again.  This later inspired lawsuits from David Yeagley, a self-described “American Indian” who the One People’s Project have revealed is actually Italian and consorts with white nationalists.  He tried to sue, among others, Daryle Lamont Jenkins, but the suits were ultimately unsuccessful before Yeagley passed away.  Now the conference has been moved semi-permanently to Montgomery Bell State Park, a government run facility that has been less responsive to organizing.

In 2013 organizers again clashed with conference attendees, this time out in Nashville.  After the primary conference, attendees including the Traditional Youth’s Network’s Matthew Heimbach and Scott Terry, RamZPaul, and several people from the CofCC and the League of the South all headed to a local par where Antifa organizers were also present.  A scuffle ensued where anti-racist organizers ended up being forced out of the bar, and the staff allowed the fascist parties to stay.

For 2016, research is being done about the attendees and location, and you can expect that the opposition to this festival of white self-congratulation will not be able to continue unchallenged.  If you are in the area, this is going to be one of the prime places to confront the dangerous white nationalist movement.

 

Alternative Right, Antifa, Internet Racism, Ku Klux Klan, Uncategorized

Hate, Now Streaming: White Nationalism’s Podcasting Breakthrough

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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.

 

Alternative Right, Internet Racism, White Nationalism

Hoods All Around: How The Daily Shoah Dumbed Down the Alt Right

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On Friday, New Year’s Day, Richard Spencer posted a new episode of the Radix Journal Podcast.  The podcast has evolved over the years, starting as Vanguard Radio, a “radical traditionalist” podcast for his Alternative Right website.  He has since split from that brand, taken the helm of the National Policy Institute, and started the Radix Journal.  The podcast has often been conversations with people on the racist and neo-fascist right wing, often including pseudo-intellectuals, professors, and authors.  Here they have attempted to reclaim a right-wing academic avant garde, where he has had conversations with everyone in his movement from Matthew Heimbach to Paul Gottfried to Kevin McDonald.  Conversations often looked at things like race and IQ, the German Conservative Revolution, Julius Evola, male tribalism, the Republican party viewed from the right, contemporary theories of anti-semitism, and profiles of organizations like the League of the South and Youth for Western Civilization.  The niche that Spencer carved out for himself, and really built the Alternative Right around, was that he would be more thoughtful and philosophical than those nationalists better known for burning crosses and shaved heads.

At least, that used to be the case.

In this new episode, called Cuckservative Speaks, he labeled it “A famous Cuckservative and respected Beltway pundit pays a surprise visit to the 2015 NPI conference.”  Here Spencer makes one of the most profoundly embarrassing moves of his career where he attempts to do a funny mocking impression of a “Cuckservative” Republican, complete with awkward voices and dubbed in laughter and applause.  The podcast was essentially him dressing up in skinny jeans and trying to “hang with you youths,” which may reveal why he has become known for his “fashy” hair.

What Spencer is trying to capture here is clear, in his attempt at both style and rhetoric.

Since its first episode in August of 2014, The Right Stuff’s primary podcast, The Daily Shoah, has become one of the most popular white nationalist program on the internet.  It has done this by taking the themes and ideas of the Alternative Right, meaning a contemporary white nationalism and neo-fascist politic, and bringing it back down into the gutter where they can understand it.  Earlier in our tenure, we did a couple of articles about The Daily Shoah discussing how they reveal exactly what the “suit and tie fascists” of the Alt Right really are.  Since their inception they have added a half dozen other shows, all trying to one-up each other on how self-referential and offensive they can be.  Now they have moved beyond simply being the “straight talk” of the Alt Right as they force all of their “colleagues” to side with their own vulgar racial hate.

The Daily Shoah was billed as “Opie and Anthony for white nationalists,” yet it is mainly composed of skits and jokes that mock the holocaust, deride people of color as subhuman animals, and generally call for the abolition of equality, democracy, and compassion.  Their open use of racial slurs and over the top racial jokes was unequivocally opposed by people like Richard Spencer for years.  Spencer has openly said that these types of words are an affront to the movement, that they miss the point of an acceptable racial nationalism, and basically would make him look like a “jerk.”  Greg Johnson, the eccentric academic founder of Counter Currents has also said that he does not like this kind of racial humor, saying that it is vulgar and completely regressive.  Even RamZPaul, the racist YouTube sensation known for making nationalist comedy videos, has openly distanced himself away from “radicals” who use Nazi imagery.

Not only has all of these people now joined The Daily Shoah on different episodes, and in many cases invited hosts like Mike Enoch onto their own shows, but they laughed along and even joined in calling people “fa****s” and “Dindus.”

 

This participation is only one way that TRS has begun to show its dominance in the Alt Right-sphere, but their ideas, rhetoric, and language has begun to seep into all channels tuned to their racial arson.  Terms like “LARPing,” “Cuckservative,” “The Current Year,” “Wow, just wow,” have all become common place, with the Radix Journal continuing to use them as jokes and show titles, almost as though the agenda is being set by idiots at the back of the class.  This extended even into their 2015 National Policy Institute Conference, where those TRS in-jokes were the lowest common denominator for conference attendees.

In general, TRS has gained its popularity through very concerted internet trolling, using provocative hashtags to chase trending topics, and use insular jokes and internet culture as the barometer of actually “seeping into the culture.”  This has had a modicum of success, at least in terms of media coverage.  They broke through with the #Cuckservative meme, and then joined in with the #BoycottStarWars campaign that very unsuccessfully went after the movie because it included a black character.  Lately, they have become the Donald Trump fan-network, and use the #AltRight hashtag to connect the reactionary Trump campaign with their own “forward thinking” white nationalism.

It is less that that rest of the Alt Right is willing to have their brand dumbed down by the the Daily Shoah as much as they have begun to realize that this is the mindset most of their audience base actually has.  The image of the intellectual white nationalist who bases his ideas simply on identity rather than racial hatred and angry bigotry is a myth, one that was created by them only to appear to be on the vanguard of radical politics.  Instead, their movement is built on angry “men in basements” who define political participation and movement building as harassing Buzzfeed reporters on Twitter using false accounts.  The Daily Shoah itself reveals its lack of intellectual pedigree quickly, where the hosts often deny the existence of global warming and reduce complex political issues simply to the fact that one person in a story is Jewish(We are still perplexed how Jewish ancestry automatically leads them to politics you disagree with, or how the complete lack of Jewish consensus on politics affirms your narrative.).  Spencer has seen the writing on the wall very clearly and is jumping on it, allowing these ridiculous inside jokes define his message because he really believes that these angry message boards hold the roots of some “paradigm shift.”

For anti-fascists, The Daily Shoah presents one of the clearest opportunities to destroy the “identitarian” mirage by showing exactly what their message means when stripped of its Evolian wordplay.  While people like Spencer may rap philosophic about Heidegger, Mike Enoch says exactly what the white nationalist movement is built on, complete with calling war refugees “barbarian hordes.”  Their politics have always been disgusting, but at least now the pretense has been shaken off as, it turns out, they never needed it to attract their base.

White nationalism has desperately grasped at intellectual straws for the last several years, including creating an Alt Right with so many disparate strands that barely recognize one another.  Once the Right Stuff fades after Donald Trump’s campaign becomes a memory, people like Spencer and Greg Johnson will likely regroup and double back on their conference-circuit.  This, however, is tactical rather than essential as, no matter how they phrase it, their politics are as complicated as the hoods that came before them.

 

Alternative Right, Internet Racism, Right Wing Politics, White Nationalism

Voice and the Voiceless: What Does “No Platform” Mean in the Donald Trump Saturated Media?

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The media loves a good scandal.  Hell, we do too.

Over the months, as the Donald Trump campaign has shifted from bumbling loudspeaker-style racist quips to copy-and-paste fascist political programs, the media response has moved from mockery, to horror, and, finally, to click-bait.  Trump’s campaign has rode this wave, which was a “shock/response” model, and the left-leaning media outlets that use a social media business model have been central to its ability to spread through the culture.  The “outrage machine” has been very real in that, from identifying a room full of Jewish Republicans as “deal makers” to banning and registering Muslims, his politics have only made their way up the ladder of offense and guttural bigotry.  The echo chamber, which has led his message and created the offense-racket that has made him popular with reactionary sectors of middle America, has been driven by this, and it has given his voice the kind of reach that he simply couldn’t have achieved with his own appearances and the standard political news machine.

Trump himself has created an entire media model of exploiting the disbelief in leftist coverage, but he has also been the gate-keeper to mainstreaming an entire narrative that has been developed over the last five years in the annals of web forums and news sites.  The Alternative Right, Neoreaction, Dark Enlightenment, and all the other variants of internet-focused and pseudo-academic neo-fascism has been developing a new language for speaking and “critiquing” society that breaks from the two sided coin of neo-Nazis and the Klan.  Now they return to race and IQ talking points, critiques of contemporary democracy, attacks on the idea of equality, rejection of modernity, and a range of other simple ideas repackaged in the aesthetics of Continental Philosophy.  Backed by the ideas of European New Right intellectuals, much of this resurrects previously fringe ideologues like Julius Evola or the Conservative Revolution, looking to build a strictly hierarchical society and the idea of ethnically defined societies.  This is not the posturing that Donald Trump has gained his popularity on, but it is much of the long-term vision that his seemingly casual comments have as their end game.  Just as there are “dog whistle” words that use economic rhetoric to signal racial tensions, neo-fascist supporters hope that his reactionary remarks are a “dog whistle” to an open fascist political program.

What the “Donald Trump phenomenon” has done, even more than just Trump himself, is to open the door to the voices of this reactionary movement in that they have a direct lineage between the two.  Buzzfeed began publicizing the use of “alt right” as a hashtag on Twitter, which has been used for years up to this point, giving extended interviews to people like Richard Spencer, RamZPaul, and Jared Taylor.  Rosie Gray, the Buzzfeed reporter who did the article on white nationalism and the Trump campaign, got pulled into an even more difficult situation when RamZPaul gave one condition to doing the interview: that he could film and broadcast it.  What resulted is another one of Paul’s well-known videos, this time where he talks to an understandably timid Gray over an iPhone speaker.  While Paul’s rhetoric in the video is confusing and rambling, it still gave him the perfect opportunity to actually draw some of the Buzzfeed crowd to an unedited piece of his own racial nationalist script.

we-asked-a-white-supremacist-what-he-thought-of-donald-trump-1210-body-image-1449734151

Richard Spencer got extended time in Vice’s recent “We Asked a White Supremacist What He Thinks About Donald Trump,” which followed a similarly vapid premise as their “We Asked a Fascism Expert About Trump.”  Here, again, Spencer’s ideas were given an open platform, not because he is an expert on the Trump campaign, but simply because his politics have now become a relevant part of the discourse.  Spencer was additionally interviewed in the New York Times for an article that placed him alongside David Duke and Stormfront founder Don Black, which angered him enough to do a response on the Radix Journal website going through the references to him point by point and discussing how he was misrepresented.  This shows a particular character of these internet-focused racialists, who exist in word vomit where they constantly have to ramble at length and can never give up the last word.

These articles are small snippets of dozens of articles in recent months that have shown that white nationalists from David Duke to the Traditionalist Youth Network’s Matthew Heimbach.  When interviewed, all parties are allowed a platform to explain very clearly their key points, why we should support trump, and what kind of vision they hold.

The problematic nature of this coverage often comes directly from its intention to reveal something very real about the Trump phenomenon and its growing far-right affiliations.  What these articles are intending to show is that Trump is, first, associated with these types of characters and, by association, tarnish his name.  But this does not end up being a straight line since, as much of the neo-fascist rebranding has done purposefully, the alt right bloggers are often prepared to muddy the discussion so as to avoid conventional critiques of white supremacist politics.  Reports in places like Gawker and Alternet are then not prepared to counter them, instead simply offering them an open platform that they could never have dreamed of on their own sites.  The intended effect, for these people to hang themselves on their own words, is often ineffective.

The issue that liberal anti-racist activists often clash with radical anti-fascists over is free speech.  The liberal notion of free speech is to defend even the most vile and erroneous forms, which, in essence, the protections are there for.  Antifa organizers then have to propose a counter view, which is not to actually argue for state intervention to criminalize certain forms of speech, but instead to mobilize direct action to stop it cold.  The distinction here is based around the use of the state and whether or not empowering its infrastructure will have a long-term positive effect.  When the organs of political power shift they could very easily use the same rhetoric and repression used in hate speech laws against us on the radical left, and it is also less than appropriate to further empower a state that is designed to maintain capital and ruling class interests.  The “no platform” concept in Antifa organizing is to show the community’s resistance to all the methods by which fascist organizing attempts to gain a foothold.  The direct result of every racialist project is violence, inequality, and authoritarianism, either politically or socially, and therefore stopping it at the root is critical.  People are free to have any ideas they want, but we are also free to mobilize to stop violence and oppression from becoming an unstoppable wave in our community.

It is difficult, then, to figure out exactly what “no platform” will always mean.  An example of this difficulty is with someone like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor.  Taylor has made a name for himself arguing points on the fringes of acceptable discourse, such as concepts like racial difference in IQ, racial disparity in crime, and the “inherent” problems and conflicts in multicultural diversity.  Taylor then uses any oppottunity, whether it is being brought by controversial student groups to campuses or going on liberal talk shows that use him as an oddity, to pitch his well choreographed lines.  His discourse is not meant to outline a clear point, it is to inspire doubt in the listeners.  People are generally not up on all the ways that race and IQ correlations have been disproven, or the very well documented explanations for racial disparity in the judicial system.  Taylor then uses this as a break through opportunity to then shift a small segment of the viewers into their whole world of “research,” explanations, and narratives.

This presents a conflict, which is often seen in how people respond to him.  One could be to simply ignore his work, refuse to debate or comment on it lest actually give it more exposure.  This has been successfully done in many Holocaust Denial situations, which is the pattern offered up by people like Deborah Lipstadt and in her book, Denying the Holocaust.  This is often the best course of action, but what if the ideas are already starting to spread because an effective counter to them has not been made?  This is often while people like Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine debated Mark Weber from the Holocaust denying Institute for Historical Review, or when anti-racist author Tim Wise has debated Jared Taylor on several instances.  The concept here is that the ideas actually are beginning to grow as the only available narrative is the one provided by the fascist right, and it is important to expose and disprove them.

The answer is actually situational, but if a “debate” or disproval of sorts is going to be in effect, the people have to be prepared to do it.  It is not that Jared Taylor is an expert on the sociology of race or intelligence and genetics, in fact he consistently embarrasses himself anytime he moves beyond platitudes to try and actually discuss these topics, but he is completely prepared to debate in sound bites.  This is really the entire front edge of the racialist movement, especially in the U.S., which means that those who are attempting to engage them as a means of attack have to be prepared to effectively counter their stylized argumentation.  Instead, Buzzfeed and related outlets, who clearly believe that exposure will generally lead to enlightened society expelling the Nazis, have not done due diligence and instead are providing them a platform completely open and uncontested.

The second real purpose, at least from an activist standpoint, would be to educate people about these movements and ideas so as to effectively understand and resist them.  This, again, has been a problem for reasons that parallel our own, yet miss the mark.  The conversations with Richard Spencer in the New York  Times, Vice, Buzzfeed, and CBS are especially telling examples of this.  He was allowed to put out points of propaganda, very attractive soundbites that are how he thinks people should first engage with his ideas.  They did not, however, actually deconstruct those ideas, provide much history, correctly correlate them to their more obvious neo-Nazi counterparts, and discuss what the real threat of them are.  This comes, partially, because they do not care what the details are because he is a racist and that is good enough.  On a certain level, we certainly agree.  Fascists of all stripes think that their specific narratives and sub-ideologies are incredibly important and unique.  In reality, to us and for our purposes, they are all really just branches of fascism, an ideology of nationalism, inequality, and anti-democracy.  The problem is, however, that we still have to understand them to effectively counter organize, and even to just have a better understanding of philosophy and politics.  In this way, we are provided with literally nothing by these articles, which instead provide a platform for fascist organizers while providing us no useful information and engaging in no concrete refutation.

Publicity of any sort can be useful to a fascist fringe, yet it can be on us to continue to create a strong counter narrative.  In a certain sense, Donald Trump has actually done this by boiling down the “alt right’s” pseudo-academic drivel to offensive racial sound bites.  Creating a strong counter-narrative is the real work that people on the radical left can do in this regard as the mainstream media can and will do what it knows and not what is best suited to anti-racist struggle.  This means confronting claims directly, continuing to be open about about the how and why of revolutionary projects, and shutting down public organizing and presence of the radical right in every available opportunity.

Trump and the Alt Right echo chamber provides us with a couple of opportunities, the primary one being the ability to counter organize and openly refute the outright lies.  If we cannot expect conventional media outlets to do this effectively, the torch is passed to us, though this can be done without providing any additional power to the voice of the racists.  The greatest weapon against their reactionary ideas of race and social divisions is to actually uproot white supremacy in our communities, and this is a project that goes far beyond the fascist framing.  As we grow anti-racist struggle, their voices will become angrier, yet we will continue to set the narrative agenda.  When Donald Trump makes claims about undocumented peoples, it provides an opportunity to undermine that false narrative and to organize a movement to stand with immigrant rights no matter who the opposition is.

When thinking further about “no platform,” the most important lesson to take into media and propaganda is to not let the racialist fringe set the conversation.  Anti-fascists around the world are growing alongside the opposition, and we can together make confronting racial oppression a priority and not just a response to the reactionaries.  Avoid sharing their lines, do not link to their blogs, block their Tweets, and generally make unavailable their rantings, while also confronting any of the lies and memes that they are successfully getting into the general culture.  It is by walking this line that we are able to undercut the only power they have while eliminating any crossover points they have.

The media is going to continue to use white nationalists as an oddity, but if we know how to approach these daily case studies we can use it to continue to silence and step over their violent impulses.

Alternative Right, White Nationalism

Racists Today: Why Is Russia Today Using White Nationalist Commentators?

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The news cycle has had another spike around the clickbaiting Trump campaign now that Vladamir Putin has thrown some tacit support around the racist billionaire.  This is not surprising given Russia’s use of racialist internal politics and support of nationalists in Eastern Europe, but this also stokes tensions between Trump and the GOP as the Republican perception of Russia tends to be as though it was still the Cold War.  This gave a lot of relevance to Russia Today, the essentially westernized cable news channel that is so popular in U.S. social media circles for its commentary, debates, and somewhat sensationalized news coverage.

As the Putin endorsement story coalesced, RT thought it would be a good idea to bring on Richard Spencer, the founder of Alternative Right and the Radix Journal.  Spencer has been on RT as a commentator, and not a subject, a large number of times, usually talking about U.S. foreign policy.  What they fail to mention is that Spencer is a leading white nationalist and has become the intellectual center of the “alt right” neo-fascist movement in America.

Speaking to RT, he joked about American audiences and their “shrill” ideological battles, but then “lays it down” for the RT audience.

This is another thing where the American media doesn’t really understand Putin. Because Putin is not a shrill ideologue like they are. Putin will speak diplomatically, will speak carefully and they just don’t get that. I think what Putin is saying when he says that Trump might deepen relations is that Trump is not going to treat Russia as an enemy. Remember, Mitt Romney who wasn’t even the craziest of the conservative bunch said that our number one geopolitical adversary is Russia. That is ridiculous. Anyone who would say that is not looking at the world as it is; they are looking at the world through some 1980’s Cold War rosy glasses. Trump, I think, would really deepen the relations in a sense he wouldn’t treat Russia as the Soviet Union or as Nazi Germany or some rogue state. He would treat Russia realistically as a state that has its interests, that has interests that might align with the US in certain situations and I think he would treat that where conflicts would be Trump would make a deal. He would deal with Russia as a real, legitimate actor of a legitimate state. So, in that sense, I truly do hope Trump gets elected. I think the world would be a more peaceful place with this bombastic man in power.

He has gone on RT and discussed the conflict in Ukraine, calling this a “new Cold war” in a battle between Moscow and Washington.  His idea that this is a “proxy war” is not an uncommon one, yet his interest in this comes from the nationalist militias that have formed in Ukraine over anti-EU tension.

Spencer, who leads the white nationalist “think tank,” The National Policy Institute, the “race realist” publishing house, Washington Summit Publishers, and the all-racist culture journal, Radix, is not someone who would normally be considered to be a commentator.  Generally, these are experts in a particular field, at least those with moderate views that are tainted by very extreme bigotries.  Spencer holds none of this expertship, and instead is someone that, in the U.S. has been the subject of “point and sputter” stories, to use Spencer’s own reference to coverage by Rachel Maddow.  Spencer is someone who believes in forming a white Ethnostate, that black and Latino people have innately lower IQs than whites, and that we need to restore a fascist empire with European “spiritual” qualities.  This is not the voice of a general policy commentator, so why is RT employing him as such?

This is certainly not the first time the RT has brought on co-hosts with this type of reputation.  In the past they have also hosted national anarchist Keith Preston, who joins Spencer on the “alt right” sharing his weird synthesis of anarchism with far-right libertarianism, nationalism, and bizarre ideas about tribal identity.  RT has hosted one of the leaders of the race realist and “human biodiversity” movement, which is primarily the idea that people of color in the global south are intellectually inferior and prone to criminal behavior.  Jared Taylor, the founder of the New Century Foundation and American Renaissance, has come on multiple times, often given complete platforms to debate his ideas about diversity and racial inequality.  Founder of the White Student Union and the Traditionalist Youth Network, Matthew Heimbach, has also gone on RT for a softball interview where he was able to prove he was just “not racist.”

When looking at RT broadly, they are not just leaning to the far right as they often have people like anti-racist commentator Tim Wise.  The real question here is why people so far outside of the mainstream and who’s ideas are not relevant to general commentary on news issues are allowed to present contemporary news stories.  One simple answer is that RT does not have the cache to actually attract name talent, which is likely a large part of it, as well as the fact that the primary RT audience is not going to know the difference between different unknown people.  The other side of this is that they are likely carving out a niche for themselves by providing fringe and sensationalistic commentary, which, though in different types of content, is commonly done at places like Fox News and Al Jazeera.

We stand with the Anti-Fascist Action principle of “no platform,” which means we do not debate with fascists and allow them a platform to share their ideas.  The easiest way to approach this issue with RT is to continue to make our voices heard that we will not tolerate these type of commentators to be allowed in as “just another voice on an issue.”

 

Alternative Right, Internet Racism, Uncategorized

Alternative Internet Racism: Alt Right and the New Fascist Branding

36 Comments

In a recent call in show, conservative radio voice Rush Limbaugh got a call from someone named Roy who asked him about a new brand of the right wing that is straying from older conservatism.  “What I’m interested in, is all this stuff about conservatives being older people,” said the caller. “But I think that’s gonna quickly change. I think there’s a group of younger people called ‘the alt right.’ And it started in the last few years in Europe because of the Muslim invasion. And I think it’s… They’re beginning to get people over here, youngsters between 18, 25, 26, to convert to what they call ‘the alt right.’ I think it’s gonna be pretty intense. I think you should keep an eye out for it.”

Many capitalized on Rush’s response, which seemed happy about the caller’s reference to the rise of the cultural right amongst young people.  As the Daily Shoah mentioned in a following show, Rush likely did not know exactly what he was referring to.  Though Rush has started using the Cuckservative meme to discuss conservatives who do not take up racist immigration policies, he certainly is a part of the conservative beltway that is not only not publicly in favor of this white nationalist contingent, it is probably not even much aware of it.

The term “alt right” was then injected into the Twittersphere as a popular hashtag, spreading around the regular reactionary troll dynamic that links together racist blogs and podcasts using labels like “neoreaction” and “Dark Enlightenment.”  This term lead to Buzzfeed doing a story on it where they interview Richard Spencer about the term, leading him to even do a follow up video to discuss the term and how it is evolved.

Though in anti-racist/anti-fascist circles have certainly come across this as they research the new face of white nationalism and the pseudo-intellectual radical right.  Spencer is the right person to be talked to about this since he, for all practical purposes, coined the term.

In 2010 Spencer had finally left a short lived career in paleoconservative publishing to start Alternative Right.  He was plucked out of a Duke University graduate program after writing an article about the “Duke Lacross Case,” where a group of white male students were alleged to have sexually assaulted a black sex worker.  This was eventually picked up by the American Conservative, a publication started by Pat Buchanan, and came on as an Assistant Editor.  It has been alleged that he was eventually fired when his racism came to light, but he could have left on his own accord, and went to the further-right web publication Taki’s Magazine.  In his time there he continued moving further to the right and consorting with groups of people on the fringes of “acceptable” conservatism.  Through this became friends with people like Paul Gottfried, American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, Human BioDiversity proponent Steve Sailer, and a whole host of other people with “heretical views” who all tried to cram into the creases of CPAC.

He then created the web publication Alternative Right, a term he started using in 2008, to bring together all of these different groups of people who were dissenting from Neoconservatism and the Washington Consensus.  These would include white nationalists, “race realists,” radical traditionalists, folk religionists, right Rothbardians, national anarchists, and so many more, all of which took on radically dissenting views from the conservative movement and the GOP.  The publication became a “go to” spot for a new type of white nationalism, one that took its queues from French and broad European intellectuals, looked towards ideas like Eurasianism and Metagenetics, resurrected philosophers like Oswald Spangler and Ernst Junger, and generally coalesced around a disdain for the “modern world.”  They often opposed the Iraq war, environmental destruction, and were critical of American Christianity.  The publication certainly had name people writing for it, such as VDare founder Peter Brimelow and, later disgraced, Heritage Foundation Fellow Jason Richwine, as well as new, openly racist commentators like Colin Liddell.  He started Vanguard Radio as a regular podcast for the website, which featured people ranging from Pat Buchanan to Jared Taylor.

Greg Johnson, editor of the neo-fascist Counter-Currents Publishing, wrote as then editor of the white nationalist Occidental Quarterly, that the alt right banner is bringing together a wide variety of people who are forced out of the mainstream and could benefit from the comfort of one another.

[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.

Spencer eventually moved over to take the reigns of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank, and start the website and publication, Radix Journal.  After continuing to do the podcast at Alternative Right for some time, he moved it over to the Radix Journal podcast, and even pulled the domain for the original Alternative Right website.  This create some animosity with between Spencer and the two co-hosts of Vanguard Radio who had taken over editorial duties of Alternative Right, but they went on to create the New Alternative Right to keep their progress going.  Spencer has gone on to make Radix Journal a white nationalist hot spot, as well as the yearly National Policy Institute conferences, one of which caused him to be deported by the Hungarian government when he tried to do a pan-European event.

Spencer has largely walked away from the term alt right simply because his politics, and those he semi-leads, have specified a bit and he feels that the moment that term inhabited is somewhat over.  Instead, the term has taken on a life of its own in that it represents a certain sphere of nationalist politics today.  From the Right Stuff to Counter-Currents, the “alt right” now often means an internet focused string of commentators, blogs, Twitter accounts, podcasters, and Reddit trolls, all of which combine scientific racism, romantic nationalism, and deconstructionist neo-fascist ideas to create a white nationalist movement that has almost no backwards connection with neo-Nazis and the KKK.  As Spencer often said, they had a “different starting point” than conventional conservatism, often coming from their disavowal of human equality.  It is an easy way of differentiating them from older forms of white nationalism that they feel they have no cultural affinity for.

Much of what distinguishes the alt right is aesthetics, education, and language choices, while the core ideas remain the same.  They maintain traditional racism and anti-semitism, a strong sense of gender roles, a traditionalism about behavior, and a necessity towards national identity, though there have been some acceptance of queer members and a move away from strict Christianity and towards Nordic paganism and the Radical Traditionalism of Julius Evola.  This broad sphere is attempting to reclaim an intellectual, spiritual, and social movement for the far-right, and, except for some exceptions, they like to couch their language in intellectual double speak rather than just stacking racial slurs.

In recent weeks the alt right hashtag has started trending mainly because of the concerted effort of many of the disparate trolls forcing it to do so, but it needs to be seen in exactly the context it exists.  This is old-school racism and neo-fascism, except looking to wear a suit and tie rather than a white hood.  As Neoconservative David From said about them, they are
“going to be white nationalists, but, by God, they’re going to be a little fancy about it.”  The attempt here is to rebrand neo-fascism as something new and hip, which has worked in some circles, but it needs to be recognized and treated as exactly what it is.

While the alt right would broadly be opposed to electoral politics, over the last couple weeks the use of the #altright has been to post constant fawning tributes to Donald Trump.  His recent insulting jokes towards a Jewish audience, claims to ban Muslim immigration, and general attack on minorities has mobilized digital reactionaries to broaden their umbrella to include support for Trump.  This is less for his ability to actually win an election and do anything significant politically, but for his ability to generally unleash the subdermal racism in the country that they can then use to mobilize more to join the broader alt right.  This kind of entryism has a real history of success as Trump represents a 2015 version of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, which helped push conservatives to the right and flood in open white nationalist organizations for the next couple decades

The alt right itself is going to stay the mark of the 21st century’s more intellectually minded and diverse neo-fascism, one that is more willing to sacrifice much of the baggage of older white nationalism so that they can create a movement that undermines the basic values of democracy, equality, and the “enlightenment.”  Understanding this new branding gives anti-fascist the tools to confront the new kind of fascist movement that is going to vie for power in times of crisis and turmoil.

Alternative Right, Traditionalism, White Nationalism

A Racist in the Streets: Trad Youth Ramps Up Public Actions

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If the rhetoric of the racist right is tweaked at the edges, with the sharp language about minority groups shifted towards a broad discourse of “white dispossession,” then it can easily go under the radar as coded racial attacks are common to Tea Party groups and Donald Trump rallies.  As we see an anti-racist movement with teeth evolve out of Black Lives Matter, many whites are taking the calls of a combed-over Fuhrer figure and feeding the darkest recesses of their reactionary impulses.  It is in this wave of Islamophobia, “all lives matter” retorts, and increasing racist violence, that the Traditionalist Youth Network has gone under the general public’s radar.

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The Traditionalist Youth Network and its political wing, the Traditionalist Worker Party, has been hitting the streets in a series of actions where their message has gotten through by being disconnected from their open white nationalism.  In a recent action in Cincinnati, Ohio, Trad Youth picketed outside of the Great American Ball Park to highlight the attack on Christopher McKnight.  McKnight had recently been attacked by a group of people who beat him pretty severely, all of which was caught on camera phones and posted on YouTube.  The reason that Trad Youth became interested in this case was that McKnight was white and the attackers were black.  They then wanted to call attention to the fact that one of the filing police officers who addressed the case had briefly considered filing it as a “hate crime,” even though there is no credible instance that the attack was racially motivated.

Trad Youth’s action garnered a great deal of publicity, and a lot of people they passed were sympathetic to the “heartland” rhetoric they laced their argument with.  The news reports never mentioned their close neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan relationships, nor their open fascist political program.  Trad Youth also does not invite these comparisons as they kept their language incredibly limited when dealing with the crowds that poured past them.

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Over the weekend of December 5-6, the Traditionalist Worker Party joined the Madisonville, Kentucky Christmas Parade complete with their Fallange inspired political signs.  Here they passed out hundreds of candy canes to the children of the town with messages that read “Local Solutions to the Globalist Problem.”  This is a very particular choice in wording as they play on the “go local” language that is often used in small towns around the holidays where small businesses are trying to stay afloat against big box competitors.  The real key to this line is “globalist,” which is a particular framing that is key to their conception of nationalism.  They handed out anti-immigration flyers to the rest of the crowd, which also indicated that they were “pro-worker” since they wanted to keep out foreign workers.  With a general support from the semi-rural, conservative community, their actual political affiliation was never suggested even as their political wing was discussing programmatic solutions.  On their own website, in the discussion about the event, they listed a quote from the Spanish fascist Fallange party founder, Jose Antonio.

Nobody was ever born a member of a political party; on the contrary, we are all born members of one family; we are all citizens of one Municipality; we all press forward in the exercise of one task of work.

Even more disturbing, the Southern California chapter of Trad Youth has been organizing in a coalition with neo-fascist National Anarchist groups to organizing Food Not Bombs.  Usually anarchist in nature, FNB is a project where by the boundaries between those who cook and those who are hungry are broken down and act as a community-building alternative to the traditional soup kitchen.  Often considered an anarchist counter-cultural staple, FNB is an attempt by National Anarchists to co-opt anarchist cultural items so that they can go under the radar as “just another type of anarchism.”  Instead, they believe in a decentralized form of racial nationalism, one where “autonomous” communities are driven by racial identity and traditionalist authoritarianism.  Together, the N-A and Trad Youth also had a sit down meeting with Ron Paul, which continues to show that the left libertarian support for Ron Paul has been a bizarre misstep.

In a continued attempt to wear the shoes of the revolutionary left for a reactionary agenda, Trad Youth and the N-A affiliates formed a four person “black bloc” to defend anti-abortion protesters around the trumped up Planned Parenthood attack.  They note particularly that they were going up against the Revolutionary Community Party, which they use to show that they are utilizing the left’s organizing strategy “against them.”

Further, since one of our national-anarchist members came from a leftist to a traditionalist mindset over time, as he grew from a teenager to a man, he was familiar with the flyering techniques of the RCP and was able to help us locate their flyers they were dropping in the downtown area to invite local drug users and homeless from skid row to a “community meeting” they were organizing in a Methodist church. While we chose not to counterprotest this meeting at that time, having located the flier and considered options to act against them as a group shows the level of discipline we have developed in just a few short months.

The Traditionalist Youth Network has shown itself to be one of the few white nationalist groups capable of even moderate organizing, though they use marginal actions more as a chance to create endless blogs and media rather than as a larger strategy.  Any success that they do have really comes from their ability to adapt to the particulars of the area.  In Kentucky they stick with a traditional rural ultra-conservative messaging, while in California they join the rhetoric of alt-fascism that tries to employ elements of the revolutionary left.  All of this tends to come under the cover of leader Matthew Heimbach’s smiling face, which provides a certain optimism that is very different from the traditional image of racist skinhead anger.

Because they intend to go under the radar in their particular areas and sub-groups, this gives anti-fascists key tools to confront and destabilize their strategy.  In this way it is simply stating the reality of their politics, showing their quotes and affiliations openly, and mobilizing coalitions against any appearance they have.  As we just saw in Seattle with the successful counter-action against Hammerskins from Rose City Antifa, there is the ability to mobilize large actions when people see that open racialism is gaining a foothold.  This fury can be organized with Trad Youth as the target, and the mild community support they have will dry up immediately when they are exposed for what they really are.

Heimbach’s calm demeanor and Christian apologetics will only go so far when the sheet is pulled off of their dog whistle politics and their plans for an Ethno-state is laid bare.