The last year has been difficult for the Alt Right.
Since Charlottesville the counter-organizing by antifascists and the broader community responses have forced Richard Spencer and his growing white nationalist cadre further into the shadows. Starting in 2015, the Alt Right began moving its fascist ideology into the more public realm through publishing, podcasts, activist organizations, and by linking up with the slightly more moderate Alt Light. That all changed in the wake of Trump’s election as the counter-movement grew, and that exploded after the debacle and murder at Charlottesville.
The two largest venues for struggle were their appearances and their web platforms. Antifascists made the Alt Right throw its hands up and stop public appearances as it became too difficult to operate in public. A parallel, but equally powerful, effect has been that public pressure has forced web companies to pull the Alt Right from using their services. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, website companies like Cloudfire and WordPress, financial platforms like Patreon and PayPal, chat functions like Disqus, all have banned the Alt Right over this year, and that number only continues.
While Richard Spencer and his various websites, many associated with the National Policy Institute, thought that he had weathered the storm, he is now officially back offline.
GoDaddy had been handling the hosting for Spencer’s AltRight.com, a trashy tabloid style hate-site that is considered low-brow even for this most racist followers. Composed mainly of racist blog threads, rambling podcasts, and synth-fash aesthetics, it had become a main venue for his inner-circle.
GoDaddy did issue a statement as to why, outlining the content.
In instances where a site goes beyond the mere exercise of these freedoms, however, and crosses over to promoting, encouraging, or otherwise engaging in specific acts of violence against any person, we will take action. It is our determination that altright.com crossed the line and encouraged and promoted violence in a direct and threatening manner.
This came shortly after Spencer’s two Facebook pages for AltRight.com and the National Policy Institute were taken down, a common thread for the Alt Right. Right now Spencer is still on Twitter, but that has a short count-down to it.
As this “shuttening” continue to limit their ability to recruit, they are starting to shrink in numbers and turn to infighting. This is a standard cycle for white nationalists, who cannot sustain a movement when opposition is strong from organized antifascists.
A dramatic shift in American political discourse began in 2015. This was not the emergence of white nationalism as a revolutionary political force, we have had that since the earliest “wages of whiteness.” Instead, a new form of racist popularization occurred when the Alt Right, a new branding for pseudo-intellectual American white nationalism, hit a synergy with certain points of the culture like the Trumpist populist phenomenon and the troll culture of 4Chan. The Alt Right became a buzzword for the media, an elusive movement that was bringing Millenials into “white identity” politics. After 18 months of coordinating with nativist elements in more standard American conservatism, the Alt Right’s movement culminated in their attempt to stand on their own: Unite the Right in Charlottesville.
Since their confirmation transformed into a horror film, they have been hit hard by the culture and the media infrastructure, leaving their future undecided. They have seen unprecedented growth, building on the increasing mistrust Americans have with public institutions, but questions arise about whether or not the far-right will be able to capture additional ground in 2018. Building on what we have seen over the past several years and drawing together what we know of the composition of the Alt Right and the history of insurgent fascist movements in the U.S., there are a few expectations that are clear for the Alt Right in the next year.
Difficulty Reaching the Public
What allowed the Alt Right to recruit en masse was their access to the culture through democratized web institutions. Social media and web publishing allowed them to be on the same Web 2.0 channels as major media outlets, which allowed subculture celebrity to drive their talking points. Hashtags, memes, and trolling created a style of argumentation that allowed them to Trojan Horse ethnic nationalism, all while playing to contemporary social issues and antagonism.
The openness that they have relied on is all but dead at the close of 2017. What has been termed “mass platform denial,” the banning of Alt Right figures and institutions from major web platforms, has decimated the financial and social infrastructure that Alt Right institutions like the National Policy Institute and The Right Stuff have depended on. Web hosting and archiving services, podcast hosting, financial transaction services, email design software, social media platforms, and just about every other vessel for commercial speech have been severed to them. This has forced these organizations into a corner where they are creating subpar services, like Gab or Hatreon, to sustain their stream of outreach and using pay subscription services that limits the reach of their message. While you used to find their podcasts on iTunes, popular Alt Right accounts like Ricky Vaughn on Twitter, and heavy funding coming through small donations on Patreon and PayPal, they are all but gone from the mainstream Internet. With the death of Net Neutrality and the further enforcement of Terms of Service on Twitter, they are only going to find it harder to reach out to the undecided, a problem that they share with many sectors of the left as well.
Campus Wars
It is hard to have an Alt Right public event today. The National Policy Institute is the largest Alt Right conference in the country, taking place twice a year and often held at the publically-owned Ronald Regan building in Washington D.C. After recent clashes with antifascist protesters, Richard Spencer was booted from this location and, after being unable to find anyone else to host him, ended up hosting the conference with a fraction of his usual patrons in an unheated barn. After they figured out who Spencer was, the owners of the facility canceled the conference halfway through and banned them from the premises.
This is the world for the Alt Right now, and the only exception the have found is at public universities. Spencer has always argued for using public institutions since it is harder for them to suppress speech, and this has meant his special focus on universities. He has successfully held speeches at places like the University of Florida – Gainesville and Texas A&M, and after a successful lawsuit at Auburn University he is using the courts to force universities that deny him to allow him on campus at great cost to the student body. Spencer is currently battling with the University of Michigan to get on campus, despite mass campus walkouts and building occupations.
This level of campus focus, as well as with groups like Identity Europa who want to pull from dissident areas of college Republications, antifascist university groups like the Campus Antifascist Network have formed to do ongoing counter-organizing. This dynamic of clashes, like we saw over the last two years when figures like Spencer or Milo Yiannoupoulos appear, is almost guaranteed to continue.
Acts of Violence
There is a common dynamic to American white nationalism that is important to identify. White nationalism is unpopular on its own, so it often has to ally with slightly more moderate areas of conventional conservatism so that can mainstream its message on issues like immigration. As time goes on, the more moderate contingent of the coalition begins to turn on the radicals, blaming them for left attacks. This has happened in the past, and today this contingent is labeled the “Alt Light,” the nativist Civic Nationalists like Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern, and Ann Coulter. The betrayals hung heavy since the election of Trump, so Unite the Right on August 12th was the Alt Right’s chance to try and stand on its own away from the more centrist counter-parts. They were defining themselves to the right, including Klansman and neo-Nazis.
When that betrayal takes place, the radicals begin acting in desperation. Their organizing isn’t working, the general public rejects their message, and the motivating issues become even more bizarre, conspiratorial, and radical their focus in on their echo chamber. It is that equation that breeds acts of “seemingly random violence,” which is acts of racial terror that could have been predicted because of the stoking of fascist thought leaders. While the leadership, including people like Richard Spencer, would decry this violence as destructive to their aims, the rhetoric and ideology itself necessitates these acts of violence. This “Lone wolf” strategy has already begun with attacks by Alt Right figures on the fringes, the most obvious of these being James Alex Fields Jr. attack on protesters that causes multiple injuries and the death of activist Heather Heyer.
Even the infighting among actual white nationalists creates further instability, a factor that is ever present in the white nationalist movement. Are Jews the prime concern? What about Muslims? What do they do with queer members? All of these create critical problems for having any unity.
There is no reason to believe that these acts of violence are in decline, and as the situation becomes more severe for the Alt Right it will likely lead to more desperate acts of cruelty. Desperation on the far-right is what motivates colossal acts of terrorism, which is both terrifyingly predictable and obvious.
Fight Back
The concern with predicting failures in the world of the Alt Right is that people will assume their decline and fall is assured. It is not. Instead, there is a good chance that they will be able to recover and to reap recruits and power from the ongoing racial tension and the reactionary sectors of the white working class that have been tricked to work against their own interests. Instead, we need to come back with a massive antifascist movement, one that will continue to put pressure on their public appearances and media platforms, shutting them down before they have the ability to gain power.
The Alt Right is, fundamentally, a social media phenomenon. The concept of the Alt Right has been around since 2010, a specific confluence of white nationalism influenced by various strands of thought including Neoreaction, Paleoconservatism, the European New Right, and so on. The phenomonon of the Alt Right, as we know it today, is that of the popularization of those ideas, turning their racialism into Twitter trolls, snarky blogs, and annoying podcasts. They have relied on Web 2.0 platforms like Twitter for publicity and SoundCloud for podcast hosting because it puts them on an equal footing with the giants of media opinion.
The only problem is that their racism violates every rule the platform has, giving them a finite life. Over the last year many of their leaders have been banned from Twitter. First, Milo Yiannoupoulos of Breitbart was shuttered for leading a racist harassment raid on actress Leslie Jones. Later Ricky Vaughn was kicked off, and then Richard Spencer and many others. Likewise, SoundCloud began dropping white nationalist podcasts like the Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation, and PayPal severed their funding. Though many of them are trying to make new platforms like Gab their home, they just aren’t going to happen in the public consciousness.
On Saturday, February 4th, Twitter just went through on a huge banning campaign. They shut down Charles Johnson (AKA Reactionary Tree), the account for the newly form AltRight.com, Dr. Joyce, Murdoch/ Murdoch, and several dozen other Alt Right figures were dropped from Twitter. This is the only way for them to break into the mainstream even a little bit, which is a huge hit to a movement that needs this trolling platform to find a place for itself. Cuckservative gave it a boost, #AltRight gave it a name, and its ability to take racism viral is what made it relevant, and without platforms like Twitter it is almost as though it will cease to be.
At the same time, Reddit has begun the purge of Alt Right subreddits that have become a home for the ugliest racism on the Internet. R/AltRight and R/AlternativeRight has been banned from the site, with R/The_Donald likely to be next. What this shows clearly is that they are banning them based on ideological grounds, understanding that Alt Right online forums are where plans for doxing and harassment begin.
While the Alt Right is still larger than we ever could have imagined a few years ago, the last six months have been a brutal social attack on them, and they are reeling.
Among the crowd of well-dressed white nationalists that made up the now infamous National Policy Institute conference in November 2016, he certainly stood out. In a purple t-shirt, an unkempt man with a thick Scottish accent took to grand metaphor and shocking allegations to keep across a message of white separatism. Millennial Woes, the pseudonym for Colin Robertson, has become an Alt Right star in the caustic cauldron that was 2016. His strange YouTube videos, often long-winded Google Hangouts with other Alt Right celebrities, are so numerous that in the world of constant racist podcast streams and talking-head webcams, he has stood out.
Colin Robertson – Millenial Woes
While his face has been well seen over the last two years, he has attempted to remain completely anonymous. The expectation was that his name, address, and personal information would remain his own, hidden from the media, all while his face and voice became ubiquitous, easily accessible in a search engine. When British tabloids finally revealed who he was several weeks ago, the only person that seemed surprised that this occurred was Robertson.
The Alt Right, as it exists today, has relied on anonymity as the key to its growth. White nationalism has been personally toxic for decades, and someone’s associations with open racism and anti-Semitism often making it difficult for them to keep a job or a hold down relationship. The ability for people to interact in a meaningful way while remaining anonymous to the general public has been exactly what the Alt Right needed to get a large base of educated Middle Class racists, exactly the crowd who would not be willing to give up their comfortable life in the way that many public KKK members and neo-Nazis have. They have been able to have their cake and eat it too: they keep their bourgeois lives in tact while also continuing to contribute to a revolutionary fascist movement.
The step beyond being a Twitter “shitlord” was to start blogging and, later, podcasting, where people could hear your racial slurs without ever seeing the face of the person on the other end of the microphone. This became popular as pseudoanonymous Alt Right ideologues became well known, from the crowd at The Right Stuff podcast network to people like Paul Kersey and his blog Things Black People Don’t Like. The number of people living under false names yet joining weekly web radio shows is growing, all with the idea that their anonymity could be maintained for the long-term. As they make the next step towards in-person organizing, this step is even more difficult, making it impossible to remain in obscurity for long.
Emily Youcis
2016’s National Policy Institute conference was the largest white nationalist event of the year, a place where the Alt Right could get together to pat each other on the back after a year of media validation and the arrival of the Trump Train. In the crowd were scores of these Alt Right media celebrities, both “out” and still under the radar. Emily Youcis has recently made a name for herself for her surrealist Alt Right cartoons and vicious racist remarks, and she stormed out of the building to tangle with the protesters out front. After the aggressive confrontation and heavy media saturation of the event, Youcis was fired from her job selling pistachios for the Philadelphia Phillies. She has since then gone on the Alt Right blogosphere and Twitter to make appeals for donations since she now lacks an income to make her bills. Youcis had not hidden her face or name from the public, and so retribution from her employer was a matter of time. For others, they have worked hard to keep their images out of photos and hide information so as to avoid recognition.
Cooper Ward – Ghoul
The Daily Shoah has been the center of this effort, becoming a popular podcast that streams to thousands of listeners who tune in every week to hear their “Opie and Anthony for white nationalists” brand of angry racial epithets. The hosts Mike Enoch, Seventh Son, Ghoul, and, off and on, Bulbasaur, rant about weekly political issues, inventing their own racial slurs, talking about “Jewish domination,” and pining for a “white Ethnostate.” After Ghoul began doing a video series without a mask and publicizing his image, activists quickly identified him as Cooper Ward, a talkative philosophy student at the University of Nebraska. He was quickly identified as an organizer with the white nationalist American Vanguard, though he has denied this when questioned by It’s Going Down. After Red Ice Radio hosted a show with a “reactionary Jew” who was asking if fascist Jews could be a part of the Alt Right, something akin to a meltdown occurred on the Right Stuff message boards. The hosts of the Daily Shoah were accused of being Jews and homosexual sympathizers; funny since they have been some of the most virulently anti-Semitic and homophobic people imaginable.
Van Bryant II – Bubasaur
After some prodding on both sides, Bulbasaur and Seventh Son were doxed by their former fans, revealing them to be Van Bryant II and Jesse Craig Dunstan, respectively. While they have discussed the desire to go public for quite some time, the fact that this could have ramifications for their careers is something they could not abide. Enoch, their talkative leader, was a software developer making a six-figure salary in Manhattan, and he took special accommodations to avoid being identified in his personal life while skyrocketing to fame in the white nationalist circuit.
Just a few days later people started hearing rumblings that Enoch was about to be revealed after someone traced an article he mentioned on Red Ice Radio to a post on The Mises Institute website from years before, and then used an old PayPal address to find his real name: Mike Peinovich. The internet came apart at the seams at this point as Mike Peinovich was revealed to be one of the most well known white nationalists in the country. He was immediately fired from his job at the tech startup Pronoun, where he was a front-end developer. His family reportedly then disowned him, except for this wife.
It was at this point that the Peinovich saga took an even more bizarre turn as it was then revealed that his wife, Ames Friedman, a PR executive in New York, was Jewish. This made the neo-Nazi wing of the Alt Right lose their mind and declare that Enoch was a “Jewish spy,” and Enoch conceded that he had hid this. He went on Rebel Yell to apologize profusely for what he has done, and it was even suggested that he was leaving his wife. It does appear now that they will stay together, though he continues to believe that Jews are subversive agents out to destroy the white race. Without a job and having lost everything, Enoch is vowing to continue to push the Right Stuff and the Daily Shoah forward, though he has been “rent seeking” for money to pay his bills while he waits to start his media empire.
While these revelations are fresh, it is clear that the fallout has been dramatic, and several have started hiding from the limelight. First, Cooper Ward left The Daily Shoah, and later so did Van Bryant, also pulling all of his social media from the Internet. Jess Dunstan has not gone into complete hiding, and even put a song by his own band on a co-hosted episode of Fash the Nation, which many are interpreting to mean that he is comfortable with taking the next step into doing this work in real life. He later began saying his name on the air, refusing to hide like his “comrades” did. This is likely because he is self-employed, though the fallout is likely to continue in this regard.
The real results of this kind of revelation can be seen as newspapers arrived at the home of Colin Robertson, asking to speak with the man behind Millennial Woes. They were instead met with the police as Robertson cowered inside, refusing to allow the press to see his face. In a statement put up on his YouTube channel he said he had left the country and is being supported by a network of his supporters. His YouTube channel has become one of the dominant institutions on the Alt Right, with over five hundred videos and 23,000 subscribers. He put out a public statement saying that he has had to go into hiding in another country and that this may be the end of his anonymous career, one built on such a tenuous grasp on reality that he actually believed he could go under the radar while putting his face on camera.
The growth of the Alt Right has rested solely on the ability to have a voice while remaining anonymous. The Right Stuff, Millennial Woes, and more blogs and podcasts than we can count have been built on this principle, with podcasts like the Neoreaction Ascending the Tower or The Fatherland being open about what would happen if they were doxed. If their identities were revealed then lucrative careers would be shattered, marriages and families torn apart, and social outcast status imposed. Part of what has kept white nationalism to the fringes and the participation of only the edges of acceptable society is that there are consequences for participation, and this rash of Internet participation has tried to blow this open. Now, a series of doxings is closing this window back up.
Some on the Alt Right are trying to push back on this and create a network of support for those being revealed. Part of this is white nationalist attorney Kyle Bristow’s Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, an organization founded to “promote the United States Constitution and to oppose people who and organizations which strive to usurp the freedoms it guarantees.” Bristow, who gained much of his experience consulting National Alliance projects, hopes to fund those who are losing their careers for white nationalist participation, namely though some form of crowd funding.
What they want, more than anything, is to create negative consequences for those who do the doxing. They had a small victory when a Salon editor was fired after posting Richard Spencer’s address on Facebook with a line about how his grandparents “took baseball bats to Bund meetings.” While they thought this was a step in the right direction, as the punching of Richard Spencer shows clearly, the culture has shifted even further into an antifascist mindset. Trump’s election put a sense of urgency around a general disgust with the far right, and now more and more people are willing to stand up and take a militant approach to organizing. At the same time, even the centrist and moderate left public is unwilling to let the Alt Right pass in their midst, which means it is still just as toxic as it ever was to be an open white nationalist.
While the Alt Right wanted to create consequences for those doxing them, journalists are continuing to reveal their information. Fash the Nation, which was the most popular podcast in the Right Stuff podcast network, went off the air and took down its website when they got wind that they were about to be doxed. Their information will still likely come out shortly, and there is little they can do as their work has been mirrored all over the internet. At the same time, their toxic internal culture threatens to dox them daily, and there is little reason to believe that the structure of anonymity will continue more than a few more months. The Alt Right now has a choice: go big or go home. The answer for many of the middle class young adherents will be to choose a family and a career over a failed revolutionary tract.
The question will be if those that are going out in the open will find enough to sustain themselves, and most will quickly see that the future for people like Mike Peinovich are less than rosy. Few people can get the family and investment funds that Richard Spencer has achieved, and therefore life as an open racist is going to be difficult. For antifascists, it will be important to institutionalize this information as much as possible; to follow up when the information is revealed and make sure everyone in their life is aware. It will also mean replicating this over and over again, therefore robbing them of the sense that they can hold down a normal existence while actively contributing to that movement. It will also mean confronting their platform hosting, distribution companies, and financial tools to sever their access to the culture and their ability to raise funds. Without this, a life out of the closet is even less viable.
This end result was inevitable for a movement who never reconciled the fact that they went full fascist with ugly racism without developing a professional infrastructure. What the Daily Shoah did was create a fandom off of the most disgusting kinds of racist humor imaginable, all of which was not slow enough to bring the culture with it. This is to our benefit since we know that they lack the ability to propagandize society and since they couldn’t insulate their vanguard from consequences, they will lose them as well. All the pieces are here for antifascist organizations; all it requires now is to use them thoughtfully and effectively.
The Daily Shoah has been one of the most popular Alt Right podcasts for the last three years, redefining the Alt Right culture with its internal jargon and snarky online troll behavior. They have stayed on the air and expanded by the regular donations of users. They had a PayPal account that they would receive donations from and, for some reason, they would read out the donations by name every week. This was starting to amount to several hundred dollars a week, that was until PayPal got wind of what they were doing.
Since their hate speech was a violation of PayPal’s Terms of Service, they banned them from using the service. This shuddered the Daily Shoah’s income source immediately and sent them scrambling, using strange libertarian services in other countries to basically receive and pay for things with BitCoin. They eventually just gave in and created another PayPal account, this time not listing it publicly and only telling its supporters and donors privately.
That PayPal account is done in violation of those Terms of Service, and is now servicing hundreds of donations a week, bringing them to one of the most well supported white nationalists publications around.
If you want to let PayPal know exactly what the Daily Shoah is doing, that they have been banned before and are continuing to try to fund their white nationalist operation through PayPal, you can do this below.
Contact aupviolations@paypal.comto report the Daily Shoah and their violation of the Terms of Service.
It is well known that white nationalists/Alt Right are some of the worst organizers on the planet. In general, just successfully getting a meme or poster into the public is considered a win for them, while their left wing opponents are carrying out complex organizing campaigns with thousands of participants.
Flyer from UM Campus.
The Daily Shoah, and its website The Right Stuff, is not calling for an “agit prop” attempt at propaganda the weekend after the election. Following Alt Right posterings at the University of Michigan and the Iowa State University, who most assume the Daily Shoah was behind even though they persist they were not, they are calling for posters to be put up at major universities after the election. If Trump is to win, then it will gloat, if he does not, then it will scale up the revolutionary call for “white identity.”
Flyer from UM campus.
Mike Enoch and Seventh Son (Sven) from the Daily Shoah cite the multi-million dollar to commitment the University of Michigan made after the Alt Right posters showed up as a victory. In response to the racialist content they university extended a huge investment in diversity training and inclusionary policy developments, something that the Alt Right is claiming victory on even though anti-racist organizers have been campaigning for it for years. Since, statistically, these diversity trainings actually lower community feelings of bigotry, equalize educational outcomes, and generally work against white nationalist interests, we are going to allow them to continue their “victorious campaign” by inspiring more universities to confront racism.
What is likely to occur is many college-aged Daily Shoah insiders are going to go on campus with these posters during that weekend, attempting to get them up in the cover of night. The Daily Shoah has worked hard to develop a community around their message boards, and that is spilling out into actual community groups like the Houston Goylers in Houston, Texas, the New York Forum, in New York City, and groups in Dallas, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, and other cities. They have given the Alt Right a huge organizational boon, and they seem to have a great deal of crossover with Identity Europa.
Many of the flyers that will be used are found on Alt Right and Right Stuff commentator Reactionary Tree’s, A.K.A. Charles Lyons, website. Here he has been putting up some racially charged propaganda.
Identity Europa poster from a San Francisco suburb.
For those who want to confront this behavior on campuses, then groups of students and anti-fascist supporters could do late night campus patrols looking to capture these people on camera. Since they thrive on anonymity for their racism, exposure will shut down their attempts at organizing. This is likely to take place on campuses that have seen this behavior before, especially where Identity Europa propaganda posters have appeared.
Some potential schools are (Based on where Alt Right and Identity Europa materials have recently appeared.):
Many of us were horrified when Alt Right staple podcast Fash the Nation, the most popular podcast in the Right Stuff white nationalist podcast network, hit the top spot in one of the political subcategories at SoundCloud. Like most Alt Right podcasts, Fash the Nation relies on platforms like SoundCloud to meet most of their audience since these reach the largest listening audience. They are also violating the Terms of Service given their pervasive use of racial slurs, arguments that people of color have lower IQs than whites, Holocaust Denial, and other forms of racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and generally disgusting banter.
After many anti-fascists, including Anti-Fascist News, began a campaign to let SoundCloud know exactly what Fash the Nation, the Daily Shoah, and other white nationalist podcasts were using SoundCloud for, they were officially banned and removed from the podcast platform. After being let know that they were “dedicated to violating the Terms of Service,” their shows were all removed from their hosting and they were prohibited from posting new shows. As the largest and most popular white nationalist podcast in the country, this is a major blow to their effort. This comes after the Daily Shoah was banned on SoundCloud, then used another name to get back on. They were banned once again along with Fash the Nation after anti-fascists let SoundCloud know that they were attempting to go under the radar.
While this is a victory, there are still several dozen other white nationalist podcasts that are still using SoundCloud. They have to continue to be exposed and removed, disallowing these racists a platform for their violent rhetoric. They are attempting to build their own platform for hosting and podcasting currently, and we hope they do as it will further marginalize them and shrink their echo chamber. They require social media and broad hosting platforms to mainstream their message, and if they slowly are banned from these services they will only be accessible to their ideological core.
Below we are including the contact information to report these podcasts to SoundCloud, as well as a list of open white nationalist Alt Right podcasts that are using SoundCloud to extend their reach of violence. Write and call in and let them know that you do not support these voices of racial nationalism and reactionary force on SoundCloud!
Here you can report the above podcasts for hate speech, which all of them openly violate. TRS Radio especially violates this as they are broadcasting a podcast that was already banned explicitly.
Twitter has been the place that the Alt Right really came into their own. Lax rules mixed with a culture of anonymity let the Alt Right expand beyond their publishing ideologues and into the snarky culture of memes, hash tags, and trolling. While this is where their numbers have ballooned, one of their archetypes is complete in Ricky Vaughn. Named after the character in the movie Major League, Vaughn epitomizes the Alt Right troll, harassing Jewish commentators and people of color and taking Alt Right arguments and crystalizing them down to snarky bite-sized bits. After Vaughn amassed 60,000 followers with his “edgelord” harassment, Twitter finally banned him for violating behavior.
Vaughn’s ideas are as basic as can be, which has lent to his success. When he describes his political evolution he says things like “I tried liberalism, then I tried conservatism” boiling down complex political positions to the most simplistic ideologies that is surprising he is able to put together coherent political points. This may be why he has limited his commentary to 140 characters rather than any substantial articles. After getting his start on the controversial My Posting Career, he went onto Twitter with RickyVaughn99 in an attempt to bridge mainstream Trump supporters with Alt Right talking points, gaining popularity after Gamergate. Here he mixed his criticism against non-white immigration with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of people like Kevin MacDonald. He was cited often as one of the conversation influencers on Twitter, especially with Alt Right hashtags like #whitegenocide, and was followed by three Trump staffers.
Though he may be arguing that it was his “Free Speech” being violated, Twitter only bans users for harassing behavior and for things that are deemed incitements to violence. Alt Lite commentator Milo Yiannoupolos was also recently banned on Twitter after he incited followers to racially terrorize Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. This is a major blow to the Alt Right since they rely on this trolling culture, and it seems like Twitter and other social media outlets are starting to refuse to participate. They recently had to soften their language to racist “codewords” since open racial slurs are getting them banned.
There is a difficult side to this as well since Twitter could, theoretically, start banning people for other reasons as well. What we can focus on, however, is their behavior and how we can set standards for conduct in these social media spaces that do not allow for racist harassment. Going after the Alt Right where it lives, the Internet, allows us to cut it off at the source, and win in the only arena that they have ever had any real success in.
In a recent episode of Fash the Nation, the most popular podcast on the Right Stuff Alt Right podcast network, hosts Jazz Hands McFeels and Marcus Halberstram joked with glee that their podcast had hit #1 on SoundCloud. Though this may be shocking, it is actually only the top spot among conservative political podcasts, though this is still a frightening development. Podcasting has been a central tool of Alt Right white nationalism, with early adopters like Richard Spencer of Radix Journal really making it a key point of outreach. The model was further popularized by The Right Stuff, who took an “Opie and Anthony” styled talk show format with Alt Right themes, complete with their own Chan type jargon and aggressive use of racial slurs and incendiary rhetoric.
In recent months the content has been made obvious on many platforms, with the Radix Journal podcast and Red Ice Radio being dropped from iTunes and the Daily Shoah being let loose from SoundCloud. This shuddering, however, seems to be short lived as the growing Right Stuff podcast network, of which the Daily Shoah is the flagship, has made SoundCloud a key broadcasting and outreach platform.
The Daily Shoah itself has found a way to get back onto SoundCloud by going under their radar, being aware that their name is likely what brought attention on them in the first place. There are multiple streams and accounts at play for the various Right Stuff podcasts, including shows like the Weekly Narrative and the Darwin Digest. The Daily Shoah is now included in their complete stream, just called TRS Radio, and streamed with the name “TDS” and then the episode number. This is essentially a way to trick SoundCloud into allowing them to broadcast even though they have been banned.
Following the Right Stuff’s example, other fascist organizations are using SoundCloud to start their podcast outreach. Nathan Damigo and Identity Europa are now broadcasting under the name On the Front, while there are also accounts for white supremacist troll Weev, the Radix Journal, the New Alternative Right, Red Ice Radio, Radio ThreeFourtheen, and many others.
SoundCloud has already shown that they are not going to tolerate openly racist podcasting on their platform, so it begs the question as to why it is continuing. The primary reason is that the issue itself just has not been raised. What this means is that anti-racists internationally need to contact them and let them know exactly what is going on here and what podcasts are broadcasting a message of hate.
Below we are including the contact information to report these podcasts to SoundCloud, as well as a list of open white nationalist Alt Right podcasts that are using SoundCloud to extend their reach of violence. Write and call in and let them know that you do not support these voices of racial nationalism and reactionary force on SoundCloud!
Here you can report the above podcasts for hate speech, which all of them openly violate. TRS Radio especially violates this as they are broadcasting a podcast that was already banned explicitly.
In the ramp up to Hillary Clinton’s Alt Right speech and in the aftermath the Alt Right headed into the public media consciousness. Drawing together the appointment of Stephen Bannon with the conspiracy popularity of Infowars and the racist crew of Twitter trolls, she has allowed a layer of media scrutiny to somewhat misrepresent the Alt Right. Her speech was generally a positive move and none of us expected her to get all the details right. As profiles came from every major news outlet, few actually got the characterization of the Alt Right correct.
What this allowed for, and what was already happening as the Alt Right label became popular over the past few months, is received a layer of commentators and angry white voices have begun calling themselves Alt Right without holding the real ideological foundations. Breitbart, the Donald Trump campaign, Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannapoulos, and a whole range of Twitter commentators and Trump supporters have been labeled as Alt Right, either by the media externally or in a sort of self-imposed Edgelord identity.
This phenomenon has been labeled by those in the Alt Right as the Alt Lite, and while it has presented them with a huge boost in exposure, it has also created a problem for their ideological consistency.
The Alt Lite mainstreams most of the Alt Right’s most public and middle ground political positions. Immigration restriction, anti-political correctness, Islamophobic policies, anti-feminism, and other Trump-like proposals. These are all superstructural positions, manifestations of an underlying politic that many in the Alt Lite do not share. While places like Breitbart are helping to fight the Alt Right’s war on immigration and demonizing voices of color, they are not necessarily centered on their white nationalism, race and IQ beliefs, and vicious anti-Semitism
A recent story released by the Forward written by Josh Seidel called “I’m a Jews, and I’m A Member of the Alt Right” was the most cited of these, and likely the one that made the most Alt Right members angry. Here he pronounces a politically incorrect, Trump supporting opinion, one that is void of almost all the features that those of us who track far-right groups would actually ascribe to the Alt Right. He was one of the many commentators who have taken on the label, using the trendy term Alt Right to simply describe their own mildly controversial views, ones that are inconsistent among these voices and not set in the ideological roots that all actual Alt Right publications agree on.
Richard Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute and the Radix Journal, is one of the centers of the Alt Right, and has been generally positive about this development. He calls himself “pro-Alt Lite,” but does say that they need to maintain ideological consistency and watch out for entryism. There is not likely to be actual conservative entryism into the Alt Right, but he is right that those with more middle ground views who simply want to appear “edgy” will help to moderate their movement.
The Right Stuff and its signature podcast, the Daily Shoah, was less happy when looking at this phenomenon, especially Jews calling themselves Alt Right. In an article called “I’m a Jews and I’m Party of the Alt Right, Trust Me Goy!” they provided an ironic commentary suggesting that conspiratorial Jews are trying to destroy the Alt Right from the inside. Here they outlined four key parts of the Alt Right that must be observed, including:
Opposing Illegal Immigration
No Globalist Elites
Natural gender roles
Anti-Semitism
The last was incredibly important to them, and one that they stress in this article that jokingly takes on a “Jewish” voice.
Unfortunately, as I said earlier there is a very vocal minority of people who claim to be part of the Alt-Right who spread anti-Semitic memes all across the Internet. They share pictures of Jews being shoved into ovens like it’s nothing. If you ask them about their disrespect they claim the Holocaust never even happened. Can you believe that? In the Current Year people still believe that the 6 million were not gassed and ovened. I got so angry one day that I asked one of these Alt-Right pretenders where they got the idea that the Holocaust never happened. The pompous brat rattled off some gibberish about there “not being any paperwork explicitly calling for the extermination of the Jews.” He even showed me a stupid coin that had a swastika (OY VEY) on one side and a Star of David on the other. As if that’s supposed to mean anything! Then he had the gall to link me to some despic–uh, I mean, confused gentile pastor who babbled on about high tech ovens and asked a funeral director about cremation times. These people are loco, amigo! So, to summarize my feelings on the matter, I don’t really care. American children are told the truth about the Holocaust and the 6 million from age 5 onward. They’re made to read Night at least 3 times and told about Hitler’s sexual derangement due to having one testicle (He was probably into butt stuff too, goys.) They’re taken on field trips to one of a dozen or so handsomely funded Holocaust Museums at least once in their school careers. A vocal minority on Twitter doesn’t scare me; although, those parentheses got real old, real fast.
The most popular podcast on the Alt Right, Fash the Nation, also stressed that Jews cannot be a part of the Alt Right since the Alt Right itself is anti-Jew. What they say very clearly, and what is echoed on almost the entire core Alt Right publications from Counter Currents to the New Alternative Right, is that Jews are responsible for undermining Western identity through globalism, immigration, feminism, queerness, and other “degeneracies” that stop White men from running a nation “in their interests.” Fash the Nation actually sites another Alt Right commentator, Lawrence Murray (a joking Semitic pseudonym) and their “principles” of what makes up the Alt Right.
(We are shortening these obviously, they clearly think that their LONG definitions are important, but you will get the drift.)
People are different.
Our world is tribal.
Our tribe is being suppressed
Men are not women and women are not men.
Freedom is a responsibility and not a right.
If we must be a democratic society, the franchise should be limited.
Jewish elites are opposed to our entire program.
While they try to have a conversational and inoffensive tone, the politic here is clear. This is ideologically in line with almost all neo-fascist programs, one that see the traditional gender roles as necessary, that racial groups are unequal, that democracy should only be for the racial “in group,” that freedom needs to be subsumed to only certain caste levels, and that Jews are the enemy. They go on to cite people like Kevin MacDonald, the anti-Semitic psychology professor who has made it his life’s work to prove that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” to confuse Gentiles and undermine their nations.
Greg Johnson, the esoteric white supremacist founder of the Alt Right publishing house Counter Currents, posted an article that sums up a sentiment that we actually agree with completely. Called “The Alt Right Means White Nationalism…or Nothing at All” he outlines what the Alt Right is versus what the Alt Lite wants it to be.
Like paleoconservatism, the Alternative Right was simply a way that timid, status-conscious conservatives could flirt with racism and even anti-Semitism while maintaining some sort of pretense of mainstream credibility.
But when Richard Spencer started the Alternative Right webzine in 2010, the principal funders and writers regarded it simply as a vehicle for White Nationalist entryism, and they would have blown it up rather than see it become anything else. Today’s White Nationalists need to take the same strongly proprietary attitude toward the Alternative Right. It is a vehicle of White Nationalism, and we will give it the Howard Roark treatment if it is hijacked from us. Full stop
Johnson is not as sympathetic to the Alt Lite phenomon as others are because he notes that Counter Currents has not really seen a traffic bump through the search terms after the Clinton speech. This kind of analysis is a good metric for the development, one that Johnson has always been pretty apt at reading. Johnson’s work is ideologically consistent, one that shows the clear connection between the Alt Right and the esoteric mysticism, Germanic neopaganism, and occultism that many associate with the spiritual ideas that run parallel to fascist movements. While associating with the surface level of Alt Right “Shitlords” on popular websites and Twitter handles, Counter Currents continues to publish books by people like Savitri Devi, a white Hindu woman who believed that Hitler was a divine avatar and that the caste system should be enforced through authoritarian violence. While many on the Alt Right associate more with a atheist “race realist” perspective, there is still a reverence for these more occult and spiritual positions echoing through all Alt Right institutions, with some, like Neoreactionaries and the Radix Journal, being more explicit about the “spiritual” foundations for their racism.
Andy Nowicki, a writer who was popularized as a co-host of Vanguard Radio, the original podcast of Alternative Right, is now the editor of the New Alternative Right website (the original was deleted by Richard Spencer amid protest by Nowicki). In his article “What the Alt Right Means to Me (Hillary Clinton Remix),” echoes this sentiment, even though Nowicki himself is not a strict White Nationalist.
In general, places like American Renaissance, Red Ice Radio, and the vlogger Millennial Woes have all created “intro videos” for the Alt Right to help orient Alt Liters, all of which are explicit about their racism, anti-Semitism, and opposition to democracy and equality.
While the Alt Lite phenomenon may be difficult for those on the Alt Right, it also presents challenges for anti-fascists. If the Alt Right is dumbed down to just means iconoclastic American conservatism, it is harder to make the connections that their public ideas, like immigration restriction and Trump success, is rooted in white nationalism. That is the source of this politic even if some recent “converts” are using the Alt Right label without accepting all of its dirty laundry. What the Alt Right will do over the next several weeks is to double down on its more unsavory connections, something that will reverberate through the Alt Lite as it becomes more and more apparent what the phrase, and the ideology, really means.
For those on the anti-fascist left it means continuing to name names when it comes to the Alt Right, and to not let their silly arguments about crime, immigrations, and politically correct speech be the end of the conversation. Instead, we should help the Alt Right tell the truth, so to speak, so that they can consistently reveal who they are.
We need to call the Alt Right what it is: fascist.
Anti-Fascist News 