The Nationalist Front is a new confederation of neo-Nazi, KKK, and Alt Right groups that is trying to capitalize on a Trump presidency. Made up of some of the more obvious sectors of the white nationalist movement like the National Socialist Movement, the groups who, until recently, was well known for emblazoning a swastika over the America flag. The Traditionalist Workers Party, the political wing of Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Youth Network, is one of the most well-known groups in the new confederation, and they have been successful at pulling both from the Alt Right community and the more traditional rural white supremacist organizations like the White Knights. Matthew Heimbach and TWP recently presented at the Right Stuff planned Atlanta Forum, which was coordinated as a Southern Nationalist event by the people behind the Rebel Yell podcast.
TWP and those in the Nationalist Front are known for their street actions, and now that Trump is threatening to lower federal scrutiny on white supremacist organizations in favor of targeting Muslims, they now think that they can make a show of strength in the South. They recently announced a rally for April 29th in Pikeville, Kentucky, a town with scarcely over 6,000 people. This is historically the kind of area where they hope to recruit from, but only if they are able to reframe the narrative on their own terms and come without opposition. They are messaging the event as taking a “stand for white working families,” part of the fascist populism that TWP is known for, arguing that they stand for the white working class against leftist immigration, free trade, and internationalism.
This action by TWP is not going unchallenged as a counter rally has already being organized and it is going to need the support of antifascists around the country. That rally meets at Pikeville Park on Main Street, and we are linking to the Facebook event below.
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.
Below is an interview conducted with anti-fascist author and organizer Alexander Reid Ross addressing many of the themes raised in his upcoming book, Against the Fascist Creep. We discuss what the idea of “creeping fascism” is, where it has become prevalent, and what organizations have begun to confront it.
Anti-Fascist News: Could you explain a little bit about this concept of “creeping fascism” that you built the book on?
Alexander Reid Ross: So the idea of creeping fascism is the emergence of fascism on the global stage through its tacit and often concealed acceptance either organizationally or in theory. So, for example, when leftwing movements in, say, 2009-2010 started trading in a very conservative language of ethnic nationalism and separatism, you know, like “white people deserve their own place because people of color are naturally inclined towards one another,” that was a sign that there some kind of influence and networking that was going on, and, again, if not organizationally, then in the ideological terrain. And I’m not saying that all left wing organizations were doing that, but I did notice a marked pattern in some of them. There was a sense in some sectors, even when Occupy came around, that we had to defeat the liberals in power even if that means letting the fascists in through the back door. I think that’s been proven false, and we need to learn from those mistakes through material analysis.
AFN: What kind of movements was that showing up in?
ARR: I think I saw it emerging in the anarchist movement and, to an extent, in some of the left wing issue based movements where Marxists were more prevalent, whether anti-imperialist or anti-war or whatever. Then there are the non-left or post-left radical groups that are just as vulnerable, if not more so. I found out, for example, that the national anarchists had been trying to affect an influence, like in Earth First! even, in the northeast, which came as kind of a surprise to me. It did sort of open my eyes to the fact that because as an editor of the Earth First! Journal during that period, I had been sort of unwittingly implicated in this process.
I think there was also a point after 2008 and the market crash that radical movements experienced an influx of people and didn’t have a filtering process that was equipped to handle the parsing through of different ideas that exist in the radical milieu, and that’s really where it takes place. Fascism emerges from the radical milieu as a combination of right and left wing ideas. If you just want to say, “I’m neither left nor right but I’m radical,” then there’s going to be a lot of territory that is contested, and that is very vulnerable to a sort of fascistic proclamations and ideological positions.
AFN: How do you respond to that then or how should left wing movements respond to that creeping influence? What are effective strategies I guess?
ARR: I think first and foremost is education. That was one thing that I started to do for myself after the news about Earth First! came out. The fact was that this one national anarchist had helped to schedule a fundraiser for Earth First!, and then they used that to speak very loudly to a European national anarchist audience about connections between Earth First! and national anarchism.
Any single move like that can be blown up into direct coordination, which is terrible, but you can always immediately quash that openly. What’s more difficult is that you have to be careful about the world of ideas in order to recognize how left wing intentions and ideas can be twisted by racists or sexists, and how that is connected to organizational affinities. So it’s equally important to recognize both the intellectual history of fascism and the trajectory of different fascist organizations. Both have fostered new movements and ideological currents that have also segued into the left wing.
The organizational factor is particularly important when talking about national anarchism because a lot of people see broader radical subcultures or milieus as more safe or secure from fascism than the left. For example, people embrace queer culture as distinct from the left, denying that fascism can have queer folks, suggesting that if there are queer people in a particular group or movement it can’t be fascist. Of course some of the most important fascists have been queer, from Rohm to Kuhnen, Nicky Crane, and Douglas P to David McCalden and perhaps Roy Cohn. The same thing goes for environmentalism, vegetarianism, avant-garde music and cultural scenes, punk, and other subcultural milieus.
Without any kind of introspection, the left or subcultures can safely say that Fascism is ultranationalist and administrative, so you would never have a fascist talking about breaking down nation-states and building up anti-hierarchical communities or, rather, communities who function through “organic hierarchy.” But, in fact, if you look at fascist organizations in the past, that is precisely what’s made them more radical than their conservative antagonists—that they have attacked nationalism in a bureaucratic or technocratic form, saying that what’s necessarily in politics is a nationalism of energy and vigor rather than a nationalism of intellectuals and functionaries, and what’s necessary isn’t a nation-state at all but a “spiritual empire” with a grand patriarch at the helm who makes the law through decision.
Without understanding the way that those ambiguous ideas are applied in different milieus, like with national anarchism and autonomous nationalism and those sorts of things, radicals can fall for easy platitudes. Pan-secessionism is another great example. When radicals start talking about the need for separatism without a clear, cosmopolitan follow-up strategy, they leave ourselves wide open to their influence and the insinuation of fascism and the ability for fascist ideas and movements to gain ground in the radical milieu and also in the broader subcultures and in mainstream cultures. When they start talking about ethnic separatism—particularly white separatism, whether de jure or de facto—they’ve basically given up the field.
I think that people in the radical milieu are very disconnected from the impact and effect that they have and their ideas actually have on the mainstream. People often look to radicals to get a sense of direction, particularly vis-a-vis subcultures, so if fascists are given a pass to influence subcultures then the mainstream is far more likely to accept them piecemeal on the basis of accepted ideas and attitudes which are very deleterious. For example, you’ve probably heard of people who you might have thought of as a left wing or a radical saying things like “I don’t believe in equality” or “equality is nonsense” or “I don’t believe in freedom,” or that kind of thing. These kinds of statements seem geared to impress people or shock them or both, but does all that really work for us?
AFN: As there has been a rise of white nationalism, what movements or organizations do you think have really effectively started to counter organize that?
ARR: It is great to see all of the Antifa groups springing up, the first of which I think was Rose City Antifa, but New York City Antifa and a bunch of others are equally important. When it works, it’s one of the best models for channeling the popular reflexes and spontaneous movements towards confronting fascism in organized and focused ways. I think networking these horizontal groups will provide important support bases for people down the road.
In the long run I also think that groups Public Research Associates and Searchlight have done great watchdogging, and more recently the One Peoples Project has been excellent at pinpointing National Policy Institute and American Renaissance. The alt-right. They were really the first group to identify these sort of “mom’s basement trolls” as wielding a significant power in todays Internet 2.0 or in todays intellectual circuit, academia even. And they’ve done a really good job at confronting it as well, not just through massive protests but through pressure campaigns; calling, getting their events shut down.
Other media outlets are key. Anti-Fascist News has done an awesome job of disseminating key information about these groups and this movement before anybody else and that’s one of the reasons people say mainstream society is influenced by the radical movements. Part of the reason is because radical movements can see changes when they are happening in mainstream society so that distance where its difficult to measure the impact, and the effect is also part of the virtue because it means that there’s a critical analysis that’s taking place. That’s why I think that, for example, Anti-Fascist News has been able to do such a great job of identifying these momentum-building movements and also chokepoints of getting them shut down.
So I do think that there is always going to be a place for militant anti-fascism, but a huge part of that is just researching, understanding a cost-benefit analysis strategy, and rather mainstream stuff like getting events shut down. So those are some of the biggest things, I think—like the increase of organized Antifas, people willing to show up in the streets and willing to protest and fight fascists, and the middle ground mainstream groups, of which I think One People’s Project has been the most forward thinking and I think also media like Anti-Fascist News and It’s Going Down, for example, have really picked up a lot of slack in terms of analyzing Trump, analyzing the alt-right, and actually using intelligence to shut them down.
The media has been a storm over the last several days as all the hosts of the Daily Shoah have been doxed, some by their own white nationalist comrades who did not believe their politics were pure enough, and others by antifascist organizers. Mike Enoch was the last of these to be revealed as Mike Peinovich, a well-paid tech worker from Manhattan. This revelation was done by a group no one had heard of using some of the information that Enoch has given away himself, as well as using an old PayPal address that he was raising money with.
What followed was a rampant series of articles from Salon, Forward, and others, all revealing the details about Mike Peinovich and his alleged job at a tech start-up (they denied he worked there, however). At the same time, they revealed that Mike’s wife was partially Jewish and ran a YouTube channel with liberal politics, including support for LGBTQ people. This is a surprise since his wife has appeared on the Daily Shoah, including reading a racist version of “Twas The Night Before Christmas” filled with racial slurs.
The Daily Shoah then put out a special episode where the hosts said that Mike was unavailable because he was in the process of separating from his wife. Apparently, the opinions of Nazis on the Internet were enough to peer-pressure him into literally leaving his wife. At the same time, they allege that his family has completely disowned him and that he is out of a job. They are saying that this is going to make him come back to the show, likely because he has nothing left to lose.
This loss of anonymity is likely going to dissuade many others from getting involved in this type of project as few people want to get a divorce, lose their job, and get shunned by their family.
Fascism, as an iconoclastic and revolutionary political orientation, is one that has made itself dynamic by bucking the traditions associated with the Right. While it is anti-liberal, anti-multicultural, and anti-democratic, it is also anti-conservative. As it believes in a mythical understanding of a “pure” past, it believes that the institutions of the past, the authorities that exist today, can no longer be “conserved.” Instead, they need a radical solution; one that destroys the conventional order and rebuilds one that they believe is a modernist interpretation of the empires of the deep past. This is not an accurate interpretation of historical nations, of course, but instead a reactionary fantasy that is colored by unrestrained hatreds, the desire to oppress, and the need to rethink contemporary society and reinstate explicit inequality.
To do this project, fascism looks to many movements and ideas associated with the Left in an attempt to “get to the root” of the problem and to recruit revolutionaries who could be swayed by their romanticism. This process is where fascists use Leftist projects for Right wing core ideas, like inequality, racial nationalism, and a cult of violent masculinity. This process was not just true in interwar Europe, but even today as neo-fascism attempts to make its way into social movements founded on Left wing principles. Anti-imperialism, radical ecology, animal rights, post-colonialism, broad-based anti-capitalism, and other projects have all seen attempts at entryism by the far right, and they have worked hard to have their ideas infect these political tendencies, so much so that often times people are unaware that a fascist politic has made its way into their political vision.
This is the founding idea behind the fantastic new book, Against the Fascist Creep, by anti-fascist journalist and author, Alexander Reid Ross. The book, just released by AK Press, outlines a history of fascism since its development in Italy, Germany, Austria, and other European nations, and how it has shifted and evolved in the decades since.
The “fascist creep,” as I am using the term in this text, refers to the porous borders between fascism and the radical right, through which fascism is able to “creep” into mainstream discourse. However, the “fascist creep” is also a double-edged term, because it refers more specifically to the crossover space between right and left that engenders fascism in the first place. Hence, fascism creeps in two ways: (1) it draws left-wing notions of solidarity and liberation into ultranationalist, right-wing ideology; and (2), at least in its early stages, fascists often utilize “broad front” strategies, proposing a mass-based, nationalist platform to gain access to mainstream political audiences and key administrative positions. (AtFC, pg. 3)
Ross weaves a history in the crevices where fascism attempts to find an avenue into mainstream discourse and reclamation of its revolutionary potential. In the years after World War II, fascist ideologues changed their rhetoric and strategies, often arguing for ethnic separatism, anti-colonial racial nationalism, and meta-political orientations so that they could avoid the associations with the failed movements of Mussolini and Hitler. At the same time, far right terrorism through the Years of Lead had direct ties to the spiritual paths of people like Julius Evola and to right populist political parties like France’s Front Nationale. Over the years the development of neofolk, Asatru and ethnic forms of Nordic paganism, the militia movement, the European New Right, and, later, the Alt Right, were all attempts at finding a new space for fascist ideas and a way to make them new and exciting again to an upcoming generation of racialists.
In the U.S., the development of national anarchism through groups like the Bay Area National Anarchists and the National Anarchist Tribal Alliance of New York, have been a part of this continuous reimagining, and they had the potential to try and recruit from the left. Projects like Attack the System, the national-anarchist, pan-secessionist project we have discussed before, has attempted to bridge the world of Left and post-left anarchism with fascism, allowing in white nationalists as a real “revolutionary” force. In the case of the radical environmental movement, where anarchism has intersected with revolutionary forms of ecology, National Anarchism has made larger inroads by exploiting deconstructionist impulses. This was particularly true in the case of Green Anarchist magazine, which Ross explains was the target of entryism by the syncretic fascist philosopher Troy Southgate.
As Southgate navigated the fascist scene, he became increasingly drawn to a branch of the left-to-right ecology movement cofounded by a British intellectual named Richard Hunt. Hunt’s UK-based journal, Green Anarchist, advocated positions that were just as problematic as, if not worse than, its US counterparts. Hunt’s “beyond right and left” political ideology generated particular hostility from the left. A supporter of village-level anarchism on a bioregional basis that operated outside of present contexts of nation-states and consumer societies, Hunt argued that racism was natural to people but unhelpful in the context of anticapitalist movements. While Hunt supported blood and soil–style bioregional movements, he incorporated nationalist histories and “ethnopluralism” in keeping with Benoist’s ideals of diversity. When Hunt backed the United Kingdom’s involvement in the Persian Gulf War based on patriotic sentiment, he was pushed out of Green Anarchist and formed a new journal entitled Alternative Green, which more explicitly advocated for a decentralized bioregionalism with traditionalist and nationalist tendencies, seeing the potential of national and cultural rebirth after the collapse of industrial civilization. (AFC 162-63)
Anti-imperialist projects have found allies in white nationalists in that they are for “Ethno-pluralism,” the right to separation from the dominant culture to maintain cultural “legitimacy.” While many discuss the right to reclaim identity for indigenous people or those of African descent, the fascist element in this discourse believes that white should be afforded this as well, and instead of seeing race as a social invention with consequence they think it is a biological and spiritual reality that should create divisions among groups. In this way, they are “against empires” since they see it as a form of “globalization” that destroys ethnic nationalism and homogeneity in nation states.
What Ross analyzes is broadly within the “Third Positionist” camp, which utilizes elements of the left for a far right purpose. This means anti-capitalist critiques from the right, even going as far as to embody some of the same visioning as the left.
With its syncretic configuration of political ideology, Third Positionism took root in the skinhead and neofolk subcultures as a kind of palingenetic ultranationalism that, with a pessimistic and nihilist sense of modern life, looked toward a revolutionary new age born of traditional culture that could thrive amid the collapse of liberal multiculturalism. (AFC 137)
While Third Positionism is often called a variant on fascism, even a minority within the larger movement, it is actually the dominant expression of fascism. The Alt Right, Neoreaction, racialist paganism, and so on, are all forms of Third Positionist thought, and the meta-political projects like Neofolk, which attempt to push fascist ideas through non-political venues, are comfortably within this analysis as well. It is from this vantage point that entryism on the left presents itself, and this can happen ideologically even without a concerted strategy from fascist organizers.
Ross attempts to answer these contradictions by putting out a call for consistency and understanding of how politics develop, to see the consequences of ideas. Are your politics consistently opposed to racial nationalism and in favor of multicultural society? Are your environmental politics intersectional, opposed to racism, and in favor of immigration? The Left’s projects have to have a clear understanding of the motivating factors for their own political ideas, as well as the ideas of the far right. The “fascist creep,” as Ross labels it, is the way that fascism can seep into left spaces, such as music circles or the movement against international capitalism. This can mean sorting out the way that anti-Semitic narratives seep into the anti-corporate and Palestinian solidarity movement, the “natural law” discourse that is celebrated in some Deep Ecological projects, and the cynical nihilism that has often been a part of the anti-consumerist movement, and to then build a politic that keeps the values of equality and diversity at the center of these varied movements. This is a call for intersectionality, or class compositional analysis, that sees that these movements need a way to remain connected and cannot throw each other aside for short-term gains.
As the Alt Right grows in the U.S., so does the anti-fascist movement. In Trump’s America there has been a validation of their toxic racism, yet there is also a growth of a mass anti-fascist movement that wants to shuffle off their influence. To do this effectively necessitates having a deep understanding of the movements we oppose so that we can clearly see where fascism is, where it grows, and where it comes from. Without that we are scrambling in the dark, calling anything reactionary or authoritarian “Fascism” without being able to see its growth in the corners. Ross’s book can be a guide for this, tracing us through how this movement of hierarchy and inequality has changed over the years, and he is able to boil it down to its essentials.
The Columbus chapter of Anti-Racist Action (ARA) held a public demonstration on Saturday, January 14th to confront Greg Anglin, a local business owner who served as the original registrant of The Daily Stormer, a nationally known neo-Nazi website, run by Greg’s son Andrew Anglin, a former resident of Worthington. Greg Anglin’s Worthington business address still receives donations for the site. Through The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin is organizing and publicizing an armed white-nationalist march in Whitefish, Montana, home of white nationalist Richard Spencer, which was originally scheduled for Martin Luther King Day weekend, but has been postponed after the city of Whitefish rejected the group’s incomplete permit application. Anglin now says the march will likely take place in February. ARA went forward with its demonstration, which was originally planned to coincide with the armed march in Whitefish. Speakers included members of ARA and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).
ARA and anti-fascist allies are urging community members to stand up against the hateful rhetoric that Anglin and his supporters promote. “We are taking action to send a clear message to hate groups from Worthington to Whitefish, that their dangerous, xenophobic agenda will not be tolerated”, said Timothy Philip, an ARA spokesperson.
WHO: Anti-Racist Action of Columbus and Community Allies
WHERE: 6827 N. High St., Worthington, OH 43085
WHAT: Demonstration Against Hate from Worthington to Whitefish
WHEN: January 14th, 2017 at 1:00 P.M.
ARA is an international network of people from all walks of life who are dedicated to eliminating racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed people.
Below is the press information that the “Media Working Group” of the DisruptJ20 organizing effort made available outlining the schedule of events for the inauguration day protests Washington D.C.
***
Fully-Permitted “Festival of Resistance,” Checkpoint Actions, Unpermitted Marches, DisruptJ20 Action Camp Press Events Scheduled this Week Include Access to a Sign-Making Session and a Nonviolent Direct Action Training at the DisruptJ20 Action Camp
Press Events / Photo Ops:
1) Wednesday, Jan 11, 6 PM – 7 PM, Art Event, sign making, banner painting, art, photo op
Tyghe Berry Studio, 1241 Evart Street NE, Washington DC
2) Thursday, Jan 12, 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM, Press Conference, get info on street protests
St Stephen’s Church Auditorium, 1525 Newton St NW, Washington DC
3) Saturday, Jan 14, 2 PM – 3 PM, Nonviolent Direct Action Training, workshop, photo op
SIS Building Atrium, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC
Washington DC — Activists and organizers are planning massive protests and acts of resistance throughout the week of the inauguration of Donald J. Trump on January 20. The DC Counter-Inaugural Welcoming Committee, also known as DisruptJ20, is planning a “Festival of Resistance,” a massive permitted, family-friendly march and rally on the 20th, as well as an unpermitted “Anticapitalist Bloc” march, protests at all twelve Secret Service security checkpoints, activist parties, and more. The goal is to give expression to the massive opposition to Trump’s right-wing, racist, and misogynist agenda. Organizers intend to demonstrate that people of conscience are the majority, and take steps towards organizing that sentiment into a force that can have an impact on Trump’s ability to claim a mandate, setting a tone of resistance for the coming years.
**Schedule of Protest Events is below.**
Three press events will help the media organize coverage for the protests of the Inauguration. At 6 PM on Wednesday, January 11, an art event will take place to give press a glimpse of the artistic and creative energies that will be expressed during the inauguration week of resistance. At 9:30 AM on Thursday, January 12, a press conference will give media access to activists and organizers planning some of the most memorable and disruptive events of the week. At 2 PM on Saturday, January 14, an open nonviolent direct action training will allow press to see activists in a hands-on training to learn how to engage in civil disobedience and safely risk arrest.
Beginning at 9 AM on January 20, McPherson Square in downtown Washington DC will be a DisruptJ20 staging area and rallying point for many marches, as well as spontaneous, unpermitted events. An unpermitted, anticapitalist march will begin at 10 AM in Logan Circle. A fully-permitted DisruptJ20 march will begin at 12 PM at Columbus Circle and march to McPherson Square. Another permitted march organized by Occupy Inauguration will start from Malcolm X Park (often called Meridian Hill) and march downtown to McPherson Square join DisruptJ20. McPherson Square will contain tents, portable toilets, a stage, sound system, signage, a medic area, food donations, and other amenities. More unpermitted actions are likely to occur at some point after 3 PM and continue into the evening.
Colorful disruptions will occur right at the Inaugural Parade Route. DisruptJ20 organizers have identified twelve checkpoints that participants will have to pass through in order to attend the inaugural festivities. To call attention to the many threats faced by people and planet, each of these twelve checkpoints will be the site of an issue-specific protest. Issues will include racial justice, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+, antiwar, immigrant and border justice, labor, climate, and other issues.
Each checkpoint protest is being organized by a group or set of groups in collaboration with DisruptJ20. In the past, each checkpoint has included metal detectors, police officers, the Secret Service, and national guard. Details and logistics are still being pulled together for these twelve actions, and information will be released publicly as soon as possible.
DisruptJ20 is also coordinating mass housing for activists from out of town, legal support for arrestees and others, medic teams to be present in the street, de-escalation teams to respond to conflict, media teams to relay current information, gathering spaces for activists, and more. Information such as welcome packets, maps, and event calendars will be distributed to the press and public.
Many groups are allied with DisruptJ20 in sending a clear message during the J20 week. A climate-specific day of action will occur on Thursday, January 18, culminating in a Earth2Trump Roadshow with performers and speakers. Antifascist groups are planning a protest at the “Deploraball,” a Trump celebration planned by white supremacists, Nazis, and rape apologists on January 19 at the National Press Club. The ANSWER Coalition is planning a large rally on January 20. A #Trump420 event planned by the DC Marijuana Justice Coalition will feature people handing out marijuana joints. Through the evening, the Peace Ball, the UnNagural, and the Unity Ball will all provide entertainment, music, and libations while standing opposed to Trump’s agenda. The All in Service DC campaign has coordinated, during the lucrative weekend, for bars and restaurants to give donations to local nonprofits serving at-risk communities. The People’s Inaugural Ball on January 20 and People’s Inauguration on January 21 are being planned by #StayWokeAndFight with Howard University to call for racial justice. The Women’s March on Washington will occur on Saturday, January 21.
From January 14 to January 16, DisruptJ20 will hold the DisruptJ20 Action Camp, a series of trainings and workshops in DC to prepare people for upcoming actions, particularly those around the Inauguration. The trainings aim to provide space for participants to collectively analyze and discuss why resistance and action is important under the Trump administration, how we can resist, and what future our actions are building towards.
More releases of information from the DisruptJ20 Media Team are forthcoming, and there will be a press conference call on the evening of January 20 to provide information on the day’s activities. Please visit our DisruptJ20 Media page if you wish to sign up to receive these releases.
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SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
We are organizing a week of trainings, actions, and events leading up to the mobilization on January 20th. Below you will find details about these events as well as convergence space for the week starting with January 14th.
January 14-16th – Action Camp
Jan 14 – 15th – American University, 10am-7pm
Jan 15th – Action Spokes Council
Jan 16th – St Stephens, 1525 Newton St NW, 10am-7pm
January 15th – Trade Justice blockade webinar – http://tradejustice.net/11517
January 17-19 – Convergence Space
Food, daily NVDA trainings, Affinity group meetings, spokes councils
St Stephens, 1525 Newton St NW, 9am-6pm
January 18 -21st- Climate Convergence
January 19th – Deploraball
January 20th –
Early Morning – Blockades Action
9am – Outdoor Convergence Space @ McPherson Square opens
10am – Anti-Capitalist Anti-Fascist Bloc @ Logan Circle
12pm – Festival of Resistance, permitted march starting @ Columbus Circle
2pm – Rally at McPherson Square
As incoming neo-Nazis organized by Andrew Anglin and the Daily Stormer promise to descend on Whitefish, Montana, Montana Antifa is one of the organizations creating the counter-demonstration. While Love Lives Here has been doing the base-building work of organizing the community against the anti-Semitic and racist harassment they have endured for weeks, they are not going to engage with the skinheads and Alt Righters who are promising to march through the streets with automatic weapons. Montana Antifa, among others, is taking up that role, and right now they are doing a blitz on regional Whitefish and Flathead Valley hotels to let them know that Nazis may be trying to book stays with them and that they should prohibit those groups from taking refuge in their facility.
IMMEDIATE ACTION. Read this carefully and closely: NO THREATS, NO HOSTILITY, AS OF RIGHT NOW NONE OF THESE HOTELS HAVE DONE ANY WRONG. We’re asking that you call into the hotels on this list and express these two concerns:
1.) Concern that the hotels would assist Nazi insurgents by sheltering them and allowing them a base from which to commit their evil acts.
2.) Concern for the safety of the hotel, hotel staff, and guests in light of armed thugs setting up a base of operations in the hotel intending to do harm to the community.
STRESS THESE POINTS:
-There is a planned armed March by Neo-Nazis in Whitefish
-They are planning on bringing in a force of Neo-Nazi skinheads from California who are likely to be armed
-These are dangerous people intending to harm the neighboring communities in a public action with heavy media coverage.
PLEASE DO NOT:
-Threaten the hotel
-Insult the person answering the phone or the hotel
-Make ANY “or else” statements
-Harass the hotels
-Go off on a tirade
-Ask if they have Battletoads 2
Be respectful, respectable, and conduct yourselves smartly.
HAVE FUN, OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY:
Kalispel
Super 8 Kalispell Glacier National Park
:(406) 755-1888
Econo Lodge Inn & Suites
:(406) 752-3467
Motel 6
:(406) 952-3206
The FairBridge Inn & Suites – Outlaw Convention Center
:(406) 755-6100
Travelodge Kalispell
(406) 755-6123
Kalispell Hilltop Inn
:(406) 755-4455
Americas Best Value Inn
:(406) 756-3222
Greenwood Village Inn and Suites
(406) 257-7719
Red Lion Hotel Kalispell
(406) 751-5050
Quality Inn
(406) 755-6700
La Quinta Inn & Suites Kalispell
(406) 257-5255
Kalispell Grand Hotel
:(406) 755-8100
Hampton Inn Kalispell
:(406) 755-7900
SpringHill Suites Kalispell
:(406) 314-6600
Holiday Inn Express & Suites Kalispell
:(406) 755-7405
Best Western Plus Flathead Lake Inn And Suites
:(406) 857-2400
Homewood Suites by Hilton Kalispell, MT
:(406) 755-8080
Hilton Garden Inn Kalispell
:(406) 756-4500
Glacier Ridge Suites
:(406) 752-4333
Colombia Falls: Meadow Lake Resort
Phone:(406) 892-8700
As we have been covering, the small resort town of Whitefish, Montana is under seige by Alt Right trolls after several of their residents decided they no longer wanted to deal with Richard Spencer and his family making money in their town. The organization Love Lives Here, an affiliate of the Montana Human Rights Network, has been doing broad-based community organizing in the town. This includes supporting the Jewish residents who have been specifically targeted for threats from the Daily Stormer and their friends by creating a system where by all residents of the town put “Menorah cards” in their window to show solidarity. They have recently organized a large rally for diversity, showing that residents will be supporting each other and that the racialist narrative of the Alt Right has no draw in the town.
Love Lives Here will not be organizing the counter-demonstration to the Nazis who are planning on “marching against Jews” on January 15th, their strategy is to build the community base of support yet not to actually engage with the Nazis. On the other side, Montana Antifa, based in the nearby Missoula, are planning on organizing the counter demonstration to show that Montanans are not going to sit back and let their towns be terrorized by armed skinheads.
Right now Montana Antifa are organizing a fundraiser to pay for the basic costs of having the counter-protest, including bussing in folks from surrounding towns that want to raise their voice against the hate.
Anti-Fascist News 