How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  Coulter is both a curious case and a revealing one. Mainstream conservatives had actually drawn a line when Coulter veered from her usual high-pitched (but entertaining) polemics into unhinged xenophobia. In 2002, National Review dropped her column after she wrote that the United States should respond to terror attacks by radical Islamists in the following manner: “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”*

  But this did not dent her continued celebrity on the Right. She wrote bestselling books, was treated like a rock star at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (once called “the Star Wars bar scene of the conservative movement”) and in 2015 actually helped launch Donald Trump’s presidential campaign by providing him with one of his defining themes.† In retrospect I should have seen it coming. Early in 2015, she came on my radio show to tout her book, Adios America, a lengthy polemic on Mexican immigrants. For the most part it was standard Coulterism, which was designed to provoke and outrage, but I was taken aback by her emphasis on “Mexican rapists.” I remember trying to imagine the reaction if she made the same sort of sweeping generalizations about other ethnic groups. It was the crudest sort of racial stereotyping.

  So I was doubly struck when Trump used similar language in announcing his presidential candidacy in June 2015. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he declared. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” I instantly recognized the line as Coulter’s. The New York Times Magazine later reported that then-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski “had reached out to Coulter for advice in the run-up to Trump’s announcement speech.” Trump’s prepared text had touched only lightly on immigration. “Instead, he ad-libbed what Coulter today calls ‘the Mexican rapist speech that won my heart.’”6

  In retrospect I regret that I did not push back on Coulter harder, confining myself to suggesting that she was “painting with an awfully broad brush.” This was, of course, wholly inadequate. Coulter was trafficking in the grossest of racial stereotypes and I should have called her on it more forcefully. I doubt that would have made much of a difference, but the failure of conservatives to police the borders of this sort of raw nativism paved the way for what was about to happen.*

  THE DANGERS OF CRYING WOLF

  Many on the Left seemed genuinely shocked that their charges of racism, sexism, and xenophobia did not seem to dent Trump’s popularity with conservatives. Only belatedly did some of them realize that may have been, at least in part, the price they paid for crying wolf for decades. Conservatives had become accustomed to being called mean, dumb, benighted bigots. So liberally had the epithets been hurled at them that conservatives came to recognize them as merely the Left’s code for “I don’t like you, shut up.”

  While many Democrats claimed to be nostalgic for the kinder, gentler, more statesmanlike GOP candidates of the past, they often neglected to remember what they had said about them when they were actually running for office. “By 2000,” RealClearPolitics.com’s Carl Cannon wrote, “calling George W. Bush a racist was the liberals’ standard operating procedure, a tactic used against Romney as well.… If Reagan and George W. Bush are routinely portrayed as warmongers, if both Bushes (and Reagan and Romney) are painted as bigots … how do we expect rank-and-file conservatives or grassroots independents to respond when Trump is dubbed by the media as an existential threat to democracy?”7

  In an essay entitled “How the Media’s History of Smearing Republicans Now Helps Trump,” Jonah Goldberg recounted the serial attempts to paint various Republicans as Nazi sympathizers, racists, and granny killers: “I have no doubt many journalists would defend their smears and professional failures, but that doesn’t change the fact that many Americans outside the mainstream media/Democratic bubble find it all indefensible. More important, they find it all ignorable—because the race card and the demagogue card have been played and replayed so often they’re little more than scraps of lint.”8

  A handful of Democrats belatedly realized the problem. “There’s enough truth to it to compel some self-reflection,” Howard Wolfson, who was the communications director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2008, told New York Times columnist Frank Bruni in September 2016. Bruni noted that the mild-mannered Romney was called a “race-mongering pyromaniac” and accused by a black commentator of the “niggerization” of Obama. Wolfson admitted that he helped use “hyperbolic and inaccurate” language to attack candidates like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. And he called for some introspection on the Left.

  “It’s only when you find yourself describing someone who really is the definition of an extremist—who really is, essentially, in my opinion, a fascist—that you recognize that the language that you’ve used in the past to describe other people was hyperbolic and inappropriate and cheap,” Wolfson told Broni.

  “It doesn’t mean that you somehow retrospectively agree with their positions on issues,” he admitted. “But when the system confronts an actual, honest-to-God menace, it should compel some rethinking on our part about how we describe people who are far short of that.”9

  It’s fair to say that no one on either side of the political divide anticipated the role that the Alt Right would play in electing the next president.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE RISE OF THE ALT RIGHT

  I’M PRETTY SURE THAT I was called a “cuckservative” before I even knew what the Alt Right was. To be sure, I knew of the existence of anti-Semitic trolls and white nationalists who had long existed on the fringes of the conservative movement. But like the John Birchers before them, they had, by and large, been excommunicated, unwelcome even in the biggest tent version of the rational Right.

  Unfortunately, this seemed to change in the last campaign, which became a coming-out party for the denizens of the fever swamp. Even this would rate as hardly more than an asterisk, except for the way that the Trump campaign—and its media allies, including Breitbart, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh—normalized, promoted, and brought Alt Right ideas into the 2016 campaign. Steve Bannon, who became CEO of Trump’s campaign and later counselor to the new president, has bragged that under his leadership Breitbart had become, in his own words, a “platform for the alt-right.”1

  A somewhat sympathetic description in the Weekly Standard described the Alt Right as an amalgam that “includes neo-reactionaries, monarchists, nativists, populists, and even a few self-declared fascists.” [Emphasis added.] They are very much a creature of the internet and congregate online in websites ranging “from Breitbart and the libertarian-leaning Taki Mag to Alternative Right—a blog that openly supports white nationalism.”2 Even this tends to understate the Alt Right’s open embrace of undiluted racism.

  In fact, as one conservative commentator noted, “Racism is not a fringe element of the Alt-Right; it’s the movement’s central premise.”3 Jared Taylor, the Alt Right editor of American Renaissance, explained, “The alt right accepts that race is a biological fact and that it’s a significant aspect of individual and group identity and that any attempt to create a society in which race can be made not to matter will fail.” The Alt Right also frequently embraces the idea of “white genocide,” which sees immigration and civil rights as part of plot to decrease the white population. White nationalist leader Richard Spencer explained that “Immigration is a kind a proxy war—and maybe a last stand—for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.” Ann Coulter had also pushed a similar narrative, tweeting out: “‘Diversity’ = nonwhite; ‘White supremacist’ = Not anti-white.” In her book Adios America, which provided some of the central themes for Trump’s anti-immigration campaign, Coulter cited the work of the Alt Right site VDare.com and its editor, Peter Brimelow.4

  TRUMPKINS VERSUS “CUCKSER
VATIVES”

  Members of the Alt Right could often be identified by their use of increasingly popular Twitter hashtag #cuckservative to criticize non-Trumpian conservatives. The hashtag in particular was singled out as one of the “apt displays of why the alternative right has often proven more effective at fighting progressive dogma than the traditional Republican Party.… The end result: Trump, the darling of the populist alt right (and its cousin, conservative talk radio), is miles ahead of his challengers.…”5

  As an early target of the epithet, I was naturally curious to discover what a “cuckservative” was.

  “Cuck,” a derivative of “cuckold,” is a noun used by white supremacists to refer to whites who invite destruction of the white race by tolerating other races, which they view as weak whites inviting other races to rape their wives, steal their homes/schools/society, etc.6

  There is no putting lipstick on this wildebeest; it’s ugly stuff. Conservative talk show host Erick Erickson was blunt in his description. The phrase “cuckservative,” he wrote, “is a racist slur.”

  It is used by racists in support of a racialist agenda. The people who use it are not opposed to illegal immigration, but are opposed to immigration in general. They are opposed to evangelical Christians who support interracial adoption. They are opposed to anyone who does not think in terms of the white race.7

  The attacks were often very personal. National Review writer David French was singled out by Alt Right trolls because he had adopted an Ethiopian child. “Many of them are unapologetically white-nationalists, hate interracial adoption and other ‘race-mixing’ practices, and think about the issue of immigration primarily, if not exclusively, in racial terms.” One Twitter troll wrote: “David likes to watch 3 Black men sharing his wife.”8

  What does this have to do with conservative politics or the current debates among the GOP candidates? Matt Lewis tried to explain:

  By supporting immigration reform, criminal justice reform, etc., a white conservative is therefore surrendering his honor and masculinity (and it won’t be long before his women folk are compromised, as well!). A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor.9

  But the term also has its defenders. Breitbart quickly chimed in, touting “cuckservative” as a Gloriously Effective Insult That Should Not Be Slurred, Demonised, or Ridiculed.”10

  By that point, its use had become so widespread that the Washington Post sought out expert commentary on the phenomenon from Richard Spencer, who served as president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute. Spencer helpfully explained that #cuckservative is “a full-scale revolt, by Identitarians and what I’ve called the ‘Alt Right,’ against the Republican Party and conservative movement.”

  According to Spencer, “Trump is a major part of the ‘cuckservative’ phenomenon—but not because he himself is an Identitarian or traditionalist. His campaign is, in many ways, a backward-looking movement: ‘Let’s make America great again!’ Why Trump is attractive to Identitarians and the alt Right is: a) he is a tougher, superior man than ‘conservatives’ (which isn’t saying much), and b) he seems to grasp the demographic displacement of European-Americans on a visceral level. We see some hope there.”11

  Along with the new right-wing populism, the Identitarian movement has been spreading across the European nationalist stream in the last few years. In some countries this phenomenon is manifested by nationalistic radicals as protest movements, in others using neo-Nazis themes. While the movement is not monolithic (there are many factions and variations) the Alt Right is not only explicitly white nationalist, it is also often explicitly anti-Semitic and comfortable with questioning and even mocking the Holocaust. One white nationalist, Paul Ramsey, produced a video entitled, Is It Wrong Not to Feel Sad About the Holocaust? One Alt Right internet hub called the Right Stuff also created a social media meme encouraging followers to identify Jews by placing parentheses around their names, such as (((Charlie Sykes))), highlighting that “all Jewish surnames echo throughout history.”12*

  Not surprisingly, the term “cuckservative” was also popular in social media postings that dwell on the perfidy of Israel and Jewish conspiracies. But that did not seem to bother some prominent conservatives.

  LIMBAUGH AND THE “CUCKOLDED GOP”

  In July 2015, Rush Limbaugh used the term himself when he labeled Trump critics as “cuckolded Republicans.” Months later he was still providing the Alt Right with valuable air cover, even though it was unclear whether he even knew what the term “Alt Right” meant. The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff captured one particular exchange in December 2015, when a caller told Limbaugh “about burgeoning excitement among right-wing youth in Europe—and then started promoting the white supremacist alt right movement.” Woodruff noted that “As the caller talked, the radio host nodded along, expressing pleasure with the caller’s analysis of the alt right and inadvertently lending legitimacy to that movement—which flirts with neo-Nazism.”13

  The caller told Limbaugh about the excitement and the appeal to younger people of the new Alt Right. “They’re beginning to get people over here, youngsters between 18, 25, 26, to convert to what they call ‘the alt right.’ I think it’s gonna be pretty intense,” he told Limbaugh. “I think you should keep an eye out for it.” Woodruff reported:

  Limbaugh sounded pleased.

  “Yeah, that’s a good thought,” he replied. “‘The alt right,’ like in alternative right?”

  “Alternative right,” replied Roy from Gurnee.

  “Yeah, like in alternative media and so forth,” Limbaugh replied.…

  “In fact, we don’t have to wait for this alt whatever it is in Europe,” the host continued. “There is a thriving youthful conservative emergence happening in this country. They may be borrowing from what’s going on in Europe. But, Roy, there’s no question you’re right.”

  But Limbaugh genuinely thrilled the Alt Right when he proclaimed “Nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal.” Limbaugh’s comments drew wide attention because he seemed to be conceding that conservative ideas, including free-market economics, no longer seemed especially important to conservative voters. During the discussion, he read a passage from a column by the late columnist Sam Francis, a notorious and valuable advocate for white nationalism.

  The article Limbaugh shared with his listeners had been written by Francis in 1996 and seemed to foreshadow what was happening twenty years later. “Sooner or later,” Francis had written, “as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives.”14

  The Alt Right picked up on the signal. Sam Francis, who is perhaps best known for his call for a “white racial consciousness,” was not merely talking about the campaigns of Pat Buchanan and foreshadowing Donald Trump; he was laying out a nationalist worldview that fundamentally rejected mainstream conservatism. The day of Limbaugh’s broadcast, one leading white supremacist wrote: “Sam Francis was right: We need to stop pretending we are ‘true conservatives’ or that we have anything in common with these bow-tied, low-T clowns. We don’t support the ‘conservative agenda’ as articulated by the National Review. We are populists and nationalists, which means we are ‘tethered’ to the well-being of our own people and protecting and advancing their interests, not some abstract ideology.”15

  Francis was also well-known in the Alt Right very specifically as an advocate of white nationalism with a strong whiff of racist eugenics. For example, Francis argued:

  If whites wanted to do so, they could dictate a solution to the racial problem tomorrow—by curtailing immigration and sealing the border, by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites and encouraging a higher white birth rate
, by refusing to be bullied into enduring “multiculturalism,” affirmative action, civil rights laws and policies; and by refusing to submit to cultural dissolution, inter-racial violence and insults, and the guilt that multiracialists inculcate. [Emphasis added.]16

  As the Southern Law and Poverty Center later noted, one frequent contributor to the white supremacist website Stormfront chided Limbaugh for not fully embracing the white nationalist premises of Francis’s argument. “Now if only El Rushbo will also acknowledge, that what’s at the heart of this Nationalist & Populist movement is Racialism,” he wrote. “Come on Limbaugh. Grow a real set of nuts would ya [sic].”17

  EMPOWERING THE ALT RIGHT

  A caveat: obviously not everyone who uses the term “cuckservative” or flirts with the Alt Right embraces its nativist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic agenda or even has any clue about its darker etymology. Nor is it fair to impugn guilt by association to those voters who may have other reasons for supporting Trump. But there’s no doubt that some white nationalists seized on the opportunity to insert themselves into the current campaign, often claiming to be legitimate—actually, the only legitimate—conservatives.

  By tapping into the Trump phenomenon online, Alt Right activists were able to vastly expand their reach, slipstreaming behind hundreds of thousands of other social media users who may not have noticed with whom they were now associating. They emerged from the campaign emboldened and empowered. Trump was notably reluctant to condemn former KKK leader David Duke. The implication was that Trump may have imagined that many of his supporters—later labeled “deplorables” by Hillary Clinton—may have shared some of his views. Some of those around him undoubtedly understood the role that the Alt Right played in social media boosting his candidacy and unleashing waves of vitriol against his opponents and critics.