How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  During the campaign Trump tweeted out fake crime stats from one notorious white nationalist website,18 and later retweeted an image posted by a Twitter account known as “WhiteGenocideTM.” (It was a photoshopped image depicting Jeb Bush as a homeless man outside Trump Tower.) The Twitter account retweeted by the future president used the name “Donald Trumpovitz,” and linked to a website containing pro-Hitler propaganda. The users’ feed was “largely a collection of retweets about violence allegedly committed by African-American suspects and anti-Arab posts.”19

  The Trump campaign also gave media credentials to The Political Cesspool, a white nationalist radio program whose host wants “to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility.”20 Earlier in the year, Donald Trump Jr. appeared on the show, dramatically raising its profile.21

  During the campaign Hillary Clinton tried to make an issue of Trump’s relationships with the Alt Right, giving a speech in Reno, that Trump “is taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party.”22 “This is not conservatism as we have known it,” she said. “This is not Republicanism as we have known it. These are race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas, antiwoman—all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’” She noted the close ties between Breitbart and the Alt Right, saying that the “de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘Alt-Right.’ A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.” Although the speech was widely covered (and drew praise from some conservative commentators) it was not enough to derail Trump or to dissuade the vast majority of Republicans from backing him in November.

  THE RATIONALIZERS

  As the presence of white nationalists on the Right became evident, there were inevitably attempts to “explain” or rationalize the movement. One of the more painful attempts was a lengthy essay entitled “The Intellectual Case for Trump: Why the White Nationalist Support?” written by a writer named Mytheos Holt.23 A senior fellow at the Institute for Liberty, Holt notes that he is Jewish and was careful to explain that he was not himself a white nationalist, but wanted to understand the perspective of the racialists.

  In his essay, he recounted his attempts to reach out to and understand white nationalists, including a young woman he calls Sylvia who inhabited some of the darker reaches of the racist swamp. The young woman, he writes, “had been raised as a member of an infamous white nationalist organization. And I do mean ‘infamous.’ These weren’t the comparatively well-mannered sorts that attend conferences led by Richard Spencer. These were the sorts of people who probably get raided by the FBI.”

  After spending time talking with Sylvia, whom he suggests may have been a neo-Nazi, Holt wrote that he “came away with an appreciation for how much, and how unfairly, her people really were hurting. I say ‘unfairly’ for multiple reasons: firstly, because people as brilliant as Sylvia is do not deserve to be written off as incurable white trash.” Holt goes on to explain that racialists like Sylvia were motivated by what he calls an “otherwise perfectly respectable, conservative pride in Western culture,” which he said had “atrophie[d] into white nationalism when the person holding it comes to believe that respect for liberal Western civilization is inextricably tied to one’s race.” He was willing to accept their reasons for sharing his enthusiasm for Trump’s candidacy, because they saw him as a champion of those Western values. And Holt shared their contempt for softer, more traditional conservatives. “In fact, Trump, and Trump alone, has been willing to say what should have been obvious from the start,” Holt wrote, “that the universalism and Whig historical pretensions of Kemp-and-W-style ‘bleeding heart conservatism’ are dangerous distractions if they leave the American people as wounded prey for anti-American, extremist bottom feeders.”

  He concluded with a sexualized imagery of the nation-as-cuckold. Unless Trump was empowered to fight back, he concluded, “the people damaged by multicultural, leftist attacks on Western civilization will be thoroughly justified in sneering at us as proverbial ‘cuckservatives’ forever mentally masturbating with our own empty universalism while barbarism rapes Lady Liberty.”24

  MILO (AND BREITBART) EXPLAINS

  Besides defending the use of the term “cuckservatives,” Breitbart also emerged as one of the chief explainers of the Alt Right, publishing a lengthy apologia by Milo Yiannopoulos in March 2016.25

  Occasionally described as an “Alt Right provocateur,” Milo quickly became a key figure in the propagation of Alt Right ideas and popularizing them on university campuses, where his flamboyant appearances have sparked sometimes violent backlashes. At the bottom of his appeal is the desire to shock and offend. After the birth of former Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro’s baby, Milo tweeted out, “Prayers to Ben who had to see his kid come out half-black,” with a picture of a black infant.26 The message, Shapiro later wrote, was that “I’m a ‘cuck’ who wants to see the races mixed.”27 He also traffics in flamboyant anti-Semitism. At one of his campus appearances Milo, who is Jewish himself, referred to a Jewish writer as “a typical example of a sort of thick-as-pig shit media Jew, who has all these sort of right, P.C. politics.”28 In July 2016, Twitter shut down Yiannopoulos’s account after he led a harassment campaign against actress Leslie Jones, who is African American. Many of his tweets, reported BuzzFeed, “decried Jones for being black and a woman.”29

  In his Breitbart essay Yiannopoulos attempted to normalize and explain the appeal of the new movement. Like the caller to Limbaugh’s show, he emphasized its youth and excitement. “The alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore,” he wrote.

  He also emphasized the movement’s intellectual seriousness. “There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence.” While skinheads were often “low-information, low-IQ thugs,” he insisted, the “alternative right are a much smarter group of people—which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.”*

  While the movement held an attraction for “isolationists, pro-Russians and ex–Ron Paul supporters frustrated with continued neoconservative domination of the Republican Party,” he acknowledged that race consciousness was at the center of the Alt Right. “The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved,” he explained. “A Mosque next to an English street full of houses bearing the flag of St. George, according to alt-righters, is neither an English street nor a Muslim street—separation is necessary for distinctiveness.”30

  But above all, Yiannopoulos argued, the Alt Right was … fun. Young rebels, he wrote, were “drawn to the alt-right for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s: because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand.” Yiannopoulos explained how the “fun” worked:

  Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide. These caricatures are often spliced together with Millennial pop culture references, from old 4chan memes like pepe the frog to anime and My Little Pony references.31

  He then proceeds to celebrate the nastiness of the movement’s trolls. When GOP consultant Rick Wilson opined on Twitter that they were “childless single men who jerk off to anime,” the Alt Right retaliated. Yiannopoulos reported approvingly:

  Responding in kind, they proceeded to unleash all the weapons of mass trolling that anonymous subcultures are notorious for—and brilliant at. From digging up the most embarrassing parts of his family’s internet history to
ordering unwanted pizzas to his house and bombarding his feed with anime and Nazi propaganda, the alt-right’s meme team, in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion, revealed their true motivations: not racism, the restoration of monarchy or traditional gender roles, but lulz.32

  Lulz is defined as “fun, laughter, or amusement, especially that derived at another’s expense.” For Yiannopoulos, the trolling, the Nazi imagery, the raw Jew hatred wasn’t about ideology, it was about being “fresh, daring, and funny.”*

  AN EXPLOSION OF HATE

  But few of the targets of the trolling and harassment found it amusing.

  In March 2016, Jewish writer Bethany Mandel wrote that “the surest way to see anti-Semitism flood your mentions column is to tweet something negative about Donald Trump.” She was called a “slimy Jewess” and told that she “deserved the oven.”

  Not only was the anti-Semitic deluge scary and graphic, it got personal. Trump fans began to “dox” me—a term for adversaries’ attempt to ferret out private or identifying information online with malicious intent. My conversion to Judaism was used as a weapon against me, and I received death threats in my private Facebook mailbox, prompting me to file a police report.33

  It had gotten so bad, she wrote, that she bought a gun: “Over the coming weeks, I plan to learn how to shoot it better.” Mandel’s case may have been extreme, but it was not unusual. A report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that hundreds of journalists had been the subject of a cascade of anti-Semitic attacks on Twitter during the presidential campaign.34 One New York Times editor was sent drawings of a “hook-nosed Jew” and an image of a concentration camp with the words “Machen America Great.” The report found that former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro (who resigned and became an outspoken Trump critic) was the most frequently targeted journalistic figure.

  The ADL task force tried to quantify the problem, concluding that a “total of 2.6 million tweets containing language frequently found in anti-Semitic speech were posted across Twitter between August 2015 and July 2016.” It went on to note:

  Of the 2.6 million total tweets, ADL focused its analysis on tweets directed at 50,000 journalists in the United States. A total of 19,253 anti-Semitic tweets were directed at those journalists, but the total number of anti-Semitic tweets directed at journalists overall could be much higher for a variety of factors noted in the report also shows that more than two-thirds (68 percent) of the anti-Semitic tweets directed at those journalists were sent by 1,600 Twitter accounts (out of 313 million existing Twitter accounts). These aggressors are disproportionately likely to self-identify as Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, or part of the “alt-right,” a loosely connected group of extremists, some of whom are white supremacists. The words that appear most frequently in the 1,600 Twitter attackers’ bios are “Trump,” “nationalist,” “conservative,” and “white.”35

  The report made it clear that the ADL was not suggesting that the Trump campaign itself either supported or endorsed the attacks, “only that certain self-styled supporters sent these ugly messages. The data also illustrates the connectedness of the attackers: waves of anti-Semitic tweets tend to emerge from closely connected online “communities.”*

  Many of the worst instances of harassment were connected to a website known as the Daily Stormer and its founder, a neo-Nazi activist named Andrew Anglin. I first became aware of the site when I received, via email, a photoshopped image of my picture inside a gas chamber. A smiling Donald Trump wearing a German military uniform is poised to press the red “gas” button. The photoshopping tool had been created by the website and was widely used to troll both Jewish and non-Jewish critics of the Trump campaign.

  The site takes its name from the German Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, which was notorious for the viciousness of its anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews. After World War II, Der Stürmer’s publisher, Julius Streicher, was executed for crimes against humanity. Anglin created the site in 2013 as an updated version of his previous website, which he called Total Fascism.36 As of this writing, the new website features pictures of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump and the slogan “Daily Stormer—The World’s Most Goal-Oriented Republican Website.”

  It is important to emphasize again that the Alt Right is a mansion with many rooms and some very real divisions. Anglin, for example, is not a fan of Milo Yiannopoulos, who is depicted on the Daily Stormer with a cartoon of the Jewish nose superimposed on his face and is referred to as “Filthy Rat Kike Milo.” But Anglin is also interested in emphasizing the common ground among the various disparate groups and interests that make up the white nationalist movement. In his own guide to the Alt Right, Anglin notes that the movement included various factions, but that they had all been led “toward this center-point where we have all met. The campaign of Donald Trump is effectively the nexus of that centerpoint.”37 Impressed by Trump’s rhetoric on illegal immigrants, Anglin endorsed Trump in 2015 and urged the readers of the Daily Stormer to “vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.” After Trump called for barring Muslims from the country, the site declared: “Heil Donald Trump—The Ultimate Savior.”

  But Anglin’s greatest accomplishment was the creation of what he calls his “Troll Army,” which he uses to attack political opponents, deployed to great effect in early 2016.

  After GQ magazine published a profile of Melania Trump by writer Julia Ioffe, the future First Lady took to Facebook to denounce the piece as “yet another example of the dishonest media and their disingenuous reporting.”38 Anglin quickly mobilized his Troll Army, posting an article headlined: “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!”39 The post featured a picture of Ioffe wearing a Nazi-era yellow star with the word “Jude” and a call to action from Anglin: “Please go ahead and send her a tweet and let her know what you think of her dirty kike trickery. Make sure to identify her as a Jew working against White interests, or send her the picture with the Jude star from the top of this article.”

  The result was a torrent of abuse, including death threats against the journalist. On Twitter, she was sent pictures of Jews being shot in the head and pictures of her wearing concentration camp stripes. When she answered her phone, a caller began playing a recording of a speech by Adolf Hitler.

  “The irony of this is that today,” Ioffe told the British newspaper the Guardian, “I was reminded that 26 years ago today my family came to the US from Russia. We left Russia because we were fleeing antisemitism. It’s been a rude shock for everyone.”40* The response from the GOP nominee was also troubling. When Trump was asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the anti-Semitic attacks and death threats, the future president pointedly refused to condemn them, pleading ignorance and saying, “I don’t have a message to the fans. A woman wrote an article that was inaccurate.”41 Trump’s refusal to denounce the Troll Army was greeted with delight by Anglin, who immediately posted: “Glorious Leader Donald Trump Refuses to Denounce Stormer Troll Army.” He exulted:

  Asked by the disgusting and evil Jewish parasite Wolf Blitzer to denounce the Stormer Troll Army, The Glorious Leader declined.

  The Jew Wolf was attempting to Stump the Trump, bringing up Stormer attacks on Jew terrorist Julia Ioffe. Trump responded to the request with “I have no message to the fans” which might as well have been “Hail Victory, Comrades!”42

  Melania Trump was also asked about the attacks on Ioffe by writer Mickey Rapkin of DuJour magazine. “So if people put a swastika on my face once this article comes out,” Rapkin wondered, “will she denounce them?” Again, she declined to condemn the threats, suggesting instead that Ioffe had brought the ugliness onto herself. “I don’t control my fans,” she said, “but I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them.”43

  BIRCHING THE ALT RIGHT

  The implications for mainstream conservatives should have been obvious. A
fter decades of fending off the Left’s smear that conservatives are racists, the Alt Right and its media enablers now seem intent on confirming the worst stereotypes. But this is not simply a matter of public relations or even semantics. A conservative movement that embraces the Alt Right—or its candidate—will have forfeited both its intellectual integrity and its political future. No tent can possibly be that big and still remain standing.

  There should be no doubt what the Alt Right represents for the Right. On an intellectual level, the Alt Right challenges the conservative belief that America is a nation founded on an idea or a vision of natural and God-given rights. They prefer to see it as defined by its ethnic and racial identities. This goes to the core of their break with the conservative tradition. “We question America’s founding myth,” Spencer, the white nationalist leader, explained. “If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it’s not just the notion of ‘all men are created equal’ that I would object to. It’s also this notion that states come into being as entities for people to defend their inalienable rights. I find that to be total hokum, nonsense. That’s not how any state, including the United States, came into being.”44 As a result, the Alt Right is skeptical of the idea of American exceptionalism. For them, it is a white, European enclave in which Jews, immigrants, and other minorities are trespassing. This is not simply a matter of emphasis, it is a fundamental rejection of the conservative view of America; and, in particular, a rejection of what Ronald Reagan meant when he described his vision of the country as a “shining city on a hill.” Reagan had borrowed this image from John Winthrop, and in his farewell speech in 1989, he explained what it meant to him:

  But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still. [Emphasis added.]45