In the early 1990s, several high-profile individuals including former Jack Kennedy adviser, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Indian-born author Dinesh D'Souza published books highly critical of multiculturalism, a practice that encourages equivalent respect for multiple cultures within American society. Since Anglo-European Christian culture had long been dominant in school curriculums, multiculturalism resulted in less Andrew Jackson and more Harriet Tubman. Just like recent immigration in Southern states, the curricular changes were minimal. But it could feel, and was certainly portrayed as, an attack on the country's Anglo-American roots. In the 2000s, the issue was picked up and mainstreamed by right-wing populist Pat Buchanan and other non-academics. Buchanan described multiculturalism as an assault on white identity in the same way that immigration was an assault on America's borders.8
Extremists like Robb took the criticism of multiculturalism, immigration, and changing demographics to its extreme conclusion. They weren't just national security issues or insults to traditional white culture but were perceived as existential threats to whites. Without drastic action, the result was clear: the complete disappearance of white culture and race. As Robb told it, the country was headed for “white genocide.”9
Up until this point, Robb's drive to expand the Klan benefited from some uniquely modern capacities—particularly the fearmongering around immigration and multiculturalism on partisan cable news networks. But these issues were not, themselves, new. What was critical and novel was the white supremacist response to the perceived threat. Instead of dressing up in robes and burning crosses, the new Klan was going to play victim.
During his acceptance speech for the 2004 Jack London literary award, evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, whom the SPLC has called the “neo-Nazi movement's favorite academic,”10 touched on the reputed clamor of Latino activists for a large section of the American Southwest to be returned to Mexico and the demographic inevitability of whites being a minority in the United States. He added a bit of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, suggesting that multiculturalism is largely a result of Jews organizing ethnic interest groups to disenfranchise white Christians. Finally, he blamed the same academic left that promoted multiculturalism for “pathologizing” the “ethnic self-interest”11 of European Americans. According to MacDonald, whites are not just a vulnerable group, but one unable or unwilling to mount a defense in the face of their near-certain demise. After establishing whites as victims of a Jewish conspiracy, MacDonald proposed a surprising solution: Zionism.
MacDonald, then a tenured professor at the California State University, Long Beach, proposed that whites emulate what he described as Jewish “hyper-ethnocentrism” by fiercely promoting their own self-interests and, ultimately, demanding their own, separate ethno-state along the lines of Israel.
Although white nationalists, including MacDonald, typically claim that segregating ethnic populations in their own states will prevent violence, it doesn't take much of an imagination to predict what dangerous forms this white “hyper-ethnocentrism” could take. And as if to squelch even that smidgen of doubt, in 2009, MacDonald joined the American Third Position—a group later renamed American Freedom Party, which was primarily comprised of neo-Nazis.
Despite his close association with skinheads, MacDonald's concepts were useful for mainstreaming far-right extremism. According to MacDonald, since white people were victims of immigration, shifting demographics, and multiculturalism, they should respond not with lynching but by unapologetically and fiercely celebrating their own culture, ethnicity, and race. They needed, as Robb would have it, not openly to hate black people but to love unabashedly white ones.
Robb and MacDonald were not the first to try to rebrand white supremacy around “white civil rights.” Back in 1981, former grand wizard David Duke founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), which met with some success. But as 2008 approached, white victimization, and the threat of “white genocide,” was ready to take off.
When asked in an April 2008 interview which Democratic candidate he'd support if forced to, Robb took the long view, picking Barack Obama: “For the white nationalist cause, I think he'll be the best one for us. He might galvanize people. And then white people themselves might look upon this as a race war and begin thinking about their blood and their heritage again.”12
In November of that year, Robb got his wish, and some white people responded just as he predicted. Stormfront and the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens had to upgrade their servers to deal with the spike in traffic to their websites.
While ugly incidents of hate and anger also followed, many of the leading figures on the extremist right saw a unique opportunity following Obama's election. A historic economic downturn, fear of jihadist attacks, a stalled war effort, and a sense among some whites that high immigration and multiculturalism were stripping them of their rights and country were already winning issues. The election of, as his critics made sure to call him, Barack Hussein Obama—an urbane, African American, liberal Democrat—seemed to combine and magnify all these threats.
As Todd Weingart, a leader of the hate group Nationalist Coalition, said, “If it was only immigration or the economy or a nonwhite running the country, there wouldn't be this interest. It's the combination that is getting people to stand up and get interested.”13
With their eyes set on the mainstream, white supremacists followed Robb's lead. Don Black banned swastikas and other Third Reich symbols from Stormfront to avoid turning off first-time visitors to the hate site.
Speaking at a Klan event, a Stormfront moderator offered recruiting advice: Keep it subtle, at first. “Find a chink in their armor and make friends. If you are too radical, they won't listen.”14
Similarly, the Detroit-based neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) switched from Nazi brown shirts to black uniforms as part of what leader Jeff Schoep called a “modernization project.”15 Nonetheless, Schoep was not willing to embrace all the mainstreaming efforts within the white supremacist and neo-Nazi communities. The NSM, said Schoep, wasn't “trying to trick people; there are enough white groups now trying to soft-pedal people into joining.”16
Thomas Robb, speaking at a Christian Revival Center and Knights Party event where his granddaughters’ white nationalist duo Heritage Connection performed, had honed his message of white victimhood. “Why is it that when a black man wants to preserve his culture and heritage it's a good thing, and when a white person wants the same thing, we're called haters?”17 he asked.
Victimhood turned out to be a popular pitch, but it was only the beginning. After 2008, Robb's brand of sanitized white nationalism merged with a much broader and less predictable online movement, which grew in ways he couldn't have imagined, eventually leaving him behind.
Richard Spencer had a comfortable upbringing in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, in the 1990s. He attended St. Mark's, an exclusive prep school, where he was friendly with the one African American student in the class but was generally described as unremarkable by classmates.1
As he tells it, Spencer “self-radicalized” almost entirely at elite universities, including the University of Virginia, where reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals had a “shattering” effect on him. He continued his intellectual journey toward extremism in graduate school at the University of Chicago, where a professor described him as a fascist, and during various stops in Europe, a continent with far more established extreme right groups.
After nine months as assistant editor at the right-wing the American Conservative magazine, Spencer was fired for holding views that were too extreme. He then edited the paleoconservative online Taki's Magazine, expanding it from primarily conservative and libertarian contributors to include writers like Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist online magazine American Renaissance, who euphemistically fashioned himself a “white advocate” and “racialist.” As Spencer's own politics definitively settled on white nationalism, he left the online
magazine and started his own website, AlternativeRight.com.
Since then, Spencer's mission has been the same as his many academic racist forebears: making fascism acceptable, and even fashionable. The National Policy Institute (NPI), his think tank, is housed in Old Town Alexandria, just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, where it occupies the top two floors above a chocolatier on a leafy street with colonial American charm. The NPI website looks more like the New Yorker than Stormfront. It offers access to Radix Journal, “NPI's popular website for writings on culture, politics and society,” and Spencer's own Washington Summit Publishers, which “produces books on culture, critical theory, and human biodiversity.” He dresses neatly in sweater vests and suits while sporting the “fashy” haircut made originally popular among Nazi youth in the 1930s.
His politics, nonetheless, are a sanitized version of white supremacy increasingly advocated by the Klan, some neo-Nazis, and other less urbane hate groups. On an NPI training video, Spencer touches on all the white genocide talking points: “As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession.”2
Spencer was a prime example of what, in 2012, academic Dr. Barbara Perry described as the “new, modern face” of the hate movement, which was repackaging itself and “attempting to move itself into the mainstream of United States culture and politics.”3
Much of this repackaging was semantic branding. Spencer, who also dressed in a suit and tie, called himself an “identitarian,” not a supremacist.4 He claimed he left the PhD program at Duke to pursue a life of “thought crime.”5 But Spencer's most important contribution was popularizing and defining the term “alt-right”—a rebranding of the term “right-wing extremist.”
Though it has never been a completely cohesive movement, what became known as the alt-right began to coalesce around 2008. Many future members of the alt-right had felt alienated from the Republican Party during George W. Bush's presidency. They rejected his neoconservative polices, the bipartisan consensus around free trade, and the multiple wars abroad. Many of these far-right figures, including Spencer, were so disgusted with Bush that, in 2004, they voted for Democratic candidate John Kerry or third party candidates out of protest. For them, the 2008 election had a double significance: not only did an African American Democrat win, but the Republicans had nominated John McCain, a foreign policy hawk who also supported bipartisan immigration reform. They were ready to burn the existing GOP to the ground.
Beginning in 2008, message boards like 4chan and reddit began experiencing rapid growth. Within a few years, though, they also saw a hardening of right-wing politics. In their early years, the communities had been rife with misogyny and pseudo-ironic racism, but they also shared an anarchist-libertarian insistence on absolute free speech. Above all, the boards celebrated an intense political free-for-all. During Obama's presidency, places like 4chan's main politics board drifted away from being chaotic online debating societies, coalescing around various reactionary, libertarian, and far-right ideologies.
The biggest single event marking this change was 2013's Gamergate controversy. The ferocious pushback against the positive reviews for a female programmer's unorthodox videogame was premised on the idea that “politically correct” or feminist forces were invading a masculine universe of first person shooter games.
Beyond all the vicious trolling and personal recriminations, Gamergate was essentially about mostly white males seeing themselves as victims of feminism, just as “identitarians” like Spencer saw whites as victims of multiculturalism. As a result, ironic, internet-savvy twenty-year-olds who wouldn't have been caught dead at a Klan rally joined a common cause with sanitized white supremacists. The meme machine joined the hate machine.
This same politics of male victimization defined another recruiting station for the alt-right, the huge network of blogs, message boards, and websites known as the “manosphere.” Issues there could include “fathers’ rights” advocates, incel groups—shorthand for “involuntarily celibate”—populated by men frustrated by their inability to find sexual and/or romantic partners, Men Going Their Own Way groups that discouraged relationships with women, as well as old-fashioned pickup artists. These often violently misogynistic groups were linked by the idea that feminism was their enemy. Many “manosphere” inhabitants saw the alt-right as a political vehicle to push back on the reverse-sexism that they claimed was lowering sperm counts and stripping men of their traditional roles.
By the time the term emerged into mainstream consciousness around 2014, “alt-right” referred to a loose coalition of academic racists, libertarians, paleoconservatives, internet trolls, conspiracy theorists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and white nationalists. But despite its ideological spread, what bound the alt-right together was the belief that they were all victims, whether of political correctness, globalization, multiculturalism, feminism, immigration, government overreach, massive Jewish conspiracies—or all of the above.
The people associated with the group tended to hate both the earnestness of the “Social Justice Warrior” left and “lamestream” conservatives. They distrusted much of the establishment media. In fact, many had serious doubts about the entire prevailing global economic and political order.
For the establishment media, the strange new political force was hard to nail down. First, the alt-right was an unconventional coalition, largely born on message boards and websites, that often manifested itself via semi-ironic memes and inside jokes. It also presented many of the same problems with covering internet phenomena that had plagued the establishment media for years and had only accelerated as social media itself became a news source. In the limitless, deceptive online world, it was very hard for a journalist to figure out exactly who was important and what was to be taken seriously.
With traditional reporting stymied, some media decided to crowd-source answers. An August 29, 2016 article in the Washington Post titled “The alt-right, explained in its own words” consisted of combing through tweets with the hashtag #AltRightMeans. The most popular consisted of complaints about being victimized by ideological movements, including feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. Other popular tweets included attacks on 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.6
Establishment news sources were accustomed to interviewing experts or leaders of movements. The alt-right was too amorphous to work that way, but Richard Spencer was very successful at promoting himself as an authority. And for the Washington Post, interviewing a well-spoken, nicely dressed man just across the Potomac River in Virginia was very convenient.
The Post ran multiple articles in which Spencer was given uncontested space to explain the alt-right movement. In a two-and-a-half-minute video titled “What is the alt-right?” mostly comprised of text and images, just two people speak on the subject. One of them, then-sixty-seven-year-old paleoconservative author Paul Gottfried, appears in a clip from a faded 2008 video. The other, is Spencer looking youthful, nattily dressed, and speaking directly to the camera.7
The decision to feature the two men makes sense, they are generally credited with co-creating the term in 2008, but no mention is made of this. Neither is the fact that Spencer was quoted in a 2013 issue of Vice saying his dream was a “white ethno-state”8 or that, because Gottfried is Jewish, he would not be welcome in that nation. No experts offering a more critical view on the movement is provided. Perhaps in the spirit of being even-handed, much of the Post's—and other establishment media's—coverage of the alt-right left the impression that it was a nonthreatening, if bigoted, emerging curiosity of American politics.
While this coverage may have been uncritical, it wasn't a straight publicity campaign like Breitbart's March 29, 2016 story titled “An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right.” To the many critics of Breitbart, which was already closely associa
ted with the alt-right, the generally positive tone of the article was unsurprising. But the lengths to which Breitbart went to explicitly sanitize the extremism rampant in the movement wasn't fully known until BuzzFeed News, a left-leaning news site, released emails detailing how the article was manufactured.
In early March 2016, Breitbart co-founder Steve Bannon assigned his high-profile provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos the prime job of explaining the alt-right to the world. Yiannopoulos's journalism consisted largely of emailing several right-wing extremists asking for their input. In an email to Andrew “weev” Auernheimer of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, Yiannopoulos said “Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”9 Yiannopoulos also contacted Curtis Yarvin, who had become famous for his searing “neoreactionary” critique of liberal democracy and suggestion that monarchs and slavery would be part of a better social order. Yiannopoulos asked, “If you have anything you'd like to make sure I include.” Yiannopoulos likewise approached Devin Saucier, the editor of the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, for contributions. All three responded enthusiastically, and Yiannopoulos forwarded their thoughts, along with the Wikipedia entry for “alt-right,” to his ghostwriter, Allum Bokhari, with instructions to “include a bit of everything.”10
After Bokhari produced a first draft, Yiannopoulos allowed the white nationalist Saucier and the monarchist Yarvin to add line-by-line edits and suggestions. Yiannopoulos also requested input from Vox Day, a science fiction writer with a history of racist outbursts.
Though this was extremely sloppy journalism, the process became much more deceptive once Yiannopoulos shared a draft with his editors at Breitbart. They were generally enthusiastic, but, like Thomas Robb, wanted to avoid accusations of racism. They instructed Yiannopoulos to make the identifiable white supremacists seem marginalized within the broader movement. After being sanitized for explicit racism, the story went to upper management and back to the collection of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, antidemocracy advocates, and racists who were serving as unofficial editorial advisors. The final product read like ad copy for the alt-right, praising its youthful energy, its promise of “fun,” and how its “fearsomely intelligent group of thinkers”11 were terrifying establishment conservatives.
Hateland Page 18