Throughout the article, readers are also reminded that the two authors on the byline—Yiannopoulos and Bokhari—are, respectively, a gay Jew and a mixed-race Pakistani. The article directly contended with—or, rather, defended against—the accusations of racism in the ranks of the alt-right. First, the authors drew a hard line between the reputedly harmless, lulzy ironic racism of trolls, and the actual racism of “1488ers” like the KKK and neo-Nazis. Then it belittles these groups, assuring readers that “there's just not very many of them, no one really likes them, and they're unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.”12
Soon thereafter, the article uses the threat of the 1488ers it has just dismissed to make demands. If the establishment refuses to take the alt-right seriously, the article suggested, the extremists may convince many in the alt-right to join their violent revolution because “the bulk of their demands, after all, are not so audacious: they want their own communities, populated by their own people, and governed by their own values.”13
The combined efforts of Breitbart editors and recognized far-right extremists had accomplished their goals: pumping up the excitement around the alt-right while denigrating the “scary” racists before suggesting that their program of ethnic cleansing was, actually, fairly reasonable. The bonus, however, was the wide-ranging coverage the article received in the establishment media. “It quickly became a touchstone,” said BuzzFeed, “cited in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, CNN, and New York Magazine, among others.”14
Richard Spencer's speeches—“I am white, my life has meaning, my life has dignity”—and the appeals of other rebranded racists like Traditionalist Workers Party head Matthew Heimbach—“faith, family, and folk”—sound much like the appeal a Christian Identitarian might have made to suffering farm families in 1983. But by 2016, the alt-right's success in soft-pedaling, redefining, and sanitizing right-wing extremism was a completely different beast.
First of all, it looked different. Even Jeff Schoep, the leader of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement who had resisted “softpedaling” white nationalism, decided to remove the swastika from the group's imagery—replacing it with a Germanic Odal Rune also used by the Nazis. Schoep said the change would help American Nazis “become more integrated and more mainstream.”15
Its messaging was also different. Schoep called his neo-Nazi group “not racist or neo-Nazi but pro-white civil rights.”16 Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website talked about a “reboot of the White Nationalist movement.”
Some extremists made names for themselves by hijacking academic language for the white supremacist cause. Nathan Damigo, a thirty-one-year-old veteran of such groups, ditched more overtly racist and anti-Semitic language in favor of phrases like “Cultural Marxism.”17 Damigo referred to writing the Identity Evropa symbol on a university chalkboard as a transgressive “thought crime.” He produced a slick website decrying the idea that “our identities are mere abstractions to be deconstructed.” Damigo's group targeted college students by demanding “safe spaces”—except that his safe spaces were for white students. His postering campaign, in which images of Grecian statues serve as backdrops for slogans like “Serve Your People” and “Our Future Belongs to Us,” garnered national coverage from the establishment press.18
In the same spirit, Breitbart's guide to the alt-right had claimed the movement was “best defined by what it stands against.” This was, however, an extensive list, ranging from feminists to intelligence agencies to liberal professors to Wall Street CEOs to Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi. To bolster their war on the establishment, the alt-right borrowed terms from the margins of the internet that suggested everything you think you know is a lie.
For example, the term “sheeple,” a combination of “sheep” and “people” that refers to the mindless herd, was used heavily on white supremacist websites like Stormfront a decade earlier. Approaching 2016, the term had migrated to the comment sections of establishment websites, with particular concentration on right-wing sites like Breitbart. It is most commonly used to dismiss people who agree with mainstream beliefs, although it could be a blanket attack on anyone with different politics. Some of the favorite terms of hardcore conspiracists—like “false flags” and being “red-pilled”—were also borrowed and increasingly mainstreamed by 2016. Those terms are, of course, extremely useful when painting the world as a massive illusion controlled by an evil cabal.
The more widely circulated these words and concepts, the easier it was to read seriously Daily Stormer articles like “Adolf Hitler: The Most Lied About Man in History,” or listen to Richard Spencer tell you that everything you've been taught at school and by your parents is hogwash.
As the tools of the alt-right began eroding the mainstream arbiters of truth and its messaging of victimization spread, people with strong links to white supremacy were increasingly shameless—and successful at—dodging accusations of racism.
In 2015, a blogger published evidence that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise had previously spoken at David Duke's white supremacist European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO. Scalise, a Louisiana politician and former neighbor of Duke's, escaped political death by boldly claiming he had no idea about the group's connection to Duke or white supremacy.19 For his part, Duke was given the opportunity to appear on both CNN and Fox News, where he claimed he had “never supported white supremacism” and that EURO was a group dedicated to “civil rights and preventing discrimination.”20
Likewise, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a group that has been supported by prominent right-wing commentators, such as Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter, was drawn into the spotlight following the revelations that church shooter Dylann Roof considered the CCC website critical to his development as a white supremacist. The group issued a statement condemning the attacks, while adding that Dylann “had some legitimate grievances against blacks.”
For this non-apology following the murder of nine African Americans in a prayer circle, the Council of Conservative Citizens’ biggest punishment was having its PayPal link suspended. However, its content simply migrated to a site that sounded like a 1990s graduate-level media-studies thesis: Narrative Collapse—Derailing Media Agendas. The site, which was also accessible through the link “conservative headlines,” pushed racially inflammatory stories primarily focusing on black-on-white crime under the guise of a news site.
Less than twenty years after Thomas Robb's awkward beginnings, right-wing extremism had been remarkably successful at sanitizing itself by appropriating the language of victimization, academic-left ideas of multiculturalism, and the Zionist project of an ethno-religious state. People and ideas that would have been shunted to the margins or dismissed altogether, like Richard Spencer, suddenly had a place in the mainstream political debate.
But Robb, and the Klan generally, were not among the beneficiaries of this sea change. In order to separate itself from accusations of violent racism, the Breitbart guide to the alt-right had dismissed the Klan and neo-Nazi skinheads as 1488ers. Even though white nationalists were among the article's editors, the extreme right's ugliest and most identifiable groups had to be publicly sacrificed to cleanse the broader alt-right. By 2016, the number of both neo-Nazi skinheads and KKK groups were in steep decline, replaced by crowds of young white men wearing white polos, khakis, and Spencer's fashy haircut.
The most revealing part of the 2016 Washington Post article analyzing responses to #AltRightMeans was the demographic data analysis of the over fifty thousand tweets. The vast majority of tweets using the hashtag did not originate with millennials or sexually frustrated incels, but with married white men forty to sixty years old. The alt-right—and its attitudes on gender, race, and multiculturalism—had moved well into the mainstream.21
Certain political and economic situations—a prolonged recession, stagnant wars in the Middle East, the nation's first African American president—set
the backdrop for this sea change. But the alt-right could not have moved in from the political margins without the assistance of establishment media, national politicians, and some of America's largest corporations, like YouTube and Facebook. Despite the close relationship between the alt-right and America's mainstream, just about everyone outside the alt-right underestimated the depth and spread of the movement. By 2016, extremism was not just mainstreamed; it was ready to take over the establishment.
Following defeat in the 2012 presidential election, a consensus developed among Republicans that they needed to be more inclusive. The party's core of aging white men was a diminishing percentage of the population. Just like white nationalists, the GOP foresaw a looming demographic death. However, its response—in terms of presidential candidates, at least—was just the opposite. Rather than double down on white maleness, the party's shining lights set out to attract new groups, especially the rapidly growing Latino voting bloc. As the early favorites for the 2016 Republican nomination announced their candidacies, they conspicuously pushed just those points.
In a speech at Liberty University, for example, Texas senator Ted Cruz's opening gambit was to ask the audience to imagine his father, a Cuban immigrant, “coming to the one land on earth that has welcomed so many.”1
Florida senator Marco Rubio, speaking in his home state, explained that “I chose to make this announcement at the Freedom Tower because it is truly a symbol of our nation's identity as a land of opportunity,”2 before playing up his Cuban parents and other immigrants who built the nation.
About a month later, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican American, announced his candidacy at Miami-Dade College on a podium surrounded by a multi-ethnic crowd. “You know,” he said, “I always feel welcome at Miami-Dade College. This is a place that welcomes everyone with their hearts set on the future. A place where hope leads to achievement and where striving leads to success.”3
The next candidate to announce, businessman and reality television host Donald Trump, went dramatically off script.
“Our country is in serious trouble,” Trump began. “We don't have victories anymore.” In quick succession, he lamented the country's trade deals with China—“They kill us”—and Japan—a country we don't beat “at anything.” Trump then turned to America's southern neighbor. “When do we beat Mexico—at the border? They're laughing at us. At our stupidity.”4
The early favorites for the Republican nomination had all invoked hard-working people who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to build the greatest country on earth. As Trump described it, America was a disaster, Americans were getting kicked around by foreigners, and American leaders were incapable of doing anything about it.
Trump wasn't done with Mexico yet. “The US has become the dumping ground for everyone else's problems,” he said. “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems. They're bringing drugs, bringing crime. They are rapists and some, I assume, are good people.”5
Though Mexican immigrants were his favorite rhetorical target, Trump also latched on to other far-right extremist talking points. Following the San Bernardino, California, attack by a couple who pledged allegiance to ISIS, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,”6 an idea that had been bouncing around white supremacist sites like Stormfront a decade earlier.
In July 2015, Trump invited Sheriff Joe Arpaio to a rally in Arizona. Arpaio, who had been dogged by Justice Department investigations throughout his tenure, was well known for reinstituting chain gangs, housing inmates in tent cities, and racially profiling Latinos. In 2007, after his department was compared to the Ku Klux Klan, Arpaio said it was an honor. In short, the sheriff was a poor choice for any candidate interested in appealing to minority candidates—especially Latinos. But Trump was ignoring conventional wisdom. It also appeared to be working. A few days after the rally with Arpaio, Trump overtook Jeb Bush in opinion polls.
Eight years after Tom Tancredo had tried to make a run at the presidency with a campaign based around immigration, Trump decided to try his luck. But Trump's staunch anti-immigrant stance was actually just part of his campaign's broader program, one that came straight out of the so-called “alt-right” playbook.
The fear of a huge wave of illegal immigration was just one of the factors the “alt-right” used in describing the alleged victimization of white, Christian males. The full list of supposed oppressors was enormous, but globalization, multiculturalism, feminism, media, intelligence agencies, Communists, liberals, Democrats, and most Republicans were prominently featured. By targeting these issues and groups, the alt-right had been incredibly successful at expanding the reach of right-wing extremist and conspiratorial ideas between 2008 and 2016. Not coincidentally, these were also some of Trump's favorite targets at his rallies. While the blustering businessman's campaign often seemed haphazard, it did have at least one consistent aim: testing how successful the alt-right had been at pushing radical fringe ideas into the mainstream.
During the rest of 2015, much of the country was simultaneously entertained and outraged by Trump, but members of the alt-right recognized his program early on. To them, he wasn't just a loudmouthed opportunist who had stumbled onto issues that resonated.
Nonetheless, many far-right extremists kept their support quiet initially, either expecting a Republican candidate for the presidency to disappoint them eventually by veering toward the center or because they thought the endorsement of identifiable racists might not help him. Not everyone stayed below the radar, however.
A few months into Trump's campaign, Matthew Heimbach, co-founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Youth Network, went public with his approval. Although he doubted Trump would win, Heimbach thought that his campaign “could be the steppingstone we need to then radicalize millions of White working and middle class families.”7
Toward the end of the year, an organizer for a KKK-affiliated group echoed this sentiment, saying that sparking up conversations about Trump was a good way to talk with strangers about issues important to white supremacy.8
Following Trump's June 2015 announcement of his candidacy, the New York Times had tried—and failed—to imagine a path to victory for him. By December, Trump had been leading in polls for five months and the newspaper was forced to re-evaluate him. Primary season hadn't begun, so Trump hadn't yet locked up a single delegate. His organization's ground game was considered somewhere between chaotic and nonexistent. He was an extremely nontraditional candidate, but it was also clear that Trump's success was not just a momentary glitch.
When sizing up Trump, the Times listed his massive media profile as one of his only political assets. Certainly, the reality TV host had used his media savvy to stand out from the crowded field. The Times article had also noted, again correctly, that Trump was the perfect candidate for an age in which news was shared virally through social media. But even given the expanded role of social media in 2016, the political consensus remained that Trump would eventually go too far, alienate too many people, and shock the nation's conscience.
In September of 2015, for example, Trump's campaign had run an Instagram ad that showed footage of a woman falling asleep next to Jeb Bush while he was speaking. The video, purporting to be an ad for a sleep aid, ended with white text that read: “Jeb, for all your sleeping needs.”9
Over the top? Bush certainly thought so. During a debate a few months later, he shot back at Trump, “You're not going to be able to attack your way to the presidency.”10 Jeb Bush, though, had last run a political campaign in 2002, and a lot had changed since then. The combination of divisive and partisan cable news and websites, social media echo chambers, viral conspiracy theory videos, pseudo-ironic memes, and a historic lack of faith in the media was, in fact, the perfect platform for the most extreme candidate in the race.
Throughout his campaign, Trump borrowed openly from mainstream extremist alt-ri
ght ideas. But his success had much more to do with the new media environment that had allowed those extremist ideologies to mainstream in the first place. Trump was sixty-nine years old when he announced his candidacy, but he would have been more at home with the trollish millennials on 4chan than any of the younger, but more politic, candidates.
Within two minutes of announcing his presidency, Donald Trump made multiple false and questionable assertions, including that there were no Chevrolets in Japan and that Mexico was sending criminals and rapists into the United States. When fact checkers, including the independent PolitiFact, called him out on the claims, Trump simply repeated them more loudly.
Accounts of Trump's business dealings suggest he was a shameless and frequent liar well before his campaign began, but Trump was no longer reneging on promises made to subcontractors on his construction projects. He was running for public office under the full heat of media scrutiny. National politicians who are exposed for outrageous and verifiably false claims either resign, quietly walk it back, or pivot to a slightly different line of attack. Trump refused to play that game, and his claims that he was correct even in the face of actual evidence frustrated and outraged his opponents.
As the fourth estate, one of the media's most important roles is holding politicians and other powerful figures accountable, but it turned out that many Americans, fed a regular diet of conspiracy theories, viral rumors, and outright false and partisan claims from cable news and websites, had no interest in making Trump pay a serious political price for lying.
Hateland Page 19