Category Archives: Alt-right

Charles Bausman, a 59-year-old American man who has lived in Russia on and off for the past three decades, founded the pro-Kremlin website Russia Insider in 2014 when he was living in Moscow. In the years following President Donald Trumps 2016 electoral win, Bausman began to use the site to promote an array of overtly fascist and antisemitic content. Upon moving from Moscow to the eastern Pennsylvanian city of Lancaster in 2018, Bausman involved himself in a plethora of right-wing causes. Then, after attending the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, he disappeared to Russia, leaving behind nearly $1 million worth of property.

There, Bausman has reemerged as a media commentator. In March, Bausman co-hosted multiple episodes of an online show with a man whom U.S. officials identified in a declassified intelligence report as at times acting on behalf of Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) to manipulate American public opinion, as Hatewatch previously reported.

Russia Insider has published speeches from Adolf Hitler justifying his 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the death of some 27 million Soviet people; excerpts from the dictators autobiographical screed Mein Kampf, which a Russian court declared extremist and banned in 2010; and the work of Nazi collaborators who waged war on the Eastern Front.

Beyond Nazi primary sources, the far-right groups and content that Bausman has involved himself with or promoted reflect a diverse array of far-right ideologies. Since 2018, Bausman has collaborated with or promoted Alex Jones, a prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorist and the founder of Infowars; the Rod of Iron Ministries, a gun-obsessed religious group; and the National Justice Party(NJP), a self-styled pro-Hitler political group with ties to The Right Stuff podcasting network.

Until now, reporters and researchers have typically pointed to a 6,000-word antisemitic diatribe from January 2018 called Its Time To Drop The Jew Taboo as Bausmans first foray into far-right extremism. In it, he lauded the alt-right, a term used in the mid-to-late 2010s by members of the movement, researchers and journalists to describe a coalitional approach to white supremacist organizing. Bausman commended the alt-rights intellectual heft and lavished praise onto several of the movements figureheads.

However, the materials that Hatewatch obtained and reviewed indicate that the pro-Kremlin propagandists involvement in the white nationalist movement dates back as early as fall 2016.

Hatewatch found that Bausman attended a 2016 conferencein Washington, D.C., hosted by the National Policy Institute (NPI), a now-defunct white nationalist think tank, in which attendees threw up Nazi salutes. Hatewatch also obtained leaked emails showing that Bausman sought to plan an event in Russia with members of NPI, including Richard Spencer, then the head of the group that organized the 2016 conference that Bausman attended.

Additionally, recent business filings and a series of blog posts with Bausmans byline on them shed additional light on his involvement with the National Justice Party, the pro-Hitler political party, which the pro-Kremlin propagandist has praised for their valuable contributions to political discussion.

Hatewatch reached out to Bausman over email. He did not respond. Hatewatch reached out to multiple current and former members of the National Justice Party, including Gregory Conte, Mike Peinovich and Joseph Jordan, over email or text message. They did not respond.

In this still from The Atlantics 2020 documentary White Noise, Richard Spencer, left, is seen with William H. Regnery II. (Daniel Lombroso/White Noise)

The emails that Hatewatch obtained reveal that Bausman sought to collaborate with members of NPI, including petitioning the groups reclusive late founder William H. Regnery IIto organize a multi-day conference in Moscow.

Hatewatch was able to verify the authenticity of the leaked material based on the fact that two sources recalled meeting Bausman at multiple white nationalist events during that time period, namely the 2016 conference and a subsequent summer 2017 conference organized by the self-styled race realist think tank American Renaissance.

The leaked materials indicate that Bausmans association with NPI began in late 2016, when he attended the groups annual conference in Washington, D.C. The event took place over the course of two days, beginning with a private dinner in northwest D.C. on the evening of Nov. 18 and culminating with a full day of speeches on Nov. 19 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center a few blocks away from the White House.

Luke OBrien, an investigative reporter who has written extensively about the far right, said in a phone conversation with Hatewatch that he met Bausman while checking in for the conference on Saturday, Nov. 19. OBrien recalled that after he introduced himself as press to NPI personnel, Bausman struck up a conversation with him.

He said, Im also with the press. He gave me his card. It was for Russia Insider, OBrien recalled in a conversation with Hatewatch.

He was there for networking purposes is what it felt like to me, OBrien said.

Bausman met with both Regnery and Spencer within the week after the 2016 conference. In a Nov. 27, 2016, email to NPI personnel, Bausman expressed his support to Spencer following blowback from some segments of the white nationalist movement and the mainstream media for a speech on the night of Nov. 19, when around a dozen people threw up Nazi salutes. Bausman referred to Spencers critics as wusses.

Later in the email thread, Bausman added, It was great to meet you and Bill [Regnery] and I will get back to you with some info on what we discussed.

Bausman soon followed up with NPI personnel via email. On the morning of Dec. 12, 2016, Regnery sent an email to Bausman with the subject line pan euro congress. The note appeared to follow a phone conversation between Regnery and Bausman.

Regnery announced that Bausman had located [a] young Russian of Ukrainian background who was brought up in the States but who lives in Moscow and [is] interested in being our legman [sic] to lubricate our meeting plans. Regnery went on to suggest a series of next steps, including proposing sending Spencer to Moscow for a week to begin making the rounds and inspecting likely venues. Though Regnery did not offer a timeline in the email regarding when such a trip would occur, he suggested September 2017 as a possible month for the event itself.

The email includes repeated references to NPIs attempt to hosta conference in Budapest in October 2014, which resulted in Hungarian authorities deporting multiple speakers, including Spencer. (In Spencers case, Hungarian authorities detained him on charges he failed to carry proper documents on his person, although others were turned away at the border.) To avoid such hurdles, Regnery suggests to have a marquee name that is indelibly associated with the Putin administration. However, the email chain does not make it readily apparent if Regnery had any specific figure in mind.

We can expect the few seconds of video of the upraised arms at the end of the fall meeting to be constantly looped by those who seek to vilify the conference, he continued, referring to footage showing attendees throwing up Hitler salutes at the November 2016 conference. Returning to the 2014 debacle in Hungary, Regnery added: Assuming we can avoid of a recurrence of this perception in Russia we need to concern ourselves with the demonization of the meeting elsewhere in Europe. We need to submerge the involvement of NPI in a handful of other Europe [sic] and Russian organizations.

Russia is the only European country in which a pan Europe Alt Right interest group can be launched, Regnery wrote.

NPIs event in Moscow did not come to fruition. However, Regnerys proposal mirrored a 2015 conference, hosted by the Russian ultra-nationalist party Rodina (Motherland), that drew a variety of far-right figuresfrom the United States and Europe, including American white nationalists Jared Taylor and Sam Dickson.

Spencer and Bausman crossed paths again at a July 2017 gatheringheld outside Nashville, Tennessee, by American Renaissance, an organization run by Taylor, where Bausman invited Spencer to team up with him on fundraising ideas.

Evan McLaren, NPIs former executive director who publicly disavowed white nationalism in April 2022, told Hatewatch in a message that he recalled meeting Bausman at the conference.

I dont remember how detailed his questions were, but he definitely took me aside and pumped me for information, McLaren said.

Greg Conte argues with police before a speech by Richard Spencer at Michigan State University on March 5, 2018, in East Lansing, Michigan. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

In addition to Spencer and Regnery, Bausman also collaborated with Gregory Conte, NPIs former director of operations, Hatewatch found. Now one of the co-founders of the National Justice Party, Conte serves as a throughline between Bausmans early involvement in the alt-right and later collaboration with the pro-Hitler National Justice Party.

Russia Insiders archives indicate that in August 2016, Bausman shared an article from the reactionary blog Atavastic Intelligentsia, penned by Greg Ritter, a pseudonym Conte then used in the white supremacist movement. Conte, this time under his given name, contributed an article to Bausmans site that was tagged as Exclusive to Russia Insider on Dec. 1, 2018, a few months after he resigned from his position at NPI and other Spencer-affiliated properties.

Contes relationship with Bausman appeared to extend beyond contributing to his site, according to Bausmans own statements and ones from Contes former collaborators.

McLaren, the former white nationalist, told Hatewatch that he met with Conte and Bausman sometime between Dec. 26, 2019, and Jan. 5, 2020, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. At the time, he said, Conte was deeply involved with Russia Insider.

I hadnt completely cut ties with Conte yet, and I let him know I was going to be stateside. Bausman really wanted to meet up. ... He wanted to recruit me to work on whatever projects they had going, and he was curious about dirt on Richard [Spencer], McLaren, who now lives in Europe, told Hatewatch in a message.

He didnt have any specific role in mind, at least not that he explained. He was just trying to involve me, McLaren added.

Furthermore, in a Nov. 4, 2021, article on a website called Lancaster Christian, Bausman described the former NPI director of operations as a good friend of many years for whom I have the highest personal esteem.

Hatewatch identified Bausman as the owner and operator of the Lancaster Christian website, where he is the sole contributor, through its review of internet records. Lancaster Christian shares an IP address with several other Bausman-associated web properties, including Russia Insider and its sister site, Russian Faith, indicating that the same person set up these sites.

Spencer, who worked with Conte until July 2018, confirmed the pairs longstanding friendship in a request for comment from Hatewatch.

Not a week would go by without some mention of Bausman from Conte, Spencer told Hatewatch.

Bausmans writings on his Lancaster Christian website and corporate documents filed on behalf of the NJP shed new light on the pro-Russia propagandists relationship with the white supremacist group.

Mike Peinovich from The Right Stuff speaks at a press conference on Oct. 19, 2017, at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Mike Peinovich, a white supremacist podcaster whose former associates have accused of running a cult, launched the NJP in summer of 2020. It featured a variety of speakers, including Conte, associates of Peinovichs The Right Stuff podcasting network, a former member of the longtime neo-Nazi group the National Alliance, and other prominent figures throughout the white power movement. At the time, Hatewatch reported that the event took place in what looks like a barn. Local news outlet Lancaster Online later identified Bausmans farmstead on Millersville Pike in Lancaster County as the location for the meetup in an expos published in October 2021.

My reason was that I believed that this group of guys, some of whom I knew personally to be of high integrity and brilliant intelligence, who had made hugely valuable contributions to political discussion in our country, and my publications, should be allowed to gather in a space and have a private meeting to discuss their whatever they want, Bausman said in the Nov. 4, 2021, articleon Lancaster Christian, in which he detailed his reasoning for allowing Peinovich and others to use the property.

Elsewhere in the same article, Bausman lauds Peinovich as famous for making good speeches.

Peinovich told The New York Timesin 2022 that the NJP went our own way with respect to Bausman. However, corporate records for the two LLCs associated with his organization, National Justice LLC and National Justice Party LLC, that Conte filed with the Maryland Secretary of State indicate that the organization continued to use the address of Bausmans farmstead on NJPs official records well into 2023.

The corporate documents that Conte filed on behalf of NJP include an application to create a National Justice LLC that Conte sent in on Dec. 7, 2021, and a trade name application registering National Justice Party LLC that Conte filed on June 9, 2022. A January 2022 reportfrom the local news outlet Lancaster Online indicated that Conte was also residing at the property for a time.

Conte used the address of Bausmans barn again in an article of amendment that he filed on Feb. 16 to transfer ownership of the National Justice LLC to Peinovich. Conte filed the document after publicly announcing his departure from the NJP in a 15-minute rambling audio clip that he published on the low-moderation app Telegram. In it, Conte accused NJP leadership of spending $10,000 of the groups funds to spend on cryptocurrency, as well as an ongoing pattern of behavior including secrecy, lies and deception. The recording closes with an inscrutable request in English and German to listeners to determine if theyre for or against the Fhrer.

Hatewatch reviewed archived Russia Insider posts, as well as materials related to Bausmans public appearances in Washington, D.C., New York and Moscow, in order to better understand his growing interest in the white nationalist movement in late 2016, as well as his subsequent turn toward far-right activism.

Hatewatch reached out to multiple people listed as speakers at two events focused on U.S.-Russia relations that Bausman appears to have attended in 2015, according to material on his Russia Insider website and other online archives. These events include the March 25-26, 2015, World Russia Forum, a once-annual gathering in Washington, D.C., organized by the Soviet-born nuclear physicist and Russia Insider contributor Edward Lozansky, and the March 27, 2015, Russia Forum New York, whose organizer, Elena Branson, has since been chargedby the U.S. government with acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the Russian government.

A user under the name RI Staff announced in a now-deleted poston the Russia Insider website that Bausman would be speaking at the World Russia Forum on March 24, 2015, on a litany of subjects including terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, climate change and drug trafficking. World Russia Forums official programdoes not even list Bausman by name and only includes his website among a handful of others during a 45-minute panel called Presentation of Alternative Sites. The same Russia Insider post does not mention Bausmans appearance at the Russian Forum New York.

Lozansky, who organized the annual World Russia Forum, confirmed to Hatewatch in an email that he brought Bausman to the 2015 event as part of a panel to discuss alternatives to mainstream media. He recalled that Bausman also attended a tree-planting ceremony in Moscow roughly a month later. The event commemorated the Allied victory in World War II.

While Lozansky was an early contributor to Russia Insider, dating back to the sites founding in 2014, the sites archives indicate that most of his contributions on the site between fall 2014 and spring 2017 consist of reposts from other media outlets. He said he wasnt sure why Bausman stopped reposting his articles and that he was unaware of Bausmans participation in the 2016 NPI event.

Lozansky said he didnt speak to Bausman for several years until he met him at a July 4 gathering of American expatriates in Moscow.

We spoke briefly, and he mentioned that RI is not doing well these days, thats about it, Lozansky said.

Russia Insiders pivot from sharing mainly material concerned with foreign policy and U.S.-Russia affairs to a solidly far-right propaganda outlet appears to have coincided with President Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign. By early 2016, Bausman began portraying Russia Insider less as a publication concerned with U.S.-Russia relations and more as another website within the broader sphere of alternative media. In a May 19, 2016, post called Russia Insider is Really a Mirror of the Trump/Sanders Phenomenon, Bausman depicted his site as countering neocon lies about Russia. Between July and October 2016, Russia Insider ran multiple articles portraying the growing alt-right movement and Trump as possible Russian allies.

At a 2016 speech in Moscow less than a month before he would attend the now-infamous NPI conference, Bausman described American politics as shifting as the result of unnamed activists.

The fact of the matter is the earth has shifted in America in a very fundamental way, Bausman said during that presentation in Moscow on Oct. 25, 2016.

The people who have realized how crazy the American system has become will not go home. They will not stop talking. If Hillary wins, she will have a big, big problem on her hands, he added.

This story is part 3 in a series. Read more about far-right propagandist Charles Bausman in part 1and part 2.

Photo illustration by SPLC

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Pro-Kremlin Propagandist Ties to White Nationalist Movement ... - Southern Poverty Law Center

Even when you do find yourself debating somebody with more extreme views, it is important to remember that todays adversaries can become tomorrows allies. Ideologues of all stripes like to claim that the people with whom they disagree suffer from some kind of moral or intellectual defect and conclude that they are a lost cause. But though few people acknowledge defeat in the middle of an argument, most do shift their worldview over time. Our job is to persuade, not to vilify, those who genuinely believe in the identity synthesis.

Sometimes, outspoken critics of the identity synthesis used to be its fervent proponents. Maurice Mitchell, a progressive activist who is now the national director of the Working Families Party, once believed that the core precepts of the identity synthesis could help him combat injustice. Today he worries about how its ideas are reshaping America, including some of the progressive organizations he knows intimately. As he writes in a recent article, Identity is too broad a container to predict ones politics or the validity of a particular position.

To avoid following the path charted by Mr. Weinstein, opponents of the identity synthesis need to be guided by a clear moral compass of their own. In my case, this compass consists of liberal values like political equality, individual freedom and collective self-determination. For others, it could consist of socialist conviction or Christian faith, of conservative principles or the precepts of Buddhism. But what all of us must share is a determination to build a better world.

The identity synthesis is a trap. If we collectively fall into it, there will be more, not less, zero-sum competition between different groups. But it is possible to oppose the identity trap without becoming a reactionary.

To build a better society, we must overcome the prejudices and enmities that have for so much of human history boxed us into the roles seemingly foreordained by our gender, our sexual orientation, or the color of our skin. It is time to fight, without shame or hesitation, for a future in which what we have in common truly comes to be more important than what divides us.

Yascha Mounk is the author of the forthcoming book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, from which this essay is adapted.

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Opinion | How to Argue Against Identity Politics Without Turning Into ... - The New York Times

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Anna Wintour: 'I just have to make sure things are being done right' - Financial Times

As recently as last week, in remarks to the Concerned Women of America Summit, Trump bragged about the anti-abortion record of his administration. Im also proud to be the most pro-life president in American history, he said. I was the first sitting president ever to attend the March for Life rally right here in Washington, D.C. The biggest thing, he emphasized, was his appointment of three Supreme Court justices who ruled to end the moral and constitutional atrocity known as Roe v. Wade.

Nobody thought that could be done, Trump said.

Whether or not Trump is personally opposed to abortion is immaterial. The truth, established by his record as president, is that he is as committed to outlawing abortion in the United States as any other conservative Republican.

There is no reason, then, to take seriously his remarks on Sunday, in an interview on NBCs Meet the Press, where he criticized strict abortion bans and tried to distance himself from the anti-abortion policies of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake, Trump said, taking aim at Gov. Ron DeSantiss decision to sign a six-week ban into law in Florida in April. Trump also rejected the 15-week federal ban pushed by his former vice president, Mike Pence, and promised to negotiate a compromise with Democrats on abortion. Both sides are going to like me, he said. Im going to come together with all groups, and were going to have something thats acceptable.

Trump is triangulating. He sees, correctly, that the Republican Party is now on the wrong side of the public on abortion. By rejecting a blanket ban and making a call for compromise with Democrats, Trump is trying to fashion himself as an abortion moderate, a strategy that also rests on his pre-political persona as a liberal New Yorker with a live-and-let-live attitude toward personal behavior.

There is a real chance this could work. In 2016, voters did not see Trump as a conservative figure on either abortion or gay rights, despite the fact that he was the standard-bearer for the party that wanted restrictions on both. It would be a version of the trick he pulled on Social Security and Medicare, where he posed as a defender of programs that have been in the cross-hairs of conservative Republicans since they were created.

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Opinion | Donald Trumps Abortion Shell Game - The New York Times

In the days immediately following the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, antifascists were comparing images online, trying to identify the culprits with methods that one might find in amateur detective guides: focus on the geometry of the ears, the curve of the nose, the parts that cant easily be changed if someone gains or loses weight or grows a beard. The violent far right is often described as a shadowy and somewhat faceless force. But, to those who follow the movements major figures, it looks more like a repertory company, one whose members might take slightly different roles in different performances in different cities: a compact, delineated group of usual suspects. Ethan Nordean, who held the war powers for the Proud Boys on January 6th, had sat for interviews with Alex Jones on Infowars. Stewart Rhodes, the eye-patch-sporting Yale Law grad and founder of the Oath Keepers, had been a prominent militia leader, staging patrols of Cliven Bundys ranch and at Trump rallies, before he was charged with seditious conspiracy and sentenced to eighteen years in prison for orchestrating his groups storming of the Capitol. I remembered Joe Biggs, a bearded Proud Boys leader and right-wing podcaster who broke through police lines at the Capitol, from an event that Roger Stone had staged during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, in 2016.

It can be disorienting to track these far-right cadres closely. You can lose yourself. Not long after the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, in 2017, I sat in the kitchen of a likable young humanities professor at the University of Virginia who was devoting hours each day to identifying the marchers and posting the results to antifascist forums online. Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written perceptively about both left- and right-wing street politics for a decade, knows these patterns well. Ive found, more often than not, when interviewing people who have devoted their professional lives to understanding perpetrators of racial violence, that they often share a similar, if diametrically opposite, radicalization process, he writes in American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress. They can identify the very moment their eyes were openedwhen they first realized theyd never again look away from the evil they now saw.

The past few years have forced plenty of ordinary Americans to regularly wonder whether they should open their eyes to the far right in this way, too. Both choices are bad. Familiarize yourself with the activities of Patriot Front or the Boogaloo Boys and you risk letting a very tiny number of unoriginal extremists unnecessarily darken your world view. Ignore them, and you may feel nave when, as at Charlottesville or on January 6th, they play a major role in political events. The events on Saturday, in Jacksonville, Florida, in which a twenty-one-year-old white gunman targeted Black customers at a Dollar General, killing three, were yet another reminder, as in Buffalo and El Paso and Charleston, that the problem of far-right and racially motivated violence isnt going away.

Politicians tend to describe the far right almost spectrallyits protagonists are said to emerge from the dark recesses of the American past or the fringes and fever swamps of the present. In some ways, the batch of new books published about the far right represents a helpful corrective. Their authors tend to see American extremism as a more specific set of political patterns. But, taken together, they also suggest how little agreement there is on basic matters: what the far right wants, and whether it represents an eternal pattern in American politics or a new one.

Lowerys focus is on race. He sees the right-wing tumult of recent years as a reaction to the increasing presence of nonwhite Americans and especially to the election of the first Black President. Even if racists sound much the same as they always have, Lowery thinks they were changed by the civil-rights movement, often referred to as the Second Reconstruction. The advent of multiracial democracy through the Second Reconstruction and the perceived browning of America through immigration has forced todays white supremacists to accept as a premise that theyre losing, Lowery writes. No longer can they claim, as their forebears did, that they aim to return to the norm of a white supremacist status quo. Todays white supremacist movement is revolutionaryits explicit aim being to overthrow our maturing multiracial democracy.

You might draw a straight line from this to Donald Trump, but Lowery takes a more episodic approach, tunnelling in on a few cases of racial violence, each of which made headlines at the time but whose details tend to be largely forgotten. Often, these atrocities turn out to be committed by longtime fanatics. Lowery relays the 2012 massacre at a Sikh temple, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in which Wade Michael Page, a forty-year-old skinhead who was active in the neo-Nazi music scene, fatally shot six people and wounded four others, in part, through the eyes of a pair of radicalism researchers. One of them found a Myspace photo of the then unidentified shooter, and exclaimed, Oh my God! Thats Wade. Lowery also lingers on the white supremacy of Frazier Glenn Miller, Jr., a prominent figure in the white-power movement for decades, who, at the age of seventy-three, killed three people at Jewish centers in Overland Park, Kansas. I had good moral reasons for doing what I did, Miller told a judge. Im going to prove to them that Jews are committing genocide against white people.

Racial violence has a way of drawing the eye back into the past because white supremacy is so deeply entwined with American history. Lowery is sharp in his attunement to the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim violence of the Bush years, which now look like a presage of Trumpism. One episode in his book concerns the Patchogue, Long Island, assault of an Ecuadorian immigrant named Marcelo Lucero, by a group of teen-agers who went out beaner-hopping days after Barack Obamas election. Lucero was killed by a seventeen-year-old named Jeff Conroy, who stabbed him in the chest. Conroy, whose father ran the areas youth football and lacrosse organization, turned out to have a swastika tattooed on his thigh. I knew about it, Conroys father later told a local journalist of the tattoo. It was just one of those stupid kid stunts.

There was a specific anti-immigrant political context in that part of Long Island following Obamas election. In 2007, a legislator from nearby Amityville said that, if he saw day laborers gathered in his community, I would load my gun and start shooting, period. Some of this was channelled politically by the Suffolk County executive, an anti-immigrant Democrat (though he would later become a Republican and maintains that he was never anti-immigrant) named Steve Levy. In 2007, Levy told the Times, Whether you are black or white or Hispanic, if you live in the suburbs, you do not want to live across the street from a house where 60 men live. You do not want trucks riding up and down the block at 5 a.m., picking up workers. A little unexpectedly, Lowery writes that the closest analogue he has discovered for Trump is not Rudy Giuliani or Sarah Palin but Steve Levy.

Lowerys book is elegant. He convincingly shows that, during the Obama years, conservative figures from Levy to Trump worked adeptly to stoke fear of displacement. But, in some ways, American Whitelash reads as a chronicle of a specific timemuch of the action concerns the backlash to Obamas Presidency, and the early years of Trumps. The last deeply reported episode in the book, chronologically, is the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. That took place six years ago, which raises the question of whether the situation has changed since.

To revisit the Unite the Right rally, as the former CNN producer Nora Neus does in her excellent oral history 24 Hours in Charlottesville, is to realize that the patterns of right-wing violence that are now familiar were then still new. Just hearing lots of reports of people bringing guns. I was like, Oh my God, is this something were going to experience today? a news photographer named Zack Wajsgras told Neus. Part of the novelty was how confident the militias were, raising Confederate and Nazi banners in the center of one of Americas premier college towns. In some ways, they behaved, nine months after Trumps election, as if they were in control. Tom Perriello, a former Democratic congressman from the region who was at the rally as a counter-protester, told Neus, You could not tell who was National Guard and who was white supremacist. They were in full camo. They had earpieces in. They were moving in formations. They had open long guns. They were, in every meaningful way, exactly how National Guard would be out in the streets. And they saw themselves that way.

Charlottesville was understood as a statement of arrival by what was then called the alt-right, the extremist cadres, organized largely online, united by a confrontational white supremacy. They had entered the mainstream. The journalist David Neiwert argues in The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Rights Assault on American Democracy that it was also their Waterloo. Neiwert has been following the far right since the late nineteen-seventies, when he was a cub reporter in Idahoa center, at the time, of the white-power movement. His story, which spans a half century, is most interesting in its account of what happened to the movement after Charlottesville. Many of the alt-rights principals wound up in jail. The Proud Boys and some affiliated groups, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and South Florida, pursued a running sequence of street fights with antifascist protesters. Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who once appeared frequently in the national media, had already effectively vanished from public view by the time a judge handed down a $2.4-million judgment against his organization, the National Policy Institute, in 2021, following a suit brought by a Charlottesville victim. Several members of the California-based Rise Above Movement, who were responsible for many of the most violent acts at Charlottesville, were sentenced to federal prison on rioting charges. These organizations and their slogans, Neiwert notes, fell into disuse. The termand, in most regards, the movement itselfwas quickly discarded, he writes. No one identified as an alt-right group after Charlottesville.

Neiwerts contention isnt that Charlottesville was a death knell for violent extremism: Like a blob of mercury crushed under a thumb, they simply spread out into newer, smaller blobs. Some of these new groups took turns toward religious conservatism, in ways that presaged the loose Christian millenarianism of the QAnon movement. Thomas Rousseau, who, as a teen-ager, had marched in khakis and a white polo at Charlottesville, founded an avowedly fascist splinter group called Patriot Front, whose members were dressed up in riot gear and arrested in a van on their way to a Pride event in Idaho. Nick Fuentes, who, at Charlottesville, had been an eighteen-year-old white-supremacist podcaster and Boston University freshman, now leads groups of his so-called groyper army in chants of Christ is King at anti-abortion and anti-vaccine protests.

Neiwert also traces a more consequential turn. By the pandemic phase of Trumps Presidency, even mainstream Republicans had adjusted their approach to right-wing extremism. In Michigan, for instance, the Republican leader of the State Senate was seen at a political fund-raiser with one of the militiamen who, months later, would be arrested for participating in a plot to kidnap and kill Michigans Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, joined a wave of fellow Republican figures in amplifying false claims that Antifathe Proud Boys street-fighting antagonists, but not otherwise a major political forcewas preparing for violence. The former U.S. Attorney and G.O.P. pundit Joseph diGenova appeared on Laura Ingrahams podcast in 2019 and insisted that we are in a civil war and advised viewers to buy guns to prepare for total war.

Neiwert emphasizes how closely the bug-eyed guys with guns follow mainstream politics. He writes that, among the deleted e-mails and online activity obtained during the prosecution of Christopher Hassona Coast Guard acquisitions officer and avowed white nationalist who was arrested, in 2019, for plotting a series of political assassinationswere planning notes for a bioweapons attack and shooting spree, and Google searches for what if trump illegally impeached and civil war if trump impeached. Neiwert writes, Its not hard to find the source of Hassons belief that civil war would erupt if President Trump were to face impeachment: By early 2019, civil war had become an endemic talking point and source of speculation among right-wing pundits.

Many of the quotes that Neiwert lifts, from congressional speeches and cable-news appearances, show how spectral and apocalyptic Republican politicians and conservative media came to sound during the Trump era. Early in Trumps term, the televangelist Jim Bakker warned that, if Democrats sought to remove the President from office, there will be a civil war in the United States of America. The Christians will finally come out of the shadows because we are going to be shut up permanently if were not careful. On the House floor, during Trumps first impeachment, the Texas congressman Louie Gohmert declared, This countrys end is now in sight. Neiwert traces the fallout. An ex-Navy SEAL named Jonathan Gilliam used Gohmerts remarks as a springboard, writing on Twitter, I see exactly what he sees. Therefor it is time we begin considering the possibility of civil war.

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How to Treat Right-Wing Violence in the U.S. - The New Yorker

Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and the majority leader, said Tuesday he had been diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer but planned to return to Washington to continue working as he undergoes treatment over the next several months.

Mr. Scalise, 57, said in a statement that he had begun treatment for multiple myeloma, which he described as a very treatable blood cancer, after feeling ill over the August congressional recess and having tests that led to his diagnosis.

It came at a critical moment for Mr. Scalise, who is known for his ability to speak to the hard-right faction of the fractured Republican conference and has a pivotal role to play in the House in the coming months, with Congress facing the possibility of a government shutdown on Oct. 1. Lawmakers remain far from reaching any agreement on spending levels that would keep the government running on a long-term basis. The House left Washington last month for a six-week summer recess nowhere near a deal on 11 of the 12 appropriations bills that still must be passed, hamstrung by internal divisions over spending and social issues.

Mr. Scalise, who previously served as the Republican whip, is expected to play a crucial role in negotiating with members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, who are threatening to force a shutdown unless their priorities are addressed.

Mr. Scalise was gravely wounded in 2017 when a gunman opened fire on members of the Republican congressional baseball team at a practice field in Alexandria, Va. He was shot in the hip and underwent many surgeries to relearn how to walk, regaining almost full mobility.

I am incredibly grateful we were able to detect this early and that this cancer is treatable, Mr. Scalise said in a statement on Tuesday. I will tackle this with the same strength and energy as I have tackled past challenges.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has had a strained relationship with Mr. Scalise, said in a statement that he had spoken with his No. 2 on Tuesday and found him to be in good spirits.

Nothing not a gunshot wound and certainly not cancer will stop him from accomplishing what he sets his mind to, Mr. McCarthy, the California Republican, said in a statement.

In multiple myeloma, certain healthy blood cells become cancerous, throwing off abnormal proteins that can cause problems and crowd out cells needed to fight infections.

A relatively uncommon cancer, it is estimated to be diagnosed in about 35,000 people in the United States annually, more often affecting men and Black people. About 60 percent of patients diagnosed with multiple myeloma in recent years survived the effects of their cancer for at least five years, though the survival rate depends on how far the cancer has spread.

Patients can face more frequent infections and bone and kidney problems, but there are a number of treatment options that depend on how quickly the cancer is growing. Those include immunotherapy, which helps the bodys immune system attack cancer cells, chemotherapy and corticosteroids.

Some patients are also candidates for a stem cell transplant. Drug treatment is first used to reduce the number of cancerous cells in the body and then unhealthy blood-forming stem cells are replaced by healthy ones.

Those treatments can range from tolerable to grueling. The most common side effect is fatigue, doctors said, debilitating some patients even as others are able to keep working full-time. Patients already in poor heart health are especially susceptible to feeling exhausted.

Treatments that suppress patients immune systems also leave them vulnerable to infections that themselves can require prompt treatment. Immunotherapy drugs often carry a risk of painful nerve damage, and chemotherapy can cause nausea and mouth sores, though doctors can prescribe medications to address some side effects.

On Tuesday, Republicans were quick to offer Mr. Scalise their public support and highlight his resilience.

Steve is as tough and kind as they come, and he has beaten so many unbeatable odds, Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, said in a statement. We know he will fight this next battle with that same resolve.

Steve is a fighter, and we stand with him as he enters this latest battle, Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, said in a statement.

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Scalise, No. 2 House Republican, Says He Has Blood Cancer - The New York Times

Internal Secret Service emails obtained by CREW show special agents in close communication with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, while failing to acknowledge the groups ties to white nationalists and clashes with law enforcement.

In September 2020, a Secret Service agent sent an email to others within the agency, informing them that he had just spoken to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes about an upcoming visit by then-President Trump to Fayetteville, NC. The agent, who referred to himself as the unofficial liaison to the Oath Keepers (inching towards official), described the group as primarily retired law enforcement/former military members who are very pro-LEO [law enforcement officer] and Pro Trump. Their stated purpose is to provide protection and medical attention to Trump supporters if they come under attack by leftist groups. He went on to say that Rhodes, had specific questions and wanted to liaison [sic] with our personnel and shared Rhodess cell phone number.

The emails obtained by CREW as part of an ongoing public records request offer only a snapshot of the communication between the Oath Keepers and the Secret Service. As they focus solely on the time period around the Fayetteville event, the extent of the contact Stewart Rhodes had with the agency remains unknown. The agent inching towards being the official liaison for Oath Keepers suggests a more longstanding relationship with Rhodes.

Another Secret Service agent spoke to Rhodes and informed the other agents that their desire is to assist those attending the event make it to and from their cars safely. They are NOT there to demonstrate or push a political agenda. In October 2022, a former member of the Oath Keepers testified that Rhodes had spoken to the Secret Service to coordinate around the rally, but an agency spokesman told CNN that, The US Secret Service doesnt have enough information to say whether or not this call actually took place. These emails show that it did.

When one agent requested intelligence about the Oath Keepers another responded: General searches revealed news articles that touched on the background of the founder Stewart Rhodes and the group. Rhodes has denounced White Nationalists ideals while sharing his dislike for ANTIFAThe group claims it is a local community response team for natural or civil disorders. Agents also noted that a Facebook account associated with the group contained pro-gun content, commentary on racism in the US, and news articles about politics, but failed to find anything else.

There was plenty of other publicly available information about Rhodes and the Oath Keepers at the time that should have easily raised alarm.

In 2014, Oath Keepers traveled to Ferguson, Missouri with assault rifles claiming they were providing security for businesses in the area after the grand jury decision not to indict the white police officer who killed Michael Brown. The St. Louis County Police Department had to demand that the Oath Keepers stop patrolling the city, explaining in a statement that members were walking on rooftops of businesses holding semi-automatic rifles, breaking the countys ordinance regulating security officers and guards. The police reportedly threatened arrest, and the Oath Keepers began protesting the authorities.

On the one-year anniversary of Michael Browns shooting, Oath Keepers again arrived in Ferguson with assault rifles and flak jackets, apparently intending to protect businesses and right-wing journalists, including an employee from InfoWars. St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar called their presence both unnecessary and inflammatory. This was also covered extensively by national media.

The group has also compared Hillary Clinton to Hitler on its website, and on May 5, 2015, Rhodes was recorded saying that then-Sen. John McCain should be tried for treason, convicted and hung by the neck until dead. A long list of former Oath Keepers allegedly cut ties with the group by 2017, citing concerns with Rhodess leadership.

Rhodess conduct outside of the Oath Keepers had also repeatedly come into question. In October 2015, the Montana Supreme Courts Office of Disciplinary Counsel recommended that Rhodes be disbarred for violating his attorney oath following a number of ethics and conduct complaints against him, joining Arizona, which admonished Rhodes in 2012 for practicing without a license.

While the nearly all-white Oath Keepers themselves are purportedly not a white nationalist organization, and Rhodes may have denounced white nationalist ideals, Oath Keepers have repeatedly worked alongside white supremacist and white nationalist groups. In 2016, as neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups such as the National Socialist Movement, factions of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Freedom Party deployed members at polling sites, the Oath Keepers advised its members to do the same undercover. The Washington Post reported in 2017 that white supremacists in the alt-right scene seem to have a lot in common with the Oath Keepers, but that the Oath Keepers were not as racist or radical as certain far-right white nationalists would prefer. The Oath Keepers have repeatedly been highlighted in national articles as part of the landscape of white supremacist militias, and are often tied to their public ally the Proud Boys, a group that has been categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Proud Boys similarly are allied with the American Guard, a white nationalist group according to SPLC.

Rhodes is now best known for his role in organizing significant turnout of insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, just a few months after he was in contact with the Secret Service. Rhodes and other Oath Keepers planned to participate in violence at the Capitolagainst Secret Service protectees, no lessand he gave followers instructions like stay fully armed and get ready to fight leading up to the attack.

In November 2022, Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy by a jury for his role in the attempt to keep Donald Trump in power, and was sentenced to 18 years in prison in Maythe longest of any convicted January 6th defendant so far. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found that Rhodess role in January 6th amounted to terrorism and said that he presents an ongoing threat and peril to this country.

Stewart Rhodes photo by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license.

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Emails reveal Secret Service contacts with Oath Keepers - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

The Michigan Republican Party is starving for cash. A group of prominent activists including a former statewide candidate was hit this month with felony charges connected to a bizarre plot to hijack election machines. And in the face of these troubles, suspicion and infighting have been running high. A recent state committee meeting led to a fistfight, a spinal injury and a pair of shattered dentures.

This turmoil is one measure of the way Donald J. Trumps lies about the 2020 election have rippled through his party. While Mr. Trump has just begun to wrestle with the consequences of his fictions including two indictments related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 results the vast machine of activists, donors and volunteers that power his party has been reckoning with the fallout for years.

As the party looks toward the presidential election next year, the strains are glaring.

Mr. Trumps election lies spread like wildfire in Michigan, breaking the state party into ardent believers and pragmatists wanting to move on. Bitter disputes, power struggles and contentious primaries followed, leaving the Michigan Republican Party a husk of itself.

The battleground has steadily grown safer for Democrats. No Republican has won a statewide election there since Mr. Trump won the state in 2016. (Republicans have won nonpartisan seats on the State Supreme Court.) G.O.P. officials in the state are growing concerned that they do not have a top-tier candidate to run for the open Senate seat.

Its not going real well, and all you have to do is look at the facts, said Representative Lisa McClain, a Republican from Eastern Michigan. The ability to raise money, weve got a lot of donors sitting on the sideline. Thats not an opinion. Thats a fact. Its just a plain fact. We have to fix that.

She added: Everyone is in the blame game. Weve got to stop.

Michigan Republicans were long a force in national politics. The state was home to Gerald Ford and George Romney and to many of the Reagan Democrats who helped transform the party four decades ago. Ronna McDaniel, the current chair of the Republican National Committee, was the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party until 2017. Betsy DeVos, the former secretary of education under Mr. Trump who resigned after Jan. 6, is a power broker in the state, managing vast wealth and a political network with influence far beyond state lines.

The slow unraveling of the state party began well before the 2020 election. Throughout the Obama administration, the right wing of the party grew more vocal and active. After Mr. Trumps victory in 2016, many party posts that were once controlled largely by megadonor families and the Republican establishment began to be filled by Trump acolytes.

By 2021, the new activists wanted to support only candidates who believed the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump lost in Michigan by more than 154,000 votes, was fraudulent and were committed to trying to do something about it.

Those leaders soon emerged. Matthew DePerno, a lawyer who advanced false election theories, became a folk hero in the state and ran for attorney general. Kristina Karamo, a poll worker who signed an affidavit claiming she had witnessed vote stealing, became a conservative media star and ran for secretary of state. And Meshawn Maddock, the leader of Women for Trump who organized buses to Washington on Jan. 6, became co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party.

Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo did not respond to requests for comment. The Michigan Republican Party did not respond to requests for comment. In a video released on Monday night, Ms. Karamo defended her actions as party chair and lashed out at more moderate Republicans she claimed were part of a uniparty.

Their nominations exposed a rift within the party, with more moderate, traditional Republicans like the DeVos family swearing off both Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo and withholding funds from most of the state party. Other donors similarly expressed their frustration. County nominating conventions devolved into open conflict.

Meshawn was never connected to the donor base, and so having her as the vice chair for a lot of us was a showstopper, said Dave Trott, a former Republican congressman from Michigan who retired in 2018 and is also a former donor to the state party. Because we just knew she would never be someone that would be rational in her approach to state party politics.

Ms. Maddock, who is no longer involved in the party, responded to Mr. Trott, saying she was not surprised at all that he takes no responsibility for disappointing Michigan voters or anyone.

The state party needs the wealthy RINOs who often fund it to come to terms with what the actual voters on the right want, Ms. Maddock said. Instead of constantly gaslighting the Republican base, the wealthy donors need to treat them with an ounce of respect for once.

As standard-bearers for the state party during the 2022 midterm cycle, Mr. DePerno, Ms. Karamo and Ms. Maddock all maintained the falsehoods about the 2020 election. In their campaigns, Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo placed extra emphasis on the 2020 election, often at the expense of other issues more central to voters.

They were resoundingly defeated. Republicans also lost control of both chambers of the State Legislature. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic incumbent, sailed to a landslide victory.

Republicans across the state were left pointing fingers. The state party blamed Tudor Dixon, the candidate for governor, for an unpopular abortion stance and anemic fund-raising. Ms. Dixon blamed state party leadership. Ms. Maddock blamed big donors for not supporting their candidates. Ms. Karamo refused to concede.

A state party autopsy days after the election, made public by Ms. Dixon, acknowledged that we found ourselves consistently navigating the power struggle between Trump and anti-Trump factions of the party and that Mr. Trump provided challenges on a statewide ballot.

Ms. Karamo, who succeeded Ms. Maddock at the helm, pledged to bring in a new donor class. But those donors never materialized. The party has lost money since Ms. Karamo took over, with under $150,000 in the bank as of June 30, according to federal campaign finance records. At the same time four years ago, the party had roughly three times as much cash on hand.

She has drawn condemnation from both Republicans and Democrats for her social media posts tying gun reforms to the Holocaust and has faced attempts to limit her power.

The party has been plagued by infighting. In April, two county leaders were involved in an altercation, with one filing a police report claiming assault, according to video obtained by Bridge Michigan. In July, a brief brawl broke out during a state party gathering. The chairman of the Clare County Republican Party told police he had stress fractures in his spine, bruised ribs and broken dentures as a result of the fight.

A memo circulated this month from the executive director and general counsel of the state party, obtained by The Times, warned of a rogue meeting being advertised under the banner of the state party that was in no manner properly connected to or arising from the true and real Michigan Republican Party.

The issues facing the party extend beyond infighting and fund-raising; this month, Mr. DePerno, as well as a former Republican state representative and a lawyer, were charged with felonies related to a plan to illegally obtain voting machines. They have pleaded not guilty.

Tell me how that helps. Tell me how that helps get the swing voter, said Ms. McClain. Voters dont care about the infighting. The swing voter wants to know, how are your policies going to help me have a better life for my family?

Prominent Michigan Republicans appear content to let the state party wither. Former Gov. Rick Snyder, among the last Republicans elected statewide in Michigan, has begun a fund-raising campaign directing money away from the state party and directly into the House Republican caucus in a desperate attempt to win back at least one chamber of the State Legislature.

(The effort bears some similarities to one Gov. Brian Kemp undertook in Georgia, another state where division over Mr. Trumps election claims hobbled the state party.)

Mr. Snyders fund-raising, as well as some activity from the DeVos family network, have filled the coffers of the Republican House caucus, led by Matt Hall, the minority leader in the State Legislature whom many party elites are looking to as the de facto leader. The House Republican Caucus, despite being in the minority, is outpacing the House Democratic Caucus in fund-raising this year, with $2.3 million to the Democrats $1.7 million.

Mr. Hall also has helped fuel 2020 election doubts. (He once was the chairman of a committee hearing featuring the Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani spreading lies about the election.) But he is far more likely to attack Democrats on spending or pork projects.

Separate from Mr. Halls efforts, the DeVos family and other influential donors have begun raising money for congressional and state legislative races only, forgoing any presidential or Senate races, according to Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the state party.

But the problems looming ahead of next years election are not just about money.

What cant be replicated is the manpower infrastructure, said Mr. Timmer, who now advises the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. You cant just go out and buy the passion and zealousness of people who will go out knock on doors and put up signs and do all those things that require human labor in a campaign.

Prominent Republicans point to the coming Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference as a sign of how far the state party has fallen. It was once a marquee stop for presidential hopefuls looking to make an impression on the critical swing state, and not a single Republican candidate for president in 2024 is scheduled to make an appearance.

Instead, the featured speaker at the September conference will be Kari Lake, who lost her race for governor in Arizona and has since claimed her loss was marred by fraud.

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How Trump's Election Lies Left the Michigan G.O.P. Broken and ... - The New York Times

The Alt Right

Origins of the term

White supremacistRichard Spencer, who is President and Creative Director at the National Policy Institute, a tiny white supremacist organization, coined the term alternative right in August 2008 in an article in Takis Magazine, a far-right publication.

At the time, Spencer was using alternative right to refer to people on the right who distinguished themselves from traditional conservatives by opposing, among other things, egalitarianism, multiculturalism and open immigration. That same year, Paul Gottfried, a Jewish paleo-conservative, employed the term alternative right when he gave a speech entitled, The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right, at the H.L. Mencken Clubs Annual Meeting in November 2008. For this reason, some sources credit Gottfried with originating the term.

Spencer further popularized the term when he chose Alternative Right as the name for an online publication that debuted in 2010. Spencer shut the website down in 2013, but it was soon re-launched by Colin Liddell and Andy Nowicki, former writers forAlternative Right. Spencer went on to found another journal,Radix. BothAlternative Right (rebranded as Affirmative Right)andRadixare forums for racists, antisemites and others who identify with the alt right.

What is the ideology of the alt right?

Alt right adherents identify with a range of different ideologies, all of which center on white identity. Many claim to be Identitarians, a term that originated in France with the founding of theBloc Identitairemovement and its youth counterpart,Generation Identitaire. Identitarians espouse racism and intolerance under the guise of preserving the ethnic and cultural origins of their respective counties. American Identitarians, including Richard Spencer, claim to want to preserve European-American (i.e., white) culture in the U.S.

As Michael McGregor, a writer and editor forRadix,wrote in February 2015, Identitarians want the preservation of our identity--the cultural and genetic heritage that makes us who we are. Identitarians reject multiculturalism or pluralism in any form.

Others in the alt right identify as so-called radical traditionalists, people who want to preserve what they claim are traditional Christian values but from a uniquely white supremacist perspective. Some inthe alt right identify as white nationalists who want to preserve the white majority in the U.S., claiming that whites losing their majority status is equivalent to white genocide. They issue mendacious propaganda on subjects like immigration and black crime as evidence of whites imperiled status.

Another segment of the alt right refers to themselves as neo-reactionaries (those who reject liberal democracy and ideas associated with the Enlightenment. Some neo-reactionaries refer to their theories as the Dark Enlightenment.) Others call themselves race realists or alternately HBD advocates, a reference to human biodiversity (a belief that ones race governs traits such as behavior and intelligencewith non-whites being inferior to whites). However they define themselves, alt righters reject egalitarianism, democracy, universalism and multiculturalism.

Many alt righters are also blatantly antisemitic and blame Jews for allegedly promoting anti-white policies such as immigration and diversity.

In 2015, alt righters began disparaging members of the conservative movement with the derogatory termcuckservative, a combination of conservative and cuckold, that is used by white supremacists to describe a white conservative who putatively promotes the interests of Jews and non-whites over those of whites. The alt right also refers disparagingly to the mainstream conservative movement as Conservatism, Inc. or Conservative, Inc., in an effort to highlight its associations with wealthy donors (whom the white supremacists dismiss as pro-immigration globalists whose policies undermine white nationalism in America).

Who makes up the alt right?

The alt right is an extremely loose movement, made up of different strands of people connected to white supremacy. One body of adherents is the ostensibly intellectual racists who create many of the doctrines and principles of the white supremacist movement. They seek to attract young educated whites to the movement by highlighting the achievements and alleged intellectual and cultural superiority of whites. They run a number of small white supremacist enterprises, including organizations, online publications and publishing houses. These includeNational Policy Institute, run by Richard Spencer; Counter Currents Publishing, run by Greg Johnson; American Renaissance, run byJared Taylor; and The Right Stuff, a website that features numerous podcasts with a number of contributors.

Alt righters use terms like culture as substitutes for more divisive terms such as race, and promote Western Civilization as a code word for white culture or identity. They tend to avoid explicit white supremacist references like the14 words,a slogan used by neo-Nazis and other hardcore white supremacists. While alt righters share the sentiment behind the 14 words theyre more inclined to talk about preserving European-American identity.

The Groypers are the latest alt right group to grab media attention. This loose network of alt right figures want to normalize their racist and antisemitic views, and are undertaking an organized effort to publicly lambast mainstream conservative organizations like Turning Point USA (TPUSA) for failing to promote an America First agenda and for not being adequately pro white.

The subculture of the alt right

The alt right also has its own subculture and language and both tend to attract young, white men. Many of these young men are active in the Chan world, including 4Chan, 8Chan (now defunct) and Reddit. These message boards, where most people post anonymously, are a key source of internet memes and trolling efforts, which often target women and minorities. For example, it is common to find memes that belittle the Holocaust and depict well-known Jewish figures, among others, being gassed. The memes creators hold that bigoted humor and irony help attract new followers to the alt right.

Another aspect of the alt right subculture is its connection to the online world of misogyny known broadly as the manosphere. Men in this movement believe they are being stripped of power by women and pro-feminist social structures. They also are hostile to women on a personal level, with some believing that women are objects to be possessed and used for sexual gratification, while others resent women for their own inability to attract them or to form meaningful relationships with them.

One incident that preceded the advent of the alt right but anticipated its misogyny was Gamergate. In 2014, males in the gaming community expressed hostility and resentment toward certain female gamers and attacked and threatened them online. This pushed a number of women to leave that community. Gamergate showed alt right adherents the effectiveness of online harassment campaigns against their perceived enemies.

Alt right vs. alt lite

In 2015 and 2016, a number of people who considered themselves part of the alt right were not white supremacists, but held certain views that aligned with white supremacist ideology: they were anti-immigrant, anti-globalism, anti-feminism and believed that the left and/or liberals are actively working to destroy American culture.

These people became known as the alt lite. In late 2016, the alt right and alt lite definitively split when people associated with the alt lite, including Mike Cernovich and Lucien Wintrich, began to distance themselves from the negative publicity surrounding the alt rights white supremacist views. The split became very clear after Richard Spencer and some of his followers were caught on video giving Nazi salutes during a National Policy Institute conference shortly after the 2016 election.

The Charlottesville Backlash

The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was a peak moment for the alt right. The event brought together between 500 and 600 white supremacists, including Klan members, neo-Nazis and racist skinheads. A torchlit rally the night before the event was attended largely by alt right adherents, and the next days gathering was the largest public white supremacist event in decades.

The alt rights moment of triumph was cut short, however, when a white supremacist named James Fields used his car to murder counter-protester Heather Heyer, and wound many others.

The repercussions were immediate for the alt right, and for the larger white supremacist community. Scores of them were doxxedtheir real identities exposed and as a result, some were fired from their jobs, had to leave their universities, or were rejected by their families or romantic partners. Many white supremacists social media accounts and websites were taken off line and some were kicked off popular crowdfunding websites, eliminating a key income source.

More than two years after Charlottesville, efforts to deplatform white supremacists continue, even as many have migrated to newer, less-scrutinized platforms like Discord and Telegram.

Alt right groups have also turned away from large rallies and have focused on distributing white supremacist propaganda, particularly on college campuses, and holding small flash demonstrations and private events.

In addition to criminal cases, Unite the Right organizers, including alt right leaders, have been dogged by civil lawsuits at both the state and federal levels, and are accused of conspiring to plan the rally and promote violence in Charlottesville.

Lawsuits are not the only irritant affecting white supremacists since Unite the Right. In July 2018, Richard Spencer was refused entry into Europe while en route to Sweden to speak at an alt right conference. Jared Taylor was banned from Europe in March 2019 and Greg Johnson was deported from Norway in May 2019.

Meanwhile, alt right leader Spencer, who helped spearhead the events in Charlottesville, has become increasingly unpopular in the alt right due in part to the perception that he failed to capitalize on the energy generated by Unite the Right.

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Alt Right: A Primer on the New White Supremacy | ADL

In recent years, adherents to the alt-right, a radically nationalist and xenophobic faction of the American right wing, have increasingly made their presenceknown, both in the digital sphere and in the streets. But while the term alt-right may evoke images of its most prominent partisans white supremacists and neo-Nazis in practice, it is a much more dangerously complex spectrum of political views.

Despite this, most discussions of online radicalization focus largely around the descent into these extremist groups, and not the subtle ways in which the echo chambers and deliberate isolation of the alt-rights indoctrination networks operate. These networks, collectively known as the alt-right pipeline, are especially dangerous to young men, but a narrow discussion of the pipelines threat means that the full scope of the issue is rarely addressed. From the violent extremes to the tamer, but much broader, wing of the alt-lite (a faction dominated by popular conservative commentators and public firebrands), the same tactics are used to exploit and radicalize the rising generation. I speak from personal experience when I say that failing to address the alt-right pipeline as a complex and multidimensional issue only serves to make it stronger.

The conventional wisdom is that the alt-right pipeline targets white men who are angry at the world, a group that originally self-identified as involuntarily celibate, birthing the abbreviation incel. These observers rightfully point out the pervasive misogyny of the alt-right, and treat it as a vehicle and prerequisite for radicalization. While this interpretation of the alt-right, one that emphasizes the pipelines exploitation of latent misogyny and sexual frustration through male bonding gone horribly awry, is accurate in many cases, it cannot be applied to every case of alt-right internet radicalization. I, for example, was only thirteen when my fall down the pipeline began. My fatal element was not male rage but self-doubt.

For most of my childhood, I was incredibly susceptible to peer pressure. I developed a personal identity, but my public identity was often whatever I thought would fit in best. The problem was only exacerbated when I hit puberty. I was an atheist when my predominantly Catholic friends were bonding over teaching religious education classes at their churches, a progressive but only beginning to understand the importance of what that meant, and starting to come to terms with what I now know to be my bisexuality. At the time, I was unsure of who I was supposed to be, or even who I was.

This was around the same time that YouTube began to play a larger role in my life, and there, I found my gateway drug to the alt-right: Dave Rubin. In Rubin, I saw a vision of myself; he was an openly gay atheist man who called himself a classical liberal. I began watching the Rubin Report on YouTube religiously, and slowly but surely bought into his message: the modern lefts obsession with identity politics went too far. The assertion was straightforward enough for me to understand, and having next to no frame of reference with which to refute it, I did the only thing I thought epistemically sound: accept it as true.

I was working my way through Rubins content when I found his multi-part interview with alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, during which Yiannopoulos half-heartedly described African-Americans as being the last oppressed group in the United States. I had no experience with the nuance of condemnable views in American politics, so even Yiannaopouloss begrudging admission of any form of systemic racism was enough to convince me that he was worth more attention than I previously thought. With Yiannopouloss points going unchallenged, I was led to believe that his rhetoric held a legitimate place in the political spectrum. Once again, with no frame of reference to do otherwise, I accepted that I must have been wrong about him, and considered myself responsible for learning more about his perspective.

I gradually cycled through the videos that my new, extremely skewed frame of reference deemed acceptable, avoiding only the most flagrant content. By then, however, YouTube had worked its magic and determined what would appeal to me most moving forward. Videos recommended through the YouTube algorithm account for 70 percent of time spent on the site. Without thinking, I let the up next timer run down, and I was directed to the next video then the next, each more aggressive than the last.

And so began a months-long tumble down the alt-right pipeline, but I was never able to acknowledge that I was trapped. I still considered myself a progressive; in my mind, I was not buying into the alt-rights rhetoric, I was learning their arguments to make my progressivism stronger. But I was more easily persuaded than I knew, and even if my intentions were sound, Ben Shapiro spoke too quickly and Steven Crowder too aggressively for me to be able to process what I was hearing beyond a superficial level. My teenage mind could not keep up, and without any conscious understanding, I was cheering along with Jordan Peterson as he destroyed feminism and as SJWs were owned with facts and logic. Before I could think through what I had watched, I was onto the next video, and my internal understanding of the world became echoes of Louder with Crowder, the Daily Wire, and PragerU.Assuming I was merely developing a more nuanced understanding of the world, the true weight of what I was watching never set in with me. I began referring to myself as a social conservative, but never publicly. I figured discussing it with my friends was a non-starter; after all, in my mind, they had fallen victim to the machinations of the radical left. I was the enlightened one.

But even as I tumbled headfirst down the alt-right pipeline, I never fell far enough to seal myself into a true echo chamber. In fact, what I broadly defined as my social conservatism rarely left YouTube. The outside world continued around me unaffected; the only impact was in how I saw it. I certainly never shared these hateful views with anyone, because on some subconscious level, I still knew that they were unacceptable for a reason.

I resigned myself to the fact that I would forever be misunderstood, because the alt-right only knows, and therefore only teaches, two emotions: anger and fear. Both of these are generalized and are used to target, broadly, the unknown; anything the alt-right does not understand, like, or benefit from, it views as inherently dangerous. In my time, the prime example of this was the concept of intersectionality. I never learned the true definition of intersectionality, that racial, ethnic, and class identities intersect with one another and should be included in progressive movements. Instead, I learned Ben Shapiros definition, that according to current leftist orthodoxy, your opinion only matters relative to your identity.

I began to see the world the way those commentators saw it. I felt threatened where there was no threat, attacked where there was no attacker, and defensive of this new identity I had been given, an identity I had never wanted to have. The world I experienced and the world I saw were fundamentally disconnected. Overwhelmed, I sank into a depression. Their anger and fear had broken me, but it had not made me angry or afraid. It had just made me sad.

In the end, that disconnect was what saved me from sinking into the fascism and white supremacy of the alt-rights public persona. Real life is not as rapid-fire or one-sided as alt-right YouTube, and when I found my peers discussing the ideas that I had been indoctrinated to believe, I realized that the people I respected had clear and concise refutations to each of those ideas. The pipeline had given me definitions of things like intersectionality, social justice, and even feminism that were dangerously inaccurate, and when I actually began challenging the views pressed upon me, they fell like dominoes.

During my time in the alt-right pipeline, I found myself echoing reactionary talking points because I had been told to see conflict where none was necessary. I was inexperienced, and that made me the alt-rights perfect target.

If we as a society are to genuinely address the root causes of the alt-right pipeline, we must come to terms with what it actually is. While it often capitalizes on the worst of human impulses, it also capitalizes on naivete and ignorant innocence, regardless of age or circumstance. It looks different for everyone, from the veteran told to fear racial replacement by Tucker Carlson to the teenager who lingered too long on a promoted Will Witt video on Facebook. For those who know no better, the alt-right is a comprehensive and comprehensible way of understanding the world.

Refutations and rebuttals of alt-right talking points must also be adapted to the digital sphere. Right-wing pundits and commentators have the most popular podcasts, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels, meaning that they are often the first thing a person genuinely looking for political discourse will find. The alt-right has already adapted to the internet and is using their head-start to indoctrinate a generation. To combat this, viable alternatives to the alt-rights demagogic rhetoric must be available to discourage people from internalizing its narrative.

Lastly, the alt-right pipeline must be addressed as a public health issue. I was never happier when I found my identity in the alt-right than I had been before or than I am now. Caught in the alt-right spiral, I told myself the world misunderstood me, when in reality, I had just cut myself off from it. My mental health only recovered when I escaped the pipeline.

Falling down the alt-right pipeline is an intensely personal process, and it must be addressed as a personal issue. But more importantly, it must be acknowledged that the alt-right pipeline doesnt lead anywhere: It just keeps descending. And while that means it will become harder and harder to address with time, it also means no one is ever too far gone.

Returning from the alt-right pipeline was without question the greatest triumph of my adolescent life. Only then was I able to fully appreciate the rich diversity of our world and understand the nuances necessary to make genuine progress. More than ever before, too, I was able to understand myself, and fully embrace who I truly was, not the person the alt-right told me I should be.

The internet is still largely in its infancy, but the alt-right and its intermediaries have already been able to establish a funnel to create new acolytes. To combat it, we must first understand it, in all of its complexity.

Image by Ales Nesetril is licensed under the Unsplash License.

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The Dangerous Subtlety of the Alt-Right Pipeline