Forward: The basic tenets combine white supremacy and white victimhood. In the former category fall bloggers like Steve Sailer, who lends the “alt-right” a pseudoscientific vibe with “human biodiversity,” a benign-sounding neologism that uses the language of genetics to explain perceived racial differences. Likewise, the anti-establishment conservative movement adopted the epithet “cuckservative” to call into question the toughness or strength of any conservative who makes concessions to the left.
At the same time, members and fellow travelers of the movement consider whites to be under attack and even facing extinction in an ongoing “white genocide,” which refers to the supposed conspiracy to destroy the white race through multiculturalism.
Some leaders see Jewish and other out-group allies as a way to protect whites. Richard Spencer is one of them. The chairman of the innocuously-named National Policy Institute (NPI), a white supremacist think tank begun in 2005, he created Radix Journal, one of the movement’s primary publications, in 2012. Since 2011, the NPI has held multiple conferences in Washington, as well as an aborted conference in Hungary, which resulted in Spencer being banned from 26 European countries, according to Radix.
But before his tenure as chairman of the NPI, Spencer helped run the H. L. Mencken Club, founded by Paul Gottfried, a Jewish academic who coined the term “alternative right.” Its conferences have become a gathering place for white nationalists who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, use it to “legitimize racism under the glossy veneer of academia.”
…“I don’t think directly associating ourselves with movements of the past like Nazism is the best way to go about changing the culture,” Richard Spencer wrote online in an “Ask Me Anything” session, or AMA, on Reddit. “We need to be a new cultural movement … Historical reenactment is not good politics.”
At the October 2015 NPI conference, Spencer made sure that at least one major anti-LGBT voice — Matthew Heimbach — was disinvited, and Jack Donovan, the openly gay “masculinist” writer, was a keynote speaker.
Jared Taylor, another figurehead of the “alt-right,” has been running the racist American Renaissance magazine since 1990, which has published articles by Jewish writers and hosted Jewish speakers at its conferences, drawing the ire of die-hard anti-Semites like former KKK leader David Duke, who is running for U.S. Senate in Louisiana.
Spencer and Taylor say the ends justify the means when explaining the inclusion of Jewish and LGBT voices — and even the voices of so-called alt-righties of color.
“I don’t think it is a good idea to drive away potential allies by declaring war on all Jews,” Taylor wrote in a July 26 Reddit AMA to defend Jewish inclusion in his response to a long anti-Semitic post by the user “Lothar_von_Trotha.”. “To be sure, there are many elite Jews who work against the interests of whites, but other Jews see themselves as men of the West who will fight to preserve European civilization.”
To Taylor, white is white is white.
“White Jews are white,” he said in a phone interview. Even white Muslims are welcome.
“I suppose if you had a Bosnian European Muslim who had a consciousness as a white person and wanted to defend Western civilization, then yes such a person would be hypothetically welcome in the ‘alt-right.’ But I’ve never met such a person.”
For Taylor, the endgame of the alt-right is create an “ethno-state” for people of European heritage.
“If there is no territory that white Americans can call their own, we will ultimately be shoved aside,” he said. “If that is not done, are what point are white Americans allowed to say it has gone too far? When we’re 20 percent of the population? When we’re five percent of the population?”
He feels that this goal has been misrepresented by the media – and that it is a peaceful movement. He said it is a fundamentally different ethos than white supremacy.
“I’m not even sure what white supremacy means,” he said. “If it means anything it means whites are supposed to be ruling over other races. I don’t think anyone in the ‘alt-right’ wants that.”
“It’s really the equivalent of the N-word in how you could refer to a white person,” he said of the term ‘white supremacist.’
But though people like Jared Taylor are willing to welcome white people of all background – at least for now – for many in the “alt-right” their hatred of Jews remains stubbornly common.
Anti-Semites like Kevin MacDonald — who has written books about the invention of anti-Semitism by Jews — are still regular guests at NPI conferences. And though he sometimes praises Israel for being an “ethno-state,” Spencer harbors deep anti-Semitism as well. He tends to pass it off as an intellectual interest in the racial and cultural distinction of Jews from white people.
“I think someone like Kevin MacDonald, he has covered the question of Jews very carefully,” Jared Taylor said. “I think he is correct on the activity of many elite Jews.”
“Dissident whites benefit from the efforts of all — Jew or gentile — who understand the crisis we face,” Taylor wrote in his Reddit AMA. “Anyone who tries to chase Jews out of a white consciousness movement is chasing away valuable allies and also raising doubts in the minds of gentiles about the legitimacy of white racial consciousness.”
