At the center of the scene is a publishing house called Arktos Media. It is routinely referred to as the preeminent publisher of the alt-right by those within the movement and experts who study it, and is known for translating many canonical alt-right texts into English, including the first full-text English translations of Russian theorist Alexander Dugin—characterized variously on the left and fight as “the intellectual guru of Putinism,” and “Putin’s Rasputin.” Dugin’s “ethnonationalism,” a belief in the creation of ethnically homogenous nation states, has been championed by white nationalists, who argue that Europe and America are innately white nations. Arktos titles largely promote a viewpoint it characterizes as “alternatives to modernity” that are critical of liberalism, human rights, and modern democracy.
Arktos originally began operations in India in 2010 when a Swedish businessman named Daniel Friberg absorbed a “traditionalist” publishing house run by American editor-in-chief John B. Morgan. Both lived in India for the first years of the company’s existence. In early 2014, both Friberg and Morgan moved to Budapest to continue to expand Arktos from within the European continent. (Morgan has since left Arktos and now works for Counter-Currents, a white-nationalist publishing house and website also partially based in Budapest.) Friberg, whose vision is central to Arktos, sees its mission as changing “metapolitics,” a term appropriated from 20th-century Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. In Friberg’s book The Real Right Returns, he argues that multiculturalism and liberal human rights—what he calls “cultural Marxism”—have been the dominant culture since the fall of Nazism, and outlines how transforming this culture space is necessary for political and social change.
Peter Kréko, a Hungarian political analyst and academic researcher of populism and extremism at Indiana University Bloomington, said that the timing of Arktos’s move to Budapest was no accident. In 2014, Jobbik’s popularity surged, thanks to a platform that pledged to preserve Hungarian ethnic purity. That year, Orbán was also re-elected to a second term, and Jobbik won 20 percent of the national vote and 47 seats in the parliament, while Fidesz grabbed a super-majority. The Identitarians “are happy that they feel that in Hungary there is a leader that represents their values. These are people with an almost medieval view on the world and they find a safe haven in Hungary,” Kréko told me.
