The Right After Charlottesville

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Luke Ford

The Alt Right disaster last weekend reminds me of Hitler’s failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Who knows what’s coming next.

Greg Johnson said last Thursday, Aug. 17, to Vox Day: “National socialism today is a perverse self-marginalizing self-defeating tendency. It’s fake.”

“The tendency within the Alt Right since the election of Donald Trump has been purity spiraling up their own ass. The people dragging it in that direction are the national socialists. They are the vanguard. They are the loudest and most intense. They’re dragging the Alt Right in the direction of national socialism…and global extermination of non-whites and unhinged misogyny (white sharia) and a new version of the pathological skinhead culture of the 1980s and 1990s — heavy drinking, heavy drugging, brawling… That’s the direction since Heilgate…since Andrew Anglin decided last fall that they needed to assert control of the Alt Right brand. We can’t have a bunch of different people calling themselves Alt Right and having a civil discussion of things like identity politics and alternatives to the Republican mainstream…

“Heilgate was Richard Spencer capitulating to the TRS (The Right Stuff) Daily Stormer wing of the movement that wanted to identify the Alt Right with national socialism inducing the split with the Alt Lite… That hardened what was once a porous frontier where people were coming and going and ideas were cross-pollinating and the Overton Window was moving towards white identity politics. That was a bad outcome.

“Then [Richard] Spencer launched AltRight.com. He finally had control of his brand (Alternative Right), which he so foolishly abandoned years for the Radix brand, but that has been turned into a gutter tabloid freakshow and embarrassment (AltRight.com). The brand Alt Right has been Cadillaced by Nazis and drunken douchebags. This is a catastrophe because there has never been a moment in my lifetime when more people have been more receptive to white identity politics. And what is the vanguard of the movement doing? They are busy making themselves as untouchable as possible.”

“I’m reeling under this huge purge that is going on like so many other people on the Right. I feel distracted today. I keep getting bad news piped into me as I listen to you, Vox. What the Left is doing is using the moral panic created by Charlottesville to purge us from many of our platforms. It’s really bad. It’s threatening the survival of a lot of organizations, a lot of platforms, a lot of companies including my own. Has anyone seen the left-wing site that has the audio from the planning sessions from United the Right? That is clown-world level of behavior.”

“Many people were injured. Huge amounts of money had to be spent by people coming in and huge amounts of money are being spent on medical bills. I hope in the future they do smaller, disciplined guerrilla operations. These are low-cost, low-risk high reward asymetrical forms of warfare.”

“If you go up against the Establishment where it is strongest, you are going to be humbled. Our greatest strength is metapolitics, not street battles.”

“The horrible thing about the blowback from Charlottesville is that it is not only affecting the people who did that, it is affecting people like me who didn’t do it but I’m still swept up in this and it is affecting my ability to reach people and to do my work and that pisses me off. There will always be people in this movement who f*** things up because they’re stupid. The sensible people have to clean up the vomit from the night before.”

Richard Spencer’s new website, AltRight.com, is frequently gutter-level trash compared to the high-brow Radix Journal and the thoughtful blog Alternative Right. It seems like since the election of Trump, Spencer has gone 1488. Spencer keeps flirting with Nazism, which is a complete loser of an approach in the West today. Why would he be down with all the inauthentic Nazi imitations in chanting, torch-carrying and rhetoric? That’s the path to repelling potential converts to the cause. The average American looks at guys carrying on like Nazis and is horrified. How hard is it to say — no Nazi flags, no Nazi anything?

How many undecided Americans are going to want to make common cause with the Alt Right now? Now it seems like the Alt Lite is compelling with its criticisms. The Alt Lite takes chances but they don’t make a Pickett’s Charge which is what the Alt Right seemed to do in Charlottesville.

Choosing to do anything Nazi in America is choosing death and destruction.

Richard Spencer is a romantic like Jon Snow — always leading front the front. Perhaps Charlottesville was his Battle of the Bastards.

ABC’s 20/20 has video of Matt Heimbach behind the scenes getting greeted with Nazi salutes and answering like a fuhrer. Spencer, who at one time banned Heimbach from NPI, has now apparently made up with him.

It’s one thing to make jokes about the deaths of your enemies such as Heather Heyer while you’re drinking with your buddies, but to make these jokes publicly shows poor judgment. Why would you publish that when you want to win a war? Maybe they’re not seeking recruits. Maybe they’re talking to themselves too much and saying this is war and we can’t get upset when an enemy combatant dies. If you’re talking among your own army, that makes sense, but it does not make sense if you are trying to recruit.

Wikipedia entry on the Daily Stormer:

Anglin has stated to media and technology company Vocativ that he was liberal as a youth, and as a teenager he read works by Noam Chomsky and “all that Communist, Jewish stuff”.[6] Former classmates at the Linworth Alternative Program and the Worthington Christian High School, which he attended from 1999 to 2003, told local website Columbus Alive that they remembered him as a dreadlocked vegan who was outspoken on social and political issues, from a liberal perspective.[7] Anglin studied at Columbus State Community College in 2003 and in 2008 he moved to the Philippines to teach English. In 2012, Anglin wrote that he found the locals to be “a civilized, non-aggressive and industrious people” but eventually became lonely and only wanted to associate with his own race, and that “By the Grace of God, I found Adolf Hitler”.[7]

In 2012, Anglin launched his first website, Adventure Quest 2012, which discussed conspiracy theories, most particularly the Reptilians. He described the aim of the site as to “mend the wounds produced by modern society … and [help] the reader transcend these physical bonds and reach total ascendancy. To mend these wounds, the world must learn to embrace diversity and color.”[7] He later studied Buddhism, Islam and 20th-century French philosophy before aligning himself with Neo-Nazism. In 2014, he stated that although he agreed with the central tenets of Nazism, he had reservations over reintroducing all aspects of Adolf Hitler’s regime.[6] Later in 2012, he launched his first far-right website, Total Fascism. Feeling that it was not appealing to a younger demographic and had articles that were too long, Anglin launched The Daily Stormer on July 4, 2013, with shorter articles and a more provocative style.[6]

The website is registered in the name of Anglin’s father Greg, who runs a Christian-inspired counseling service in Worthington, Ohio.[8] Anglin said in March 2014 he spends 70 hours a week writing for the website,[6] which is primarily funded through donations which he solicits regularly from site visitors.[8] The older Anglin was protested by Anti-Racist Action for cashing his son’s checks.[vague] In February 2017, the website announced a corporate sponsor — Smerff Electrical, owned by Simon Hickey of Brisbane, Australia,[7] whose website contains images of alt-right meme Pepe the Frog.[9] Anglin told Mother Jones that he received donations from Silicon Valley, and that Santa Clara County, California—home of Apple Inc. and Intel—was the largest source of traffic to his website.[10]

Anglin’s location is not known. An investigative article by The Huffington Post in November 2016 analyzed his social media and FBI sources, and concluded that he was living in Germany. Rumors have also placed him residing in Russia.[7] In July 2017, Anglin told CNN he was residing in Lagos, Nigeria.[11]

Content and reception

The Daily Stormer takes its name from the Nazi Party’s tabloid newspaper Der Stürmer,[1][12] known for its virulently antisemitic caricatures of Jews.[13] Its publisher, Julius Streicher, was executed after the Second World War for crimes against humanity.[14]

Anglin asserts that the purpose of The Daily Stormer is to provide “a means to propagandize people … to get them to look at the world in a certain way”.[6] Headlines include “All Intelligent People in History Disliked Jews”, “Adolf Hitler: The Most Lied About Man of All Time”[8], and “White Teenage Girl Raped by Asian Man Then Again by Another Asian Man”. The site bills itself as “America’s #1 Most-Trusted Republican News Source”.[15] According to The Jewish Chronicle, The Daily Stormer “posts hundreds of racist articles targeting black people, Arabs and Jews”.[16] The website offers pro-separatist coverage of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which Anglin considers “the correct moral position” in addition to pro-Assad coverage of the Syrian Civil War.[6] The SPLC described the site as “the newest up and comer in the heated competition to rule the hate web”, which “has in the last six months [up to March 2015] often topped the oldest and largest hate site on the web, Stormfront, in terms of reach and page views, based on Alexa data”.[8] Anglin claimed in May 2016 that the website’s traffic had doubled over the last six months, peaking at 120,000 daily visitors.[17] The website is part of the alt-right movement, and calls itself “The World’s Most Visited Alt-Right Website”. As the movement made headlines in mid-2016, “bolstered in part by the unexpected rise of Donald Trump and Britain’s decision to leave the European Union”, Anglin declared: “We won the meme war; now we’ve taken over the GOP, and we did this very, very quickly.”[3] Unlike other figures such as Breitbart News journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, Anglin does not play down the extremist elements in the alt-right, stating that: “The goal is to ethnically cleanse White nations of non-Whites and establish an authoritarian government. Many people also believe that the Jews should be exterminated”.[18]

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) stated that The Daily Stormer owed its success to the online imageboard 4chan becoming popular among racists, as both websites use similar memes and rhetorical styles.[8] One meme the website has used is to overlay photographs of Taylor Swift with anti-Semitic quotations, including those by Hitler.[19] The website puts triple parentheses around the names of Jews, a far-right meme created by fellow website The Right Stuff.[20] Jacob Siegel of The Daily Beast wrote that the website was growing in popularity amongst a younger audience due to its use of humor, and was attracting activists of other anti-political correctness ideologies—such as Gamergaters, men’s rights activists and opponents of Social Justice Warriors—who would not usually identify with fascism.[4] The SPLC has also documented Anglin’s involvement in and encouragement of culture jamming by making hyperbolic statements in fake online accounts as women and minorities.[19][21] He has also said that “ridiculous” statements such as “gas the kikes”, if repeated in media coverage, can work to desensitize the public to the Holocaust.[19] He also believes that his extreme right-wing rhetoric can normalize less extreme right-wingers such as Trump.[22]

Hacker and Internet troll weev wrote an article on the website after his release from prison, espousing his recent conversion to Neo-Nazism and his opposition to Jews who had “abused our compassion to build an empire of wickedness the likes the world has never seen”.[23] Fredrick Brennan, founder of the online community 8chan, wrote an article on The Daily Stormer encouraging eugenics, based on his own experiences of having brittle bone disease.[24] Florida-based Jewish troll Joshua Ryne Goldberg, who encouraged a 2015 attack on a free speech exhibition in Garland, Texas, under the alias of a Muslim extremist, wrote white supremacist articles for The Daily Stormer under the pseudonym Michael Slay.[25][26]

The Daily Stormer attracted media coverage when the SPLC stated that white supremacist spree killer Dylann Roof—who on June 17, 2015, shot nine African Americans to death in the Charleston church shooting—may have made several comments on the site. The SPLC found similarities between one user’s comments and Roof’s manifesto.[27] The Daily Beast stated that Anglin “repudiated Roof’s crime and publicly disavowed violence, while endorsing many of Roof’s views”.[4] In October of that year, Anglin gave a positive reaction to an attempted assassination on Henriette Reker, a pro-immigration candidate to be mayor of the German city of Cologne, decrying her as a “feminist hag”.

White nationalist websites such as Stormfront and Counter-Currents have taken issue with what they see as lowbrow coverage on The Daily Stormer, as well as Anglin’s defense of Christianity and denunciation of the white supremacist group Christian Identity.[8] Kyle Rogers of the Council of Conservative Citizens has also criticized the website for reprinting its material.[8] Anglin has also been criticized for his relationships with non-white women in the Philippines, and for his insults towards white women on his website.[7]

Colin Liddell of AlternativeRight.com has criticized Anglin’s beliefs and tone. Liddell, who believes that stopping migration and encouraging higher birthrates is more important for preserving the white race, condemned Anglin for writing that it was impossible for the race to survive without adopting his views on Jews, Hitler and the Holocaust.[5] Liddell considered that Anglin was attracting poor whites with his provocative online persona in the same manner as monster trucks and professional wrestling, writing that “it is hard not to conclude that Anglin is a paid shill and agent provocateur, whose purpose is simply to infest and discredit White nationalism”.[2] Jared Taylor of American Renaissance criticized The Daily Stormer’s “extremely harsh, dismissive and insulting tone toward blacks”, which he called unhelpful.[2]

Others, such as the Traditionalist Youth Network, have praised The Daily Stormer for its reach and influence.[8] Anglin’s extreme tone has led some white nationalists to suspect that he is an undercover Jew, an accusation he finds analogous to believing that Jewish LGBT activist Allen Ginsberg was an undercover Nazi.

Andrew Anglin is about 34 years old and Richard Spencer is 39. Maybe they’re too young to be leaders of the Alt Right.

Andrew Anglin and Jason Kessler gave Big Tech an opening to boot them and their comrades by making stupid jokes about Heather Heyer. You can’t give people openings like that if you want to succeed. Nobody wants to defend you for making fun of a woman who was run over. Nobody wants to hear you call her a slut. You’ve made it easy for Big Tech to get rid of you, to ban you from Paypal and from Facebook and AirBnB and Uber. This seems like a giant failure of leadership on the Alt Right. You’d think they’d have the goal of winning by recruiting. Instead, their goal was to radicalize their membership, to go into battle, and go full Hitler. It was as though they allowed Antifa to get them so angry that they made mistakes. Andrew Anglin seems to have an anger problem, maybe Richard Spencer does too. Roosh suggests that Richard Spencer is not fit for power.

On the other hand, all of Spencer’s posts after Charlottesville make sense. Maybe making noise is worth something. And they can always count on the Left and organized Jewry to go nuts when the Alt Right pokes its head above ground.

Now that Steve Bannon has left the White House, he doesn’t have to shut up anymore. He’s back in the saddle and he knows how the White House works. He’s had access to secrets. How will he use them? Maybe Breitbart.com will become lively again. I haven’t looked at the site since the election. I haven’t had reason to. I just followed Breitbart News on Twitter for the first time.

Antifa loves to talk about punching a Nazi but soon everyone right of center becomes a Nazi and so they start punching women wearing red hats.

According to the USA Today:

Heimbach has become increasingly radicalized in recent years, said Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

“He is definitely someone who has been a rising young leader in the white supremacist movement,” Mayo said. “The way I see him is he kind of bridges the gap between intellectual racists and the neo-Nazis, and he’s done that for some time.”

Heimbach is “considered by many to be the face of a new generation of white nationalists,” the the Southern Poverty Law Center said.

Washington Post:

The road to Charlottesville, 540 miles away from his home in Paoli, Ind., began decades ago for Matthew Parrott, who at 35 calls himself “the first alt-righter,” referring to a small and decentralized movement of extreme conservatives, many of whom profess white-supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs and seek a whites-only ethno state.

Parrott had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at 15, he said. So his family pooled their money and got him a computer with access to the Internet — a rarity in his neighborhood of mobile homes — which he came to see as his “secret portal in my bedroom.” In chat rooms, he developed a taste for intellectual combat, always taking the contrarian side, obsessing over how to dismantle progressive arguments until, as he puts it, he “ended up self-radicalizing.”

That radicalization was rooted, he said, in his own feelings of alienation, which intensified when he went to Indiana University and confronted an elite he soon came to disdain. “They made fun of my accent and overbite and they called me white trash and hillbilly,” Parrott said. “I was never able to identify with a single person.”

He dropped out after his first semester, and his disillusionment festered until, at age 23, he went to the national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-nationalist organization based in St. Louis. He considers this moment when comparing what white nationalism once was and what it has become. “I was the youngest one in the room,” he said. Old men, “asked me, ‘Whose grandson are you?’ They were baffled. . . . And now those guys are too frail to understand what’s going on.”

What was going on: The same alienation and purposelessness that once defined his life had come to characterize that of so many others. An economy capsized, a job market contracted, a student-loan crisis erupted, and feelings of resentment and victimization took hold among some members of Parrott’s generation.

“This is not some hypothetical thing,” said Parrott, who soon established the white nationalist Traditionalist Youth Network and started recruiting. “This is, ‘I’m stuck working at McDonald’s where there are no factory jobs and the boomer economy is gone and we have got this humiliating degrading service economy. . . . They feel the ladder has been kicked away from them.”

Matt Heimbach is lower middle-class. Parrott is a middle class intellectual who used to work for Jared Taylor and got radicalized over the neo-cons. You can talk to him. He’s empathic. Heimbach is rough. You could see him hunting. It’s amazing that Heimbach and Parrott have joined forces and gone full Nazi. It’s interesting that Spencer finds them useful. I guess Heimbach is the guy who’s going to mobilize the troops. He’s gonna make sure the guys are there for the rallies and make sure you are protected. He’s going to run the paramilitary operation. Just like the Nazis were a working class movement. Heimbach embodies that. He’s authentically the working class.

Andrew Anglin does not read like he’s from a working class background. He feels like a middle class man who tries to position himself as working class. His subtlety and satire are not working class. You don’t have that satirical ability from the working class. His contact joking that he resides in Lagos is a higher-class thing. Vincent Law on AltRight.com is middle class mockery.

The middle class produces the intellectual revolutionaries.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
This entry was posted in Alt Lite, Alt Right, Richard Spencer. Bookmark the permalink.