Mr. Hovater, 29, is a welder by trade. He is not a star among the resurgent radical American right so much as a committed foot soldier — an organizer, an occasional podcast guest on a website called Radio Aryan, and a self-described “social media villain,” although, in person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother. In 2015, he helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a “White Lives Matter” rally last month in Tennessee. The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans.’’
Its leaders claim to oppose racism, though the Anti-Defamation League says the group “has participated in white supremacist events all over the country.” On its website, a swastika armband goes for $20.
If the Charlottesville rally came as a shock, with hundreds of white Americans marching in support of ideologies many have long considered too vile, dangerous or stupid to enter the political mainstream, it obscured the fact that some in the small, loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make those ideas seem less than shocking for the “normies,” or normal people, that its sympathizers have tended to mock online.
And to go from mocking to wooing, the movement will be looking to make use of people like the Hovaters and their trappings of normie life — their fondness for National Public Radio, their four cats, their bridal registry.
“We need to have more families. We need to be able to just be normal,” said Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, in a podcast conversation with Mr. Hovater. Why, he asked self-mockingly, were so many followers “abnormal”?
Mr. Hovater replied: “I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”
New York Times, 2017: "George Zimmerman, the white man who shot the black teenager"
Quote. Unquote.https://t.co/vVcgiWpq2r pic.twitter.com/3CG7Dy7HL1
— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) November 25, 2017
Last 3 hires of New York Times opinion section:
Bret Stephens
Michelle Goldberg
Bari WeissNow that's getting outside The Bubble!
That's Diversity! https://t.co/VKJDoY71qN
— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) November 26, 2017
Single biggest unspoken fear among journalists — what drives much of the current hysteria — is that their own demands for race and sex quotas in hiring will be extended to ethnic quotas. https://t.co/k5ziODlnpt
— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) November 26, 2017
