Luke Ford

One of the contributions of George Hawley’s new book, Making Sense of the Alt Right, is his point that so far the Alt Right has not been violent.

Similarly, although there is a connection between the Alt-Right and earlier white-nationalist and white-supremacist groups, and some of those groups and their supporters have engaged in violence and terrorism, I am not implying that the Alt-Right is a terrorist movement. At the time of this writing, I am aware of no acts of physical violence directly connected to the Alt-Right… This is not to say that racist violence is not a real threat in contemporary America. We have, as just one example, the chilling case of Dylann Roof, who murdered nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Yet Roof’s manifesto suggests he was more influenced by older white-nationalist writers and organizations, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens (the offspring of the Citizens Councils that once flourished in the South during and following the civil-rights era) and Harold Covington’s Northwest Front, than by the Alt-Right.
1 It is possible that the Alt-Right will morph into something more dangerous and tangible in the real world,2 and for that reason vigilance is necessary. But for now, the Alt-Right’s activities are mostly limited to the Internet.

Whether you are for or against the Alt Right, you’ll profit from reading this perspective by a critic who went inside the movement. He has a sharp eye for bizarre behavior and egomania.

If you go inside any insular group where people feel safe, they’ll trash outsiders. Orthodox Jews, orthodox Muslims, orthodox Christians speak this way. White nationalists don’t have any more hate for out-groups than do other strongly identifying in-groups.

From Hope Not Hate:

For the past year, Patrik Hermansson, a young, gay, anti-racist activist from Sweden has been undercover inside the alt-right for HOPE not hate. He risked all to go undercover in some of the most notorious far-right networks in the US and the UK, culminating in the violent clashes in Charlottesville.
This is his story.

The Croatian writer Tomislav Sunić, an important figure in the European New Right and author of the influential book Against Democracy and Equality, sat next to me discussing the prospect of mass-scale expulsion of non-white British citizens. He asserted that it was possible to “fly everybody home” and that a plane could leave Heathrow every three minutes!
At any normal dinner the prospect of forcibly removing all non-whites would be greeted with shock, but repatriation was a relatively uncontroversial topic around this table.
The rest of the night I talked with Brits, Swedes, Lithuanians and Americans. Some of these were super-stars within the movement, such as the never-before-photographed American alt-right figure, Greg Johnson.
Above the sound of clinking glasses men in rented tuxedos discussed eugenics, the coming “race war” and the supposedly ongoing genocide of white people. Smugly they congratulated themselves on managing to keep the dinner a secret, away from the prying eyes of anti-fascists. Little did they know, I was secretly filming the whole thing…

Everyone has always assumed that Jez Turner was the most influential person in the organisation: he was the public face and to the outside world, the key player. Originally, our plan was to get to Turner, through Steadman, but once inside a different picture emerged.
In reality, the Forum is almost completely organised by Stead Steadman and a close friend of his, Mick Brooks, but as both of them completely lack charisma Turner was strategically chosen as the leader. Turner supposedly doesn’t even have a computer at home and it is Steadman and Brooks who use their contacts within the domestic and international far right to organise speakers.

Brooks is a secretive character and it’s difficult to describe his appearance beyond saying he looks utterly normal, nondescript. He rarely opened up to me though he did like to brag about once being in the back of a Hungarian police van with American alt-right leader Richard Spencer after a demonstration turned violent. More recently Brooks’ long-running relationship with Arktos Media has soured after he backed the wrong side in a failed coup…

[Greg] Johnson admired the London Forum so much that he replicated the concept in New York and Seattle with closed conferences of hard-core activists addressed by leading speakers from the far right. Recent events had been attended by big names, such as the internationally recognised antisemite and editor of The Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald, as well as the UK’s most well-known alt-right vlogger Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes).
One sunny Saturday in June, I joined the list of speakers at one of these forums in Seattle. I had intended to attend as a guest but one week before the event Johnson contacted me and asked me to give the opening address, removing any doubt in my mind that I was now accepted as part of this movement.

The Seattle Forum is smaller than those in London but, having started just a couple of months ago, people tell me that it has grown considerably since. It’s organised together with a group called Cascadia, named after the mountain range that lies south-east of Seattle. It’s run by a group of young men who call themselves a “tribe” and to become a member you need to be white.
Jeffrey, one of their leaders, says that they’ve put the limit at 1/8th, meaning that you cannot have more than one-eighth “non-white blood” to be considered for membership and even claim that they require recruits to take a DNA test to prove it…

I manage to convince Jason Reza Jorjani, co-founder of AltRight Corporation and editor of Arktos Media, to meet for a drink. I’m sitting across from him in an Irish pub in the shadow of the Empire State Building. The first thing he said was: “You’re not in touch with Greg [Johnson], are you?”
I assure him I’m not, knowing he would leave if he ever found out I had spent the last month getting to know people on the other side of the split, some of whom had recently accused Jorjani of being a CIA agent. “It’s like the SA and the SS,” Jorjani said. “A Night of the Long Knives is coming though.”
Jorjani talks for hours, displaying a remarkable arrogance coupled with a tiring self-pity. He’s a remarkably extreme character, much more so than his public persona. He sees the world one day being run by a single strong leader and predicts it won’t be long before bank notes are adorned with images of Hitler.

Jesse Singal writes for the New York Times:

In Britain, Mr. Hermansson attended a private dinner of extremists where Greg Johnson, a reclusive leading American far-right figure who is editor in chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, explained the need to “mainstream this stuff — or, more precisely, we need to bring the mainstream towards us.”

Mr. Johnson later expressed confidence that this process is working. “I see the upward curve in web traffic, and the upward trend in quality and quantity of younger people getting involved,” he told Mr. Hermansson in conversation captured on hidden-camera footage. (During that same chat, he said he believed in ethnic homelands and favored telling Jews, “You need to go to Israel or we’re going to freeze you out of our society.”)

This goal of mainstreaming is an abiding fixation of the far right, whose members are well aware of the problems their movement has had with attracting young people in recent decades. At one point in Mr. Hermansson’s footage, Colin Robertson, a far-right YouTube personality who goes by the name Millennial Woes, explained to an older extremist the importance of putting forward a friendly, accessible face: “If we don’t appear like angry misfits, then we will end up making friendships with people who don’t agree with us,” he said.

Some of Mr. Hermansson’s most arresting footage comes from a June meeting with Jason Reza Jorjani, a founder, along with the American white nationalist Richard Spencer and others, of the AltRight Corporation, an organization established to foster cooperation and coordination among alt-right groups in Europe and North America.

Mr. Hermansson and Mr. Jorjani met at an Irish pub near the Empire State Building, where the baby-faced Mr. Jorjani imagined a near future in which, thanks to liberal complacency over the migration crisis, Europe re-embraces fascism: “We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great. And Hitler will be seen like that: like Napoleon, like Alexander, not like some weird monster who is unique in his own category — no, he is just going to be seen as a great European leader.”

More shockingly, Mr. Jorjani bragged about his contacts in the American government. “We had connections in the Trump administration — we were going to do things!” he said at one point. “I had contacts with the Trump administration,” he said at another.

This article presents the first public look at Greg Johnson (since a youtube video briefly surfaced circa 2010.)

Friend: “Pretty good physiognomy–doesn’t look like a masturbator.”