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.
