Luke Ford

Forward.com: As a Jewish immigrant from the Former Soviet Union whose family came to the United States in 1980, I’ve been dismayed to see so many liberals looking down their noses at Russian Jews who support Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Writing in the Forward, Margarita Gokun Silver recently asked, “How Can Russian Jews Be So Naively in Love With Donald Trump?” She suggests that we’re naïve, but her own view is ill-informed. Worse, it’s condescending.

In her essay, Gokun Silver asks this question about Russian Jewish supporters of Trump: “How can people who left their homeland to escape anti-Semitism — and whose families include victims of both the Holocaust and the Gulag — not see the signs?”

Maybe I can provide some answers.

It was because my family stuck to our Jewish roots and followed our traditions while we lived in the FSU that, in 1949, my maternal grandfather was sentenced to 10 years of Gulag camps. Later, in the mid-1950s, he was released with “full rehabilitation.” But in the ’60’s and ’70s, my father received repeated rebukes for hiring Jewish professionals, my uncle received continuous pressure from the KGB (he was a computer scientist and they wanted him to become an informer), my sister received a rejection letter from university (despite stellar grades), and my cousins and I received several physical assaults over our ethnicity. All this prompted my family to seek a better life in the U.S.

And what happened when Jews from the Soviet Union arrived in the U.S.? They received an immense amount of invaluable help from the members of the American Jewish community — and faced a major cultural misunderstanding. The majority of immigrants from the FSU were not, as many American Jews expected, the simpleton Tevyes and backward Goldes who needed to be shown how to turn on the lights or how to use toilet paper. The people who immigrated were mostly professionals, with college degrees and good (although skewed) knowledge of history, arts, geography and politics. We were, and are, educated Jews.

Most important, we had — and have — enough reason and good sense to evaluate political options and make informed choices out of our own preferences. Expecting us to follow a liberal agenda that’s been highlighted for us is as absurd as expecting us to follow Lenin’s raised hand toward the glorious Communist future.

Forward.com has apparently turned off its comments for its Alt-Right articles.

Forward.com:

1. Breitbart.com

The conservative news site Breitbart has quickly become recognized as the leading publication in the push to take the views of the “alt-right” into the mainstream. Andrew Breitbart, one of the founding editors of the Huffington Post, created the site in 2007. Its latest chairman, Steve Bannon, was just hired to be the manager of the Trump campaign.

2. American Renaissance

Jared Taylor founded AR in 1990 as part of his New Century Foundation, an early center of pseudoscientific ideas about race. It has been both a print magazine and an online publication. It claims to promote a free flow of ideas about segregation, education and immigration, but “regardless of its calm tone and academic look and feel, the magazine openly peddles white nationalism,” according to the watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center.

AR hosts conferences that bring in many white supremacist speakers, many of whom hide behind euphemistic terms like “racialism,” “white advocacy” and the “alt-right.”

AR is unique among the movement’s publications in that it has demurred on the subject of Jewish inclusion. In a 2006 op-ed, Taylor wrote defended his decision to publish articles by Jewish writers as a way to broaden the movement.

“AR has taken an implicit position on Jews by publishing Jewish authors and inviting Jewish speakers to AR conferences,” he wrote. “It should be clear to anyone that Jews have, from the outset, been welcome and equal participants in our efforts.”

3. Radix Journal

Richard Spencer, the leading voice of the “alt-right,” founded Radix Journal in 2012. It is a publication of the National Policy Institute, the Washington think tank that is the center of the movement’s push into mainstream politics. Spencer is the chairman of NPI, and contributes regularly to Radix.

Biannually in print and in several posts a day online, Radix posts long format, personal essay-style pieces promoting white racial heritage, decrying the tragedy of multiculturalism and attacking mainstream conservatives as “cuckservatives” — a Republican who makes a concession of any kind to the Democrats.

4. Daily Stormer

Billing itself as “The World’s Most Visited Alt-Right Site,” the Daily Stormer is the most openly neo-Nazi media outlet of the “alt-right.” Andrew Anglin, an avowed neo-Nazi, started the site in 2013 after shuttering his year-old site, TotalFascism.com. Total Fascism published long-format articles promoting white supremacy, while Daily Stormer’s articles look a lot like classic Buzzfeed articles in style: lots of GIFs, snarky comments and embedded Tweets and Youtube videos.

5. VDARE

Named for the first white person born in North America (Virginia Dare), VDARE is a white supremacist website that the SPLC has described as “an anti-immigration hate website.” Both Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer have contributed to VDARE.

Peter Brimelow, a self-described “paleoconservative,” founded VDARE in 1999. Brimelow believes that immigration is to blame for the September 11 attacks.

6. The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff is an anti-Semitic blog run by Mike Enoch, who has been a speaker at National Policy Institute events. A virulent anti-Semite, Enoch has said that the movement is one based around “ethno-nationalism, meaning that nations should be as ethnically and racially homogeneous as possible.”

The Right Stuff also runs the podcast The Daily Shoah, which created the parentheses, or (((echoes))) meme, in a 2014 podcast. The meme was created because “all Jewish surnames echo throughout history,” an allusion to the age-old conspiracy that Jews run the world through a secret network of power.

After the (((echoes))) meme came to widespread media attention in May the Anti-Defamation League added it to their list of recognized hate symbols.

Forward: The basic tenets combine white supremacy and white victimhood. In the former category fall bloggers like Steve Sailer, who lends the “alt-right” a pseudoscientific vibe with “human biodiversity,” a benign-sounding neologism that uses the language of genetics to explain perceived racial differences. Likewise, the anti-establishment conservative movement adopted the epithet “cuckservative” to call into question the toughness or strength of any conservative who makes concessions to the left.

At the same time, members and fellow travelers of the movement consider whites to be under attack and even facing extinction in an ongoing “white genocide,” which refers to the supposed conspiracy to destroy the white race through multiculturalism.

Some leaders see Jewish and other out-group allies as a way to protect whites. Richard Spencer is one of them. The chairman of the innocuously-named National Policy Institute (NPI), a white supremacist think tank begun in 2005, he created Radix Journal, one of the movement’s primary publications, in 2012. Since 2011, the NPI has held multiple conferences in Washington, as well as an aborted conference in Hungary, which resulted in Spencer being banned from 26 European countries, according to Radix.

But before his tenure as chairman of the NPI, Spencer helped run the H. L. Mencken Club, founded by Paul Gottfried, a Jewish academic who coined the term “alternative right.” Its conferences have become a gathering place for white nationalists who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, use it to “legitimize racism under the glossy veneer of academia.”

…“I don’t think directly associating ourselves with movements of the past like Nazism is the best way to go about changing the culture,” Richard Spencer wrote online in an “Ask Me Anything” session, or AMA, on Reddit. “We need to be a new cultural movement … Historical reenactment is not good politics.”

At the October 2015 NPI conference, Spencer made sure that at least one major anti-LGBT voice — Matthew Heimbach — was disinvited, and Jack Donovan, the openly gay “masculinist” writer, was a keynote speaker.

Jared Taylor, another figurehead of the “alt-right,” has been running the racist American Renaissance magazine since 1990, which has published articles by Jewish writers and hosted Jewish speakers at its conferences, drawing the ire of die-hard anti-Semites like former KKK leader David Duke, who is running for U.S. Senate in Louisiana.

Spencer and Taylor say the ends justify the means when explaining the inclusion of Jewish and LGBT voices — and even the voices of so-called alt-righties of color.

“I don’t think it is a good idea to drive away potential allies by declaring war on all Jews,” Taylor wrote in a July 26 Reddit AMA to defend Jewish inclusion in his response to a long anti-Semitic post by the user “Lothar_von_Trotha.”. “To be sure, there are many elite Jews who work against the interests of whites, but other Jews see themselves as men of the West who will fight to preserve European civilization.”

To Taylor, white is white is white.

“White Jews are white,” he said in a phone interview. Even white Muslims are welcome.

“I suppose if you had a Bosnian European Muslim who had a consciousness as a white person and wanted to defend Western civilization, then yes such a person would be hypothetically welcome in the ‘alt-right.’ But I’ve never met such a person.”

For Taylor, the endgame of the alt-right is create an “ethno-state” for people of European heritage.

“If there is no territory that white Americans can call their own, we will ultimately be shoved aside,” he said. “If that is not done, are what point are white Americans allowed to say it has gone too far? When we’re 20 percent of the population? When we’re five percent of the population?”

He feels that this goal has been misrepresented by the media – and that it is a peaceful movement. He said it is a fundamentally different ethos than white supremacy.

“I’m not even sure what white supremacy means,” he said. “If it means anything it means whites are supposed to be ruling over other races. I don’t think anyone in the ‘alt-right’ wants that.”

“It’s really the equivalent of the N-word in how you could refer to a white person,” he said of the term ‘white supremacist.’

But though people like Jared Taylor are willing to welcome white people of all background – at least for now – for many in the “alt-right” their hatred of Jews remains stubbornly common.

Anti-Semites like Kevin MacDonald — who has written books about the invention of anti-Semitism by Jews — are still regular guests at NPI conferences. And though he sometimes praises Israel for being an “ethno-state,” Spencer harbors deep anti-Semitism as well. He tends to pass it off as an intellectual interest in the racial and cultural distinction of Jews from white people.

“I think someone like Kevin MacDonald, he has covered the question of Jews very carefully,” Jared Taylor said. “I think he is correct on the activity of many elite Jews.”

“Dissident whites benefit from the efforts of all — Jew or gentile — who understand the crisis we face,” Taylor wrote in his Reddit AMA. “Anyone who tries to chase Jews out of a white consciousness movement is chasing away valuable allies and also raising doubts in the minds of gentiles about the legitimacy of white racial consciousness.”

Jakub Jankowski writes:

Equality is bullshit. Hierarchy is essential. The races are different. The sexes are different. Morality matters and degeneracy is real. All cultures are not equal and we are not obligated to think they are. Man is a fallen creature and there is more to life than hollow materialism. Finally, the white race matters, and civilisation is precious. This is the Alt-Right.

– Millennial Woes

Hillary Clinton’s newest offensive against Donald Trump’s campaign involves the vilification of a political movement that until recently was reputedly hiding in the ‘far reaches of the internet’ from which ‘dark conspiracy theories’ are allegedly being forged. This denunciation was aimed at an increasingly popular congregation known as the ‘Alternative Right.’ This crowd was recently labelled as ‘Trump’s Shock Troops’ by the BBC in an overt reference to Nazi Germany, and as ‘white supremacists’ as well as ‘a paranoid fringe group’ by Clinton herself, during the speech she gave in Reno, Nevada. How close is Clinton to the truth – is the ‘Alt-Right’ really solely composed of racist, intolerant, neo-Nazis and of other non-kosher superficial labels? Warm, hot, cold!

The ‘Alt-Right’ is a term commonly thought to be coined by self-described ‘Identitarian’ Richard Spencer, founder of the ‘Alternative Right’ blog and president of the National Policy Institute. This, however, is not accurate, as the first person to coin the term in relation to developments within American politics was Paul Gottfried (although, admittedly, Richard Spencer popularised the term). Meanwhile, the movement itself is an amalgamation of all ‘alternative’ right wing views that are today considered heterodoxy. This means that the views of one person who considers himself to be part of the ‘Alt-Right’ can be, though do not necessarily have to be, radically different to another. These views can range from disillusioned libertarians who previously supported Ron Paul, but upon becoming ‘race realists’ have adopted cultural conservatism (more specifically, Hoppean Paleolibertarian views); to traditionalists; to ethno-nationalists; to European nationalists; to fascists; to ‘neo-nazi’ types who gleamingly partake in ‘Alt-Right’ discourse as it fits their racial and fascist agenda; to edgy teenagers and young adults who want to ‘troll’ liberal left types by gratuitous displays of right-wing rhetoric and create controversy. All these folks have their place in the Alternative church of the right. All of them have a use when combating ‘the Cathedral’, the ‘Alt-Right’ term for everything left-wing and mainstream, through many political dimensions. This philosophy is not quite as simple as Hillary makes it out to be in her speech, and contrary to popular opinion, is not just a rowdy mob of ‘hateful bigots.’ Although she is right about one part – it is a growing threat to the political status quo of the West.

Though many mainstream media outlets seem to imply that the popularity of the ‘Alt-Right’ arose through Trump’s campaign, their political thought was already present before Trump. In fact, they were the de facto precursor to Trump’s rise. It was the ‘Alt-Right’ that breached the membrane of obscurity into mainstream politics by breaking down the message and political thought of its forerunner philosophy (which we will get to later) into soundbites, memes, ironic humour, and simple educational infographics about race, culture, sex and IQ differences. It was the Alt-Right who discovered and chose Trump as their ‘mascot’ for this election, not the other way around (although, there are rumours of Trump’s campaign officials reading Alt-Right sites and even partaking in the discussion).

Despite the presence at some level of dissonance and incongruence in the multitude of ‘Alt-Right’ beliefs, which can cause division within the movement – often with harsh criticism and trolling of other ‘sections’ of the Alternative Right, with the more National Socialist inclined elements calling the Libertarians ‘lolbertarians’, and in return the National Socialists are called ‘Stormweenies’[1] – it is generally agreed that there are certain overarching ideals that all on the ‘Alt-Right’ subscribe to. These include: the disgust with politically correct culture; the recognition of cultural Marxism’s effect on western society; and the continued destruction of Occidental civilisation. This is what unites the various factions into the Alt-Right.

Indeed, the philosophical incompatibility between the separate groups seems to be disappearing, with the libertarians of the Alt-Right appropriating certain elements of fascism via the embracing of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and twisting Hoppean thought. These libertarians enjoy making memes about ‘physical removal, so to speak’ (A reference to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s statement about the necessity to separate and remove ‘communists and democrats’ from a libertarian society), ‘free helicopter rides’ (Pinochet’s preferred method of executing communists), and ‘unleash the cops’ (a reference to Rothbards piece on ‘Right-Wing Populism’ where he proposes radical social and economic reforms). Alternatively, there are some libertarians who adopt more traditionalist Catholic beliefs: distributism, monarchism and aristocratic ideals…

Ethnic Nationalism

In contrast to civic nationalism, which espouses nationhood based on citizenship, the neoreactionaries define ‘nation’ in terms of race, civilisation, national identity. This is seen as a necessity in order to ensure the continuity of the race, ethnicity or nation.

In the case of the Alt-Right, the Americans have transfused the idea of ethnic nationalism based solely on white racial identity. Indeed, Americans have no other choice but to resort to white nationalism as they have no other European identity to which they can turn to; whether English, German, French, Polish, Irish, or other. None fits as the US is a melting pot of white identities, with many migrant waves arriving ever since its conception. The alleged difference between these waves and the current waves of immigration is that the ones who came before integrated into the American way of life, meanwhile many of the current ones are hostile, preserve their own identity and through the willingness of the liberal state, are eroding the core of Americanism.

“Most whites do not have a racial identity, but they would do well to understand what race means for others. They should also ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom such an identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.”

– Jared Taylor

Why isn’t there something akin to the ‘Alt-Right’ in Britian and Europe?

There is, it’s just the Beeb and Grauniad haven’t reported on it. The Traditional Britain Group is the British equivalent of the American Renaissance but the current relative shortfall of the TBG in comparison to their American counterparts is not due to any kind of fault of the organisation itself, but rather, that Britain itself is not yet primed for the return of the real right. Arguably, the Traditional Britain Group, (many of whom are also part or affiliated with the Libertarian Alliance) and its members do not consider themselves part of the ‘Alt-Right’ – and rightly so; the Alternative Right is an almost exclusively American idea, while the Neoreaction is not. Nevertheless, there have been numerous ‘Alt-Right’ volk who attended the conferences or even gave speeches (think: Richard Spencer), and there should be no shame on the side of the TBG for associating or even affiliating with a growing popular crowd which espouses many of its tenets. Moreover, there are many other Britons who openly espouse Neoreactionary views, one such notable person is the Youtuber Millennial Woes, who is considered to be the hearth fire of the British Alt-Right, having recorded many commentaries on the movement and its beliefs. Let us also not forget that the milquetoast interpretation of the Alt-Right was largely being popularised by the infamous Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, who should not entirely be shunned by the more radical elements on the Alt-Right. Indeed, he provides an outlet for the more down-to-earth Alt-Right and Trump sympathisers, whether it be through his university tours, the creation of the Young British Heritage Society which aims to fight leftism on campus and promote free speech, or through his constant mockery of feminism and the left.

On the European mainland, the most significant ideological counterpart is the French ‘Generation Identity’ a pan-European socio-political movement that started in France in 2002. The Identitarians finds their roots in the Nouvelle Droite – the European New Right, ancestor-philosophy of the Alt-Right. They describe themselves in their manifesto ‘We Are… Generation Identity’:

“Generation Identity is a fighting community which brings together young men and women from across French-speaking Europe… We call upon young people to raise their heads high: in the face of foreign riffraff, in the face of those who want to police our lives and thoughts, in the face of the homogenisation of nations, in the face of the tidal wave of mass immigration, in the face of a school system which hides the history of our nation from us to prevent us from loving it, in the face of a pretended coexistence which is becoming a nightmare…”

Is there a place for the left in the Alt-Right?

Yes and no. The left did have influence on the way the Alt-Right came about. The left-libertarian author Keith Preston was an early speaker at the American Renaissance and a contributor to the old Alternative Right blog. He penned his own left-anarchist critique of the Frankfurt School, and his own Anarcho-pluralism stance opposes mass-immigration. His leftism opposes the corporate state. His anti-imperialism and anti-interventionism means he lines up with the Alt-Right on foreign policy. The goals of the radical right and left were bound to meet at some point, for the fruitful benefit of both movements! This is not to say that there are many, if any at all, self-ascribed leftists amongst the Alt-Right, that would be an error by definition, yet the example needed to be pointed out.