AltRight

Review: A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders

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A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders
George T. Shaw (ed)
Arktos, 2018

“After absorbing the initial impact the alt-right remained intact and forward-oriented, no nearer or further from its goals, but now more serious and matured.” Thus remarks Evan McLaren, former Executive Director of the National Policy Institute, in a profound personal account of Charlottesville and its immediate aftermath. McLaren’s account is one of 21 essays which together comprise the latest offering from Arktos: A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders. His thoughts offer a succinct summary of the broader contents of the volume — the essays here are representative of a movement in some respects battered and bruised from legal and media entanglements, but also remarkably clear-headed and ideologically robust. Heightened media attention devoted to the Alt-Right, which peaked in 2017 and not always for the better, has been intense and fluctuating, dating probably from Hillary Clinton’s September 2016 “Basket of Deplorables” speech. At first this attention seemed oriented towards crowning an Alt-Right leader who could then be used as a focal point for both defining and maligning the movement. It now seems absurd that Milo Yiannopoulos was the first pick, though he gradually faded into obscurity as the 2016 NPI conference, along with the “Whitefish” incident, brought Andrew Anglin and then Richard Spencer to national prominence. Arguably, it was Whitefish that first offered an opportunity for the media to introduce fear of the movement, rather than simply horror or disgust, into its narrative. Tanya Gersh, one of the key protagonists in that affair, declared she was not being harassed by trolls or deplorables, but “terrorists.” The texture of media coverage quickly changed in the aftermath, absorbing the language introduced by Gersh and her backers in the Southern Poverty Law Center, and culminating on August 11–12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

While the media has busied itself for two years with talk of trolls, deplorables, ‘Nazi’ salutes, tiki torch marches, and even domestic terrorism, the ideas and experiences which form the backbone of the Alt-Right remain off limits. You will search in vain for serious journalism in which the thought leaders of the movement are probed for opinions on matters of national or cultural significance. In short, the movement has never been given a fair hearing. The latest literary offering from Arktos is a corrective of sorts, addressing curious ‘normies’ as well as established movement members. A definitive statement of ideology is not found in A Fair Hearing, but rather something better. The volume deals with all of the key ideas around which the Alt-Right has coalesced, but also introduces personal paths of awakening, cultural commentary, essays by women about women, and even a guide to trolling. It’s a text which manages to convey the cultural as well as ideological complexities of the movement without compromising on even the most sensitive topics — a danger that is always present in any attempt to attract mass attention and support. For example, not only is there an excellent contribution on the Jewish Question from Kevin MacDonald, but several other contributors also touch on the subject, with editor George T. Shaw remarking candidly in his introduction: “Jews not only wield obscene levels of power in Western societies, they use that power to damage native White populations.” Read more

Operational Hygiene: Spheres of Activism for the Alt Right

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I was relieved to note that towards the end of 2017 after serious infighting, public arguing, and hurt feelings, not to mention cases of business rivalry gone awry, several major outlets of the AltRight addressed what is — my mind— a vital topic of internal and organizational discipline. Among the people who talked about what I would like to dub “Operational Hygiene” were Caerulus Rex of TheRightStuff.biz and Richard Spencer. In the following, I will try to flesh out this concept some more and hope to give my kind reader an idea of its importance for establishing a staunch and steadfast operational structure capable of braving the challenges lying ahead. I feel compelled to make clear that I do not intend to spoon-feed any AltRight activist or sympathizer in the United States while riding the not-so-enlightened Old World horse (as some of my similarly inclined colleagues within the European New Right have done, especially in the aftermath of Charlottesville; some still do). On the contrary, I hope to draw attention to an issue that might be of even more importance for the ossified political right in Europe and might become worth considering after it is successfully proved in the US, which is where Europeans are by and large still prone to look for ideas or guidance.

When I was asked to give a lecture in Munich in late June 2017 about what was to be learned from the AltRight’s sweeping performance during the later stages of the Trump campaign and afterwards, I chose the working title “Ethnostate, Movement, /pol/,” playfully channeling Carl Schmitt’s infamous 1933 essay Staat, Bewegung, Volk in which Schmitt, whom I consider one of my prime influences in the political realm, for the most part cheered the Gleichschaltung legislation of the early National Socialist government.[1] My ambition in the following is not to evoke a forthcoming seizure of power by the National Policy Institute or Andrew Anglin’s media-hyped troll army, but rather to stress the structural concept of the (meta-)political triad Schmitt had hinted at with his title (and in doing so, to take little to no account of its historical implications). The three catchwords I chose for my lecture were meant to represent the three spheres of Alternative Right work in order to make it more understandable for people who had never before heard of it, let alone actively followed its development online: 1.) the realm of Realpolitik, whether in collaboration with the GOP or not, aiming at a reversal of the catastrophic developments ever since at least the mid-1960s; 2.) the realm of the activities of all the people and organizations associated with the term “AltRight”, such as conferences, public speeches, tiki torch marches und so weiter; and 3.) the realm of informational warfare—trolling and memeing, and using sophisticated, but at the same time tongue-in-cheek anarchical, anti-establishment culture jamming. And while I tried to use these three spheres to outline a rugged morphology of the diffuse political and cultural landscape that is the AltRight, I found a (slightly forced) way to apply this triad to European and German political developments. This application, however, evidently works as well across the Big Pond. Read more

He Doth Opine: A Review of Making Sense of The Alt-Right by George Hawley

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Making Sense of The Alt-Right
George Hawley
New York: Columbia University Press, 2017, 218 pp.

With any book, it helps to take into account who wrote it and who published it.   George Hawley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama.   Assistant professor is the lowest professor rank.   Hawley’s a young faculty member, in his early thirties by the looks of his picture with his young child on his website — just starting his academic career, or so he hopes. Assistant professor is probationary status.  At the end of six years typically, you are checked out by senior faculty and administrators and if you pass muster, you get promoted to associate professor and granted permanent status, or tenure, at the university.  If you don’t get tenured, it’s the help wanted ads over breakfast, so the stakes are extremely high for young Hawley.  (With tenure, there’s just one more promotion, and it can be anytime, or never, to full professor.)   A must for getting tenure is a good publication record — publish or perish is real — which means Hawley had to give the editors at Columbia University Press what they wanted or he was dead in the water.

All to say, don’t expect an assistant professor to take intellectual or professional risks—such as running up against the PC doctrine of today’s universities and academic presses; or to go much, if at all, beyond the boundaries of his (or, of course, her) academic discipline, political science in this case — integrating, say, history, philosophy, psychology, and/or literature into his considerations; or to produce mature scholarship so early in his career.  Do expect diligence, however—nobody works harder than an assistant professor.

In sum, I got what I expected from this book.  That means a 4, perhaps 5, on a 10 scale—not bad, but it could have been a lot better.   That acknowledged, this book was worth my time—in fact, I read it in a single setting.  Professor Hawley thinks clearly enough (for this stage of his working life), he writes reasonably well, and he obviously devoted much time and effort to this project.  I profited from his descriptions of what’s going on with the internet (the Alt-Right, he reports, is largely an internet phenomenon, much of it anonymous), about which I am clueless.   I also found helpful the distinction he draws between the Alt-Right and the “Alt-Lite.” Alt-Lites he mentions include Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Joseph Paul Watson, and the only two women in the book, Ann Coulter and Laura Southern.    No Alt-Right women, such as Lana Lokteff of Red Ice Radio, in this presentation.   The quotes in the book from Hawley’s interviews, including those with Richard Spencer,  were very good, though you couldn’t prove it by me that he took in and worked with what these people actually said. Read more

Justin Murphy’s “The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers”

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Here is Justin Murphy describing his background, research, and activism:

Why is there not more rebellion against status quo institutions? How have economic and political processes pacified our capacity for radical collective action? As a political scientist, I am interested in the roles played by information, communication, and ideology in the pacification of political resistance and conflict. Before joining the faculty of Politics and IR at the University of Southampton in the UK, I did my PhD at Temple University in the US. There I was active in Occupy Wall Street, some civil disobedience and shutting down of things, some longer-term campaigns against the big U.S. banks, and sundry other works and deeds, including a radical warehouse project where I lived for nearly three years.

So Murphy is an academic on the left. He is therefore part of the establishment, a card-carrying member of the institutional structure that dominates intellectual discourse in the West. But, unlike the vast majority of his academic brethren, he is quite aware that the left is now the status quo and that it is doing everything it can to preserve its elite status — and that its self-preserving tactics are at base nothing more than irrational assertions of power and privilege. Murphy makes these claims in a blogpost: “The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers.” Part of the subtitle says it all: “The real motivation of respectable progressivism is managing guilty conscience and conserving bourgeois privileges.”

What’s so refreshing about this is that instead of “exclud[ing] independent right-wing intellectual work on moral grounds,” he would actually “enjoy thinking” with intellectuals on the right. Indeed, moral indictments have become the stock in trade of establishment intellectuals — as noted in my three-part “Moralism and Moral Arguments in the War for Western Survival.” Moral condemnations are easy. No intellectual heavy lifting required. All one need do is appeal to conventional moral intuitions as shaped by the the same institutions that are now the status quo — the media and academic culture. As I note, those who dissent from the status quo are “not only misguided, [they are] malevolent … consumed by hatred, anger and fear towards non-Whites, gays, women and the entire victim class pantheon, or so goes the stereotype And that’s the problem. Being cast as evil means you are outside the moral community. There’s no need to talk with you, no need to be fair, or even worry about your safety. You are like an outlaw in Old Norse society  — ‘a person [who] lost all of his or her civil rights and could be killed on sight without any legal repercussions.’” Read more

Auburn is already a success: We must have a public presence by any means necessary

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Update: Due to the efforts of Atty. Sam Dickson (whose writing for TOO is referenced below), Auburn was forced to hold the event. A video of the event is posted in the TOO video corner.

It’s really great that the Alt Right, led by Richard Spencer, will be holding an event at Auburn today, even after getting canceled by the university. Having a public presence is absolutely critical to any political movement that intends to become mainstream. There is a fairly long history of the left shutting down public events by intimidating hotels, as happened several times with American Renaissance and recently with a proposed VDARE.com conference in Yosemite. And recently we have had the antifa rioting in Berkeley, shutting down the Milo talk, and antifa violence against Trump supporters in several places, most notably at the Trump inauguration and last weekend in Berkeley.

Too often antifa violence and intimidation have been successful. The forces of intolerance, intellectual conformity and hostility to Whites and their interests have succeeded. A sure sign that the left is in an impenetrable bubble is that we read about “Alt Right thugs” on blogs and Twitter feeds. No violence would have happened apart from antifa attacks. The antifa is all about shutting down free speech, Trump supporters, and the Alt Right “by any means necessary.”


And the fact is that, until last weekend in Berkeley, the antifa had been winning consistently. Police typically stood by and did nothing even as antifa were assaulting their victims and burning down stores. When arrests were made, little or nothing has come of it (see Sam Dickson’s “The assault on Richard Spencer: No punishment for crimes against White activists“). They are, indeed, pillars of the establishment. Or perhaps Storm Troopers of the establishment would be a better label. Read more

The Alt-Right and the Election of Trump: the End of the Dominant Ideology?

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The following is a translation of an interview given to the French daily Présent. Présent,  a magazine dealing with culture, politics and art, is popular among traditional Catholics and identitarians, and is also sympathetic to France’s National Front.           

On January 18, Libération  lashed out at the American Alt-Right, of which you are considered to be one of its leading intellectuals, along with your book Homo americanus; rejeton de l’ère postmoderne  (published in France by the publishing house  Akribeia, 2010 and soon to be reissued in the USA). Could you tell us more about this movement, launched a few years ago by Richard Spencer, who is viewed by the far left as very dangerous, and who on January 20, during a television interview, was violently assaulted, without there being any voice of outrage? 

The term “Alt-Right” is a bit vague, lending itself perfectly to various usages by various opposition movements within the Euro-American right-wing, including those that have nothing in common with Spencer’s version of the Alt-Right. The System-friendly media, in this case Libération in France, the FAZ in Germany, or The New York Times across the Atlantic, are currently in the process of forging demonological guilt-by-association memes to portray Spencer and his version of the Alt-Right.  Read more

The Assault on Richard Spencer: No Punishment for Crimes against White Activists

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Washington, D.C., for some years has essentially withdrawn the protection of the law from rightists, White activists, etc.

We have seen how AmRen Conferences can be shut down by terroristic threats. I was assaulted by a masked anti-fa thug at an NPI Conference in the Spring of 2016. She was arrested…but all charges were “dropped.”

It would be nice to find out what has happened with the charges against the 6 thugs who beat a Red Ice cameraman bloody at the last NPI Conference and sprayed the Red Ice correspondent, Emily Youcis, with Raid, which potentially could have blinded her. My guess is that all charges were dropped against them too. There were other assaults as well, as I recounted in a previous article.

The police, the FBI and other police agencies of the System are just not interested in punishing crimes committed against us.

Those with lingering illusions about the fairness of the System, the trustworthiness of the FBI and the police, our being part of the civic debate and so on should wake up and smell the coffee.

Once again on Inauguration Day the anti-fa “protesters” were allowed to appear in their masks. No effort has been made in any of these instances by the D.C. police department to enforce any “anti-mask law” against these cowards who hide behind their disguises as they commit their crimes.

Some were arrested today. It’s a good bet that the charges against most of them will be dropped eventually. The others will get sprung by the judges or the juries, sympathetic as they are to multiculturalism. Any that fall through the cracks and aren’t able to evade justice head on will get derisory sentences.

And now, an open physical assault on Richard Spencer by a masked assailant.

Don’t expect any righteous resolutions from the Methobapterian churches or the Council of Catholic Bishops. Don’t strain your eyes looking for editorials condemning lawlessness in the nation’s capitol from the likes of The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic or National Review. There will never be a statement of outrage from Hillary Clinton or the Black Caucus.

These people play for keeps.

They have no illusions.

They don’t want to be fair.

They don’t want to play nice.

They mean business.

And it’s 100% their way.

Recognize this and think about it.