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My Journey to the Center of the Alternative-Right
My Journey to the Center of the Alt-Right
Trump has gone beyond playing footsie with the alt right. "This man is 88% woke," wrote a columnist on The Daily Stormer. "I don’t think that Donald Trump set out to inspire the alt-right, but we’ve been thrown into the same boat by our shared enemies, so Trump has become an alt-right god,” Spencer told me. “If you wear a Trump hat in many places, you might as well be wearing a swastika." "I can’t get over how rapidly this has come alive,” Parrott said, attributing the surge in interest to Trump. Heimbach described the Republican nominee as a “gateway drug” to white nationalism. “We’re all growing and using this momentum,” he said. The Republicans need racists to win,” Heimbach said. “They need us to win and they want to chain us in the attic and ignore us but then count on us for votes. That’s just not going to work long term.” Wolf Blitzer asked Trump if he had a problem with his supporters issuing anti-Semitic death threats. “I don’t have a message to the fans,” said Trump. “We interpret that as an endorsement,” Anglin said. To get to the white ethnostate, I drove through cornfields, listening to a man on the radio hype an upcoming “machine-gun shoot” at a nearby firing range. Paoli is a pretty postage-stamp-size town in southern Indiana. The seat of Orange County, it has a charming central square and a beautiful Greek Revival courthouse built in 1850. It also has an alt-right base camp occupied by neo-Nazis. My instructions were to meet the “comrades” outside the Walmart. From the entrance, I watched a horse and buggy clop into the parking lot. An Amish couple got out and tied up the horse, then pushed shopping carts into the store. After a few minutes, I noticed a dirty red van idling nearby. There were three men inside, dressed in black shirts emblazoned with a pitchfork surrounded by a gear of industry—the logo of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which the Anti-Defamation League categorizes as a hate group. Behind the wheel, wearing a black military cap, was Matt Parrott, 34, the Traditionalist Worker Party's co-founder. In the passenger seat was Matthew Heimbach, a burly, black-bearded 25-year-old who has been referred to as the “next David Duke” and the “future of organized hate.” In March, Heimbach was caught on video at a Donald Trump event in Louisville, Kentucky, shoving a black female protestor and yelling, “Leftist scum!” The protestor, who also said that Trump fans had called her a “nigger” and a “cunt,” is suing Heimbach, who, she alleges, assaulted and harassed her. All of this has won him a reputation as an up-and-comer in extremist circles, and he is currently angling to be a standard-bearer for a younger, funkier version of American white nationalism that has sprouted online. This is the alt-right. Until recently, not many Americans knew this term, a catchall for a loose confederation of far-right locos so deviant that a few years ago they were in danger of extinction. Then they found Trump. Or Trump found them. Now, they are stationed along his parapets in a union that represents the biggest uptick of white power activity in American politics since the Ku Klux Klan’s invisible empire in the 1920s. Neo-Nazis do door-knocks for Trump and scream “Sieg Heil” outside his rallies. And Trump has gone along for the ride, retweeting alt-right propaganda and hiring Stephen Bannon, whose Breitbart News Network has become the most significant transmitter of the movement’s ideas to a mass audience. Thanks to Trump, ethno-nationalism is poised to be a force in American politics for the first time in decades. Experts who track hate groups lament that the alt-right is just old white nationalism rebranded. And it is. But it’s more than that, too. It is also a grassroots movement that coalesced online, in the primordial ooze of chat forums and message boards like 4chan, 8chan and Reddit. Most alt-righters are digital natives, and they have weaponized social media. To appreciate how far through the looking glass Trump and his online storm-troopers have taken us in this strange election, consider that Hillary Clinton devoted an entire speech to denouncing alt-right ideology, and that Pepe the Frog, a once-harmless cartoon frog transformed by the alt-right into an anti-Semitic icon, now needs little introduction. "I can’t get over how rapidly this has come alive,” Parrott said, attributing the surge in interest to Trump. Heimbach described the Republican nominee as a “gateway drug” to white nationalism. “We’re all growing and using this momentum,” he said. It is tempting to mock the alt-right as an exhibition of political rarities. There may only be a few thousand of these souls rattling cages; there may be many more. But the risks of dismissing them, even when they wave cartoon frogs, should be clear. According to a study conducted by an assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University, 65 percent of white Americans would consider supporting a nativist, xenophobic party. And two toxic months reporting on key figures in the movement convinced me that they are serious in their desire to crack open a hateful new space in the system. With an assist from the Trump campaign, the alt-right’s fusion of musty racist dogma and millennial troll power has given it a political influence far beyond that of tobacco-stained Klansmen and swastika-bedecked skinheads. Now, from operatives in D.C. to wannabe politicians in the heartland to trolls lurking in online grottoes around the world, its would-be leaders are trying to take the malignant energy that has coursed through conservative circles this election and transform it into something lasting. There is, it turns out, a small network of young, educated white nationalists braided into the conservative apparatus in Washington. One Sunday morning in early September, I went to meet 38-year-old Richard Spencer, the originator of the phrase “alternative right” and the movement’s debonair frontman. "I don’t think that Donald Trump set out to inspire the alt-right, but we’ve been thrown into the same boat by our shared enemies, so he’s become an alt-right god,” Spencer told me. “If you wear a Trump hat in many places, you might as well be wearing a swastika.” The Daily Stormer’s editor and publisher is a 32-year-old named Andrew Anglin. He is preoccupied with the idea that Jews control the world, mainly through the global financial system, and designed The Daily Stormer as a “hardcore front for the conversion of masses of people into a pro-White, Antisemitic ideology.” In the year after Trump announced his candidacy, its traffic doubled, to about 2 million readers a month, according to web tracking data. “I represent the will of the mob,” Anglin told me. Wolf Blitzer asked Trump if he had a problem with his supporters issuing anti-Semitic death threats. “I don’t have a message to the fans,” said Trump. “We interpret that as an endorsement,” Anglin said. A month before the election, and exactly one year after Trump retweeting Nazi Pepe the Frog, Trump delivered a thunderous speech in West Palm Beach in which he all but named the Jew. “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors,” he said. “This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system.” The Republicans need racists to win,” Heimbach said. “They need us to win and they want to chain us in the attic and ignore us but then count on us for votes. That’s just not going to work long term.” In the waning days of the presidential election, Anglin primed his readers to prepare for an inevitable Trump victory, seizing on FBI director James Comey’s decision to notify Congress of ongoing inquiries into Clinton’s emails. “I knew James Comey was a pretty cool guy...,” Anglin said. It was a characteristically dangerous gambit by Anglin. Raising the hopes of Trump supporters will only fuel their anger should their candidate lose and confirm their conviction that the election is rigged. Anglin was doing his best to inflame that conspiracy, too, trying to convince reporters that he planned to send an army of white nationalists to watch the polls. But in a way, the prospect of a Trump defeat held its own appeal for him. “Honestly, it’s better for us as a movement if Clinton wins,” Anglin said. “Everyone is going to be extremely angry and looking for answers and they will come directly to us.” http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/a.../en/alt-right/ 
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#3
November 4th, 2016
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Bottom Line: Democrats and Republicans are in it for themselves. Two sides of the same coin. They're so confident in their lock on the system that they feel safe offering us shit candidates to vote for, knowing that the voting public can be played like a fiddle and distracted by bullshit, and business continues as usual. Well, "business as usual" is good for the stock market and my 401K, so I'll play along, but I hate myself for doing it.
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