7

FROM NEO-NAZI TO WHITE SUPREMACIST CONSPIRACISM

Bitter conflict between the Christian creed and loyalty to the White Race convinced me more than anything that Christianity had to go, and that the White Race needed to replace it with a sane, basic religion of its own.

Ben Klassen, Dedicated to Posterity

American politics just after World War II is remembered primarily for its anti-Communism. The Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and Russian spies all contributed to a fearful Red Scare and to the rise of McCarthyism. The years from 1945 to 1960 saw a diminution in accusations against Jews, despite occasional headlines like “Yiddish Marxists Plot USA Defeat.” A 1960 University of Illinois study estimated a thousand groups distributing “great quantities of right-wing literature.”1 But how much of this right-wing output was conspiracist in nature? Just as it had been possible to oppose Roosevelt and the New Deal without being a conspiracist, it was quite possible to be a vehement anti-Communist without recourse to conspiracism.

Most of the literature examined in the Illinois study contained at least some conspiracist sentiment, enough to lead the authors to note the long tradition on the right of belief in “an international conspiracy, . . . possibly centuries old, which is destined to destroy our civilization.” They saw this conspiracism along a continuum, ranging from the American Legion’s unsurprising determination to “protect our country from penetration by those who would subvert it,” all the way to Admiral John Crommelin’s manifesto announcing his candidacy for governor of Alabama: “Whereas: The ultimate objectives of the Communist-Jewish conspirators is [sic] to use their world-wide control of money to destroy Christianity and set up a World Government in the framework of the United Nations, and erase all national boundaries and eliminate all racial distinction except the so-called Jewish race, which will then become the masters—with their headquarters in the State of Israel and in the UN in New York, and from these two communication centers rule a slave-like world population of copper-colored human mongrels. . . .”2 However, a similar study that focused on right-wing military officers posited two distinct types of anti-Communism: one based on a rational assessment of the threat, and a second group with views “growing out of a mood of frustration . . . a form of political paranoia” in which the problem “is defined as one of evil conspiracies.” This second group was what Richard Hofstadter had in mind with his concept of “pseudo-conservatives.”3

The connection between anti-Communism and conspiracism cannot be specified exactly. There is no point at which exaggerated fear of Soviet subversion became unambiguously conspiratorial, and examples such as Cardinal Spellman’s essay “Communism Is Un-American” are hard to classify as one or the other, but in practice the onset of conspiracism was generally clear. Those not conspiracy-minded might well warn of subversives worming their way into important political positions, but conspiracists would see a Communist-controlled government and would imagine the peril to all other social institutions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the publications of the John Birch Society, begun in 1958 by Robert Welch. At the society’s organizational meeting, Welch laid out his beliefs: “Communists are much further advanced and much more deeply entrenched than is realized by even the most serious students of the danger among the anti-Communists. . . . I personally have been studying the problem increasingly for about nine years, and practically full time for the past three years. . . . Yet every day I run into some whole new area, where the Communists have been penetrating and working quietly for years, until they are now in virtual control of everything that is done in that slice or corner of our national life.”4 Beyond its near total domination of the federal government, Communism’s “virtual control” of American life was said to be staggering. Norman Dodd, former director of research for the Reece Committee, which had investigated tax-exempt foundations, exposed the “effective contribution to Communism” made by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, among others. The media, notably the “controlled New York papers and radio,” were also vital parts of the Communist conspiracy. Other notorious hotbeds of Communism included labor unions, the ACLU, and the motion picture business.5

But in keeping with the tendency of conspiracism to expand, many unlikely institutions were also exposed as communistic. As in the 1930s, religious institutions were subjected to conspiracist attention. Harvey Springer railed against the “rape of fundamentalism by the Federal Council of (Anti) Christ.” A self-appointed watchdog committee found a “pink fringe” on the Methodist Church. H. L. Birum, among others, claimed the National Council of Churches was saturating its Revised Standard Version of the Bible with Communist propaganda as part of its “militant program of SPIRITUAL BOLSHEVISM.”6 On the secular side, a “giant cell of political radicalism” (actually comprising organizations as dull as the National Municipal League, which united various city reform groups throughout the country) was pursuing a plan to “plunge Americans into the bondage of political and economic slavery.” The American Legion reported that even “veteran anti-communists” were “frankly baffled” by the success of Consumer Reports, since the magazine was put out by a well-known “Communist Party front.” And there were exposés of organizations ranging from the YWCA to the Community Chest.7

While most anti-Communists looked to the Kremlin as the source of the subversion, conspiracists were more likely to summon up Karl Marx himself, who was portrayed often as a puppet of the Illuminati. Some bypassed Marx in favor of Clinton Roosevelt, whose 1841 essay on the science of government was billed as “the plagiarized communist teachings of Adam Weishaupt, a renegade Jesuit, and the substance of the Communist Manifesto.”8 Equally important to conspiracists were the early twentieth-century progressives, especially those with internationalist leanings, and Fabian socialists. Depictions of these individuals blurred the lines between liberalism, socialism, and Communism, making it easier to throw them all into a single conspiracy. They also served to link leftist ideas with a suspicious cosmopolitanism. And last, as the embodiment of the new, highly educated class of political and social leaders, they were used to besmirch intellectuals, academics, experts, and other elites.9

Anti-Communist conspiracism proper did not outlast the Cold War, but it contributed to other conspiratorial themes that did. In combination with the residue of the hidden hand, anti-Communist conspiracism played a role in the development new world order conspiracism. But it also provided some grist for the mill of neo-Nazi conspiracism.

Residual Nazi Conspiracism

The career of the clique of conspiracists dedicated to Nazism is both clearly defined and distinct from all other strands of conspiracism, though it shares wellsprings with other racist conspiracies. A 1937 American Guard leaflet appealed both to whites (“Let us again adhere to the ideals of the White race.”) and to “Gentiles!” who might not realize that Jews “actually amount to an economic dictatorship.” During the war, pro-Nazi conspiracists held fast to the view that Germany was the victim of a Jewish plot to trick Britain and America into waging war against it, destroying not just Germany but ultimately the United States as well. Charles Hudson, one of the more hyperbolic conspiracists, explained that, by volunteering as air wardens, Jews “have access and full opportunity to get an absolute check (on personal firearms, etc.), block by block, of all citizens and non-citizens. Think it thru!”10

Immediately after the war, one event and one nonevent bonded this group in defense of Germany. The nonevent was Treasury Secretary Morgenthau’s plan to destroy German industrial capacity altogether in order to prevent it from waging war again. While this plan was quite punitive, it was rejected by Roosevelt and never went into effect; still, conspiracists wrote about “Morgenthauists” as though they existed. The actual event was the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–46, disparaged as a kangaroo court for putting on trial “Germans who were doing nothing else but allowing their rulers to do as they did.”11

Conspiracists saw the postwar plight of Germany as a product of the Jews’ ongoing war on civilization. Conde McGinley’s newspaper Think Weekly featured articles such as “Slave-Laboring German Prisoners-of-War” and “Ravishing the Conquered Women of Europe.” The writings of eccentric Swedish Nazi Einar Åberg—much of which declared the allies and their Jewish masters to be the true “war criminals”—were distributed in the United States. So were the ideas of Ludwig Fritsch, who saw the Germans as America’s “greatest benefactors.” Only “Roosevelt’s advisors,” Fritsch claimed, hated the Nazis: “Only thus is understandable Roosevelt’s demand of ‘unconditional surrender’ and the most inhuman ‘Morgenthau Plan,’ starving to death a great nation, because in the heads and hearts of our leading men all vestige of Christianity disappeared and Judaism and Paganism prevailed.”12 Francis Parker Yockey, whose vision was more encompassing than most, decried the “post-war annihilation program” for European civilization generally.13 Not surprisingly, the victimization of the Germans was traced back to the Protocols, “a blueprint which forecasts the drama of destruction of all our moral and spiritual values . . . reaching its climax in the tragedy of Nuremberg.” Kenneth Goff pushed back the origin of the “conspiracy to destroy Germany” even farther, to 1776, the year Adam Weishaupt founded the Bavarian Illuminati. Contemporary connections were made as well. Lyrl Van Hyning’s Women’s Voice portrayed an industrial explosion near Houston in April, 1947 as cosmic payback for the “Roosevelt-Morgentheau-Frankfurter plan.” As late as 1960, Aryan diehards were still claiming that “‘liberals’ plot the end of a Teutonic nation.”14

As Germany rebuilt and its “plight” diminished, leaders of the pro-Nazi conspiracy turned their attention to the United States. In establishing the National Renaissance Party, James H. Madole outlined his plan to create a new America, “subordinating the interests of the individual citizen to the interests of the national community as a whole. Whereas our doctrine of Racial Nationalism welds the nation into a united and compatible Iron Front based on the ancient ties of blood and race, the poisonous Jewish doctrines of Democracy, Liberalism and Communism seek to foment class warfare, disunity and revolution within the borders of all national states.” Liberal democracy, Madole had written, was based on “mythical claims” of “Jewish intellectuals” such as Adam “Weisshaupt” and Karl Marx. Its founding doctrine of equality was merely a ruse perpetrated by Jews to pollute the Aryans’ “pure blood and creative ingenuity by mixing sexually with Zulu Hottentots and Asiatic ancestor worshippers.”15

Many pro-Nazi conspiracists published in Conde McGinley’s Think Weekly (later, Common Sense), including many hidden hand conspiracists. Eugene Sanctuary, George Van Horn Moseley (and his sidekick Charles B. Hudson), and Elizabeth Dilling were all contributors. Virtually every article expounded on the Jewish conspiracy. One front-page plea, signed by McGinley, Dilling, and Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, urged readers to flood Congress with letters and telegrams that would combat the undying influence of Bernard Baruch: “Before every fresh holocaust BARNEY comes before Congress for legislation in preparation for harnessing and slaughtering ‘the people who are like an ass-slaves [sic] who are considered the property of their master’—the Talmudists.”16

As blatant neo-Nazis, these conspiracists were never in the mainstream even of the conspiratorial right wing. Remarkably, they managed to move still further afield by embracing the Soviet Union in the wake of Stalin’s antisemitic purges and the highly publicized Prague trials, which targeted accused Trotskyists. Seemingly attracted to the sheer authoritarian antisemitism of these events, pro-Nazi conspiracists interpreted them as setbacks to “the death plans being hatched for European culture in Washington by American Jewry.” The subsequent execution of Lavrenty Beria (head of the Soviet secret police), whom conspiracists said had been “designated by the Baruchs [?] to fill Trotsky’s place in the near future,” was an additional blow to the establishment of “the Jewish Imperium.”17 Consistent with their newfound appreciation for Stalin, and like Madole, these conspiracists openly called democracy a fraud, perpetrated by the Jews: “a small, fanatical nationalist minority which has subjugated the world.”18 In 1953, Madole’s solution to “poisonous” democracy was the abolition of parliamentary government. He fleshed out this view in 1956: “Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and Peron knew that democracy was invariably an instrument in the hand of the International Jew. They knew that ‘freedom and democracy’ meant only freedom for the Jew to exploit and terrorize his host people hence their first move was to abolish the traditional ‘democratic parties and institutions’ which had become political brothels for the most shameful prostitution of the peoples interests.”19 To the neo-Nazis, democracy was not merely a fraud, it was the equivalent of a social disease.

Francis Parker Yockey and James H. Madole: Neo-Nazi Conspiracism

The transformation of postwar Nazism from Hitler-loving groups that “essentially imitated the past with uniformed cadres, swastika flags, and marches” into something focused more on the future can be attributed to a pair of actual conspiracy theorists.20 Francis Parker Yockey, still a cult figure today, had been associated with William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts before the war. His intellectual inspiration, however, was Oswald Spengler’s 1918 work The Decline of the West, a book as pessimistic as its title suggests. Spengler’s treatment of the Jews was no worse than his treatment of most people and his ideas were scorned by the Nazis prior to his death in 1936—which is to say that Decline of the West was not a Nazi (or even fascist) manifesto. Francis Yockey’s 1948 opus Imperium altered Spengler’s ideas, linking them to Nazidom by reinterpreting the conflict Spengler has limned between the West’s “Faustian” soul and the Middle East’s “Babylonian-Semitic” soul. To Spengler, “Jewry represented a fateful form of ‘cultural distortion’” that undercut the West’s imperial destiny. For Yockey, “Jews vengefully exploited the new cultural forms of money thinking, rationalism, materialism, capitalism and democracy to destroy the traditions of the West and the authority of its old elites.”21

Yockey saw Europe undergoing a non-Christian, slow-motion apocalypse. His ideas about the United States, however, were clearly affected by the secret government conspiracism of his youth. Imperium depicts a Jewish “invasion” beginning in the 1880s that replaced America’s “organic individualism” with Jewish “Rationalism.” The only part of the country to understand and fight the invasion was the South, which was protected by an “aristocratic traditional life-feeling.” Yet when the South fought back through the Klan “as an expression of the reaction of the American organism to the presence of foreign matter,” it was branded “‘Un-American’ by the propaganda organs of America.” Imperium wraps up with standard secret government arguments about the Federal Reserve and the Jews’ “seizure of power” with the New Deal “so that thenceforward elections were mere pageantry.”22 Yockey’s combination of secret government conspiracy and distorted Spenglerism provided an avowedly non-Christian platform for gloom-and-doom racists and antisemites such as Revilo P. Oliver and William Luther Pierce.

James H. Madole does not have the intellectual reputation of Spengler or even Yockey. He did, however, become known as the “father of post-war occult-fascism.” He resurrected Helena Blavatsky’s nineteenth-century theosophical ideas, to which he contributed his own interpretations of ancient Vedic Hinduism. Blavatsky’s theory of five planetary eras, each dominated by a “race,” was vaguely compatible with Spengler’s succession of “organic” civilizations. Madole believed that Aryans had once been—and should again be—worshipped as “White Gods” by the other races. He saw the Hindu caste system as the ideal vehicle to re-create an elite white government such as the one that had made Atlantis’s civilization great.23 In this way, Theosophy infused racism into Spengler’s portrait of the West’s decline, while its stern and hierarchical doctrine buttressed Madole’s Aryan aversion to Christianity as too soft and egalitarian. Occult fascism was further distinguished by its opposition to capitalism, which followed from a more fundamental opposition to the Enlightenment and even the Industrial Revolution.24 Stalinism, however, was acceptable, as it was now fighting against Jewish democracy.

Yockey and Madole’s racist and mystical appropriation of Spengler’s explanation of history amounted to a nostalgic attempt to bring back the preindustrial, racially homogenous culture of Europe, governed not by monarchs or elected officials but by an Aryan elite.25 Standing in the way of this vision were the modern inventions, democracy and capitalism—and behind these, of course, the Jews. Madole’s National Renaissance Bulletin asked, “America, Which Way?” over drawings indicating the choice: the “proud and free” Aryan family standing on a hill or the “Decadent Jewish-Liberal Democracy” embodied by the skid row prostitute smoking in front of a sign reading “BUY ISRAEL BONDS.”26

The impact of occult fascism on conspiratorial thinking was narrow but important, particularly in how it emphasized authoritarian toughness, as in one of Madole’s pamphlets: “Only the superbly efficient totalitarian economic systems of Fascists, National Socialist, and Communist regimes are adaptable to the strain of TOTAL WAR as practiced in the 20th century. . . . The spirit of democracy is a glorification of weakness and cowardly conduct. It glorifies the coward instead of the fighter, it raises feeble weaklings to leadership rather than a trained, iron-hard, and youthful elite.”27 In a tribute to Yockey’s Imperium, Revilo Oliver not only warned against soft-hearted “‘liberal intellectuals’ or other children” reading it but also hoped that it would not “fall into the hands of tenderhearted Conservatives who want to Love Everybody.” Disparaging “those dear ladies,” Oliver allowed that they may have “noble souls, but they are much too good for this world.” Thanks to Yockey and Madole’s blurring of Spengler’s ideas, Oliver attributed to Spengler a “masterful discussion” of the need to rid society of the Jewish money power. The problem, as Oliver saw it, was that “our fat, complacent Goy citizenry want to keep the nineteenth century going forever; but the twentieth century will make mincemeat of those who want to live in the past. This is the century of steel rather than gold; the century of war rather than peace; violence rather than order; of young men rather than old men. In short, this is the NAZI CENTURY.”28

This farrago of ideas points toward another extremely influential Yockey-Madole contribution to conspiracism: what Michael Barkun has termed an “improvisational” approach to conspiracy building. Abandoning even minimal conventional limitations, the improvisational style “is characterized by a relentless and seemingly indiscriminate borrowing.” Spengler’s understanding of “the growth and decay of civilizations according to organic principles,” Yockey’s virulent antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and Silver Shirt militarism, and Madole’s Vedic-pagan, Theosophist-inspired vision of an authoritarian utopia constituted an unprecedented mixture of previously unrelated ideas. This practice was picked up on by conspiracists of all stripes over the next several years and today poses considerable difficulty in making sense of many conspiracy theories.29

Most of those drawn to the Yockey-Madole ideology were racists and antisemites first and conspiracists only second. Yockey was a loner, but Madole was deeply involved in a network of Nazis and, later, other racist groups—Karl Allen Jr.’s White Party of America, Robert DePugh’s Minutemen, George Leggett’s United Nordic Federation, and others. Their conspiracism grew primarily out of a feeling that the white race had been betrayed, and they reveled in the widespread offense this view could cause. In an advertisement for its edition of Imperium, the National Youth Alliance bragged that the book offended black Muslims, the mainstream press, and the John Birch Society—that is, pretty much the entire political spectrum. From the beginning, Yockeyites had disparaged both “ignorant liberals” and conservatives—whether “Establishment” or “anarchistic Libertarian.”30

Yockey’s ideas had a strong impact on Willis Carto, a major right-wing force for years and the leading organizer of Holocaust denial in America. Founder of the Liberty Lobby, associated with at least half a dozen neo-fascist organizations, and publisher of periodicals ranging from the Washington Observer to American Zionist Watch, Carto worked with (and often fell out with) right-wing conspiracists from William Pierce to Ron Paul. Every issue, for Carto, came down to “the political Zionist planners for absolute rule via One World government.”31 The influence of Yockey’s preindustrial pastoral Nordic ideal shows through in an appeal to college students to join Carto’s openly fascist National Youth Alliance:

We want to achieve an organic society which will not only protect and perpetuate the great traditional values of Western civilization but will purify the Western world of the degeneracy of communism and liberalism. . . .

. . . The media-peddled philosophy-religion of the present System is alien to our people and must be utterly rooted out and eliminated, along with its bearers. We want to safeguard our racial identity by putting an end to the present insanity of forced racial integration. . . .

We want to foster among our people, through the recapture of our information media and our educational system, a new spiritual outlook: the outlook of free men living and working in harmony with nature.

The alliance’s first step toward achieving these goals, ahead of even opposing moral degeneracy and “race-defiling efforts of the System,” was “Opposition to Zionism.”32

But while occult fascism and its offspring seeped into and reshaped the conspiracist ecosystem, neo-Nazism itself had become a niche conspiracy by the 1970s, which was kept going by determined advocates such as William Pierce. Pierce recorded weekly messages about “black terror and Jewish degeneracy and liberal treason” for the answering machine at the headquarters of the National Socialist White People’s Party.33 Its incompatibility with Christianity dampened most conspiracists’ reaction to it, as did its relative inattention to Communism or the new world order.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli War spurred a short-lived burst of activity among neo-Nazis. William Pierce renamed the National Youth Alliance as the National Alliance, which he imagined as a “superstructure” for an “array of specialized, coordinate [sic] groups.” In 1974 another organization, the American Nationalists, tried to establish themselves as a clearing house for neo-Nazi groups with a peculiar appeal to diversity. Their manifesto noted that one of “the basic problems of such groups is their lack of prospective [sic] as to what their job is. They think they can beat the world with just one organization tailored to one type of person.” Since it required “many kinds of people to build a movement of historical significance,” the American Nationalists’ envisioned themselves working alongside “the thousands of black and Mexican nationalists” who were eager to leave “this white man’s land” and with whom they could “UNITE AGAINST THE ANTI-CHRIST!”34 This combination of odd ideas failed to catch on.

The Neo-Nazi Legacy

Yet Aryan white supremacy turned out to have considerable staying power, if only for its propagation of the idea that Jews were conspiring to destroy the white race. For example, Ben Klassen and his followers in the Church of the Creator, which Klassen established in 1973, devoted their attention to the conspiracy by the Jewish Occupation Government to destroy the white race just as the Jews had “destroyed our White Racial ancestors” beginning with the “White Egyptians.” Klassen was committed to the Racial Holy War (RaHoWa) that would “throw off the yoke of Jewish tyranny and control” and “make it impossible for the Jews and the other mud races to ever again threaten the existence and well-being of the white race.”35

Also in the mid-1970s, Wilmot Robertson’s monthly magazine Instauration took up the cause of the oppressed white majority from a self-consciously highbrow perspective. Mixing articles about racial genetics and holocaust denial with equally racist reviews of art and theater, Instauration marked the beginning of intellectual white supremacism. Even an article about voting was prefaced with William Butler Yeats’s negative assessment of democracy before making its claim that the white majority’s votes “have almost no impact because we have no one to represent us.” Willis Carto’s Noontide Press distributed RaHoWa material supporting a “resistance movement” to fight a government based on “conspiratorial tyranny.” One of his more popular publications was an amateurish but thorough guerilla war “plan for the restoration of freedom when our country has been taken over by its enemies.”36

But the Yockeyite tradition also had adherents determined to maintain its distinctive antimodern, Aryan supremacist paganism and its concomitant disgust with Christian “weakness.” Like Klassen, William Pierce established his own non-Christian belief system, manifested in his newly established West Virginia compound, the Cosmotheist Community. The influential independent conspiracist William Gayley Simpson credited Nietzsche as an antimodern inspiration, but in his treatment titled “The Fateful Crisis Confronting Western Man,” Yockey’s influence is unmistakable. Revilo P. Oliver, the intensely racist University of Illinois classics professor, in Yockeyite fashion tried to rescue from obscurity the antifeminist biological determinist Anthony Ludovici, who believed that Spengler’s seemingly inexorable Western decline could be reversed through “practical eugenics.” Michael O’Meara portrayed Yockey as a Vabanquespieler (player of a dangerous game) fighting “the Jewish-dominated, liberal-capitalist, anti-European Mammon system” of America.37 The Creativity Movement (the name Klassen’s Church of the Creator adopted after a copyright infringement lawsuit) played up Yockeyite opposition to Christianity, whose emphasis on forgiveness and compassion makes the white race weak. Klassen himself disparaged Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations as “schizophrenic” for “preaching that we, the White Race, are the real Israelites, and Christ was our savior” and mocked the efforts of Christian militias such as The Order (a.k.a. the Silent Brotherhood). The latter violently antisemitic, antigovernment organization, Klassen maintained, should have been able to kill hundreds of Jews with the effort they put into murdering Denver radio personality Alan Berg.38 Today, the Creativity Movement publishes the magazine Imperium—yet another tribute to Yockey—which is filled with conspiratorial ideas. The negative associations many people have regarding White Racial Loyalists, for example, “have been implanted by the controlled mediums.” Dylann Roof’s attack on a South Carolina black church congregation is a false flag operation (“The whole thing stinks to high heaven of a conspiracy theory!!!”). And the Jewish Rothschilds (“the largest slaveowner in the South”) had Lincoln assassinated.39

Neo-Nazi conspiracism and Yockey’s iconic status have both resurged with the rise of the alt-right white supremacists. Alt-Right theorist Kevin MacDonald, who began his career as a bio-behavioral psychologist searching for a genetic justification for antisemitism, draws on conspiracies back to the hidden hand. Between 1994 and 1998 MacDonald published three books that blamed the Jews “for introducing evil social vices and other perversions into Nordic society” and portrayed them as “degenerates preying on unsuspecting, wholesome Aryans.” Aside from replacing “Gentiles” with “Aryans,” MacDonald’s ideas are exactly the same as the hidden hand conspiracy theory. MacDonald’s concerns stretch back to the 1920s—he complained that anthropologist Franz Boas had inspired an “onslaught against the idea of race and against Western culture [that] gradually had become ensconced in the universities”—and continue on up to current events: he considered Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik “a serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy.”40

Yet the major split within the alt-right concerns antisemitism. To some degree the Aryan renaissance tradition has been offset by intellectuals such as Paul Gottfried, who has argued for a fashionable “Eurofascism” (such as in Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain) distinct from Nazi Germany and associated with alt-right favorites such as Julius Evola and Anthony Ludovici.41 This perspective allows people to embrace elements of fascism while likening Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler. But there is at least one alt-right faction that is viscerally antisemitic: the 1488ers (fourteen for the number of words in white supremacist David Lane’s mawkish homily “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and eighty-eight for the eighth letter of the alphabet—H—doubled to convey “Heil Hitler”).42

But generally, the alt-right “mainstream” has been limited to rarefied intellectual antisemitism and calculated ambiguity. Jared Taylor, writing in the magazine American Renaissance, describes the “debate in our ranks on . . . the role Jews may or may not have played in creating the crisis we face. Some people in the AR [alt-right] community believe Jewish influence was decisive in destroying the traditional American consensus on race. Others disagree.” Richard Spencer, an acknowledged alt-right leader, has soft-pedaled the “rabid” antisemitism of Andrew Anglin, telling an interviewer, “Andrew and I have different styles; we have different approaches.”43 Taylor’s American Renaissance conferences have exposed the rift between “those who see Blacks, Hispanics and Muslims as the primary enemy and those who say ‘the Jews’ are behind every evil.” Avowed Nazis such as David Duke have generally stayed with Taylor’s organization, while white supremacist Jews have drifted to Michael Hart’s Preserving Western Civilization, a “white nationalist venue more friendly to Jewish participation.”44

Most alt-righters have never been strongly conspiratorial, beyond taking for granted that the government (along with its allies who control the universities and most of the media) has been purposefully undermining the white race. William H. Regnery II, longtime anti-Communist and cousin of Alfred Regnery, the right-wing publisher, became a convert to the conspiracy against the white race in 1993. Since then, his financial backing has provided a great deal of the organizational infrastructure of the alt-right. Samuel Francis, who was fired from the Washington Times for his war-against-the-white-race activities, took an implicitly conspiratorial approach in the statement of principles he wrote for the Council of Conservative Citizens in 2005, opposing: “All efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called ‘affirmative action’ and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”45 The alt-right has contributed to the growing conspiracist worldview by discussing race, immigration, and terrorism with constant but inferential references to the same white victimization conspiracism that has been a hallmark of the Right for decades. The alt-right also took the lead in framing “political correctness,” a constant thorn in the side of white supremacists, as a conspiracy. Andrew Breitbart promoted the idea that “cultural Marxism is political correctness, it’s multiculturalism, and it’s a war on Judeo-Christianity.”46

Recently, the alt-right has expanded into the online world of “Fake news, . . . hoaxes, fraudulent click-bait articles, and outright conspiracy mongering.”47 The alt-right has brought what had originally been a marginal neo-Nazi conspiracy theory to the strongest position it has ever held. When the violently racist Richard Spencer was punched in the head by a protestor while giving a television interview, the anonymous presence behind the Francis Parker Yockey website took it as a declaration of war: “We have officially entered a new and improved chapter in this race war and it has officially came [sic] at the hand of the great Richard Spencer. Unintentionally that is. I am calling this the Richard Spencer Race War Has Begun and if you copy my shit I will kick your ass for acting like a NIGGER! I can do it too.”48 This sort of gratuitously offensive, yet anonymous, tough-guy stance has become the hallmark of alt-right blogging.