16 The Rise and Fall of the Far Right in the Digital Age

16 The Rise and Fall of the Far Right in the Digital Age ¹

Louie Dean Valencia-García

Beginning in 2005, a small Danish company called Integral Tradition Publishing (ITP) began building what became a network of nationalists, traditionalists and white supremacists intent on creating an alternate vision of modernity—a lofty, if not seemingly impossible, task. The books they sold peddled the works of lesser-known fascist authors whose hands were seemingly less dirty—most prominently the Italian proto-fascist philosopher Julius Evola.² Today, Arktos Media, the British-based inheritor company to ITP, is headed by a former coal mining company CEO, Swedish nationalist Daniel Friberg. Friberg, who first entered the Swedish neo-Nazi skinhead scene in the 1990s, has staged music festivals, organised seminars and founded numerous media channels, digital and analogue, that have sought to make white nationalism mainstream.³ Many of Arktos’ editors and authors are closely associated with proud American white nationalist Richard Spencer. Together, Spencer and Friberg even co-founded AltRight.com, a website designed as a bullhorn for their fascistic ideologies.⁴ As a print and digital publisher with considerable reach, Arktos is one the largest dealers of alt-histories in the world today. In addition to short pamphlet-length literature, Arktos publishes alt-histories, pseudo-academic monographs, historical fiction novels and currently operates a journal that attempts to give off an academic façade.

The evolution of ITP/Arktos represents a seismic shift of far-right ideologies from the periphery to the centre, quite literally moving from Denmark to a Hare Krishna base in India to right-wing Hungary, and eventually settling somewhere between Sweden, London and Washington, DC—with employees and contributors scattered globally.⁵ Arktos has grown into what Charles Lyons, who has served as both head of Arktos US and chief administrative officer, has called the ‘biggest publisher of traditionalist, conservative, nationalist, Identitarian and overall alt-right literature in the World’.⁶ Arktos’ rise coincided with the ‘collapse of skinheadism and the rapid rise of the Sweden Democrats’⁷—a far-right party which in 2010 managed to gain representation in Sweden’s parliament despite having roots in earlier neo-Nazi movements.⁸ As Benjamin Teitelbaum describes, ‘Revolutionary white nationalists and neo-Nazis throughout the world have long showcased imagery of the North in their artwork, myths, and songs, praising Swedes as the quintessential members of the community they championed—as the “whitest of all whites”’. The publisher’s name, ‘Arktos’, recalls a Greek centaur, the Greek name for the bear in the constellation Ursa Major, and is the root of the word ‘artic’—recalling ‘Northerness’.⁹

Arktos’ books are easily available via their own website and the internet retailer Amazon. YouTubers and message boards dedicate themselves to the ideals proposed by many of the authors published by Arktos—decrying democracy, globalism, multiculturalism, ‘cultural Marxism’¹⁰ and ‘degeneracy’. Such coded language is often used to laud both misogyny and nationalism, whilst inciting Islamophobia. In this chapter, readers will be introduced to a hybrid print/digital publisher that has brought esoteric, fascist ideologies back from the grave. I will delve into various aspects of the media company, outlining ITP/Arktos’ history, while describing more broadly the ways its collaborators have used, and continue to use, both the internet and analogue media to promote fascistic ideologies. While most historians rightfully delineate historical fascism from neo-fascist groups today, we can still certainly identify fascist tendencies that apply more broadly. Although there is no ‘fascist checklist’, or a fascist minimum for that matter, there certainly is a moment in which fascist tendencies are easily recognisable.¹¹ To this end, I will draw historical lines between fascism in Mussolini’s Italy, Spain’s Falangism and neo-fascist youth movements in Europe today.

This chapter will analyse the publisher’s ideological underpinnings and explore how Arktos has promoted the rise of a fascistic, ‘Identitarian’ trans-European youth movement, ‘Génération Identitaire’ (Generation Identity), which has grown prominent in Austria, France, the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy, the United States and beyond. With an eye towards understanding Arktos’ extension vis-à-vis print and digital technologies, I will explore Arktos’ history, writers and publications to investigate the reception of that material in the public sphere.12,13 This chapter will provide general background information on the company’s origins and cultural milieu, explore some of its prominent figures, outline the philosophy behind the construction of history by some of ITP/Arktos’ authors and figures, analyse some of the influences and philosophies present in Arktos’ publications attempting to understand the fascistic tendencies present in those writings and will provide an in-depth analysis of the company’s use of digital and analogue platforms.

Rise of an Esoteric and Traditionalist Company

In 2005, Jacob Christiansen Senholt (b. 1983), a student studying at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Patrick Boch (b. 1983), a recent graduate from the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, co-founded an online bookstore and publishing company, ITP—registering the company in their home country, Denmark.¹⁴ The company published several titles under its own imprint and sold books from other publishers on its website, IntegralTradition.com.¹⁵ As Charles Robert Sullivan and Amy Fisher-Smith describe in chapter seven of this volume, ‘Integral Traditionalism developed in the early twentieth century as a repudiation of what it saw as a modernity that had abandoned the perennial wisdom that was the secret core of all religions’. ITP ostensibly sold and published texts on mysticism and the occult—books that promoted what the website described as ‘traditionalist’ and ‘esoteric’ worldviews. These ideologies often contained a mélange of nationalism and pre-modern religious practices—pre-Vatican II Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Sufism, various forms of Nordic and Roman paganism. Already, by the end of 2007, as many as 274,976 visits had been made to the ITP website.¹⁶

On ITP’s website, interested readers could find authors of the ‘European New Right’, a post-fascist Nationalist-Traditionalist ideology that arose in the aftermath of the Second World War. Nationalist-Traditionalists largely used so-called occult and traditionalist philosophy to obscure their fascistic ideologies.¹⁷ Many of the books listed as ‘most popular’ on ITP’s website promoted both fascism and anti-liberalism, with titles such as Metaphysics of War (Julius Evola); Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans (Hans F.K. Günther); New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Michael O’Meara). Evola was a proto-fascist philosopher, Günther a Nazi eugenicist and O’Meara an advocate for a white ethno-state. ITP’s most popular book, Evola’s Metaphysics of War, was also the first book published by their imprint. Evola (1898–1974) was an aristocrat who was a leader of the Italian Dadaist movement, a prominent collaborator with Nazi-Fascists and a philosopher who proposed ‘traditionalist’ ideology that was anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic.¹⁸

Despite decades of suppression of fascistic ideologies in the wake of the Nazi-Fascist genocide, today, new digital technologies have facilitated the creation of a space where such fervent nationalism (and neo-fascism) can once again find supporters—and more than just through Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, 8chan and other underbelly websites where fascistic ideologies fester.¹⁹ While many elements of the radical right were suppressed in the decades following the Holocaust, today, neo-fascists, white nationalists, far-right traditionalists and new groups such as the ‘Identitarian Bloc’ have used the internet to form an interconnected global movement by creating what I call ‘digital imagined communities’—to borrow from political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson.²⁰ The internet has facilitated the ideological reconstitution of the far-right, bringing back hateful discourses that once were either culturally taboo or illegal in many European countries after the Holocaust. While quicker knowledge distribution has sparked democratic uprisings—such as the Arab Spring—digital media publication has also allowed for the rise of anti-liberal, anti-democratic movements that extol ‘traditionalism’ and white nationalism.

Today, Arktos specialises in publishing mostly short, readable texts by resurrected proto-fascist and European New Right philosophers, and a hotchpotch of pseudo-historical and mythological works that seek to restore what many of the ITP/Arktos authors convey as a lost sense of white European identity.²¹ Co-founder Jacob Senholt has described the European New Right as:

…a cultural and intellectual network presenting itself as working towards the preservation and rekindling of European culture, tradition and identity. It utilizes a metapolitical strategy aimed at inspiring a revolutionary change in the current cultural hegemony of the global liberal-democratic system, and works towards the establishment of new tribal communities.²²

Rejecting pluralism, democracy and globalism, Nationalist-Traditionalism has found appeal amongst the disenfranchised libertarian-minded, religious, white, working class in Europe—and increasingly in the United States. Often, Nationalist-Traditionalists show a propensity for scapegoating minority groups. Whereas many practitioners of esotericism and traditionalism once eschewed Christianity as a non-European tradition,²³ ITP/Arktos has accepted more orthodox iterations of Christianity as a category of traditionalism.²⁴ Today, many of their most recent texts reflect an admixture of European paganism and more conservative iterations of Christianity.

Because of ITP, and publishers like it, the ideas of one of the founding figures of esoteric-traditionalist thought, Julius Evola, have gained new interest amongst this sect of right-wing extremists, particularly in the present-day writings (and YouTube rants) of Russian Traditionalist Alexander Dugin, who both publishes with Arktos and is a known advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin.²⁵ However, this combination of nationalism and traditionalism is hardly new. Nationalist-Traditionalism was present in early Nazism,²⁶ and a Christianised version of this worldview also has precedent in the National-Catholicism found under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain (1936–1975).²⁷ Today’s Nationalist-Traditionalists have found common enemies in the Enlightenment values of rationalism, secularism and liberalism—an antagonism perhaps most infamously present in Steve Bannon’s worldview, a Catholic who has lauded nationalism and traditionalism and also served as White House Chief Strategist and campaign manager for American President Donald Trump.²⁸

Arktos has unexpectedly become a nexus between Russian Nationalism, the European New Right and the American Alt-Right.²⁹ Through a case study of Arktos, we can better understand a rising anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-globalist, anti-modern, global network that desires a white ethno-state founded on ‘traditionalist’ ideologies. ITP/Arktos has recognised how print can be more effective than digital technology in some cases, and vice versa, allowing them to create a variety of ways to ‘unite the right’—and to appeal to new audiences. In short, Arktos is attempting to play the long game, with the singular goal in mind: re-writing history by proposing a fascistic future. Arktos not only proposes to sell books, but more importantly intends to legitimate alternative visions of history and to disseminate them in the public sphere and the deep web, as articulated in Marc Tuters’ chapter in this volume.

ABCs of Arktos: People, Ideas and Movements

Over the last decade, ITP/Arktos has created a trans-European and global Nationalist-Traditionalist network, translating and editing texts that have appealed to supporters of both nationalist and neo-traditionalist ideologies. As a point of comparison, in the late summer of 2017, Arktos had 43,130 followers on Facebook, while Verso Books, a well-respected, leftist-leaning academic publishing house founded in 1970, had 77,738 followers.³⁰^,³¹ While seemingly a small publisher, with fewer than 200 total publications to its name, Arktos certainly is attempting to position itself as a bridge to popularise far-right ideologies. The company website has described itself as such:

ARKTOS MEDIA is the result of a novel idea that was arrived at simultaneously by several individuals scattered across many parts of the globe, causing us to combine forces to bring this idea to fruition. The basis of this idea is our common observation that there are a growing number of individuals who believe that something has gone terribly wrong with the modern world.³²

To better understand the mostly male-dominated ITP/Arktos, it is useful to understand where many of the main actors come from, as well as their ideological agendas, particularly, co-founder Jacob Senholt, former editor John Morgan, C.E.O. Daniel Friberg and former editor Jason Reza Jorjani.

In August 2017, on his Academia.edu page, a social media platform for academics, ITP/Arktos co-founder Jacob Senholt described his expertise as ranging from ‘Western esoterism to Vedic theology and includ[ing] religio-political movements, such as the New Right’.³³ Senholt’s research interests included: Indo-European Studies; Traditionalism; Julius Evola; the New Right; Counter-Enlightenment; Antimodernism; Aryanism; and Fascism.³⁴ Obviously, the study of these topics is not inherently problematic; however, there is certainly a difference between the study of far-right/fascistic ideologies and beliefs and the active promotion of them. Through their publications, ITP/Arktos has promoted many of these ideologies listed by Senholt. However, to Senholt’s credit, as early as 2014, on his own personal website, he claimed to be a strong supporter of democracy and rejected totalitarianism.³⁵^,³⁶^,³⁷ Senholt went on to defend his doctoral dissertation on 1 September 2017, titled, Identity Politics of the European New Right: Inspirations, Ideas and Influence. The dissertation was directed by Ole Morsing and Mark Sedgwick, both of Aarhus University in Denmark. On his blog, Traditionalists: A Blog for the Study of Traditionalism and the Traditionalists, following Senholt’s dissertation defence, Mark Sedgwick published this announcement:

A PhD dissertation on the New Right, covering…the impact of Traditionalism, has just been successfully defended at Aarhus University… In the dissertation, Senholt distinguishes three main inspirations: the “Counter‑Enlightenment” from Herder onwards, the Conservative Revolution from Spengler onwards, and Traditionalism from Guénon onwards. Even if New Right thinkers sometimes criticize Traditionalism and try to distance themselves from it, its impact still remains clear.

For ideas, Senholt stresses especially “metapolitics,” the idea that politics can be changed by changing the way issues are conceived and discussed. For influence, Senholt notes that the New Right is suddenly important and everywhere. This, he thinks, is because circumstances have changed, not because the New Right has. The New Right has actually been saying much the same thing for thirty years, without having much impact. Now, suddenly, issues relating to identity, to migration and globalization, have given it traction.

A fine dissertation.³⁸

Responding to this announcement was John Morgan, who posted, ‘Congratulations to Dr. Senholt, in the hope that he will continue the work of making alternative viewpoints better-known in the Academy’.³⁹ Sedgwick’s blog has become a sort of node connecting scholars of traditionalism and traditionalist activists.⁴⁰ While Senholt’s dissertation is not yet available publicly at the time of this writing, one reader of that work has privately commented to me that they were ‘disturbed by his evasiveness and attempts to airbrush out fascism and neo-Nazism in the background of some of his Scandinavian fellow travellers in it’.⁴¹

Beginning in 2007, the ITP website listed the aforementioned John Morgan (b. 1973) as a member of the team. Some years later, in public events, Morgan was presented as one of the co-founders of ITP, despite not being listed on the original ITP website or in the initial filing documents for either ITP or Arktos.⁴² Morgan’s ITP biography described him as interested in traditionalist perspectives, the European New Right and mysticism. He has translated the work of fascist/traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola. Ardently devoted to his mission, Morgan lived amongst Hare Krishnas for five years in India during ITP/Arktos’ early years—later moving Arktos’ operations to Budapest from Mumbai.⁴³ He later became both Editor-and-Chief and a director of Arktos.

By the spring of 2010, the ITP website posted the company was ‘no more’ and had been ‘supplanted’ by Arktos. The announcement proclaimed:

Arktos is the result of a collaboration between the former staff of Integral Tradition Publishing and some new colleagues in Scandinavia. While we retain many of the same aims that ITP had, with Arktos we believe that we have crafted something that is genuinely unique. With our catalogue…we want to provide the resources for individuals of many different inclinations to find alternatives to the onslaught of modernity.⁴⁴

The transition from ITP to Arktos began a shift from a focus on occultism to one that more explicitly supported white nationalism.

Arktos was registered in the United Kingdom in 2009, listing Boch as its founding director (who at the time was residing in Powai, Mumbai). Initially, ITP was a 50% shareholder of Arktos, while a company called NFSE Media AB, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, owned the other half—represented by Swede Daniel Friberg (b. 1978). NFSE Media AB (with its legal name being listed as Motpol AB) was established in 2005 as a magazine and sound recording publisher, for which Friberg was listed as its director.⁴⁵

Senholt was appointed as a second director of Arktos on 1 January 2010, with Friberg listed as third director as of 28 January 2010.⁴⁶ From Arktos’ founding until 2016, Friberg also served many directorial positions at Wiking Mineral (now called Svenska Bergsbruk)—a Swedish mining company founded in 2005. For a publishing company founded on a rejection of modernity and globalism, Arktos’ team heavily relied upon technology and globalism to both communicate amongst each other and to connect to potential customers. Moreover, by living in India, Arktos’ staff reduced production and living costs. Senholt and Boch officially left their director positions at Arktos in 2011 and 2012.⁴⁷

Already in 2012, Friberg was hosting a seminar called ‘Identitarian Ideas’, which in that year was themed ‘Identity Geopolitics: Towards a Multi-Polar World’. One observer noted that participants of the conference wore ‘[p]ressed khakis, wingtips, suits, and cherry-red sweaters on top of button-up shirts’.⁴⁸ As Cynthia Miller-Idriss argues, ‘clothing acts as a potential gateway to far right scenes, facilitating access, communicating political views, helping far right youth find others with similar opinions and attitudes, and providing some measure of credibility to insiders’.⁴⁹ By consistently wearing preppy clothing, the far-right has attempted to normalise their ideologies into mainstream society through their aesthetic. These far-right ‘identitarians’ look more like they belong to the William F. Buckley conservativism of the mid-twentieth century than the skinheads of the late twentieth century. Friberg, through the promotion of an aesthetic, has attempted to convey a certain legitimacy. One will note that the aesthetic of Arktos is crisp, yet still harkens to images that recall a sort of mythological past of Vikings, Celts and the like.

Friberg was also co-founder of the so-called ‘metapolitical think-tank’ Motpol (NFSE Media AB).⁵⁰ According to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Friberg and Motpol were also listed as the administrative contact for Metapedia.org, a Wiki website billed as ‘the alternative encyclopedia’, catering to far-right ideologies and interpretations of history.⁵¹ In the spring of 2017, Friberg, now C.E.O. of Arktos, said, ‘After more than a century of retreat, marginalization and constant concessions to an ever more aggressive and demanding left, the true European right is returning with a vengeance’.⁵² This assertion of a ‘true European right’ implies that other contemporary right-affiliated parties are somehow inauthentic—suggesting that the true right, a more fascistic and traditionalist right, was the ‘true’ right.

More recently, Arktos built a coalition with American white nationalist Richard Spencer (b. 1978), a prominent figurehead for the American Alt-Right movement. Spencer has called for a ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ in the United States and Europe,⁵³ and currently serves as president and director of the innocuous sounding ‘National Policy Institute’, which is in fact a white nationalist think tank based in the United States. Spencer is also known for organising white nationalist rallies at public universities and spaces nationwide, which have increasingly contained contingents of self-proclaimed Nazis, neo-fascists and the Ku Klux Klan.⁵⁴^,⁵⁵ Spencer, while studying his PhD in modern European intellectual history,⁵⁶ claims to have mentored American President Donald Trump’s senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller (b. 1985), when the two participated in Duke University’s Conservative Union.⁵⁷^,⁵⁸^,⁵⁹ Spencer dropped out of his doctoral program; Miller went on to serve as the founding national coordinator for the Terrorism Awareness Project, an alarmist organisation that stokes fear of Muslims, and then to the White House.⁶⁰ The US-based Southern Poverty Law Center further exposed Miller’s own far-right connections and ideologies in a more recent investigation.⁶¹

In January 2017, Spencer and Friberg launched the incendiary AltRight.com—a far-right website run by Arktos collaborators under the co-editorship of the two men. RightOn.net, another far-right propaganda website previously operated by Friberg, soon redirected to AltRight.com, incorporating much of its previous content.⁶² The website’s aesthetic was both minimalist and relatively well-designed; at its launch, the website claimed, ‘The challenge for us is to be as accessible as possible—to reach new hearts and minds—while being as as [sic] groundbreaking and challenging as possible’.⁶³ The website’s masthead listed Richard Spencer as its American editor, and Daniel Friberg as its European Editor, Irani-American and Lecturer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology,⁶⁴ Jason Reza Jorjani (b. 1981), as its culture editor, and a Hungary-based Swede, Tor Westman (b. 1988), as its technical director. All sat on the AltRight.com’s board of directors.⁶⁵ In the summer of 2017, Friberg served as Arktos’ C.E.O., Jorjani as editor-in-chief, Westman as chief marketing officer. All three were registered as directors of Arktos.⁶⁶

Jorjani, who quickly took a prominent role in the Alt-Right globally, received his BA and MA from New York University, and his PhD in philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Beginning in October 2016, Jorjani served as Editor-and-Chief of Arktos. Jorjani has described himself as ‘…an Iranian-American and native New Yorker of Persian and northern European descent’.⁶⁷ During this time, Jorjani’s work particularly was interested in the so-called ‘Iranian Renaissance’, promoting a vision of Iran as white and Aryan, calling the Persian Empire the ‘world’s greatest ‘Aryan Imperium’’—seen in Jorjani’s writing about the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Rumi.⁶⁸

Jorjani’s connection with the Arktos and the Alt-Right even came to the attention of his doctoral alma mater, SUNY at Stony Brook. The department discussed the alumnus in a meeting held in the autumn of 2016. In the department’s meeting minutes, one unidentified faculty member stated,

One of our Ph.D. alumni is involved in the Aryan white supremacist movement. Is easily accessible on the internet. I have watched a couple of his videos and they are appropriately described as Aryan white supremacist, couched in Western philosophical tradition.⁶⁹

Denying that he was a white supremacist, in a fit of outrage, just shortly before the launch of AltRight.com, an indignant Jorjani posted an open letter titled ‘Forever Deplorably Yours’⁷⁰ to RightOn.com, Friberg’s propaganda website:

I am the Editor-in-Chief of the leading press of the New Right or Alt-Right…These movements are connected by an Indo-European philosophical tradition that extends back through Heidegger and the Kyoto School to Nietzsche, Schelling, Hegel, Bruno, Suhrawardi, Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Gautama Buddha, and Zarathustra. This Aryan heritage has roots in the Earth that are thousands of years old and the branches of its tree will grow through distant star systems…To imagine that you can label my thought “NeoNazi” or “White Supremacist” and then file me away in your prison of prefab and facile categorizations is delusional and it only demonstrates your own spiritual poverty.⁷¹

Jorjani’s attempt to tie Persia today to an Aryan heritage—claiming this heritage as being rooted in the earth, or soil—is significant. It mirrors a fascist belief in ‘bodenständigkeit’, a sort of ‘rootedness in the soil’.⁷²

As Jorjani alludes, bodenständigkeit was a belief propagated by the aforementioned philosopher, Martin Heidegger, as well as Nazi eugenicist Hans Günther,⁷³ who believed that what distinguished Germans from Jews was the German connectedness to the soil, as opposed to the supposed ‘uprootedness’ of the Jews.⁷⁴ As Dontella Di Cesare explains:

[R]ootlessness had a broader meaning for Heidegger than simply the lack of one’s own land…The Jews were not the only nomads, devoid of a land and state—or, rather, incapable of creating the political structure of a state. Their rootlessness was considered as that unboundness…The absence of one’s own land, also seen as the lack of a background and a foundation, was a peculiarity of a superficial way of existing, without ties—in fact, with a breaking of ties. Above all, a breaking of the tie with Being.⁷⁵

In essence, without being, those who are ‘unbound’ from the soil are denied their humanity. Although Heidegger was an advocate of this belief, it was far from exclusive to his philosophy as the nineteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant understood the ‘servant-master’ relationship had ‘inextricably conferred upon the Jewish people a condition of perpetual slavery’.⁷⁶ This concern for ‘rootedness’ flowed from Kant to G.W.F. Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche to Günther, Heidegger and Evola to the New Right of the 1960s to Alexander Dugin, the Identitarian movement and the authors promoted by Arktos today.⁷⁷

For Jorjani to be accepted by white nationalists like Richard Spencer—the two even sharing living and work quarters for a time in the Arlington/Washington, DC area—,⁷⁸ it made sense that Jorjani emphasise his own whiteness—most likely why he adamantly claimed both Northern European heritage in conjunction with an Aryan-Persian identity. By connecting Aryan identity to Persian soil, Jorjani could lay claim to whiteness and European identity. To be sure, Jorjani’s insistence to claim Persian Aryan blood is also part of the very real question of where Europe (and the West) ends, and what does it mean to be white.

In fact, a version of this bodenständigkeit discourse even made its way into popular rhetoric used at white supremacist rallies—particularly in the Richard Spencer-organised protest against the removal of statues in Charlottesville, Virginia that celebrated the racist American Confederacy, where violent protestors marched chanting ‘Blood and Soil!’⁷⁹ Notably, Daniel Friberg walked side-by-side with Spencer (seen in the earlier image). In Charlottesville, one white supremacist reporter for The Daily Stormer, a far-right propaganda publication, commented to a reporter for VICE that the racist movement wants to show they are not ‘atomized individuals’—that they are more than an internet community. The reporter emphasised the goal of removing ‘degenerate’ populations from ‘white countries’ (read: ethnic cleansing).⁸⁰ Importantly, as that white supremacist reporter makes clear, although much of the organising is occurring online, it is important for those individuals to be a visible force in the public sphere—a ‘counterpublic’ as it were.⁸¹

When this violence broke out, Jorjani was in San Francisco, California meeting with computer scientist, Jacques Vallée, whose work with ARPANET contributed to the creation of the modern internet.⁸² At about the same time, Jorjani also claimed to have been in ‘a private meeting concerning research and development of exotic technology that may someday serve the Iranian Air Force’.⁸³ Jorjani was making steps towards leaving Arktos to start a new organisation, the so-called ‘Iranian United Front’, to bring together what he called ‘the most well established and prominent nationalist political parties of Iran together into a single coalition, one that transcends the division between monarchists and republicans’.⁸⁴ On his personal blog, Jorjani indicated his intention to sell his shares of the Alt-Right Corporation to Friberg and Spencer so that they might stay with its leadership. He warned:

…from now on, former associates within the Alt-Right movement of Europe and North America ought to consider any interactions with me as diplomatic relations with a representative of the coming post-Islamic political order of Iran and the wider Persianate world. This point cannot be overemphasized. Over the next few years, we will be watching with a hawk’s eye to identify the true friends and enemies of our archeo-futurist Iran.⁸⁵

In an email sent out in late 30 August, Arktos announced the appointment of Charles Lyons, a regular contributor for Alt-Right.com, as chief administrative officer and Head of Arktos US, taking over Jorjani’s duties. As of this writing, Jorjani planned to continue his advocacy for the Iranian United Front, but was suspended in September 2017 from his position at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, a public university in Newark, after a video of him circulated online promising the return of concentration camps in Europe, as well as Adolf Hitler’s image to European monies.⁸⁶^,⁸⁷ To be sure, Jorjani, a formative figure in the current vision of Arktos, has moved from lightly espousing fascistic ideals to advocating for what many would describe as Nazism.

Does History Repeat Itself?: Cyclical History and the Rebirth of Far-Right Ideology

In 2006, ITP’s website pronounced an affinity for orthodox texts—whether ‘Vedic-Aryan, Islamic or Catholic’.⁸⁸ ITP posited a belief in the ‘cycle of meta-history’—what their website described as golden, silver, bronze and iron ages.⁸⁹ For this small Danish company, the contemporary historical moment represented a so-called iron age, the low point in the cycle. Ironically, despite being a transnational online company, many of the works sold by ITP rejected both globalism and modernity. ITP desired to restart the so-called metahistorical cycle—to begin a new golden age.⁹⁰ Indeed, if Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ in the 1990s,⁹¹ ITP sought to restore some imagined, lost past (that never really existed), thus restarting the cycle. To do this, ITP/Arktos promoted what I call ‘alt-histories’—alternative imaginings of the historical past (or, to borrow from United States Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, what we might call ‘alternative facts’, or false or intentionally misrepresented facts, which I argue are reconstructed into alternate histories that are used to legitimate a political régime) so that to construct a new sort of future based on that imagined, ahistorical past. The Alt-Right’s project, in tantamount, advocates for a white ethno-state, spanning from Europe to the United States legitimated by an imagined homogeneous past. Despite being a refrain repeated ad nauseam to historians, history only repeats itself when people no longer see themselves as historical actors. History only repeats itself when we do not learn from our mistakes, or worse, fail to recognise them.

Established by many of the original ITP collaborators, most of whom no longer are with the company, Arktos dominates the field of far-right publishing, and has published and translated authors with the purpose of radically transforming the conservative and neoliberal right—calling forth a return of the ‘real right’, as Arktos C.E.O., Daniel Friberg, articulates in his less-than-eloquent manifesto work published in 2015.⁹² Today, Arktos publishes books in 17 European languages, with titles such as Dissent Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology; A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth; The Colonisation of Europe; The Indo-Europeans: In Search of the Homeland; and Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right—just to name a few. While Arktos’ publications rarely evoke the term ‘fascism’ directly, when taken together, the hundreds of books published by Arktos reflect a fascistic, far-right, white supremacist ideology. Indeed, the term ‘fascist’ or ‘neo-fascist’ might simply not be adequate to describe Arktos’ neo-traditionalist, Alt-Right, Identitarian thought. The aforementioned recent publications, Alt-Right/far-right guides, false histories and apocalyptic mythic tales, targeted towards Christians and young people, hint to where the Alt-Right/New Right seeks to expand its membership.

Former editor-in-chief John Morgan said in a speech given in 2015 at Identitarian Ideas, an annual far-right conference held by the publisher:

What Arktos is trying to do could perhaps be summarized as trying to find alternatives to Modernity. Which basically means alternatives to the current liberal order, which is based on individualism and materialism, and the dominance of the state over every aspect of its people, which runs contrary to anything traditional or communitarian, and it’s spread everywhere across the world…Arktos’ idea is that we should take a broad approach to the desire to seek an alternative to liberalism.⁹³

In that talk, Morgan also cited Michael O’Meara’s New Culture, New Right and Tomislav Sunić’s Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, both of whom draw from Alain de Benoist and the French-based ethno-nationalist think tank GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne). Morgan makes his rejection of modernity clear, as well as his diagnosis of what is to be done ⁹⁴:

[T]he radical liberals have managed to convince the vast majority of people that the mode of life we are in today is something completely normal…Therefore, what we need to do is to imitate their example, but in our own way. This means waging war on the cultural as well as the political level. It may be difficult to discern on the surface how books on political philosophy…help in this endeavor, but I would argue that it is very difficult to motivate people simply using straight-forward political arguments…People need a vision of the future that can inspire them, and give them something not only to fight for, but to give them motivation in their daily lives. I believe that books remain one of the best ways of instilling this sort of vision in people.⁹⁵

Here, Morgan describes Arktos’ ‘metapolitical’ strategy to launch a culture war that inspires nationalism—that seeks to ‘return’ the West to the ‘traditions’ of the past. Morgan also imagines some sort of pure past where culture has not been corrupted. For Morgan, and similarly minded traditionalists, modernity represents a break from heritage; he does not see culture as pluralistic and in motion. Like Nazi-Fascists before him, anything that does not fit into his imagined Golden Age mythology is degeneracy.

Morgan remarks, if he were to pick one term to describe Arktos, he would borrow the term ‘true right’, which he describes as coined by the ‘Italian traditionalist philosopher Evola’, who defined it as ‘those principles which were accepted and seen as normal by every well-born person everywhere in the world prior to 1789’. By marking 1789, Morgan (and Evola) clearly references the French Revolution as the epicentre of liberal democracy. Moreover, by citing the emphases on ‘well-born’ Morgan and Evola express a desire for the classism, castes and hierarchies of the Old Régime—a world before the wide acceptance of democracy, equality or egalitarianism. Morgan argues:

…[I]f we are to defeat our liberal, globalist enemy, we ourselves must adopt an alternative form of globalism, seeking alliances and common ground with individuals and groups who share our interests everywhere, even outside of Europe…Only together, by working with nationalists and traditionalists everywhere can we succeed.⁹⁶

While Senholt and Boch had left Arktos, Morgan continued his affiliation with Arktos until spring 2017, when in-fighting with Friberg resulted in Morgan’s dismissal.⁹⁷^,⁹⁸ With Morgan’s ouster, Daniel Friberg had wrestled control over the print and digital publishing fiefdom of the European Alt-Right.⁹⁹ One might speculate that Arktos’ toleration of non-European traditionalist schools of thought might continue to be diminished in Arktos’ catalogue in the years to come, given Morgan’s departure and particular interest in the occult.

Both Boch and Morgan were excoriated online in an article written by Arktos in June 2017 for having had raised questions of embezzlement against Friberg, which were never proven. At the end of the incident, which resulted in the dismissal of several members of the Arktos staff, frozen PayPal accounts and legal action, Arktos, as a company, told their side of the situation, calling attention to Boch, who was referred to as the former accountant for Arktos instead of as co-founder and former director. The incident highlighted some of the internal weakness within the organisation—e.g. a reliance Arktos has on the internet. Without the internet payment service, PayPal, the company was in peril. The incident also demonstrated ways racism has caused problems internally within Arktos. To diminish the accusations of embezzlement lodged by Boch and Morgan, Arktos stated in a straw-man attack: ‘Curiously, Boch is a member of the Hare Krishna cult—famous around the world for panhandling and its hokey moralizing—and is married to and has a family with a woman of dark complexion’. The article also noted Morgan’s time as a Hare Krishna.¹⁰⁰ These critiques attempted to discredit the men in what can be understood as a racialised attack against Boch for marrying a ‘woman of dark complexion’ and against Morgan for having been a Hare Krishna during his time in India. To treat what amounts to melatonin quantity and religious practices as an accusation indeed highlights the ways racism plays out even inside of the far-right publisher.

Since leaving Arktos, Morgan has gone on to join as a book editor for the ethno-nationalist publisher Counter-Currents, which also publishes and distributes many of the same authors as Arktos.¹⁰¹ Indeed, the Counter-Currents website echoes some of the type of language previously found on ITP:

Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd., takes its guiding principles from French Traditionalist René Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World…History is cyclical, and its prevailing current is downward, declining from a Golden Age through Silver and Bronze Ages to a Dark Age…We live in a Dark Age, in which decadence reigns and all natural and healthy values are inverted.¹⁰²

Is Arktos Fascist?: Tracing a Tradition

In 2007, ITP’s website listed books by authors such as Italian traditionalist/fascist thinker, Julius Evola, far-right French nationalist and founder of the Action Française journal, Charles Maurras (1868–1952), and Michael O’Meara (b. 1946), author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, amongst numerous other far-right authors. The website described itself as being ‘devoted to distributing and publishing books on traditionalism, metapolitics, initiation, esoterism and the crisis of the modern world. We also carry books on the religious traditions of Europe and beyond, including the Indo-European, Christian and Islamic traditions’.¹⁰³

From its beginning, ITP/Arktos heavily promoted the work of far-right philosopher Julius Evola, whose ideas were popular amongst fascist thinkers and in the press under Benito Mussolini. Politically, Evola located himself to the right of fascism. Like many of his fascist contemporaries, Evola wanted to eschew modernity to restore an imagined, glorious past,¹⁰⁴ delving into a sort of occultism that obscured the rhetoric of his fascistic ideologies. In the wake of the Second World War, Evola’s ideologies became heavily coded as ‘traditionalism’ as a means of survival in an intellectual world that no longer tolerated the xenophobia of fascism as it had during and prior to the Holocaust and the deaths of millions of people.

This coded far-right ideology was especially important for Evola’s philosophical survival given fascism’s disfavour in postwar Europe.¹⁰⁵ Today, Evola’s coded language has become useful for a European far-right living in a climate that until recently did not tolerate hate speech, having learned that toleration of intolerant hate speech, a form of violence in and of itself, only allows for more violent actions to escalate. Europeans, generally, had learned that to tolerate intolerance was to become a bystander to hate.¹⁰⁶ This was understood as the ‘paradox of tolerance’, or the way in which tolerating intolerance can ultimately only lead to more extreme intolerance writ large—an idea first elaborated by Viennese Jewish philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 magnum opus The Open Society and Its Enemies.¹⁰⁷

In the second half of the twentieth century, the tragedy of the Holocaust became Europe’s rationale for a popular belief in the value of pluralism. Despite this new pluralism, Evola’s writing has continued to inspire far-right ideologues.¹⁰⁸ Today, the far right fights for Evola’s idealised ‘traditional’ past rooted in a pre-Enlightenment, imagined, homogenous idea of Europe—one that never was.¹⁰⁹ In fact, American white nationalist Richard Spencer has called Evola ‘one of the most fascinating men of the twentieth century’.¹¹⁰ According to Mark Sedgwick, one of the dissertation advisors of ITP/Arktos co-founder Christian Senholt, the Greek far-right party, Golden Dawn, lists Evola first on their recommended reading list.¹¹¹

While many of the ITP/Arktos authors frame their ideologies not as explicitly fascist (in the pre-Second World War sense of the term), many of the authors, such as Evola, certainly considered themselves fascistic, and even to the right of fascist ideology. Similar to how the Spanish Falange founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera was not strictly an Italian fascist, he certainly was a follower of Mussolini’s ideologies and held fascistic ideologies. ITP/Arktos’ authors and followers’ ideologies are inheritors of this fascist past, and in many ways are reanimating a sort of zombie fascism that avoids calling itself as such to avoid criticism, as virulent as ever—whether disguised as ‘the New Right’ or the ‘Alt-Right’, the ideologies are contemporary iterations of fascism.

ITP/Arktos’ careful selection of authors often has skirted explicitly fascist ideologies (that is to say the books are often ideologically close to fascism, but not explicitly fascist avant la lettre). Like historical Nazi-Fascism, many of the works sold by ITP/Arktos positioned themselves as anti-modernist. The books sold and published by the company were either predecessors to fascism (Evola), or arose in the aftermath of the Second World War (the New Right), giving plausible deniability to their Nazi-Fascist roots—especially important given the sensitivity to Nazi-Fascist propaganda in most European countries. As Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg have demonstrated, the linage from the European New Right to early twentieth-century fascist ideology is clear.¹¹²

Meta-Histories and Politics

Like how Nazi Germany looked to the pre-Weimar years, Spain’s Falange to its imperial past and Italian Fascists to the fallen Roman Empire, the works published by ITP/Arktos have looked towards an imagined past where Europe was ‘pure’ to reconstruct an idealised future where a white ethno-state could exist—to accomplish this they claim to use ‘metapolitics’ to deconstruct what they see as a leftist cultural hegemony that has been in place since at least the post-Second World War era. Jacques Marlaud (1944–2014), the former President of the GRECE—a French-based ethno-nationalist think tank founded in 1968 by philosopher and founder of the European ‘Nouvelle Droite’ (New Right), Alain de Benoist (b. 1943), a dominant far right academic school of thought—defined their so-called metapolitics as

any work of reflection or analysis, any diffusion of ideas, any cultural practice liable to influence political society over the long term. It is no longer a matter of taking power but of providing those in power with ideological, philosophical, and cultural nourishment that can shape (or contradict) their decisions.¹¹³

That is to say, their far-right project is intended to operate so that to move those in power further towards what they saw as an alternative politics. This ‘metapolitics’ posited a ‘third way’ separate from a left/right binary—a new type of politics supposedly drawing from pre-Enlightenment thought. The New Right employs what Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg call ‘right wing Gramscism’ to overturn the supposed liberal-leftist cultural hegemony.¹¹⁴ In reality, this ‘third way’ reflects echoes of fascistic ideologies harkening back to Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Julius Evola.

The word ‘fascist’ can be a difficult one to negotiate, as much of the writing by followers of GRECE does not explicitly claim fascism; however, they certainly lend themselves to fascist tendencies.¹¹⁵ Followers of GRECE have blamed liberalism (in the broadest sense of the word—including, but not limited to, democratic systems of governance based on the ideas of equality and pluralism) for the rejection of ‘traditional’ beliefs—primarily scapegoating ‘cultural Marxism’ for a decadent and degenerate modern worldview. While the New Right claims distain for ‘cultural Marxism’, they, too, draw on Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s theories of cultural hegemony—hoping to use Gramsci’s theoretical frameworks to flip what they see as the dominance of ‘cultural Marxism’ in Western society today. This is partially due to the historical moment in which GRECE was founded—in the midst of Europe’s youth revolt, May ’68 and the Hippie ‘Summer of Love’—GRECE vilified leftist philosophical thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse (and the Frankfort School of Critical Theory), who taught a generation of influential leaders and scholars such as Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman and Kathy Acker. For GRECE, and its inheritor ideologues, such as the Identitarians, the May ’68ers are to blame for the rejection of traditionalism in Europe. They believe young people were seduced by the likes of French philosophers Marcuse and Guy Debord into believing in what they would call a degenerate worldview.

Arktos has even published the English language translation of one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s advisors, the aforementioned Alexander Dugin—known for posting Islamophobic rants and videos that strongly support American president Donald Trump on YouTube.¹¹⁶ In 2014, the self-proclaimed platform for the American Alt-Right,¹¹⁷ Breitbart News, under the stewardship of Steve Bannon, called Dugin ‘Putin’s Rasputin’.¹¹⁸ Bannon has even hinted at knowledge of Dugin’s esoteric-traditionalist inspiration, even citing Julius Evola in an interview.¹¹⁹ Dugin sees himself as an inheritor of both the ideologies of GRECE and Evola. This was particularly surprising at the time due to Evola’s name recognition being primarily limited to followers of the New Right and scholars of fascism.

In fact, Arktos’ website even featured photos of Dugin at a meeting held with Arktos’ staff in India.¹²⁰ Dugin, a grizzled, bearded man that strikes a remarkable resemblance to the infamous mystic and advisor, Rasputin, has written numerous books published by Arktos, including: The Fourth Political Theory (2012), Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism (2014), Putin vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right (2014), The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory (2017). Significantly, Dugin also wrote Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning for Washington Summit Publishers (2014), the publishing arm of Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute. In the work, Dugin explicitly connects his own philosophy to that of the Nazi philosopher.¹²¹ To raise money to publish and translate Dugin’s work, Arktos even has used the digital fundraising platform, Kickstarter.¹²² Once published, these books are typically sold on the Arktos website and on the online retailer, Amazon. To be sure, while Dugin’s stage presence is lacking, the company has managed to find ways to promote him online.

Most of the Dugin translations for Arktos were done by Canadian Michael Millerman, who translated many of these while studying a PhD in political science at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Ruth Marshall. These translated works include: The Fourth Political Theory (2012), The Last War of the World-Island: Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia (2015), The Rise of The Fourth Political Theory (2017), and Ethnos and Society (2018). Millerman’s personal website references forthcoming work, including: Foundations of Ethnosociology, Political Platonism, and Theory of a Multipolar World.¹²³ Millerman’s dissertation, defended in 2018, was titled Beginning with Heidegger: A Comparative Study of Four Receptions of Martin Heidegger by Political Thinkers. As a graduate student, Millerman claims he was punished instead of rewarded for introducing his department to Dugin’s philosophy. After having had four of his dissertation committee members quit during the process, indicating clear difficulty in finding a place for Dugin’s philosophy in the academy, Millerman decided to leave academia (for now).¹²⁴

In his 2014 doctoral dissertation proposal, Millerman wrote about his own exposure to Dugin’s philosophy in a lecture on what Dugin calls the ‘Fourth Political Theory’. Millerman writes:

Besides piquing my interest sufficiently to motivate me to translate his book The Fourth Political Theory, published in English in 2012, Dugin’s lecture gave me a key to understanding my own academic experience as a political thinker attracted, theoretically, to certain aspects of contra-liberal conservative thought. I had noticed the common phenomenon that the term “fascist” was often employed to delegitimize forms of political thought that were neither liberal nor left of liberal.¹²⁵

After delving further into Dugin’s work, Millerman claims,

I began to wonder whether there was an opportunity not only to think from “the fourth political theory” and thus avoid being thoughtlessly dismissed as “fascistic,” but also to take “fascism” more seriously as a political theory than it had been presented from within the framework of the prevalent first and second political theories.

Indeed, as Millerman indicates, the work of far-right philosophers like Dugin and Heidegger is certainly fuelling young far-right academics to use that work to legitimate their own ideologies. As political scientist Ronald Beiner argues in his recent book outlining the ways far-right intellectuals have been returning to the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger,

Richard Spencer and Alexander Dugin, scary as they are, are not unique cases. They are part of a new Fascist International that is becoming more and more assertive. As incredible as it may seem, the alt-right even managed to establish a beachhead in the Trump White House [referring to Steve Bannon].¹²⁶

Millerman, and Dugin alike, is drawing from a tradition that seeks to create the liberal-democratic world that emerged out of the French and American Revolutions.

Generation Identity: A Millennial Fascism for the Future

While many elements of the extreme far right were suppressed after the Second World War, neo-fascists, white nationalists, far-right traditionalists and other similar groups have re-emerged in the last decade. One prominent group is Génération Identitaire—a trans-European, networked group of primarily young people who advocate for a ‘Europe of Nations’.¹²⁷ Birthed out of a contingent of the European New Right inspired ‘Identitarian Bloc’, since their introduction in France in 2012, Génération Identitaire has quickly acquired their own autonomy separate from the Bloc and have expanded their reach precipitously, with new chapters appearing at an alarming rate. The success of this movement has occurred in large part because of the ease for like-minded individuals to connect to each other vis-à-vis the internet, forming ‘digital imagined communities’.

However, there is no Generation Identity umbrella organisation. Each locality creates its own variation, operating in a way that is similar to movements such as the 15-M movement in Spain (spring 2011), Occupy Wall Street (autumn 2011) and Black Lives Matter (summer 2013) in the United States—holding a common banner, but operating with local autonomy. Not only has Generation Identity borrowed organising strategies from the left, but they have also appropriated and used consumerist and capitalistic ideologies to promote their white supremacist beliefs—even selling Identitarian food, clothing, beer and books.¹²⁸^,¹²⁹ Targeting primarily young people, they hold camps, organise lectures, host militant training exercises in which participants all dress alike and even teach classes on marketing and graphic design for the purposes of outreach and to promote a Europe free of Islam.¹³⁰

The British strain of Generation Identity, which curiously includes Ireland, has even made references to the Spanish Reconquista, which culminated with the Catholic Kings, Isabel and Fernando, expelling Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula beginning in 1492, instituting strict religious rules that excised native-born Jewish and Muslim Iberians from the new Spanish state. Both Islam and Judaism had histories going back more than seven centuries. The group argues on their website:

The term Reconquista (“reconquest”) is based on the historical event of the gradual recapture of the Iberian Peninsula, which had been held by Muslim conquerors, by the successors of the Visigothic kingdoms. It’s true that today we are not facing an immediate military confrontation but the threat instead is one of self-destruction through a multicultural zeitgeist. Our fight is therefore a war of words, ideas and politics.

We, the Generation Identity, want to reconquer social spaces of discourse, which have been dominated by a left-wing hegemony. We are a loud patriotic voice that shows its face, one that is creating new pathways for the values of tradition and national pride. Love for our own and an awareness of our ethno-cultural identity are matters we take for granted and of which we should not feel ashamed. We want patriotism to become an important value for society.

We also value true freedom of expression so that these important issues will have a place in the public discourse. These are our demands and for this cause we go on the streets every day to form a phalanx for the Reconquista.¹³¹

The use of the terms ‘Reconquista’ and ‘phalanx’ is not insignificant, as they explicitly recall both the Spanish expulsion of Muslims and Jews during the early modern period and the fascist régime of Francisco Franco, whose ‘Falange’, Spanish for ‘Phalanx’, a fascist party founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, ruled Spain during the authoritarian dictatorship that lasted from 1939 to 1975. Moreover, such rhetoric also reiterates the foundational myth propagated by the Francoist régime that the Kingdom of Spain depended upon a cleansing of Spain from more than 700 years of Muslim and Jewish heritage. By recalling the Reconquista and the Falange, the group demonstrates a fear of pluralism, advocating for homogeneity of ideas, cultural practices and ethnicity—squarely a fascist tendency.

Curiously, Generation Identity members often reject the label of ‘nationalist’,¹³² but still show a marked form of xenophobia towards immigrants and antipathy towards the European Union. One speculates that because the term ‘nationalist’ has become so loaded because of the legacy of Nazism in Europe this legacy might serve as a rationale for young people to reject the term. Nevertheless, actions do often speak louder than words. In the spring of 2017, one arm of the Generation Identity movement started a campaign called ‘Defend Europe’ to fundraise so that to acquire a ship to sail the Mediterranean, near Libya, with the purpose of picking up refugees escaping from Libya and returning them to that country—hoping to find Libyans before governmental and non-governmental organisations patrolling those waters would have the chance to rescue the seafarers who gamble their lives on the open sea. Effectively, Defend Europe sought to circumvent the arrival of these refugees to European shores. In an attempt to block the Defend Europe campaign, the internet payment service company, PayPal, recently froze the organisations’ ability to accept funds—a tactic which has proven effective at slowing down the movement but has not entirely halted it. As of late summer, 2017, some 3,095 people had contributed $228,656 to the group’s crowdsourced fundraiser.¹³³^,¹³⁴^,¹³⁵^,¹³⁶ To be sure, while the label of ‘nationalist’ might be rejected, these anti-immigrant actions certainly reflect a form of xenophobia and nationalism.

Arktos Media has served as one of the primary publishers and translators for Generation Identity. Although Génération Identitaire already has a considerable following online, nearly 20,000 at the end of the summer of 2017,¹³⁷ Arktos has played an important role for the movement, funding the publication of short, accessible, aesthetically pleasing volumes that have helped to make Identitarian ideologies more appealing and understandable to white European audiences looking for a scapegoat—whether the older generations (the so called ‘May ’68ers’) or immigrants.

Generation Identity heavily relies on aesthetics and branding to appeal to its audience—a fascistic tradition, indeed. Although they are composed of loosely organised regional chapters/cells, they typically identify themselves as part of the movement through the use of a Greek-inspired, encircled ‘lambda’ symbol, often set in black, with a bright yellow background for contrast. On their website, the Identitarians employ sleek black and white videos featuring young, trendy white people who have been aggrieved by immigrants and people of colour—afraid to walk the streets, denied jobs.¹³⁸ The demand for the Generation Identity literature has been popular enough for Arktos to publish three volumes dedicated to the movement. The first volume, We are… Generation Identity, was published in 2013 by an anonymous author. The next two volumes, Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers and A Europe of Nations, were written by Markus Willinger (b. 1992). Willinger writes on behalf of all young people in a tone of indignation to his parents’ generation, ‘We go to class with 80% or more foreign-born students. Knife-mad Turks, drug-dealing Africans, and fanatical Muslims’.¹³⁹ Indeed, the alterophobia is blatant and pronounced. In A Europe of Nations, Willinger argues:

A person’s cultural identity is nearly unchangeable. Every person is moulded in early childhood, and this process can only occur again in absolutely exceptional cases…Under such circumstances, how should millions of people from the Global East suddenly become Europeans? They can’t… Our continent and our culture can’t survive if millions of non-Europeans live here. We can’t preserve our identity under these conditions… Europe and the Muslim world have always been diametrically opposed.¹⁴⁰

Arktos has also published a short volume by Alexander Dugin, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, aesthetically designed to appeal to readers of the Generation Identity books, mimicking black and yellow colour schema and short form of the Generation Identity books. Arktos has used other ploys to gain new readership. They have implemented tactics that have incentivised the selling of their books in bulk, offering a 35% discount to anyone who were to buy five or more Arktos titles to sell to friends, family and coworkers.¹⁴¹ Additional incentives in the form of discounts were also offered for recruiting new customers.¹⁴²

As is well established in the popular press, because of the internet, individuals and fringe radical right-wing groups that otherwise would have likely found themselves marginalised have been able to construct a virulent social network to connect their fascistic ideologies.¹⁴³ ‘Greetings, you proud sons of Rome’, often starts ‘The Golden One’ in his immensely popular right-wing YouTube channel. The Golden One is the pseudonym of Marcus Follin, a Swedish far-right nationalist, twenty-something who produces a continual flow of videos that are posted to YouTube. In his videos, the long, flaxen-haired bodybuilder is often seen flexing his muscles, often shirtless, decrying immigrants, cultural Marxism, globalists, multiculturalism and most infamously ‘beta-leftists’. His videos also include a strange sort of mix of workout tips, video game walkthroughs where he plays historical figures and gives his own variations of history. He talks about his family, masculinity and the need to protect one’s ‘clan’. With a reach that seemingly dwarfs that of Arktos, The Golden One, as of late summer 2017, had 7,780,923 views on YouTube, 60,539 YouTube subscribers and 20,486 fans on Facebook.¹⁴⁴^,¹⁴⁵ By the beginning of 1 September 2018, the channel, describing itself as ‘dedicated to how glorious and magnificent I am’ had risen to 10,218,647 views on YouTube, 82,617 YouTube subscribers and 22,998 followers on Facebook.¹⁴⁶^,¹⁴⁷ In effect, he acts as a translator of these texts for a broader audience. A self-proclaimed ‘alpha’, Follin considers himself an Identitarian. His aesthetic resembles a nineteenth-century romanticised idea of the past that conflates Nordic lore, ancient Rome and an ad hoc mixture of ‘barbarism’, and Renaissance festival reenactment. He frequently stops to admire his musculature, flexes his pectoral muscles spasmodically and poses awkwardly at the camera. The Swede even appeared in a podcast hosted by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke in the autumn of 2016.¹⁴⁸ An avid fan of Arktos, Follin sometimes contributes to various Motpol-related websites, and often reviews and discusses Arktos books for his fans in his videos.

In Follin’s review of Generation Identity: A Declaration of War against the ‘68ers he claims:

This is a perfect book to understand the political landscape of Europe right now. Now, there are differences in the different European nations, but in the whole Western world, a lot of things are very similar. So, Markus Willinger writes like a manifesto, a declaration of war against the 68ers. And the 68ers are basically what I call ‘beta leftists’. People who revere everything that’s unnatural, sick, unhealthy, unglorious, untraditional [sic].¹⁴⁹

In what enters into the realm of a stream-of-consciousness rant, the Golden One decries proponents of the ‘multicultural-hell project’, intellectuals and academics of the 1960s, the media and Jews as people who have wanted to ‘destroy Europe’—except for ‘regular Jews’ who are in danger because of Muslim immigrants coming to Europe.¹⁵⁰ This hesitance, to delineate Jews who want to destroy Europe, and ‘regular Jews’, potentially marks a hesitancy, or at least a recognition of what most would read as anti-Semitism.

Like many Identitarian projects, Follin has also set up a website in which he sells clothing apparel with double-headed eagles, pseudo medieval crests and shirts emblazoned with ‘Aux Armes’ with a kitschy fleur-de-lis design. The Golden One currently has a Patreon account set-up, of which he has 255 patrons regularly donating some amount of money. On that page, he writes:

Your support enables my continued metapolitical work via YouTube (videos) and my other social media. Any and all financial aid is extremely appreciated. Moreover, I can no longer rely on YouTube ad-revenue which makes your contributions here even more appreciated! I would like to aim a massive and heartfelt thank you to everyone who has aided me financially, you are contributing greatly to my metaphysical work!¹⁵¹

While seemingly harmless, Follin is perhaps an example of the real impact of Arktos—the ability to appeal to followers, who, in turn, create new followers, spreading fascistic ideologies. Moreover, he is not alone as YouTube is littered with other such personalities who imbibe Alt-Right fascistic tendencies, many preparing for cultural war against liberalism, democracy and pluralism.

Mixed Digital and Analogue Methods for the Internet Age

In April 2018, the social media platform, Facebook, suspended many of Richard Spencer associated accounts, including AltRight.com and the National Policy Institute.¹⁵² In May 2018, AltRight.com was removed from the internet by the webhosting company GoDaddy.¹⁵³ While the website has since reappeared, its content in the following months was not refreshed. While both the National Policy Institute and AltRight.com have encountered setbacks, Arktos continues strong—perhaps because of the nature of its digital and analogue presence.

On a shoestring budget, using little more than semi-decent graphic design skills, some zombified proto/neo-fascist ideologies, occultism and the internet, Arktos has seemingly carved out a place for themselves in both the digital and physical world. While seemingly vulnerable to in-fighting on occasion, Arktos has also demonstrated that they can be creative when they encounter a roadblock—constructing their own far-right publishing house when they did not have one, producing their own propaganda websites when they could not get the press attention they wanted and building networks of people that not only hold sway, but who are not afraid to join in this so-called war against equality, democracy and pluralism.

After former editor-in-chief Jason Reza Jorjani left, Arktos welcomed new collaborators to the fold, including chief translator and editor Roger Adwan and assistant art director Patrik Ehn, who joined Daniel Friberg, Tor Westman and Charles Lyons as directors. Lyons also was listed as the chief administrative officer. Gregory Lauder-Frost was listed as Head of Arktos UK. Martin Locker, who had been working with Arktos since 2015, assumed the position of assistant editor-in-chief. Editor John Bruce Leonard and Hungarian-American YouTuber Melissa Mészáros joined the regular staff; shortly thereafter, the Italy-based Leonard was promoted to editor-in-chief in February 2018.¹⁵⁴ Of himself, Leonard has said,

Here, then, Reader, is John Bruce Leonard as he would like to be: a man of letters, a man of the Muse—whenever she will have me—; a sometime poet, sometime draughtsman; a free spirit on occasion and on occasion a scholar; a dilettante in music and an aesthete by turns; an anti-modernist and enemy of most of what today is toted [sic] as “progress”; a lover of the noble past, a striver after a nobler future—may all this serve to mark me!¹⁵⁵^,¹⁵⁶

Like Nazi-Fascists before him, Leonard makes no equivocation as to his desire to push back against modernity and the pluralist world that has emerged out of the Enlightenment.¹⁵⁷

In early 2018, William Clark, who had been the registrar and North Atlantic regional coordinator for ‘Identity Evropa’,—the then United States’ branch of Generation Identity which used a stylized ‘v’ in its name as a visual cue to evoke a sort of pseudo-Latinate/European tradition (now rebranded as the American Identity Movement)—was named Head of Arktos US, representing the publisher in the United States. In a newsletter email introducing Clark to Arktos’ readers, he was described as having previously helped ‘with conference sales in the US’. In the new position, Arktos announced Clark’s responsibilities include ‘giving speeches on our behalf, as well as organising conference book stalls, marketing initiatives and other activities aimed at improving our market presence in the US’.¹⁵⁸ Prior to this appointment, in September 2017, Clark was spotted hanging posters for both Arktos and Identity Evropa on the campus of Millersville University of Pennsylvania. As seen in a tweet posted by Identity Evropa, some posters found on that campus featured an Islamophobic image of Guillaume Faye’s xenophobic book, Understanding Islam, which features a skeleton dressed in a burka on the cover. The phrase ‘So radical your professors will blush’ hung above the cover image—the Arktos logo below.¹⁵⁹^,¹⁶⁰^,¹⁶¹ Clark listed himself as a board member and administrative planner for ‘Operation Homeland’, a new white supremacist group announced by Richard Spencer in December 2017.¹⁶²

Presumably under the direction of Clark, in June 2018, Arktos initiated a ‘Collections’ program that allowed for bookshops and individual sellers to purchase Arktos books in bulk at a 50% discount off the cover price vis-à-vis their website. At that time Daniel Friberg was listed as chief executive officer, Tor Westman was chief marketing officer, Charles Lyons was chief administrative officer, John Bruce Leonard was editor-in-chief and Martin Locker was assistant editor-in-chief. The collection was described as such:

Supposing you are a professional bookseller who would like to bulk order a variety of our titles at a discount, or a private retailer looking to spread our literature and to earn money by becoming one of Arktos’ Community Retailers; or supposing you need some material to start up a book club or a study group, or would simply like to set off on a personal journey into unexplored territories of the human mind and soul — in all these cases and more, Arktos Collections are your answer.

The Arktos Collections included categories, including: ‘Essentials’, ‘Activist’, ‘Metapolitical’, ‘Traditionalist’ and ‘Fiction’. In addition, Arktos began podcast and live stream events that featured conversations with authors, hosted by John Bruce Leonard, Charles Lyons and Martin Locker.

These new digital initiatives roughly coincided with the release of Arktos’ new anthology dedicated to the Alt-Right, titled: A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders (May 2018). This anthology was the product of a much more ambitious project. At the website www.afairhearing.net, a micro-site, Arktos defined the movement as:

The alt-right is foremost an intellectual movement, but its thinkers are anything but retiring academics. Its members are seldom over 40, often from middle class backgrounds, often college educated, and always on the cutting edge of Internet culture. With their legendarily brutal attacks on liberal utopianism, their ability to dominate any social media platforms where they aren’t censored, and more recently, their controversial public demonstrations, the alt-right has become the proverbial elephant in the room of American politics.

Are these merely neo-Nazis with updated packaging, or has this movement, as its members believe, tapped into something more profound?¹⁶³

Not only does this description indicate the importance of the internet to the movement, the micro-site, launched 20 November 2017,¹⁶⁴ was used to solicit articles for the volume. The call for submissions described the project as such:

The goal is to compile approximately twenty-five essays, ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 words in length, in which the leading lights of the alt-right, as well as lesser known activists, clear the air regarding what they do and do not think about the issues that define their movement, and our time.

The target audience is white conservatives who are:

Aware of but not particularly knowledgeable about the alt-right

Not strongly biased for or against the movement

Intelligent and literate, but not necessarily erudite

The purpose of the project is to demystify and destigmatze [sic] the alt-right for regular Americans. This is meant to be a book that can be shared with potential alt-right allies or converts. The tone should be sincere, and the subject matter, style and language should not require any specialized knowledge.

Ideally, we would like your essay to feel like a personal appeal to a family member who is reasonable and smart, but who has internalized the mainstream narratives regarding the issues that define the alt-right. In terms of audience/reading level, the material should be appropriate for fans of authors such as Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn.

This book will be released in paperback, ebook and audiobook formats.¹⁶⁵

The description of the purpose of the book leaves very little room for ambiguity. The target of the Alt-Right is explicitly white conservatives, fans of Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn—regulars on mainstream conservative media channel Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, or, as Arktos would define those potential readers—so-called ‘regular Americans’. To be sure, this definition of ‘regular Americans’ by default considers non-whites as ‘other’. The collection was hastily edited and released in May 2018, with contributions by Richard Spencer, Daniel Friberg, Evan McLaren—of Spencer’s National Policy Institute—, Marcus Follin—the YouTuber known as ‘The Golden One’—, Kevin MacDonald—who the Southern Poverty Law Center has called ‘the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic’—,¹⁶⁶ Bre Faucheux—a pseudonym used by podcaster Brittany Nelson—,¹⁶⁷ Gregory Hood—a writer for the far-right website American Renaissance—, amongst many others. It is not unimportant that this movement recognises how to both utilise digital and analogue methods to spread its message and to shape their narrative.

As dire as all this sounds, while it might be obvious how influential the internet as a tool has become in helping to promote white-nationalist ideas, and although much has been written about the democratic potentialities of the internet,¹⁶⁸^,¹⁶⁹ we must remember Melvin Kranzberg’s first law of technology: ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’.¹⁷⁰ Kranzberg (1917–1995) believed his law ‘should constantly remind us that it is the historian’s duty to compare short-term versus long-term results, the utopian hopes versus the spotted actuality, the what-might-have been against what actually happened, and the trade-offs among various “goods”; and possible “bads”’.¹⁷¹ The founder of the Society for the History of Technology believed that the outcome of technology depended upon interactions between sociocultural situations and the values of societal institutions.¹⁷²

Conclusions

For the writers and editors of Arktos, the world we live in is about to break into a new Golden Age that will harken in a traditionalist society that reverses the damage they believe was caused because of the Enlightenment and modernity—ideas of equality, democracy and pluralism. It would be facile to call this Identitarian movement strictly the fascists of old, for they are not. They are, as they claim, to the right of fascism, they are building a new movement, they know how to use aesthetics and ingenuity to both create a platform and to win converts and they know how to use technology to their advantage. For them, the stakes are high: what they believe to be the genocide of white culture and European identity—which they believe to be inextricable. For them, there is no place for diversity—only homogeneity. They do not want to win this homogeneity by force, though they are preparing for race wars; they want to win minds and new believers—to change paradigms by creating new fascist potentialities and futures through an inbreeding of fascistic ideologies. With their alliance with Richard Spencer in the United States, Arktos seemingly will continue to hold sway and continue to win new followers.

Today’s European New Right and Alt-Right are a variety of fascism that sees nationalism as a means, not an end-goal. Mixed with libertarianism, they posit a sort of ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ that works like an ‘invisible hand’ that will sort people out through ethno-nationalism. For them, their nationalism—Swedish, Austrian, French, American—works to empower them as individuals, a subcategory of white, Western, European culture. Unlike fascism of old, they hardily embrace individualism. Their end-goal is racial purity through the re-assertion of nationalism—a white nationalism. They do not wholly trust nationalism of old; they see it as malleable, something that can be changed by outsiders. Aryan whiteness and an imagined idea of ‘Europeanness’ are the teleological objective for this latest mutation of fascism. For them, to be European is to be white. They believe that only race, unlike nationalism of old, can remain biologically fixed, and to remain so, and to make their nations great again, they must ‘defend Europe’ through the promotion of white nationalism. Through their publications online and print they seek to alter the history of Europe, and to promote a version of the past that negates the history of fascism.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as part of a five-part series, “The Rise of the European Far-Right in the Internet Age,” published in EuropeNow: A Journal of Research and Art (New York: Council for European Studies), February 2018, www.europenowjournal.org/2018/01/31/the-rise-of-the-european-far-right-in-the-internet-age/.
2 Né Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola.
3 Teitelbaum, Benjamin R. “White Nationalists Give Up Trying to Be Respectable; Daniel Friberg, a Media-Savvy Swede, Stood there in Charlottesville Alongside the Hooligans.” Wall Street Journal, 13 August 2017.
4 Right On Staff, “Right On Staff: Introducing AltRight.com | RightOn.net,” Right On, 17 January 2017. Archived 18 January 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170118085255/https://www.righton.net/2017/01/17/introducing-altright-com/.
5 The Metapolitics of Arktos – Speech by John Morgan @ Identitarian Ideas VII (2015), perf. John Morgan, YouTube.com, 20 November 2015, accessed 16 June 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qV2QTJr_Hk.
6 Charles Lyons, “The Birth of Arktos and Its Role in the Alt-Right,” AltRight.com, 1 June 2017. Archived 5 June 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170605205918/https://altright.com/2017/05/31/the-birth-of-arktos-and-its-role-in-the-alt-right/. For more on Identitarianism see José Pedro Zúquete, The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).
7 Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2.
8 Ibid., xi.
9 Nathan Leonard, “A Blaze through the Gloom; an Interview with Arktos Media’s John Morgan,” Heathen Harvest, 7 July 2014, accessed 7 August 2017, https://heathenharvest.org/2014/07/07/a-blaze-through-the-gloom-an-interview-with-arktos-medias-john-maorgan.
10 For the European New Right, and the American Alt-Right, ‘cultural Marxism’ is meant as a derogatory turn of phrase used to describe the interdisciplinary and intersectional academic methodological framework commonly known as ‘critical theory’, which draws on influences from the likes of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who popularised the concept of ‘Hegemony’ in his Prison Notebooks. Included in the New Right’s definition of ‘cultural Marxism’ one might also find authors prominent in what was the Frankfurt School, originated at the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, which sought to understand issues of class in relation to ethnocentrism, nationalism and race. Later scholars have augmented issues of gender, sexuality, bodies—expanding critical theory to understand more complicated systems of oppression.
11 Some of these tendencies include: an attempt to impose an idea of purity or homogeneity onto others, an idealised and utopian future based on a romanticised, imagined past, and a use of binary and absolutist categorisation that promotes nationalism, ethnocentrism, anti-intellectualism, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, classism and anti-liberalism. Tactically, fascism is appropriative of other movements, uses ritual and mystical symbolism and relies upon false information, propaganda. Adamantly against individualism, fascism advocates for militarism, violence, surveillance and expansion of an authoritarian state’s powers. In its more extreme instances, it holds colonialist ambitions, desires a nation-centric economy and relies on forced labour and genocide for the supposed purpose of returning a fatherland, or country, to greatness. See Louie Dean Valencia-García, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 40–1.
12 I use what I call ‘digital archival excavation’ to situate the recent history of the publisher and its relationship with the rise of the European far-right/alt-right through the use of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) and by scouring webpages and sites that are preserved or abandoned in the recesses of the internet. I define digital excavation as a methodological process that uses websites, such as the Internet Archive, which attempt to ‘capture’ websites. The Internet Archive does not always capture all the pages of a given website, but do often take multiple captures of a given page, which facilitates user’s ability to see changes made to a given page over time. In addition, other sources include photographs and text from Arktos collaborator’s personal websites, editorial pieces, social media and videos posted to the website, YouTube.com, from their conferences and interviews.
13 In my footnotes, when citing from the Internet Archive, I will not note when I “accessed” the website, but instead will indicate when the archive’s web crawler archived the page, as that will more accurately reflect the information and context of the digital document. To this point, when a scholar visits an archive they do not cite the date that they viewed the document, unless for some particularly significant reason. Instead, they cite the date of record for the document. Using the Internet Archive, scholars can often see both the date of publication of an article (if indicated) and the date of capture—which do not always align. In my citations, when referring to the Internet Archive, I will indicate the date the webcrawler ‘archived’ the page. In cases when I am citing a website that is not archived by the Internet Archive, I have marked my date of access, and have saved a copy of the site as it appeared when I visited it in my own records.
14 The company was registered in Århus, Denmark by Christiansen and Boch on 1 November 2005 and was closed on 31 December 2009. “Integral Tradition Publishing I/S V/Jacob Christiansen Og Patrick Boch,” https://data.virk.dk/, accessed 11 August 2017, https://datacvr.virk.dk/data/visenhed?enhedstype=virksomhed&id=29051895&soeg=29051895&language=en-gb.
15 At first, only Senholt and Boch were listed on the ITP website’s “About” page. Others, such as John Morgan, also have claimed to be co-founders as well, though there does not seem to be an indication of that either on the website of documents filed. See “About Us,” Integral Tradition Publishing, archived 15 March 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070315013345/http://www.integraltradition.com:80/catalog/about.php.
16 Counting began on 19 August 2006. The number was likely larger. Integral Tradition Publishing, “Welcome,” archived 27 December 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20071227175659/http://www.integraltradition.com:80/catalog/index.php.
17 This traditionalist school can be thought of as a variant of the Nouvelle Droite, or European New Right, which came into being in the 1960s under the direction of right-wing philosopher Alain de Benoist and his GRECE, which took cues from proto-fascist, esoteric/traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola.
18 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 53.

19 For more on 4chan, Reddit and Tumblr, see Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump (Winchester, UK; Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2017). While these websites have garnered a fair amount of attention, the focus of this essay is not those well-known sites.

20 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).

21 I use ‘ITP’ to describe the earlier years of the press, ‘Arktos’ when specifically discussing the post-ITP years, and ‘ITP/Arktos’ when discussing a broader scope that includes both projects.
22 Jacob Christiansen Senholt, “Radical Politics and Political Esotericism: The Adaptation of Esoteric Discourse within the Radical Right,” in Contemporary Esotericism, ed. Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm (Acumen Publishing, 2012), 248.
23 Ibid., 256.
24 “About Us,” Integral Tradition Publishing. Archived 15 March 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070315013345/http://www.integraltradition.com:80/catalog/about.php.
25 Today, one of the most prominent proponents of traditionalism globally, and an early influence on ITP, Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) has called for “neo-Eurasianism,” a nationalism that is thought of better suited for Russia, one that could include the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus and even the Islamic world. For more background on Dugin’s philosophy, see Chapter 7 of this volume, and Mark J. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 221–40. For more on Dugin, see Sullivan and Fisher-Smith’s chapter in this volume.
26 At the turn of the twentieth century, the swastika itself was described as a religious symbol that typically meant ‘good luck’, and is found in Hinduism and Buddhism, amongst other world religions. Famously, Heinrich Schliemann discovered its use in the ancient site of Troy, and considered it a lost religious symbol in Europe. See Thomas Wilson, The Swastika: The Earliest Known Symbol, and Its Migration; with Observations on the Migration of Certain Industries in Prehistoric Times (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1896), 771. Many German national movements concerned with völkisch traditions appropriated the swastika, and tied it to Aryanism. For more on how occultism influenced early Nazism, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 2004). Moreover, we might consider the ancient function use of the meander or swastika as a ‘phatic’ character, particularly on buildings or material objects. While by the turn of the century the swastika certainly became a symbol for luck, it is possible that its origins might have been more functional than symbolic. In How Ancient Europeans Saw the World,Peter S. Wells, borrowing from Paul Virilio, uses the term to describe images ‘whose primary purpose is to attract attention—to force the viewer to look—rather than to convey information…The viewer is spellbound by the appearance of something and loses his or her ability to turn away’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, 31–2).
27 For more on National-Catholicism, see chapter two of my upcoming book Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

28 J. Lester Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” BuzzFeed, 15 November 2016. Archived 17 November 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20161117025150/https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world?utm_term=.hu7gJKGlW#.fmpeLRbnA.
29 Indeed, the connection between the Alt-Right and white nationalism has become so established that in November 2016 the Associated Press advised journalists: ‘[W]henever “alt-right” is used in a story, be sure to include a definition: “an offshoot of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism,” or, more simply, “a white nationalist movement”’. See John Daniszewski, “Writing about the ‘Alt-Right’,” 18 November 2016. Archived 28 November 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20161128203006/https://blog.ap.org/behind-the-news/writing-about-the-alt-right.
30 “Arktos,” Facebook.com, accessed 11 August 2017, www.facebook.com/Arktos/.
31 “Verso Books,” Facebook.com, accessed 11 August 2017, www.facebook.com/VersoBks/.
32 “ARKTOS,” About ARKTOS, archived 18 June 2010. http://web.archive.org/web/20100618042727/http://www.arktos.com/about/about-arktos.html.
33 Vedism, a type of ancient Hinduism, was written in Sanskrit, and was an Indo-Aryan religion finding its origins in what is today northern India. Esoterism can best be understood as a variation of occultism, promoting European pageanism, pre-Vatican II Catholicism, pre-Islamic pagan religion in what is today Iran.
34 “Jacob Christiansen Senholt,” Jacob Christiansen Senholt | Aarhus University – Academia.edu, archived 12 August 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170812145452/https://au.academia.edu/JacobSenholt.
35 Jacob Christiansen Senholt, “About Me,” Jacob Christiansen Senholt, archived 12 August 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20141215155405/http://jacobsenholt.dk/about-jacob-christiansen-senholt/.
36 Senholt has claimed affiliation with both Konservative Studenter and Liberal Alliance. Liberal Alliance demonstrates libertarian tendencies; in 2014, their website proclaimed a desire for smaller governmental involvement and lower taxes—a maximum of 40% tax rate “Liberal Alliance,” LiberalAlliance.dk, archived 16 December 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20141216185613/https://www.liberalalliance.dk/.
37 Boch has described his interests as being in “traditional jurisprudence and statecraft, particularly the traditional doctrine of state legitimacy.” See “About Us,” Integral Tradition Publishing, archived 15 March 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070315013345/http://www.integraltradition.com:80/catalog/about.php.
38 Sedgwick, Mark, “How the New Right gained traction,” in Traditionalists: A Blog for the study of Traditionalism and the Traditionalists, 2 September 2017. Archived 17 September 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20180815210526/https://traditionalistblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-new-right-gained-traction.html.
39 Emphasis is mine. See Sedgwick, Mark, “How the New Right gained traction,” in Traditionalists: A Blog for the Study of Traditionalism and the Traditionalists, 2 September 2017. Archived 17 September 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20180815210526/https://traditionalistblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-new-right-gained-traction.html.
40 As presented on the blog, the relationship between Sedgwick and the far-right is ambiguous at best. Sedgwick is the author of Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
41 In order to protect the identity of the scholar who shared with me this observation, I have decided to publish this quote anonymously.
42 Morgan has allowed himself to be presented as one of the founders. While the assertion may certainly be accurate, the original website published in 2006 does not corroborate that claim. See Metapolitics of Arktos: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qV2QTJr_Hk.
43 See, Metapolitics of Arktos: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qV2QTJr_Hk.
44 “Dear Customer,” Integral Tradition Publishing, archived 13 October 2011. http://web.archive.org/web/20111013082221/http://www.integraltradition.com/.
45 NFSE Media/Motpol AB was registered as company number 556692-5904. See “Motpol AB,” Motpol AB – – Se Nyckeltal, Befattningar Med Mera, accessed 10 August 2017, https://www.proff.se/foretag/motpol-ab/-/f%C3%B6rlagsbyr%C3%A5er/10278853-1/.
46 Arktos Media, LTD was incorporated by the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales on 11 November 2009 as company number 07073448. Boch, who was named a director of Arktos on 11 November 2009, at the time of its founding, resigned on 19 November 2010, only to be reappointed on 29 November 2010, until 29 February 2012. Senholt was appointed a director of the company on 1 January 2010 until 1 December 2011, and was listed as an academic at the time. See “People for ARKTOS MEDIA LTD (07073448),” Companies house.gov.uk, accessed 5 August 2017, https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07073448/officers. See records: N07073448K, XWDHAJZF, and XL99EK1Z.
47 Senholt left Arktos on 1 December 2011, Boch on 29 February 2012. See “People for ARKTOS MEDIA LTD (07073448),” Companieshouse.gov.uk, accessed 5 August 2017, https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07073448/officers. See records: X11UP5ZS and X190U64O.
48 Teitelbaum, Lions of the North, xii–xiii.
49 Cynthia Miller-Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, 50).
50 “Daniel Friberg.” Arktos. 18 April 2017. Archived 18 April 2017. https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20170418171348/https://arktos.com/people/daniel-friberg/.
51 “Showing Results For: METAPEDIA.ORG,” ICANN WHOIS, accessed 18 July 2017, https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=Metapedia.org.
52 Porter, Tom. “Meet Daniel Friberg, the Swedish Mining Tycoon Bankrolling the Alt-right’s Global Media Empire.” International Business Times, 6 March 2017. Archived 3 March 2017. https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20170303132916/http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/meet-swedish-mining-tycoon-bankrolling-alt-rights-global-media-empire-1608221.
53 Oliver Willis, “White Nationalist Group Headed By “Peaceful Ethnic Cleansing” Leader Holding Pro-Trump Conference in D.C.,” Media Matters (blog), 3 March 2016. Archived 29 April 2017. http://web.archive.org/web/20170429012612/https://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/03/03/white-nationalist-group-headed-by-peaceful-ethn/208996.
54 Jason Wilson, “‘Increasingly Nazified’ White Nationalist Rally Descends on Virginia amid Expected Protests,” The Guardian, 12 August 2017. Archived 12 August 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170812192411/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/12/nazi-white-nationalist-rallies-virginia-protests.
55 As cited in James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model, Charles Vibbert, a Frenchman, argued in 1930, “The Ku Klux Klan are the fascists of America” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, 69).
56 “Richard Bertrand Spencer,” Southern Poverty Law Center, archived 17 August 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170817212353/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-bertrand-spencer-0.
57 William D. Cohan, “How Stephen Miller Rode White Rage from Duke’s Campus to Trump’s West Wing,” The Hive, 26 May 2017. Archived 30 May 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170530093504/https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/stephen-miller-duke-donald-trump.
58 While Miller has distanced himself from Spencer, an email correspondence given to me indicates that the two worked together to organise a debate on immigration through the Duke Conservative Union in 2007. The debate brought Peter Laufer, the James N. Wallace Chair of Journalism at the University of Oregon, and Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigrant activist and founder of the white supremacist website, VDARE, to campus.
59 “Richard Bertrand Spencer,” Southern Poverty Law Center.
60 Cohan, “How Stephen Miller Rode White Rage from Duke’s Campus to Trump’s West Wing.”
61 See Southern Poverty Law Center, “Stephen Miller: The Breitbart Emails,” HateWatch. Archived 15 January 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200115213154/https://www.splcenter.org/stephen-miller-breitbart-emails.
62 Right On Staff, “Right On Staff: Introducing AltRight.com | RightOn.net,” Right On, 17 January 2017. Archived 18 January 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170118085255/https://www.righton.net/2017/01/17/introducing-altright-com/.
63 The Editors, “Welcome to the Alt Right,” AltRight.com, 16 January 2017. Archived 17 January 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170117010310/http://www.altright.com/2017/01/16/welcome-to-the-alt-right/.
64 “Faculty Humanities » People » Faculty,” New Jersey Institute of Technology, archived 27 January 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170127123050/http://humanities.njit.edu:80/faculty/.
65 “About AltRight.com,” AltRight.com, 19 January 2017. Archived 20 January 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170120125657/http://www.altright.com:80/about-altright-com/.
66 See “People for ARKTOS MEDIA LTD (07073448),” Companieshouse.gov.uk, accessed 5 August 02017, https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07073448/officers. See records: X5K12UQW and X658YIUW.
67 “Jason Reza Jorjani,” AltRight.com, archived 20 January 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170120100442/https://altright.com/author/jasonrezajorjani/.
68 Jason Reza Jorjani, “Rumi Was White,” AltRight.com, 21 January 2017, archived 24 January 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170124073152/https://altright.com/2017/01/21/rumi-was-white.
69 Jason Reza Jorjani, “Forever Deplorably Yours,” Right On, 12 December 2016, archived 5 January 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170105073000/https://www.righton.net/2016/12/12/forever-deplorably-yours/.
70 The use of “deplorable” was significant in preparation of the Alt-Right’s “Deploraball” event celebrating the election of U.S. President Donald Trump—named after an epithet used by presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton to describe racist supporters of Donald Trump.
71 Jason Reza Jorjani, “Forever Deplorably Yours,” Right On, 12 December 2016, archived 5 January 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170105073000/https://www.righton.net/2016/12/12/forever-deplorably-yours/.
72 Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 15.
73 Found in the editor’s notes of: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939).
74 Ibid., 13.
75 Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks (Medford, MA: Polity, 2018), 84–5.
76 Ibid., 42.
77 While the far-right has certainly cited Nietzsche’s work as an influence, it’s important to consider Nietzsche’s own work in its own historical context; see Hugo Drochon’s book Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
78 Rosie Gray, “An Alt-Right Leader Sets Up Shop in Northern Virginia,” The Atlantic, 12 January 2017. Archived 13 January 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170113001947/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/a-one-stop-shop-for-the-alt-right/512921/.
79 Charlottesville: Race and Terror (New York: Vice Magazine/HBO, 2017), accessed 16 August 2017, https://news.vice.com/story/vice-news-tonight-full-episode-charlottesville-race-and-terror.
80 Ibid.
81 See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
82 “Jason Reza Jorjani,” Facebook, 23 August 2017, accessed 27 August 2017, https://www.facebook.com/jason.jorjani.5.
83 Jason Reza Jorjani, “Blog,” Jason Reza Jorjani, accessed 27 August 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170825001718/https://jasonrezajorjani.com/blog/.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 “Jason Reza Jorjani,” Facebook, 15 August 2017, accessed 27 August 2017, www.facebook.com/jason.jorjani.5.
87 Jessica Mazzola, “NJIT Prof Suspended over Video of Him Discussing Hitler’s Legacy,” New Jersey Advance Media, 26 September 2017. Archived 14 October 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20171021011726/http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2017/09/college_suspends_professor_plagued_by_alt-right_co.html.
88 “About Us,” Integral Tradition Publishing, archived 15 March 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070315013345/http://www.integraltradition.com:80/catalog/about.php.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
92 Daniel Friberg, The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True Opposition (London: Arktos, 2015).
93 The Metapolitics of Arktos. Identitarian Ideas VII (2015).
94 Though, I am certain Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin would not appreciate this use of his words to describe Morgan’s motivations.
95 The Metapolitics of Arktos.
96 Ibid.
97 Senholt left Arktos on 1 December 2011, Boch on 29 February 2012. See “People for ARKTOS MEDIA LTD (07073448),” Companieshouse.gov.uk, accessed 05 August 2017, https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07073448/officers. See records: X11UP5ZS and X190U64O.
98 In 2007, the ITP website also listed Sergio Knipe, who was described as in the process of ‘completing a Ph.D. on Greco-Roman blood sacrifice at the University of Cambridge’. Knipe was interested in Late antiquity, (neo-) paganism, Hinduism, radical environmentalism and modern traditionalist thought. Others listed were David Wingfield, who lived in Nottinghamshire, England, and Martin Häggkvist, who was studying a magister examen degree at the University of Umeå in Sweden. See “About Us,” Integral Tradition Publishing, archived 12 October 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071012195910/http://integraltradition.com:80/catalog/about.php.
99 Arktos, “The Attacks on Arktos,” AltRight.com, 17 June 2017. Archived 18 June 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170618030046/https://altright.com/2017/06/17/the-attacks-on-arktos/.
100 Ibid.
101 “About,” Counter-Currents Publishing, archived 22 June 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170622020411/https://www.counter-currents.com/about/.
102 “About Us,” Integral Tradition Publishing, archived 12 October 2007, http://web.archive.org/web/20071012195910/http://integraltradition.com:80/catalog/about.php.
103 Integral Tradition Publishing, archived 30 July 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20080730045648/http://www.integraltradition.com:80/catalog/index.php.
104 For Italian fascists, their idealised past was the Roman Empire, for the Nazis, a pre-Weimar Germany, and for the Falangists in Spain, it was the Spanish Empire.
105 For more on the occultism and fascism, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1993).

106 This is a lesson that has yet to be fully understood in the United States, which clings to a version of free speech that doesn’t consider hate speech as dangerous as other violent types of verbal aggression such as threats of physical harm. When left to fester, the logical conclusion of violent hate speech is physical violence.
107 Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, trans. Ernst Hans Gombrich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 581–2.
108 See Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 145–6.
109 Many have demonstrated the ways that a genetically pure Europe never existed. This is seen in the work of Mark Lipson and David Reich, “Working Model of the Deep Relationships of Diverse Modern Human Genetic Lineages Outside of Africa | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic,” Oxford University Press Academic, 12 January 2017, accessed 7 August 2017, https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/34/4/889/2838774/A-Working-Model-of-the-Deep-Relationships-of. White nationalists tend to conflate culture and genetic traits (race being a socially constructed thing), believing, erroneously, that culture is tied exclusively to an imagined purity of blood.
110 Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,” The New York Times, 12 February 2017, accessed 15 May 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html.
111 Mark Sedgwick, “Evola Poised to Enter Greek Parliament?” Traditionalists, 3 May 2012, archived 23 May 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20120523202815/http://traditionalistblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/evola-poised-to-enter-greek-parliament.html.
112 See Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).
113 Ibid., 120.
114 Ibid., 121.
115 I elaborate upon what I mean by ‘fascist tendencies’ in part I of this series.
116 Dugin’s Guideline – In Trump We Trust, prod. Katehon Think Tank, perf. Alexander Dugin, 4 March 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOWIoMtIvDQ.
117 Sarah Posner, “How Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists,” Mother Jones, 23 June 2017, accessed 10 August 2017, www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-alt-right-breitbart-news/.
118 James Heiser, “Putin’s Rasputin: The Mad Mystic Who Inspired Russia’s Leader,” Breitbart, 10 June 2014, archived 13 March 2015, http://web.archive.org/web/20170102175703/http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2014/06/10/putin-s-rasputin-the-mad-mystic-who-inspired-putin/.
119 Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World.”

120 “About Arktos,” Arktos, accessed 5 May 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20161011171050/http://arktos.com:80/about/.
121 Heidegger’s writing has long been used by leftist academics from Hannah Arendt to Jean Paul Sartre to Michel Foucault for his study of being, used to understand postmodern thought, political theory, phenomenology, existentialism. In his later work, Heidegger turned to pre-Socratic thought, creating fertile ground for the likes of the European New Right and Alt-Right, which also seeks a sort of primordial European identity.
122 “Alexander Dugin and the Rise of The Multipolar World,” Kickstarter, archived 12 August 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20170812203838/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/motpol/alexander-dugin-and-the-rise-of-the-multipolar-wor.
123 “Translations,” archived 25 August 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180825203213/https://michaelmillerman.ca/translations/.
124 https://web.archive.org/web/20181001013509/https:/twitter.com/M_Millerman/status/1041824476936011776.
125 This is cited from Michael Millerman’s dissertation proposal (submitted 10 November 2014). Michael Millerman, “Beginning with Heidegger: A Comparative Study of Receptions of Martin Heidegger as a Political Philosopher,” MichaelMillerman.ca, archived 25 August 2018, www.academia.edu/36042254/Dissertation_Proposal_Beginning_with_Heidegger_-_A_Comparative_Study_of_Receptions_of_Martin_Heidegger_as_a_Political_Philosopher.
126 Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 5.
127 Markus Willinger, “Markus Willinger: United States of Europe or a Europe of Nations? | RightOn.net,” Right On, 7 September 2015, archived 16 September 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160910044134/righton.net/2015/09/07/united-states-of-europe-or-a-europe-of-nations.
128 Bouron, Samuel. “Les « Identitaires » Se Mobilisent Pour Moderniser La Lutte Des Races En Savoir plus Sur” www.lemonde.fr/Idees/Article/2014/11/26/Les-Identitaires-Se-Mobilisent-Pour-Moderniser-La-Lutte-Des-races_4529388_3232.Html#cYyLflvpxL2bYyhZ.99.” Le Monde, 26 November 2014, www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2014/11/26/les-identitaires-se-mobilisent-pour-moderniser-la-lutte-des-races_4529388_3232.html.
129 For more on the topic of commercialism in far-right youth culture in Germany, see Cynthia Miller-Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
130 “The Strategy of the French Identitaires,” in Trouble on the Far Right: Contemporary Right-wing Strategies and Practices in Europe, ed. Maik Fielitz and Laura Lotte Laloire, by Samuel Bouron (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016), 111–5.
131 “Generation Identity: Frequently Asked Questions,” accessed 26 December 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20171221222911/https://identitarian-movement.org/generation-identity-faqs/.
132 Markus Willinger, “Markus Willinger: United States of Europe or a Europe of Nations? | RightOn.net,” Right On, 7 September 2015, accessed 16 September 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160910044134/righton.net/2015/09/07/united-states-of-europe-or-a-europe-of-nations.
133 Michael Bonvalot, “Weitere Bank Kündigt Spendenkonto Der Identitären,” Zeit Online, 22 June 2017, archived 17 August 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170818011113/http://blog.zeit.de/stoerungsmelder/2017/06/22/weitere-bank-kuendigt-spendenkonto-der-identitaeren_24006.
134 Generation Identity Ship, YouTube.com, 9 July 2017, accessed 17 August 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIemg5ga3x8.
135 May Bulman Social Affairs Correspondent, “Far-right Group Sends Ship to Confront Boats Rescuing Refugees in Mediterranean ‘and Take Them Back to Africa’,” The Independent, 13 July 2017, archived 13 July 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170713153302/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anti-immigrant-ship-mediterranean-ngo-ships-refugee-crisis-migrant-boats-people-smugglers-defend-a7838731.html.
136 “DEFEND EUROPE – Identitarian SAR Mission on the Libyan Coast.” WeSearchr. Archived 17 August 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170817041523/https://www.wesearchr.com/bounties/defend-europe-identitarian-sar-mission-on-the-libyan-coast.
137 The French Generation Identity had a considerable following online, nearly 20,000 at the end of the summer of 2017. Their account, https://twitter.com/g_identitaire, is currently suspended by Twitter.
138 “QUI SOMMES-NOUS?” Generation-identitaire.com, archived 14 August 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170814095515/https://www.generation-identitaire.com/generation-identitaire-2/.
139 Markus Willinger, Generation Identity (London: Arktos Media, 2013), 37.

140 Markus Willinger, A Europe of Nations (London: Arktos Media, 2014), 38–9.
141 “ARKTOS,” Sell Arktos Books from Home – About,” archived 26 June 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110626055456/http://www.arktos.com:80/about/private-retailer.html.
142 “ARKTOS,” Recruit a Friend – Earn Discounts,” archived 21 January 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20130121091556/http://www.arktos.com/about/recruit-a-friend.html.
143 Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017) acts a primer to some of this material. Despite her noticeable lack of citations, Nagle gives some important insights into the ways the Alt-Right has used the internet to its advantage.

144 TheLatsbrah, “The Golden One,” YouTube, accessed 12 August 2017, www.youtube.com/user/TheLatsbrah/about.
145 “The Golden One,” Facebook.com, accessed 12 August 2017, www.facebook.com/TheGloriousLion/.
146 TheLatsbrah, “The Golden One,” YouTube, accessed 2 September 2018, www.youtube.com/user/TheLatsbrah/about.
147 “The Golden One,” Facebook.com, accessed 2 September 2018, www.facebook.com/TheGloriousLion/.
148 David Duke, “The David Duke Show: The Golden One and Angelo John Gage on Personal and National Revolution,” Daily Stormer, 21 October 2015, accessed 24 October 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20170814135309/https://www.dailystormer.com/the-david-duke-show-the-golden-one-and-angelo-john-gage-on-personal-and-national-revolution/.
149 Generation Identity Ship, perf. “The Golden One,” YouTube.com, 5 April 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rrZnHrx8x0.
150 Ibid.
151 Marcus Follin, “The Golden One Is Creating YouTube Videos,” Patreon, accessed 12 August 2017, www.patreon.com/thegoldenone.
152 Tess Owen, “White nationalist Richard Spencer’s pages just got kicked off Facebook,” Vice, published 13 April 2018, archived 14 April 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180414235737/https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbxqea/richard-spencer-kicked-off-facebook?utm_source=vicenewstwitter.
153 Ryan Broderick, “Richard Spencer’s Website Has Been Pulled Offline by GoDaddy,” published 3 May 2018, archived 20 July 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180720161210/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/richard-spencers-website-has-been-pulled-offline-by-godaddy.
154 Arktos, “Yockey biography, audiobook, new Editor-in-Chief and more…,” Newsletter email sent 15 February 2018.
155 John Bruce Leonard, “On the Author and the Journal,” archived 18 February 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180218132901/http://johnbruceleonard.com/index.php/about-the-author/.
156 “John Bruce Leonard,” archived 18 February 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180218020645/https://arktos.com/people/john-bruce-leonard/.
157 “Staff,” archived 18 February 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180218020549/https://arktos.com/people-category/staff/.
158 Arktos, Newsletter email, “Yockey biography, audiobook, new Editor- in-Chief and more…”
159 Identity Evropa, Twitter, 16 September 2017. Accessed 18 February 2018. https://twitter.com/IdentityEvropa/status/909163907108892672. Screenshots available upon request.
160 “The White Supremacists Who Attacked Charlottesville Are Coming Back with a Vengeance,” CNN, 11 September 2017. Archived 17 February 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180217154054/http://www.newsweek.com/white-supremacists-charlottesville-campus-fliers-662659.
161 Jared Hameloth, “Names Released for Identity Evropa’s Vandalizers,” The Snapper, 14 November 2017. Archived 18 February 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180218143939/http://thesnapper.millersville.edu/index.php/2017/11/14/names-released-for-identity-evropas-vandalizers/.
162 “William Clark,” archived 18 February 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180218020524/https://arktos.com/people/william-clark/.
163 “Synopsis,” archived 29 November 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20171129030228/http://afairhearing.net:80/.
164 “Showing Results For: AFAIRHEARING.NET,” ICANN WHOIS, accessed 27 August 2018, https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=afairhearing.net.
165 “Project Overview,” A Fair Hearing, archived 30 November 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20171130143026/http://afairhearing.net:80/index.php/project-overview/.
166 “Kevin Macdonald,” Southern Poverty Law Center, archived 18 August 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180818012315/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/kevin-macdonald.
167 “Exposed: This racist alt-right leader used to be a pro-LGBT beauty blogger,” Babe, archived 10 August 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180810071821/https://babe.net/2018/03/26/who-is-bre-faucheux-alt-right-we-found-her-real-name-44539.
168 One recent example of this is: Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain, Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
169 Manuel Castells’ Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015) work also highlights the potentiality of the internet for promoting democracy.
170 Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws,”” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 15, no. 1 (1995).
171 Ibid.
172 Ibid.