If chaos was the new normal in the United States after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, then the world standing of the United States as a global power was greatly diminished at the end of 2016. To those who saw the power and prestige of the Shining City on a Hill waning, the Alternative Right (alt-right) movement was joyful that the 242-year American experiment was finally going to fail.
As the conservative movement grew stronger within the United States, they pushed the traditional Republican platform off the cliff. Gone were the days when balanced budgets and personal responsibility were the party’s hallmark. The party started to shift with Russia’s assistance. The Republicans became more concerned with white grievance like their European brethren. And like their cousins overseas, the alt-right appeared to relish doing the work of the Kremlin in the same way that the European Nationalists were aligning themselves with the United Russia Party. Alexander Dugin cheered the rise of this new conservative movement, “Out of the shadows has emerged a second America.”1
Many European Nationalists, especially in Eastern Europe, have used the internal systems of democracy to create chaos with endless debates on austerity, blaming gypsies for societal ills, scapegoating all non-whites and foreigners not of European descent. Alt-right Americans are no different. Countries ranking lowest on the Democracy Index or nearing the gamut of flawed democracies have entered such debates unwittingly and almost never emerge unscathed. American disunity and diminishment of global standing were the pinnacles of Vladimir Putin’s wish list.
Alt-right is a short name for “Alternative Right.” It is considered a “moderating” umbrella term for the white right-wing conservatives including neo-Nazis and others who view white supremacy and ethno-nationalist tribalism as natural. Though there are many wings of the alt-right, the most outspoken are the Ku Klux Klan and the American neo-Nazis. Nazi leader Richard Spencer believed that “White People need to be just as activist as Black People.” Self-proclaimed White Nationalist, Spencer is the freshly shaved clean-cut baby face preppy image of the alt-right. Others, like Mike Tokes, co-founder of the newright.com, are the tough New Right competition. Spencer believed that diversity was against white identity instead of being inclusive of everyone. Richard Spencer and the alt-right was against AIPAC, most Jews and Muslims, and against political correctness, feminism, and immigration from third-world countries.
The goal of the alt-right is to bring White Supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology together with bigotry, racism, and xenophobia, but with a milder, kinder image. When they march they wear polo shirts and khaki pants. They project that they are normal and that it is both masculine and chic to be a gentleman race hater. A strange version of this is Breitbart writer, Milo Yiannopoulos. He is an unabashed English gay man who constantly brags of his well-endowed black male lovers. However, he spews the most incredible racism and misogyny. To claim that the alt-right had diverse white men who are gay and cavort with blacks made him a superstar on Twitter with well over a million followers. He was eventually banned for harassing African American actress Leslie Jones and has been banned from speaking on many college campuses. However, he acts as a protest touchstone because when his speeches are shut down, alt-righters prepare to start riots with the opponents.
The father of the alt-right is Trump Presidential Campaign CEO and former Trump Presidential Advisor Steve Bannon. He credited Breitbart, the online web news channel for extremist youth, as being their natural home and “the voice of the alt-right.”
Younger conservatives are generally referred to as the New Right. Traditionalist worthies include the late William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, and President Ronald Reagan. Until Donald Trump, they and their college republican wing, Young Americans for Freedom, represented old-school conservatism at its finest. They formed in the 1950s and did not believe that skin color was the defining issue for conservatism—those were tax cuts and national defense. Mike Tokes, a young YouTube champion of the tie-wearing tribe, stated that “white people are the majority and to reject people based on skin color is wrong.” Others who make up the main force of the alt-right are not so altruistic or liberal. They are represented by some of the most hated groups in American history.
After the Civil War, ex-Confederate officers founded a white terror group called the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction era as a way to intimidate freed blacks. As democracy in the South was under construction by White Union Republicans (today’s Democrats), organizations like the Klan were designed to ensure that Southern resistance to black progress never faded. The Ulysses S. Grant Administration eradicated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s but they resurfaced nostalgically in 1915 with the help of D.W. Griffith’s silent film, The Birth of a Nation. By the 1920s and 30s the Klan had progressed to the point of being nearly mainstream as a fraternal social club, displaying vehement xenophobic displays of hatred toward Catholics, Jews, and foreigners, in addition to their hostility toward African Americans and Civil Rights movements later in the 50s and 60s. Currently, David Duke stands at the helm of the KKK despite being a “retired KKK wizard.” Duke states that he does not support violence, yet his hate speech incites riots and validates the lack of social conscience for many of his followers who view him as financially successful and, therefore, stable.
Neo-Confederates longed for the days of traditional, yet archaic, race and gender roles. In that ethnocentric, White Supremacist fantasy world, there is a longing for an historical revival of the days of slavery or the Reconstruction era where emancipated slaves had rights but could only partake in the possibility of a meager constitutional democracy as “Americans.” This historical narrative is what distinguishes the Neo-Confederates from all other far-right racists. Klansmen like David Duke feel inferior in the present-day and strive to conquer by their own outdated terms, submerged in futile nostalgia.
White Supremacists, also known as White Nationalists, believe that they are biologically superior due to their European blood, which they consider the highest pedigree. White Supremacists gravitate toward genealogical evidence. They do not wish to remove multicultural societies because they feel that they are at the top of the hierarchy and enjoy the privilege of being white. White Nationalists believe that they are genetically superior to minorities and so believe in a white ethno-state devoid of other cultures.
Neo-Nazis, like the original Nazis, hate Jews, non-whites, people with disabilities, and LGBT people. Neo-Nazis appeared in the United States after World War II as WUFENS (World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists), founded by George Lincoln Rockwell in 1959, who later renamed it the ANP (American Nazi Party) hoping to attract more followers. In 1967, George Rockwell was assassinated after changing the name of the American Nazi Party to the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP), which alienated even more followers—as they were misperceived as Socialist. After the assassination of George Rockwell, the name changed back to the American Nazi Party.
Comprised of several different factions of WUFENS, the American Nazi Party is now headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and although current neo-Nazi support is low, there are more right-wing terrorist organizations in the US than left-wing terrorist organizations, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
One very dangerous neo-Nazi paramilitary group, known as Atomwaffen Division, was founded in 2015 by Brandon Russell in Tampa, Florida. The name Atomwaffen Division means Atomic Weapons Division in German. It boasts over 80 members in 2018. Russell was arrested by the FBI and the Tampa Police Department when they found explosive devices made with hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, and the radioactive compounds thorium and americium, in his garage. Other members of Atomwaffen include Devon Arthurs, a man who considered the 2016 Orlando shooter at Pulse Nightclub a hero and later converted to Islam. In May 2017, he murdered two Atomwaffen members and was arrested after a hostage barricade. Vinlanders Social Club, founded in 2003, is a large skinhead gang with their highest enrollment numbers in Arizona and Indiana. Their enrollment has decreased in Minnesota according to the SPLC.2
Even after the election of Donald Trump there was no unifying organization or event to mark the coming out of the new American power base in the extremist world. That would be corrected when all wings of the alt-right showed up to make a demonstration of power at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally was scheduled for Saturday, August 12, 2017. It was billed as a national unifying event and as a protest of the removal of confederate statues across the South. This theme brought together all branches of the white right. They were making their stand at the scheduled removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, home of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and his educational legacy, the University of Virginia. The SPLC summarized the motivations of the protesters’ leadership—like in Europe, they originated in Russia:
“… unabashed in its open admiration of Russia’s authoritarian strongman president, Vladimir Putin, and the nationalist agenda he has promoted both in Europe and in the United States. A number of alt-right figures [have] well-documented connections to the Russian regime, which also has played a major role in underwriting far-right movements in Europe. It later emerged after the 2016 election that Russia’s propaganda machine had a powerfully symbiotic relationship with the alt-right in spreading its ideology and memes through social media during the campaign.”3
The protests started after a cryptic text message from neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer on Friday, August 11, 2017. The text stated “I’d be near campus tonight, if I were you. After 9 p.m. Nameless field.”4 The alt-right had congregated to protest in Charlottesville, but they had come armed for a race war. They were a hot-headed mix of white America’s rebellion against the establishment’s vision of a diverse democracy. At 9 p.m. hundreds of khaki-wearing, white polo–shirted White Supremacist protesters lined up in two-by-two formation, carrying tiki torches and chanting “White Lives Matter,” “Jews will not replace us,” “You will not replace us,” and interestingly “Russia is our friend!”5 Some included English renditions of Nazi Germany’s most fervent chant “Blood and Soil.” But the most noteworthy was the oft-repeated “Hail Trump!” Black and white students surrounded the statue of Robert E. Lee to counter the nighttime protest. The fuse was lit. The protest died overnight but the next morning by 11 a.m., the alt-right would fill the protest route that was supposed to start at 5 p.m.
The right-wing extremists had been coordinating with German and other European White Supremacists using the DISCORD chat app on their phone. The Europeans gave them pointers on equipment and riot tactics. The alt-right came armed with “legal” weapons. Flagpoles were thick and solid because they were really designed to be clubs. Somehow the police allowed plastic riot shields. Many wooden and Plexiglas shields were decorated to look like Norse warrior rune symbols. Many alt-righters view Viking and Celtic medieval symbols, from braided beards to horned helmets, as part of their own legacy. Others brought more traditional weapons such as pepper spray, and an armed contingent walked boldly with AR-15 assault rifles and pistols.
At 11 a.m. the dam broke. The White Supremacist marchers formed ranks and charged the opposition protesters. Widespread violence broke out. Bottles, pepper spray, and rocks flew. In one instance, a concealed firearm was shot at protesters in the thick of the fight while police stood aside and watched for about 30 minutes. At 11:22, the police broke up the two sides but running fights continued throughout the day. The violence took an ominous turn at 1:22 p.m. when a car driven by James Field Jr., a 20-year-old member of the White Nationalist group, Vanguard America, drove at high speed down a street and directly into a crowd of student protesters. He backed up and drove back through them to escape. When the attack was over a young paralegal named Heather Heyer lay crushed to death and 19 others were seriously injured.6 Field was quickly found and arrested. When interviewed, he stated “he was scared” and drove through the crowd to escape but the police chief said at the official press conference that the death of Heather Heyer was not an accident but a planned attack.
Outrage at the alt-right and their violence burned across the nation. Politicians of all sides condemned the violence but when Donald Trump was asked about it, he spent an inordinate amount of time blaming the anti-fascist resistance ANTIFA. When pressed, Trump summed it up as “there are very fine people on both sides.” He could not understand why people were furious at that remark. The Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis were delighted. The alt-right understood that Trump stood on their side.
As right-wing organizations throughout Europe were forming their alliances, the far-right nationalists in America were also being fueled by Russian ethno-state propagandists. It helped to have a newly elected President align himself with these racist groups. Their rise and his narcissism led to the elite of America being believers in the white genocide conspiracy theories. With Trump’s Twitter feed active, these xenophobic views were becoming part of the mainstream media dialogue in America. The alt-right and mainstream Republicans adopted the European-Russian mantra of hatred toward immigrants. For years, Republicans had used the false belief that immigration from Mexico was the reason why Americans were jobless. But this was different. The organizer of the Charlottesville protest, Jason Kessler, had a BA degree in psychology from the University of Virginia. He had held a myriad of low-paying jobs including as a dishwasher, gym technician, truck driver, and handyman. Kessler was also a failed poet, novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. The rally attracted people like him—members of the KKK, American neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, White Supremacists, White Nationalists, neo-Paganists, and alt-right followers. The biggest organizations that participated included:
Why was the rally called? Matthew Heimbach and Jason Kessler of the Unite the Right Rally convinced themselves that “white genocide” was occurring. They believed wholeheartedly in the conspiracy theory propagated by White Supremacists that natural foreign immigration and the ability of white women to have abortions are plots by Jews and the super-rich to snuff out the white race. The ACLU had facilitated Kessler’s right to hold the rally because of his First Amendment constitutional right to free speech. Heimbach convinced his fellow members of the Traditionalist Worker Party to participate and be ready to attack counter protesters.8
One of Trump’s biggest fans was the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke. Duke often tried to bring his racism to the political arena starting in 1975, when he ran for Louisiana Senate and again in 1979. He ran for President in 1988 and 1992, first as a Democrat, then as a Republican. He successfully ran for a seat in the Louisiana State House of Representatives in 1988 and served from 1989 to 1992. He ran for a seat as US Senator for Louisiana in 1990 as a Republican against J. Bennet Johnston Jr. and lost. This was followed by a run for Governor of Louisiana in 1991. Duke lost again. In 1992, he ran again for US Senate and came in fourth in the primaries, but the election ultimately saw the victory go to Mary Landrieu. He ran again in 1999 for a seat in the US House of Representatives but lost. He ran again in 2016 for US Senator from Louisiana but barely received 3% of the vote in a race that was won by Republican candidate John Neely Kennedy.
On November 16, 2000, David Duke’s home in Louisiana was searched by the FBI while he was in Russia. The FBI search warrant was based on information received that political donors were concerned that funds were gambled in casinos and used to fix up his home. Duke had been accused for years of pocketing money from supporters. Ultimately, he was charged for tax fraud and sentenced to prison and fines for back taxes.
Duke turned to Europe for acceptance—as America increasingly rebuked racists. He found allies around Europe and was given a doctorate from a Ukrainian university, the Interregional Academy of Personal Management, reputed for its promotion of anti-Semitism.9 Despite the appearance of a degree, the institution has no accreditation. This didn’t stop Duke from teaching anti-Semitism there as “Dr. David Duke, PhD.”
Duke has a fondness for Russia and has proclaimed, “In my opinion, Russia and other Eastern countries have the greatest chance of having racially aware parties achieving political power.”10 Russia loves him back. In fact, Duke’s book The Ultimate Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question was for sale at the Duma in Russia for $2.00.11 Duke owned a condo in Russia that he rented out to a fellow White Supremacist Preston Wiginton,12 who was, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “a key white power activist in Russia and the US.”13
Duke was not the only Russian-loving racist in the South. Sam Dickson, a wealthy White Supremacist lawyer in Atlanta who wrote about Abraham Lincoln being both a “myth” and a “demagogue,” was a passionate admirer of Vladimir Putin.14 Dickson had a reputation for bullying African Americans into undesirable real estate transactions, along with defending White Supremacist and White Nationalist individuals and groups.15 In 2015, he gave a speech at a Rodina (aka Motherland) Party conference of the worldwide White Nationalists network in St. Petersburg, titled “International Russian Conservative Forum.” He ended his speech with “God save the czar.” Dickson possessed a very romantic view of Russia, which could also be attributed to his long-time admiration and association with David Duke. Dickson said, “I admire the Russian people. They are the strongest white people on earth.”16
Dickson’s website had a 2017 Easter Message in which he spoke of the history of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and how it had been destroyed by “Bolsheviks” (what many White Supremacists view as liberal Jews and minorities that they accuse of controlling the media). Dickson described how the poor, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, funded the restoration as the first church to be rebuilt in Russia. He wrote in his blog:
“How I wish the White Russians I knew in my youth in Atlanta could have lived to have seen the day when the Head of State in Russia would attend Easter ceremonies in this shrine! Happy Easter! We can rejoice that Lenin’s work like his projected shrine and statue are gone.”17
Preston Wiginton is a neo-Nazi who believes Russia is “the only nation that understands RAHOWA,” or the racial holy war. He leases David Duke’s apartment in Moscow.18 Wiginton has been allied with Russian radicals like Alexander Belov of the anti-Semitic Pamyat group,19 Wiginton romanticized Russia’s white ethno-state and was known for inviting Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin to Texas A&M University in April 2015, after the United States government had imposed sanctions on Dugin. The lecture was titled “American Liberalism Must Be Destroyed: Insights from Professor Alexander Dugin, Kremlin Insider and Informal Adviser to President Putin.” Seventeen people attended.
It is worth noting that the same conference organized by the nationalist Russian party known as Rodina was attended not only by Sam Dickson and Preston Wiginton but also by Matthew Heimbach, Jared Taylor, and David Duke, and amounted to approximately “150 far-right leaders from the United States, Russia, and Western Europe, including politicians linked to neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic views.” It was a remarkably successful joint international effort by Russia to discredit the United States and other Western nations for their position on the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s subsequent attempt at Christian traditional values propaganda.20 Wiginton takes a dramatic view toward Moscow:
“Russia is under third world invasion. Luckily Russia is the only nation that understands RAHOWA.… Because of this immigrants [sic] think twice about coming to Russia.”21
Wiginton likely moved to Moscow in late 2006, when Stormfront moved its server to Russia after Google dismantled it. It was there that he met Aleksandr Belov, who runs the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, a group well traveled by several far-right masterminds: Wiginton, Duke, Heimbach, Taylor, Spencer, and the nearly 200 other far-right Americans who attended the International Russian Conservative Forum. In the spring of 2007, Wiginton returned to America to protest the possibility of the African American Presidential candidate, Barack Obama. He hosted a series of lectures by White Nationalists and White Supremacists, co-sponsored by the CCC (Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist think-tank). One of the lecturers at Clemson University (that actually gave this racist initiative its blessing), the chairman of the BNP (British National Party—known for harboring Holocaust deniers) Nick Griffin, showed up to lecture not only at Clemson but also at Texas A&M. He then subsequently traversed to Michigan State University to lecture MSU’s Young Americans for Freedom (who had sponsored that leg of Nick Griffin’s tour) on October 26.22 Wiginton often encouraged White Nationalists to find Russian woman as wives and to avoid Americans: “Real Russian women, not half-breeds or Jews, want real Russian men.”23
Jared Taylor is the leader of right-wing extremist group New Century Foundation, and founder of the White Supremacist magazine, American Renaissance. He claims he created the phrase “alt-right,” but whether he did or not he is still a hard-core White Nationalist who has tried to normalize his extreme racism through pseudo-science. Taylor is a Yale University graduate with a degree in philosophy. He describes himself as a “racial realist” like his former colleagues at the National Policy Institute, an organization founded by William Regnery II and led by Richard Spencer.
As with other racists in the West, Taylor has found a home in Russian support. Jared Taylor was not only invited to the “International Russian Conservative Forum” organized by Rodina leader, Aleksei Zhuravlyov, the Wall Street Journal reported that his travel and lodging were also paid for by the organizers.24 Taylor told his Russian audience of the “American disease” of multicultural integration.25 Taylor claims on the American Renaissance site that Russia and the United States have never fought a war against each other, which fails to see the amount of blood spilled in proxy wars and the century of spying and active measures.
Notably, he used his role to conduct robocalls on behalf of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.26 And while some campaigns can’t control who may advocate for them, Taylor was validated when he was retweeted by Trump before Twitter suspended Taylor’s account.27
Taylor called the United States “the greatest enemy of tradition everywhere.”28 He has said that “There is a worldwide awakening of nationalism among European countries—and I include the United States in that.”29
WHITE NATIONALIST MATTHEW Heimbach was active in trying to make his racist views go mainstream for several years before he became well known for his role in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Heimbach founded the White Student Union at Towson University, where he also created a chapter of the Youth for Western Civilization in 2011.30 Heimbach and Matt Parrott, Heimbach’s father-in-law, founded the Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) in May 2013. The TYN also opened a chapter in Bloomington, Indiana, at Indiana University under the leadership of Thomas Buhls.31 Heimbach was training director of the League of the South group, a neo-Confederate group, beginning in late 2014. The primary group associated with Heimbach is the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), which he founded with Parrot and Tony Hovater in January 2015. In 2017, Matthew Heimbach’s group notoriously attended the Charlottesville rally. The group joined the Nationalist Front, a coalition of White Nationalists and neo-Nazis, on April 22, 2016. Other members are the National Socialist Movement, League of the South, and Vanguard America. The Nationalist Front was responsible for the October 2017 rally called “White Lives Matter” in Murfreesboro and Shelbyville, Tennessee.
Heimbach believes he is part of a counter-revolutionary effort in that the Western dynamic has been successfully overtaken by a revolution that displaced God, traditional values, and, most importantly, white power. Further, he believes that his group’s views are not crazy, fringe, or extreme. However, he’s also been spreading messages like, “the Jew does not care if you’re pagan. The Jew does not care if you’re Christian. The Jew does not care if you are a national socialist or a libertarian because they want to destroy us all.”32
Matthew Heimbach shared this same Putinesque worldview. He had praised Putin as the best European leader of the 21st century.33 Heimbach said that Russia under Putin became “kind of the axis of nationalists.” Heimbach said, “I really believe that Russia is the leader of the free world right now,” in an interview with Business Insider. He said that Putin was “supporting nationalists around the world and building an anti-globalist alliance, while promoting traditional values and self-determination.”34 To Heimbach, this is a battle he wants to take to the global stage in his war against “globalism.” Heimbach compares the modern nationalism drive from Russia to the COMINTERN and sees it as an opportunity for racists around the world to unite through networks of nationalism. This would include moral support, financial support, aligned actions, and breeding to expand the size of the movement. Echoing the language of the former Soviets, “see what our comrades are doing around the world,” he once preached to a small audience of supporters.
Heimbach says he sees Putin as leader of the free world and Russia as “our biggest inspiration.”35 “The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union has fallen and now Russia has become the bastion of traditionalism, of nationalism, and Christianity,” and that it was important for American nationalists to align themselves with Russia against the United States. In Heimbach’s view, the globalist evil of the world comes from Washington, DC, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. To Heimbach, the battle is globalism versus nationalists.
He associated himself with racist groups around Europe like Golden Dawn and with neo-Eurasianist Alexander Dugin. Quoting Dugin, who once said, “If you support globalism, you are my enemy,” Heimbach said, “Globalism is the poison, nationalism is the antidote.”36
To Heimbach, “America is the problem.” America is the Roman Empire and the nationalists are “the new barbarians.” “By flying the American flag, by supporting generic American nationalism, you’re actually waving the flag of the regime that wants to destroy you.” Dugin even sent Heimbach a video speech for one of his meetings launching the Traditional Worker Party, called “To My American Friends in our common struggle.”37 On his honeymoon, Heimbach met with Golden Dawn, the Czech Workers Party, and Romania’s New Right. He’s a member of the “World National Conservative Movement,” a Russian-created group aligned with the Russian Rodina Party and the Russian Imperial Movement. According to the New York Times, by December 2016, Heimbach had had three trips to Europe for fundraising and organizing strategies.38 He said his visits taught him how to turn his movement into “a real political force” that would be part of a worldwide network. Heimbach said, “Russia has already taken its place on the global stage by organizing national movements as counterparts to the Atlanticist elites,” which is a full echo statement of Alexander Dugin. “Intellectually, they’ve shown us how it works.”39
“The internet is the greatest thing given to our movement,” said Heimbach, but he expressed that it should ultimately lead to meeting others, planning actions, and taking efforts “to the streets” as he saw in Europe when he went to visit Golden Dawn and as he sees in the success of anti-racist groups like Black Lives Matter.40
Heimbach lays out his plans to followers who will listen, essentially presenting them a plan that reads as follows:
• Find aligned people for his movement
• Use propaganda on the street and internet
• Move to same general area
White Nationalists need to reach out to women since the movement has been dominated by males. Yet he believes women should be taught modesty by men, and to promote virtue and honor to reject the “American slut culture.” Heimbach teaches the need of “cultural secession” to return to traditional values. He says the new racists will not ask for permission and they will not ask for forgiveness. “Their agenda is to make us all slaves on the international plantation.” He believed that his peers should protest anti-racist activist Tim Wise. “We shall never betray our patrimony,” he said defiantly.
RICHARD SPENCER HARDLY matches the profile of a downtrodden white American male. Instead, he was born into a wealthy family and sent to the finest schools. As a White Supremacy advocate, Spencer runs a White Nationalist institute with the goal of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” via policy positions, but not all White Nationalists are nonviolent in achieving their objectives. He became president of the National Policy Institute, created by William H. Regnery in 2005. Regnery is the financial backer of Richard Spencer.41
After quitting Duke University as a PhD student, Spencer began working to spread his extremist views. First, he worked for American Conservative magazine, becoming an editor in 2007, but he was fired by Scott McConnell for being “a bit extreme for us.”42 He then went on to work for Taki’s magazine in 2008. He founded the website, AlternativeRight.com in 2010, the foundation of the term “alt-right,” according to Spencer. In 2011, he was hired as executive director of the Washington Summit Publishers (WSP), a White Nationalist publisher created by Louis Andrews in 2006.43 The WSP published articles by notable racists like American psychologist Kevin MacDonald, White Nationalist Samuel Frances, British psychologist Richard Lynn, Finnish politician/professor Tatu Vanhanen, and white separatist Michael Hart. WSP published Spencer’s Radix Journal, beginning in 2012.
Days before the election of Donald Trump, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Spencer launched a new website dedicated to the alt-right audience, AltRight.com. It was an outlet that featured the works of notable racist columnists including Jared Taylor and Swedish White Supremacist Henrik Palmgren and, like Spencer’s other projects, was funded by William Regnery II.
But two events highlight Spencer’s influence on the American White Supremacist movement, and both occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia. The town had voted to remove a statue of failed confederate traitor Robert E. Lee, which provoked racists around the country to defend their heroes. On May 13, 2017, Spencer led a group of White Supremacists with torches in chants including “Russia is our friend” as they descended on Lee Park.44
Spencer would do this again in August for the infamous Unite the Right rally that saw a convergence of White Supremacists from around the nation on August 11, 2017. He returned yet again on October 7, 2017, to more chanting of “You will not replace us,” but with far fewer numbers than the disastrous events in August.45
He may find friends in Dugin and other racists, but the global community hasn’t been so keen to accept Spencer’s views. Spencer was kicked out of Hungary like other racists who sought refuge there.46 Under a treaty agreement established in 1985, dubbed the Schengen Agreement, Spencer subsequently is banned in 26 countries covered in the Schengen area. They include Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
His visits to college campuses have sparked protests, including visits to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2010; Providence College in Rhode Island in 2011; Texas A&M in College Station, Texas, in 2016; University of Florida in September 2017; Louisiana State University in 2017; Michigan State University in 2017; and Ohio State University in 2017. The block to speak at University of Florida led to a lawsuit resulting in the court’s ruling in favor of Spencer and he subsequently spoke to a mixed audience of supporters and campus students on October 19, 2017. But the event was met with a large protest and the cost of security for the event was estimated to be around $600,000.
Additionally, the social media platform Twitter had provided a verification check mark to Spencer’s account. The blue mark was often seen as a status symbol. The verification mark was revoked in November 2017 and Twitter announced it would be reviewing its use of the verification status for all future accounts.
Spencer was married to Nina Kouprianova, a Russian-Canadian citizen. Kouprianova was also known as a Kremlin troll who wrote under the name Nina Byzantina, whose Twitter handle @NinaByzantina states that “This account is personally protected by Putin and [Chechen warlord, Islam] Kadyrov.”47
Kouprianova is also Alexander Dugin’s translator. She is a well known “Moscow mouthpiece” who spreads #disinformation stories that clearly benefit the Kremlin on her blog and on Twitter. Her husband touts the same political ideology as Alexander Dugin: stay out of NATO, say no to the UN, play nice with Bashar al-Assad (Syria’s President), and say no to globalism in general.
Spencer’s online magazine, Alternative Right, has Alexander Dugin as a contributor. Spencer has called Russia the “sole white power in the world.” Spencer said, “I think we should be pro-Russia because Russia is the great white power that exists in the world.”48
Jason Kessler was the primary organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He wrote an op-ed that was published by Chuck Johnson’s Gotnews.com titled, “ANALYSIS: #Russia will be one of America’s Greatest Allies During The Trump Administration.”49 In the piece, Kessler argued that Russia was a natural ally to the United States in the areas of nationalism. Andrew Auernheimer fled to Ukraine.50 He worked with Andrew Anglin to create forums for Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.
Louis Marinelli, a native of Buffalo, NY,51 was an English teacher who found his path to Russia through the California secessionist movement and helped found Sovereign California. In 2004, he worked as a volunteer for the John Edwards campaign. Later, he was involved in supporting anti-gay marriage campaigns before changing views in 2010 to a more moderate stance. He said he voted for Trump in 2016. He announced a bid for office in 2015 as he attempted to run for a seat in the California assembly in the 2016 elections. He picked up just over 4,000 votes. When that failed, he repeatedly filed various ballot proposals, all aimed at splitting California away from the United States. Every one of them failed. Marinelli launched the movement called “Yes California Independence Campaign” in 2014 after the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014.52 The resulting campaign also picked up a hashtag, #Calexit after the British effort Brexit that succeeded in getting the UK to break away from the European Union. He was invited to a separatist conference in Russia in September 25, 2016, sponsored by the Rodina-aligned front group, Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia.
The ADR, as it is known in Russia, was created on March 15, 2012, and listed as a Russian NGO. The ADR is funded by a Kremlin-based grant of $50,000 from the National Charity Fund.53 The ADR is a one-man operation under Alexander Ionov.54 Ionov is the leader of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, and CEO of Ionov Transcontinental, LLC. He’s been involved with other outreach efforts, including a meeting called “Syria and Russia: Peace to unbreakable friendship,” in February 2014. He was co-chair of the Committee for Solidarity with the Peoples of Syria and Libya, under former Rodina member Sergei Baburin. The group has bestowed honorary memberships to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al-Assad. Marinelli’s trip to Russia was paid for by the Russian group. They even gave him free office space. The Moscow-based event was organized under the name of the International Congress of Separatists. The conference was dubbed “Dialogue of Nations: The Right of People’s to Self-Determination and Building a Multipolar World.” The attendees of the conference promoted separatists from California, Hawaii, Texas, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Catalonia, Western Sahara, and Donetsk.
In previous conferences, the ADR hosted the American organization United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), led by Joe Lombardo. In December 2014, the group invited members of the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) to attend a meeting but the FBI raided the TNM’s offices. In June 2, 2016, the ADR worked with the Rodina Party to create other events like the “Human Rights Movement for Indians in the US.” The event featured Mashu White Feather of the Cherokee tribe. Also in attendance was Doreen Bennet of New Zealand, from the radio station “Voices of Indigenous People.” Rodina member, Feodor Biryukov (also co-chair of the Stalingrad Club), was joined by Ionov.
Despite all the ties to Kremlin initiatives, Marinelli stated, “We don’t have any communication with or contact with or receive any support of any kind from the Russian government or any Russian government officials.”55 Ironically, Vladimir Putin signed a law in January 2014 outlawing spreading separatist views inside of Russia. The punishment could be up to five years in jail. In December 2016, Russia Today was eager to cover Marinelli’s opening of the “California Embassy” in Moscow.56 Despite these welcoming arms, Marinelli refused donations from out of state. “The People of California alone should determine their own future.”57 However, Marinelli echoes the Kremlin’s lines better than Putin himself, “The people in Washington are the enemy,” and “those people in Washington are masters of propaganda.”58 As if the Russian support wasn’t enough for Marinelli, he also sought to get a boost from Julian Assange after WikiLeaks backed the separatists in Catalonia.59
In 2016, when Marinelli sought to return to Russia, his now wife Anastasia was unable to travel with him after they moved to San Diego because her visa had expired. Fearing a 10-year ban for the violation, Marinelli was forced to travel without her as he moved to Yekaterinburg, Russia, near Siberia in 2016.60
Texas separatist Nate Smith told a Russian newspaper during a trip to Moscow that “We [Texas] need independence, because we are different.” Smith was the Executive Director of the Texas Nationalist Movement.61 Smith bragged to Russian newspaper Vzglyad that his group had 250,000 people supporting the movement, which led the newspaper to state that when it comes to Texas independence, the group was “the largest and most important organization in America.” He additionally claimed, “we have no reason to stay in the US,” and “We have a completely different way of life.”530 When Smith spoke to the Russian newspaper he said he was invited to come to Moscow because of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia and that it was his second trip. He also stated that a large number of military members from Texas are supportive of Texas independence. He falsely stated that “Texas has its own army,” referring to the Texas National Guard. He told the Russian newspaper that “Texas receives nothing from the US federal government. Nothing.” But this is clearly not true. For instance, the comptroller of Texas said the state received 35.5 percent of its net revenue from the federal government in 2016.62
Smith stated that despite local-, state-, and federal-level governance, “there are simply no people who represent the interest of Texans.” In fact, Texas has two senators like all other states and 36 members in the House of Representatives. At the state level there are 150 members of the Texas House of Representatives and 31 members of the Texas Senate.
Smith addressed the education system in Texas by stating that “the federal government is artificially trying to create an American identity,” even though the US identity is older than even that of a notion of an independent Texas. Smith argued that the movement wanted to teach “our children to study the history of Texas,” which is indeed taught statewide.
Like Louis Marinelli of the Yes California secession group, Smith was working with Alexander Ionov of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia.
DAILY STORMER IN many ways is the evil little brother of the first White Supremacist site, Stormfront. In the early days of the internet, there was Stormfront, established by Don Black, an ex-con Alabama Klansman who put his prison schooling in computers to really poor use. Black, who was in prison for conspiring to invade an island in the Caribbean dominated by blacks (the race and not his surname), had launched and christened Stormfront just weeks prior to the Oklahoma City bombing that left nearly 200 people (predominantly children) dead.
Daily Stormer became the Stormfront for a new generation of little Nazis. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville reminded the world about the danger of neo-Nazis and White Supremacists, a backlash ensued against tech companies giving safe harbor to the sites, forums, and social media profiles. As a result, the White Supremacist website Daily Stormer was booted from GoDaddy servers and it wound up on servers in Russia.63 The site emerged as dailystormer.ru. Additionally, alt-right groups were banned from Facebook and Twitter and began to seek community in the arms of the Russian social media platform, VKontakte.64