2
WHY THE ALT-RIGHT
HATES ME
To the proud white supremacists at Daily Stormer, I am a “nigger-loving … kike faggot” and a “disease-ridden Jew.”19 But to NBC News and USA Today I am a “white nationalist leader.”20 Aside from the “disease-ridden” part, Daily Stormer is closer to the facts. What does that tell you about the mainstream media?
Anyone who calls me a white supremacist has no understanding of what white supremacy is. That’s sadly common in America today, where wearing a Trump hat is enough to get you called a Nazi and attacked in the street by black-masked “anti-fascists.” The media, in its hysterical, fact-free hunt for racists under the bed, has lost its authority in these matters.
For those of you still confused, I’m going to explain what white supremacy is, what the alt-right is, and why I have no love for either.
In late November 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek published their annual Jealousy List, a collection of “stories we wish we’d done this year—and don’t want you to miss.” The list was predictable: Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, as well as BuzzFeed and Deadspin.
And then, not so predictably, Breitbart.
Bloomberg chose “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” a 5,000-word explainer on the controversial movement written by yours truly along with my colleague Allum Bokhari. They were right to pick our story. It was the most influential piece of political journalism published that year.
When we published our exposition, there had been little commentary, and no trace of an authoritative definition of the emerging alt-right. The media stuck to their usual hysterics that accompany the rise of any popular new right-wing movement.
It’s profoundly anti-intellectual to substitute moral outrage for genuine understanding, but that was the approach taken by many commentators towards the alt-right when it first emerged. This was grossly unfair: in its early days, the alt-right included a member base as diverse as disaffected Tea Party supporters and eighteen-year old meme addicts curious about a movement that defied so many taboos. Even today, it’s not clear-cut. There are Jews who still identify with the alt-right.21
National Review portrayed alt-righters as embittered members of the white-working class, which was not correct. “Thuggish alt-right Trumpers” said Red State, another conservative outlet hand-wringing about online trolling. BuzzFeed described the alt-right as a “white nationalist movement” where “rare Pepes … are common.” (I’ll explain what a “Pepe” is later in this chapter.)
BuzzFeed also quoted lawyer Ken White, who lamented that it was “Really hard to tease out the genuine white nationalists from the trolls,” but added, “At a certain point the distinction isn’t meaningful.”22
Well, I think the distinction is very meaningful.
To deny the movement’s complexity in a frantic effort to advertise their own moral virtue, as so many columnists did on the Left and Right, was an act of supreme intellectual dishonesty. The distinguished Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss insisted scholars should seek “to understand the author as he understood himself.”
There’s a world of difference between teenagers telling jokes on Twitter about forbidden subjects to wind up whiny SJWs, and someone like Richard Spencer, who wants a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of the United States.
The definition of alt-right has evolved since we penned our guide. White nationalists and Neo-Nazis took over, and people who initially enjoyed the label were being accused of sins they did not commit. This suited the media just fine. It’s weird how obsessed the media is with calling everyone racist, isn’t it? It’s almost like they want everyone to be racist or something, for some reason. Whatever their reasoning, they were given many more cover story options as a result.
In effect, the extremist fringe of the alt-right and the leftist media worked together to define “alt-right” as something narrow and ugly, and entirely different from the broad, culturally libertarian movement Bokhari and I sketched out. This wanton virtue signaling was wholly unjust to young members of the movement who were flirting with dangerous imagery and boundary pushing. Bokhari and I called them “memesters,” and those are the people I will always speak up for. God knows I’ve dabbled with dangerous iconography myself. I wore just about every political symbol you can imagine in my teens and early-twenties experimentation phase. Not because I have any particular love for the regimes they came from. I just like pissing people off!
There are lot worse things you could do in your youth than shock National Review writers on Twitter. As many realized during the 2016 election, National Review needed a little shocking.
For the record, flirtation with the alt-right is nowhere near as deplorable as the left-wing extremist youth movements of the 60s and 70s. If you currently attend Columbia University, you might find yourself in a class led by adjunct professor Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground terrorist who served twenty years in jail for assisting in the murder of two Nyack, New York policemen, including the first black officer in the precinct.
Even before her release, Harvard Educational Review was publishing her articles. Surprise, surprise: if you join a left-wing extremist organization, your life is not going to be ruined.
And of course, if you were a student at the University of Illinois in the early 2000s, you may well have found yourself taught by Obama associate William Charles “Bill” Ayers, an unreformed communist and co-founder of the Weather Underground, responsible for dozens of terrorist attacks on targets ranging from police precincts to the Pentagon.23
At least he never compared a black person to Harambe on Twitter.
I have no sympathy for Ayers and others who took part in and directed terrorist violence in the 70s. I would be sympathetic to someone who hung a Weather Underground flag in their dorm-room because of the rebellious appeal it represented in that era. Young people have always dabbled in radical, dangerous ideas, and so long as such dabbling was only a phase and did not extend into violence, they shouldn’t be punished for it later in life. Maajid Nawaz, former member of the Islamist group Hizb Ut-Tahrir and now one of the world’s leading anti-extremist campaigners is a perfect example of why we should be lenient about what people do in their youth.
My support of dangerous memes holds, by the way, even if your desire to explode polite taboos includes taking aim at the Holocaust. This is where I lose some of my conservative readers, but hear me out.
What a lot of conservatives don’t realize is that no one aged 21 knows anyone who was alive during World War II. And because they’re not educated properly, they don’t regard anti-Semitism any differently from racism or sexism.
I happen to disagree, strongly, that anti-Semitism is just like racism or sexism. I think it’s a unique case, and in my college talks I often underscore what I think is a particularly virulent history of bigotry against Jews. Since there have been Jews, it has always been dangerous to be one, somewhere in the world. But a lot of teenagers I talk to regard right-wing journalists complaining about oven jokes with the same contempt they have for left-wing complaints about racism and sexism. They think it’s all a load of crap cooked up to save people’s feelings. And when you look at what has passed for anti-Semitism in the age of identity politics, they have a point.
It’s simply a fact that Jews are disproportionately well-represented in the media, entertainment industry and in banking. We perform well in those industries! And merely pointing out that statistical success should not be considered anti-Semitic. When you attack people for telling the truth, you lose credibility—and young observers might just lump you in with the race-baiters of Black Lives Matter and the dishonest professional victims who make up the majority of third-wave feminism.
I understand why so many young people find jokes about the Second World War attractive: they drive establishment types, especially conservatives, absolutely crackers. And I will defend to the death their right to tweet jokes about gas ovens, no matter how badly their words may burn.
THE ALT-RIGHT DECLARES A HOLY CRUSADE—AGAINST ME
From day one, the media had an agenda with the alt-right: turn it into a synonym for “Neo-Nazi,” and then accuse all young conservatives of being members of the movement. It’s an old game, and it’s growing exceedingly tedious.
Because I was guilty of writing the only even-handed analysis of the alt-right—in other words, I gave them a fair hearing, as I thought journalists were supposed to do—the mainstream media decided to crown me queen of the movement.
I publicly stated numerous times that I was not a member of the alt-right but it didn’t make a difference. Nothing would make the media tell the truth: journalists simply lie and lie until their enemies are beaten into submission. I won’t be beaten into submission by anything other than a BBC.
The only people who want me at the head of the alt-right are the mainstream media, who have variously described me as a “leader,” a “self-proclaimed leader” and a “face” of the movement. These include NPR, BBC, Bloomberg, Daily Beast, Daily Telegraph, Prospect, Evening Standard, The New Republic, and many, many more.
On the one hand, these guys are declaring the alt-right to be a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic hate group. On the other, they’re saying that a gay Jew with a black boyfriend is the head of it. Something doesn’t quite add up. But consistency has never been a strong point of the liberal media.
I’m willing to accept there are a few idiots working at NPR and Daily Beast who simply don’t know better. The rest are just outright liars. No matter how visually appealing my face is, the alt-right does not want me associated with them. Perhaps some of the younger, less serious memesters wouldn’t mind, but the hardline, white supremacists are unequivocal about it.
“I am hereby declaring a Holy Crusade against Milo Yiannopoulos, who is the single greatest threat our movement has at this time,” wrote Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin last year.24 “He is our archnemesis. We need to stop this kike.”
Frankly, I am overjoyed that both infantile communists and internet Nazis all hate my guts. All the worst people in the world—feminists, cyclists, Black Lives Matter activists, vapers, vegans and, yes, the couple thousand Bitcoin brownshirts living in their parent’s basements really, really hate me.
To the idiots at NBC News, USA Today and CNN: the editor of the most hard-core alt-right site on the web declared me the movement’s “arch-nemesis.” I will personally pay $10,000 to any of these failing outlets that report this fact (I know they need the money).
Breitbart’s former executive chairman Steve Bannon offered a nuanced take on the alt-right to the Wall Street Journal, defining it as, “Younger people who are anti-globalism, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment.”25 Unfortunately, nuance doesn’t play well in the mainstream media. Breitbart was repeatedly pigeonholed by the press as an “alt-right” platform. Yes, Breitbart, where virtually the entire management team and most senior editors are Jewish, the same Breitbart that publishes the Breitbart Jerusalem vertical, is supposedly a platform for a movement that, according to the mainstream media, hates Jews and Israel.
The media’s ultimate target was the incoming Trump administration, which is why they stepped up their attacks on Breitbart after Steve Bannon was appointed to the campaign team. Huffington Post and The Intercept published mind-bending “explainers” on how Bannon was somehow both anti-Semitic and pro-Israel at the same time. According to The Independent, Bannon was an “alt-right media baron” with “the ear of the president.” According to the LA Times, the alt-right was actually “Steve Bannon’s fringe brand of conservatism.”
Once again, the Fake News Media displayed its talent for spinning a web of lies across multiple publications.
But this was 2016, a year that unlike any other proved just how absurd, powerless, and morally bankrupt the press had become. Donald Trump ignored the media pressure and named Bannon his Chief Strategist.
THE FRINGE TAKES OVER
Alt-right is dead. It was killed by the media.
You see, if you call something neo-Nazi long enough, it will invariably attract actual Neo-Nazis and—this may surprise you—scare off normal people.
The alt-right has always had a fringe element of Reich-loving basement-dwellers who describe the Holocaust as a “Holohoax” and want to ban “race-mixing.” When Bokhari and I wrote our alt-right guide, these were just one of many factions in it, alongside dissident intellectuals, taboo-breaking kids, and instinctive social conservatives.
An Israel-supporting former Tea Party member was, in those days, just as likely to be drawn to the alt-right as a Richard Spencer devotee, because it was the most exciting, dynamic, and effective right-wing movement to emerge since the Tea Party. Even leftist outlets like BuzzFeed acknowledged its power to dominate the internet and influence the news cycle.
One week in September, shortly after Hillary Clinton read out several of my headlines in a speech on the alt-right, the national broadcast media spoke of little besides Pepe the Frog. Pepe, for the uninitiated, is a cartoon frog from a web comic that went viral in the mid-noughties. Originally used as a reaction image to signify a poster’s emotional response to something (there are “Sad Pepes, Happy Pepes, Angry Pepes and Smug Pepes—a lot like emojis), the frog inexplicably evolved into something of a mascot for the alt-right and for Trump supporters.
Following the classic media playbook of “if you don’t understand it, call it racist,” the media branded this innocent cartoon frog a “symbol of white supremacy.”
We should give thanks to NPR, CNN and the Southern Poverty Law Center for identifying the real causes of racial tension in America. It isn’t terrible schools, or black fatherlessness, or constant race-baiting from hucksters like Al Sharpton. No. It’s a cartoon frog.
If you’re wondering why largely apolitical trolls are attracted to the alt-right, this is it—nothing tickles them more than getting the entire world to discuss one of their memes and desperately try to make sense of it. Double points if it makes people angry and they start calling it names on cable news!
Thanks to the willingness of old-school conservatives to march in lockstep with the mainstream media, the alt-right gradually came to be dominated not by friends of Pepe, but by actual white nationalists. A turning point came shortly after Donald Trump’s election victory, when Richard Spencer encouraged a room full of his supporters to “Hail Trump,” which about three people promptly did—with so-called “Roman salutes.”
Even nominal white identitarians like Paul “RamZPaul” Ramsey decided they’d had enough with the movement after that, and promptly disavowed it.26
It increasingly looks like the only people left in the alt-right movement are Holocaust-deniers, Richard Spencer fans and Daily Stormer readers. If that’s the case, I want nothing to do with the movement—and, as I’ve made clear, the movement wants nothing to do with me. Still, I can guarantee CNN will continue to refer to me as the alt-right’s leader anyway.
The tragedy of the alt-right is that it has some legitimate grievances: demographic transformation, popular anti-white rhetoric, affirmative action, identity politics for some but not others and enforced diversity, to name just a few. But the alt-right won’t continue to receive attention for these things. It will continue to be painted as another word for neo-Nazi.
Pepe, I am happy to report, has escaped the redefinition of “alt-right” mostly unscathed, and is still a mascot on college campuses, where he is used as a symbol of dissidence and resistance to progressive Left orthodoxy.
If leftists continue to ignore sensible moderates, like me, the frustrations that animate alt-righters will grow stronger. There is no rampant anti-Semitism in America today—except from Muslims—and there is no widespread white nationalist movement. But one day there might be, if the media keeps calling people like me “white supremacists” because they can’t work out how to beat a gay version of Anna Nicole Smith in an argument about campus rape culture. Kimmie!