Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America (3-17-18)

https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=120998

Vegas Tenold writes:

* Richard Spencer, the man who had coined the term alt-right and, by 2016, had become its de facto leader and also a proud Trump supporter, once told me that he saw himself and the rest of the movement as the ideological kitchen for the far-right positions, which Trump, by osmosis, made his own. Even though Spencer and Matthew very much disliked each other, they agreed that the Trump campaign was co-opting their ideas. Others in the alt-right movement were more skeptical of Trump but still grateful for his candidacy, believing he would be a gateway drug to white nationalism. Whatever the truth of the relationship was, Trump’s ascendancy had created a sense of urgency and vigor on the far right that its members had never felt before, and now they were all scrambling to capitalize before Trump inevitably screwed up and lost to Hillary Clinton. In separate interviews Matthew, Jeff, and Richard Spencer had all told me the same thing: this was their moment.

* Klansmen. To people like Richard Spencer, the KKK and the neo-Nazis were obscene and outdated, and unless Matthew could convince Spencer and his comrades that there was value within his ranks, then his alliance, although certainly an unprecedented achievement, would still be largely irrelevant.

* Matthew was part of the boots faction of the nationalist movement, Spencer was the apotheosis of a suit. He was affluent, well educated, and well spoken. He had a degree from the University of Virginia, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and an unfinished doctorate from Duke. He wore tweed, drank tea, and mixed an air of affected intellectualism with the smug arrogance of every evil fraternity kid from 1980s college movies. He and Matthew had never met, but Matthew had written him off as a cocktail-sipping asshole who was afraid to get his hands dirty; I suspected that Spencer likewise had little love or understanding for Matthew. Spencer’s nationalism felt much more like an intellectual exercise performed for his own amusement than any form of deep-seated conviction. He would casually throw out some outrageous statement and then sit back and enjoy the carnage. His politics revolved around what he called identitarianism, which he explained as identifying first and foremost as a white man of European descent. It was a bastardization of identity politics that assumed that whites—and white males in particular—had similar political interests based on being white and male alone, but he’d managed to create a following for himself through it. He once tweeted that “all women want to be taken by a strong man” and was an early proponent of Donald Trump. Somehow he and a cadre of other nationalists had been able to mount a virtual army from disgruntled internet dwellers, misogynists, racists, and self-proclaimed firebrands that, in their own minds at least, had given Trump the presidency.