The chickens are coming home to roost. When you're not right wing enough.....
Why White Nationalists Are Turning on Trump Republicans
An outgrowth of the alt-right has become impatient with the white nationalist promise of the Trump presidency.
BY
TALIA LAVIN
November 25, 2019
Last week, Charlie Kirk, 26-year-old spokesman for the deep-pocketed Republican youth group Turning Point USA, held an event called “Prove Me Wrong” at the University of Houston. Billed as a chance to watch Kirk “debate the merits of capitalism vs. Socialism” in his signature blustering style, it ended in chaos. A hostile throng materialized around the small table—adorned with a poster that said, “I’m pro-choice. You can pick your gun”—at which Kirk was sitting and chased him bodily from the area, shouting, “America first!”
It was the latest in a series of escalating disruptions of conservative events that amounted to a piecemeal showdown between the corporate wing of the Republican establishment and an insurgent faction of white nationalists, an outgrowth of the alt-right. The events underscored the perils engendered by the Trump-era Republican Party’s willingness to accede to the goals of white nationalism, even as it attempts to keep the ideology’s most strident proponents at a careful, corporate-friendly arm’s length.
The insurgent faction’s agenda had three major points: advocating for anti-Semitism; advancing the theory that white Americans are being “replaced” by immigrants, including legal ones; and asserting the necessity of explicit homophobia. It is led, tactically and spiritually, by a 21-year-old named Nicholas Fuentes, who was neither a particularly significant nor a particularly popular figure on the white nationalist right prior to the disruption campaign. He was a minor participant in the deadly Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville in 2017, dropped out of Boston University, and then launched a YouTube channel called “America First!” Although Fuentes is frequently described as a “Trump supporter,” the principal objection he and his faction have toward the Trump administration is its insufficient cruelty to nonwhites, and its perceived coziness with Jews. Fuentes’s strategy—sending minions to disrupt the Q&A sections of corporate-conservative events with overtly white nationalist questions—was effective, but did not require any significant cunning: Pointing out the hypocrisy of establishment conservatism in the age of Trump is a fantastically easy task, fruit hanging so low it brushes muck.
The evident success of Fuentes’s faction in humiliating and distressing mainstream conservative speakers engendered a slew of press coverage, which in turn emboldened the youthful white nationalists further. Last week, Donald Trump Jr. faced a humiliatingly abbreviated launch for his book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, scampering off stage right a mere 20 minutes after his event began, as he was beset by demands for a Q&A—silenced by a MAGA-hatted crowd that thrives on hate. The neo-Nazi publication the Daily Stormer, which has aligned itself with Fuentes’s faction, revealed plans for the disruption campaign to continue throughout November and beset several events scheduled by the Young America's Foundation.
The subsequent scramble by Republicans to repudiate white nationalism has been a tragicomedy in Tweet form. Benny Johnson, fired from BuzzFeed and the Independent Journal Review for plagiarism and currently serving as chief creative officer of TPUSA, laid out a long thread establishing Fuentes’s history of public bigotry, from overt racism to “Unabashedly Sexist” (sic) commentary. Johnson ended with a passionate plea to fellow conservatives to “disavow hatred, racism, identity politics and open antisemitism.” And Texas Republican representative Dan Crenshaw, who was heckled by Fuentes’s acolytes no fewer than three times, took to Twitter to clarify that “conservatives are 100% different” than these “vehement racists, anti-semites & ethnic-nationalists.”
Yet both Johnson and Crenshaw are avid supporters of Trump and his policies. Johnson spent the following day live-tweeting the House impeachment inquiry, manically defending a president who has predicated his entire rule on racism, and who is credibly accused of multiple rapes; Crenshaw has advocated ending visa lotteries and policies that make it easier for immigrants’ family members to immigrate, and has advocated repeatedly for Trump’s signature border wall, a concrete symbol of xenophobia.
Trump’s own statements and policies are the strongest argument that his vision aligns with that of white nationalists. One wonders how, precisely, someone like Charlie Kirk could have answered a question posed by Fuentes in his channel: “Why does the president prefer immigrants from Norway vs. Haiti?”
While the litany of Trump’s acts cozying up to and encouraging a once-fringe white nationalist element is long, it’s worth considering the architect of the immigration policies that establishment Republicans like Dan Crenshaw champion. An ongoing series of articlesby the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael E. Hayden, drawing on some 900 e-mails sent by Trump's senior policy adviser Stephen Miller to former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, have laid out precisely the ideological affiliations of the administration’s immigration czar. From championing the Confederate flag to repeatedly linking to openly white nationalist sites like VDARE and American Renaissance, Miller stridently embraced the tenets of white supremacy; and like the Fuentes faction, he also advocated a complete cessation of legal immigration of any kind. “There should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes,” he wrote to McHugh.
Miller’s e-mails show a familiarity with—and advocacy of—the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits a plot by elites to replace the white population of America and Europe with nonwhite immigrants. Miller stops short of embracing a crucial tenet of “great replacement” theory embraced by most of the white nationalist right: that this replacement is being orchestrated by Jews. (That precise theorem is what motivated the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter to murder eleven Jews almost exactly a year ago.) Perhaps this is because Miller is Jewish, a fact that the White House has belabored in its increasingly mendacious defenses of the staffer, going so far as to accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center of an anti-Semitic campaign.
But it is impossible to advocate for white nationalism, as Miller has throughout his career in politics, without simultaneously elevating anti-Semitism. For most white nationalists, anti-Semitism is a non-negotiable raison d’être for the movement, the unified field theory that ties a bigoted worldview together. In their minds, nonwhite people are too ignorant and barbaric to organize the kind of demographic coup the “great replacement” theory lays out; instead, they assert again and again, it has been orchestrated by cunning Jews, pulling the marionette strings of mass migration and advocating for interracial marriage. The sites, forums, and chats that advocate for an end to legal immigration—and that push the false theory that demographic change amounts to “white genocide”—are places that praise Hitler and traffic in the ugliest of anti-Semitic sentiments. This is why an administration awash in anti-immigrant sentiment, slashing rights for asylees and refugees, governed during the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the deadliest pogrom in American history. It is not a coincidence. It never was.
None of the Republican figures so quick to disavow Fuentes did the same for Miller; indeed, there has been a profound, impenetrable closing of the ranks around him on the right. The chief difference at play is that Miller advocates from the White House for the end of legal immigration, while the insurgent faction does so on messaging apps, and while lined up in the audience section at events, like plebes. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the differences are not primarily ideological; principally, they are about an aversion to heckling.
The sudden, awkward repudiation of white nationalism by conservative ideologues subjected to its unruly minions may be comical, but it is a small part of the story of a national plague. Begrimed in the filth of racist invective and nativist sentiment, which groups like TPUSA have eagerly whipped up in their own right with a constant stream of culture-war content, the Republican establishment finds itself unable to ward off the forces they have unleashed. It’s akin to someone who starves a dog intentionally; lets it terrorize a neighborhood, maiming and wounding all who come close to it; and then reacts in horror and surprise when at last the wretched cur turns on them.
There are tens of thousands of children who have been separated from their families by Stephen Miller’s policies; there are dozens of dead, murdered in an El Paso Walmart and a Pittsburgh synagogue and a Charlottesville street and by inadequate medical care in migration facilities. Through these years, as ethnic minorities and Jews and feminists and trans people and gay people have sounded out the alarm bells, the mainstream GOP laughed. They turned a profit on “triggering the libs”; they called opposition to the tide of rising white nationalism “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Only when the hound turned on them, its jaws red and insatiable, did they at last begin to cry out in alarm about the danger the rest of us have known for years.
https://www.gq.com/story/white-nationalists-trump-republicans
Why White Nationalists Are Turning on Trump Republicans
An outgrowth of the alt-right has become impatient with the white nationalist promise of the Trump presidency.
BY
TALIA LAVIN
November 25, 2019
Last week, Charlie Kirk, 26-year-old spokesman for the deep-pocketed Republican youth group Turning Point USA, held an event called “Prove Me Wrong” at the University of Houston. Billed as a chance to watch Kirk “debate the merits of capitalism vs. Socialism” in his signature blustering style, it ended in chaos. A hostile throng materialized around the small table—adorned with a poster that said, “I’m pro-choice. You can pick your gun”—at which Kirk was sitting and chased him bodily from the area, shouting, “America first!”
It was the latest in a series of escalating disruptions of conservative events that amounted to a piecemeal showdown between the corporate wing of the Republican establishment and an insurgent faction of white nationalists, an outgrowth of the alt-right. The events underscored the perils engendered by the Trump-era Republican Party’s willingness to accede to the goals of white nationalism, even as it attempts to keep the ideology’s most strident proponents at a careful, corporate-friendly arm’s length.
The insurgent faction’s agenda had three major points: advocating for anti-Semitism; advancing the theory that white Americans are being “replaced” by immigrants, including legal ones; and asserting the necessity of explicit homophobia. It is led, tactically and spiritually, by a 21-year-old named Nicholas Fuentes, who was neither a particularly significant nor a particularly popular figure on the white nationalist right prior to the disruption campaign. He was a minor participant in the deadly Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville in 2017, dropped out of Boston University, and then launched a YouTube channel called “America First!” Although Fuentes is frequently described as a “Trump supporter,” the principal objection he and his faction have toward the Trump administration is its insufficient cruelty to nonwhites, and its perceived coziness with Jews. Fuentes’s strategy—sending minions to disrupt the Q&A sections of corporate-conservative events with overtly white nationalist questions—was effective, but did not require any significant cunning: Pointing out the hypocrisy of establishment conservatism in the age of Trump is a fantastically easy task, fruit hanging so low it brushes muck.
The evident success of Fuentes’s faction in humiliating and distressing mainstream conservative speakers engendered a slew of press coverage, which in turn emboldened the youthful white nationalists further. Last week, Donald Trump Jr. faced a humiliatingly abbreviated launch for his book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, scampering off stage right a mere 20 minutes after his event began, as he was beset by demands for a Q&A—silenced by a MAGA-hatted crowd that thrives on hate. The neo-Nazi publication the Daily Stormer, which has aligned itself with Fuentes’s faction, revealed plans for the disruption campaign to continue throughout November and beset several events scheduled by the Young America's Foundation.
The subsequent scramble by Republicans to repudiate white nationalism has been a tragicomedy in Tweet form. Benny Johnson, fired from BuzzFeed and the Independent Journal Review for plagiarism and currently serving as chief creative officer of TPUSA, laid out a long thread establishing Fuentes’s history of public bigotry, from overt racism to “Unabashedly Sexist” (sic) commentary. Johnson ended with a passionate plea to fellow conservatives to “disavow hatred, racism, identity politics and open antisemitism.” And Texas Republican representative Dan Crenshaw, who was heckled by Fuentes’s acolytes no fewer than three times, took to Twitter to clarify that “conservatives are 100% different” than these “vehement racists, anti-semites & ethnic-nationalists.”
Yet both Johnson and Crenshaw are avid supporters of Trump and his policies. Johnson spent the following day live-tweeting the House impeachment inquiry, manically defending a president who has predicated his entire rule on racism, and who is credibly accused of multiple rapes; Crenshaw has advocated ending visa lotteries and policies that make it easier for immigrants’ family members to immigrate, and has advocated repeatedly for Trump’s signature border wall, a concrete symbol of xenophobia.
Trump’s own statements and policies are the strongest argument that his vision aligns with that of white nationalists. One wonders how, precisely, someone like Charlie Kirk could have answered a question posed by Fuentes in his channel: “Why does the president prefer immigrants from Norway vs. Haiti?”
While the litany of Trump’s acts cozying up to and encouraging a once-fringe white nationalist element is long, it’s worth considering the architect of the immigration policies that establishment Republicans like Dan Crenshaw champion. An ongoing series of articlesby the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael E. Hayden, drawing on some 900 e-mails sent by Trump's senior policy adviser Stephen Miller to former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, have laid out precisely the ideological affiliations of the administration’s immigration czar. From championing the Confederate flag to repeatedly linking to openly white nationalist sites like VDARE and American Renaissance, Miller stridently embraced the tenets of white supremacy; and like the Fuentes faction, he also advocated a complete cessation of legal immigration of any kind. “There should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes,” he wrote to McHugh.
Miller’s e-mails show a familiarity with—and advocacy of—the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits a plot by elites to replace the white population of America and Europe with nonwhite immigrants. Miller stops short of embracing a crucial tenet of “great replacement” theory embraced by most of the white nationalist right: that this replacement is being orchestrated by Jews. (That precise theorem is what motivated the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter to murder eleven Jews almost exactly a year ago.) Perhaps this is because Miller is Jewish, a fact that the White House has belabored in its increasingly mendacious defenses of the staffer, going so far as to accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center of an anti-Semitic campaign.
But it is impossible to advocate for white nationalism, as Miller has throughout his career in politics, without simultaneously elevating anti-Semitism. For most white nationalists, anti-Semitism is a non-negotiable raison d’être for the movement, the unified field theory that ties a bigoted worldview together. In their minds, nonwhite people are too ignorant and barbaric to organize the kind of demographic coup the “great replacement” theory lays out; instead, they assert again and again, it has been orchestrated by cunning Jews, pulling the marionette strings of mass migration and advocating for interracial marriage. The sites, forums, and chats that advocate for an end to legal immigration—and that push the false theory that demographic change amounts to “white genocide”—are places that praise Hitler and traffic in the ugliest of anti-Semitic sentiments. This is why an administration awash in anti-immigrant sentiment, slashing rights for asylees and refugees, governed during the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the deadliest pogrom in American history. It is not a coincidence. It never was.
None of the Republican figures so quick to disavow Fuentes did the same for Miller; indeed, there has been a profound, impenetrable closing of the ranks around him on the right. The chief difference at play is that Miller advocates from the White House for the end of legal immigration, while the insurgent faction does so on messaging apps, and while lined up in the audience section at events, like plebes. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the differences are not primarily ideological; principally, they are about an aversion to heckling.
The sudden, awkward repudiation of white nationalism by conservative ideologues subjected to its unruly minions may be comical, but it is a small part of the story of a national plague. Begrimed in the filth of racist invective and nativist sentiment, which groups like TPUSA have eagerly whipped up in their own right with a constant stream of culture-war content, the Republican establishment finds itself unable to ward off the forces they have unleashed. It’s akin to someone who starves a dog intentionally; lets it terrorize a neighborhood, maiming and wounding all who come close to it; and then reacts in horror and surprise when at last the wretched cur turns on them.
There are tens of thousands of children who have been separated from their families by Stephen Miller’s policies; there are dozens of dead, murdered in an El Paso Walmart and a Pittsburgh synagogue and a Charlottesville street and by inadequate medical care in migration facilities. Through these years, as ethnic minorities and Jews and feminists and trans people and gay people have sounded out the alarm bells, the mainstream GOP laughed. They turned a profit on “triggering the libs”; they called opposition to the tide of rising white nationalism “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Only when the hound turned on them, its jaws red and insatiable, did they at last begin to cry out in alarm about the danger the rest of us have known for years.
https://www.gq.com/story/white-nationalists-trump-republicans
