In the early 2000s, metapolitics began to cohere as a framework for the nascent alt-right in the United States. The concept—essentially the belief that winning the hearts and minds of white Americans is a necessary first step toward massive social change—became a conceptual anchor for people like Greg Johnson, who established Counter-Currents Publishing in 2010 for an “elite” audience, which he believes is one whose members possess an IQ of 120 or higher.
The alt-right views metapolitics as pivotal to dislodging the left’s control of culture, fomenting white identity politics, and installing the alt-right brand. In Counter-Currents, which is a webzine as well as a book publisher, Johnson explains that “our enemies have carefully laid the metapolitical foundations for the power they enjoy. They control academia, the school system, publishing, the arts, the news, and entertainment media, and they have remade the American mind to their liking.”
The aim of Counter-Currents, he maintains, is to “change people’s sense of what is politically desirable and right, and their sense of what is politically conceivable and possible.” The alt-right’s “war of position” will unfold on cultural terrain. As one comment posted to Counter-Currents stated, “The medium of metapolitics is culture.”
Alt-righters espouse two prongs for building and expanding “soft power.” The first is propaganda, or “articulating and communicating our message”; the second is community organizing or “creating a community that lives according to our philosophy today and will serve as the nucleus of the new political order we seek to build tomorrow.”
Identified strategies for effective messaging and community building include disruptive tactics like trolling; the creation of cultural spaces like publishing houses, websites, and musical bands; and the reclamation of “turf from the left” such as unions, environmental organizations, and media. With this plan of engagement on various levels, the alt-right wants to build up a rivaling “soft power” exclusively for white people that will permeate all the contours of daily life.
Before Trump’s win, the intellectual camp of the alt-right viewed its work as occurring in the margins and focused on shaping belief systems about what was politically and culturally possible. A small cadre affiliated with Counter-Currents, Taki’s Magazine, Occidental Quarterly, and Radix Journal interpreted books, movies, and music through alt-right lenses, producing a constant output of books, articles, blog posts, vlogs, podcasts, and more.
Around 2010, as alt-righters were evincing equal alienation from Republicans and Democrats, metapolitical change solidified as the Holy Grail. Alt-righters were devising strategies to convert white minds, one at a time, to the allure of a racially homogeneous society guided by traditionalism and anti-egalitarianism, whether by coaxing or willing it into being.
Alt-right blog posts have explored the world of Hogwarts, from the Harry Potter series, praising its whiteness, rituals, and occult dramas but criticizing Harry’s boarding school for upholding tenets of meritocratic education. Alt-righters were urged to make hipper choices in clothing, photography, and design, fashioning themselves on their identitarian brothers in France and Germany.
Metapolitics extends to sports. A recent post on Counter-Currents contends there is a strong affinity between skateboarders and alt-righters given that the sport “is undeniably a White innovation,” even as it undergoes “multiracialization.” As with many manifestations of American culture, this writer asserts that white skateboarders need to become “conscious of their sport as an expression of their ethnic heritage.”
At the same time, the alt-right has claimed affinity with elite cultural and literary forms, including the poetry of imperialist Rudyard Kipling, neofascist modernist Ezra Pound, and even the socialist writer Jack London.
One arena that has received special attention in metapolitics is music, above all heavy metal, which offers a bridge from the neo-Nazism of the 1980s and 1990s to the alt-right counterculture of the 2000s. As one writer asserts in Radix Journal, “I can say with confidence that heavy metal music has done far more to advance authentic rightwing aesthetics, values, and yes, even philosophy, than all the failed institutions of the Beltway Right put together.” Metal is rightwing in part because “it’s very un-Black in its rhythm and structure.”
In the 1980s, white power skinhead groups appeared on the punk scene, and in the 1990s bands like RaHoWa (short for Racial Holy War) were promoted to “transcend national boundaries and reach out to our racial brothers and sisters around the globe.”
Since the 2000s, there has been an increasing turn to neofolk music, which draws on paganistic themes, invokes Nordic and Greek iconography, and pays tribute to the metaphysical writings of the Italian neofascist Julius Evola. In Europe, metal and hardcore music is popular among many identitarians.
The Swedish group Arditi, for example, celebrates the warrior ethic and calls for a return to traditional white Europe. The band name is taken from a World War I Royal Italian Army special force known for being on the front lines of assault and for its interwar associations with nationalists and proto-fascists.
The biggest blessing, and to some extent curse, for alt-right metapolitics has been the advent of cyberspace.
Metapolitics found its medium online, merging with digital culture.
The digital engagement of white nationalists dates back to the Aryan Nations’ development of the Aryan Liberty Net, a computer-to-computer network created in the 1980s using first-generation Macs and PCs.
The World Wide Web took this to the next level, exemplified by the launch of the trendsetter message board Stormfront in 1995, followed by websites such as Infowars (1999), Red Ice TV (2003), the Right Stuff (2012), Daily Stormer (2013), and a slew of webzines, such as Occidental Quarterly (2001), Taki’s Magazine (2008), the short-lived AlternativeRight.com (2010), Counter-Currents (2010), and the now-folded Radix Journal (2013).
Since the mid-2000s, white nationalists and misogynists have flocked to the Internet, creating websites and blogs, and launching YouTube channels, which run the gamut from David Duke’s poisonously anti-Semitic website to the almost cult-like vlogs of Vox Day, VertigoPolitix, and Sargon of Akkad. Platforms like Facebook have birthed virtual communities, as have the nasty online arenas of 4chan and 8chan. And there is a steady proliferation of alt-right and alt-light YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, and blogs.
These sites are visited by thousands of users, many of whom offer comments or participate in live chats. For example, Stormfront counts more than 800,000 monthly visits and close to 1,800 interlinked websites; the Daily Stormer has nearly 600,000 monthly visits and more than 1,000 interlinked websites; and American Renaissance gets 350,000 monthly visits with just under 1,500 interlinked websites. Counter-Currents reports that in its eighth year, ending in summer 2018, it received 150,000 unique visitors per month, uploaded forty-three podcasts, and produced eighteen interviews.
For the most part, the combination of a legal landscape characterized by stalwart support for free speech, limited precedents for regulating hate speech, and a virtual infrastructure characterized by decentralization, anonymity, and unaccountability has been conducive to the forging of an alt-right “wild west” that has grown dramatically over the past two decades. This extends to the microblogging platform Twitter, which, with its lax moderation, “unwittingly gave white supremacists an ideal venue for their hatred.”
Author Alexandra Minna Stern
Since the deadly protests at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, the alt-right’s Internet presence has been tested. For instance, the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts of Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, Vox Day, Millennial Woes, the Mormon nationalist Wife with a Purpose, and others have been temporarily or permanently suspended.
Most notably, Infowars was deplatformed, with blanket removals from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify.
Yet this wave of deplatforming has been inconsistent and, for the purposes of shutting down the alt-right, too little, too late. The interventions have been done haphazardly and with scant transparency, so that it is not clear why one person is blocked and another person is not. Moreover, the feedback circuitry so instrumental to alt-right amplification is firmly in place, as tweets and retweets flash among alt-righters, alt-lighters, and rightwing pundits and politicians.
As long as they can maintain online footholds, the alt-right will continue to propound its metapolitical messages, hoping to transform American society from outside in.
From Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, by Alexandra Minna Stern. Copyright 2019. Excerpted with the permission of Beacon Press.