How the President and Neo-Nazis Work Hand in Hand

The alt-right would rather destroy liberal democracy before they allow people of color and women to gain political and social power. And Trump can't risk alienating them.

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President Donald Trump had one job.

On the morning of Saturday, August 12, Americans woke up to images of neo-Nazis wielding flaming tiki torches on the march in Charlottesville, Virginia. As the morning progressed, the news got even worse. A car plowed into a group of antiracist counter-protesters, killing activist Heather Heyer and injuring others. As the public attempted to digest the unsettling news, the White House remained silent.

It was nearly two hours after the attack when President Trump spoke from his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

In times of national tragedy modern U.S. Presidents generally follow the same familiar script. They appear on TV to give a brief statement, reassuring Americans that we are resilient and there’s nothing we can’t overcome. They outline who the bad guys are, as well as the heroes, and promise us that the heroes will triumph in the end because we are America. Most importantly, they bring the country together, reminding us that we’re stronger when we’re united.

So Trump had one job, and a relatively easy one at that: to unite the country against the literal neo-Nazis who were terrorizing Charlottesville. Instead, much to the astonishment of Americans across the political spectrum, he did the opposite.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence,” he proclaimed. “On many sides, on many sides.”

“On many sides.” Much of the national conversation in the days that followed centered on the fact that Trump couldn’t manage to condemn the murderous white supremacists. But this wasn’t merely, as some speculated, to score political points by bashing the left. And it certainly wasn’t a misguided attempt at unity, spreading the blame evenly around.

It was that Trump couldn’t risk alienating this mob.

And they heard him loud and clear. “He didn’t attack us,” gloated Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, after the remarks. “He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”

Whether you call them neo-Nazis, the alt-right, or white nationalists, Trump simply knows them as a key constituency and a significant portion of his political base.

Whether you call them neo-Nazis, the alt-right, or white nationalists, Trump—an overt racist who refers to black-majority nations as “shithole countries”—simply knows them as a key constituency and a significant portion of his political base. After they intruded on my own life, just a month before the 2016 election, I began studying their interactions online. In the months since, I’ve started calling them by another name, one that best describes their relationship to our sitting President: Trump’s Army.

Four years ago, the blog TechCrunch, which covers startups and Silicon Valley, ran a curious piece, “Geeks for Monarchy,” by writer Klint Finley. The article may have sounded like it was about some fantasy role-playing game. It actually reported on a tech-related political movement: the Dark Enlightenment, a.k.a. neoreactionism.

“Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good,” the article explained. “They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order, and monarchy.”

The article lists prominent neoreactionaries in Silicon Valley, names that have surfaced again in Trump’s Army, including former Business Insider Chief Technology Officer Pax Dickinson and PayPal founder and Trump booster Peter Thiel. (Curtis Yarvin, credited with founding the movement, regularly corresponded with rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos during the latter’s Breit-bart tenure.)

The TechCrunch piece didn’t use the term “alt-right,” but it essentially described the same movement. As Finley points out, neoreactionaries are pro-monarchy, tied to a belief that intelligence is largely dependent on genetics. “It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks,” Finley reflected. “It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world.”

The alt-right coalition that helped elect Donald Trump is a toxic combination of domestic white nationalism, European new right philosophy (and resources), and tech savvy. HOPE not Hate, the British antiracism organization, illustrates this coalition as a sort of Venn diagram coming together to form what they term the “International Alternative Right.”

There has been some debate about whether the term “alt-right” should be used at all. Is it a new political movement, or just a new way to describe the same old white supremacist views? The Associated Press issued guidelines calling on journalists to avoid using the term alt-right, saying “the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience.” It preferred such other terms as racist, neo-Nazi, or white supremacist.

Shireen Mitchell, a pioneer tech entrepreneur and activist, argues that “we are in the middle of the civil rights movement 2.0. The web version of 1968. All of the language and sentiments are exactly the same. What’s different [is that] this is online in the open for all to see.”

Most Americans probably associate the term “alt-right” with white nationalism, but you can’t understand this movement without also acknowledging that its members are against democracy as a concept. They would rather destroy liberal democracy before they allow people of color and women to gain political and social power.

My personal interest in Trump’s Army stems from being targeted by it in October 2016. One of my tweets about the second presidential debate went viral, generating nearly 12,000 retweets and more than 20,000 likes. The same tweet caught the attention of alt-right trolls, and my Twitter mentions were filled with abusive threats, unprintable insults, and hundreds of memes that went on for days. Not content with mere Twitter harassment, the trolls found my Facebook profile, personal email, and tweeted at the consulting firm where I was working at the time, urging that I be fired. They even sent abusive tweets to my husband.

I’ve endured my fair share of online attacks but I’d never experienced anything quite this intense.

I’m a digital strategist for Democratic campaigns and advocacy groups with a decade of experience. I’ve endured my fair share of online attacks, including when I worked on President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, but I’d never experienced anything quite this intense. I was worried for my personal safety, but the political organizer in me was impressed. So I traced the online origins of my attack and all subsequent attacks against me. The more I learned about who this new political force was and how they were organized, the more I wanted to know.

“The biggest meme ever.” That’s how DeploraBall, the alt-right’s inaugural event in Washington, D.C., billed itself. With two events in the D.C. metro area and a call for Trump supporters to host satellite events in all fifty states, the DeploraBall was billed as a coming-out party for the American alt-right coalition. Organizers booked the National Press Club for the first event and the 1,000 available tickets sold out quickly. Trump’s debutantes were ready to make their grand entrance.

Most of the press coverage leading up to the DeploraBall, however, focused not on the event itself but on the in-fighting that surrounded it. DeploraBall organizer Mike Cernovich, a notable online Trump supporter and conspiracy theorist, disinvited Tim Treadstone—better known online as @BakedAlaska—because of his anti-Semitic tweets and refusal to tone down his rhetoric.

Given Treadstone’s known history of anti-Semitism and Cernovich’s own history of misogyny, it might seem strange that anti-Semitism was seen as a bannable offense. But the movement that elected Trump was having a bit of a PR problem. White supremacist Richard Spencer, credited with coining the term “alt-right,” had just been caught on video leading a “hail Trump” chant and sticking his hand out in a Nazi salute while on stage at an alt-right conference he’d organized in Washington, D.C.

As DeploraBall attendees inside the venue contemplated what it meant to be the new political establishment, a new group of outsiders were already at their doorstep, determined to have their own voices heard. Large protests took place just outside the door.

The period between Election Day and Inauguration Day was marked by uncertainty and a city full of people attempting to grasp what their new normal would be. Activists and reporters made attempts to better understand Trump voters, often going out of their way to ignore the obvious racial resentment that motivated them. Elites assured us that once Trump came into office, he’d become more presidential as the weight of the moment and the role hit him.

Then, less than two weeks after the election, Trump tapped Steve Bannon, a former Breitbart executive chairman and darling of the alt-right, as his chief strategist. Bannon’s appointment was met with protests outside the transition office and denounced by both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. But his position didn’t require Senate confirmation, so there wasn’t much that could be done to stop it.

Charles Johnson, an alt-right provocateur, reportedly advised Trump’s transition team. Stephen Miller, an alleged white nationalist, was named a senior adviser; Richard Spencer, Miller’s friend since their college days at Duke, praised the hire, saying, “Stephen is a highly competent and tough individual. So I have no doubt that he will do a great job.”

The President-elect, perhaps wary about being celebrated in a quasi-fascist chant by Spencer and his ilk, told The New York Times about the alt-right: “I condemn them. I disavow, and I condemn.” He said the alt-right was “not a group I want to energize. And if they are energized, I want to look into it and find out why.”

It made for an interesting contrast—Trump going on the record to disavow the movement while hiring some of its best-known thinkers to work in his administration. With Bannon at the helm, the Trump team had the alt-right in its DNA but they clearly also understood the importance of pretending to pay lip service to denouncing racism.

If the D.C. political establishment was coming to terms with the Trump Administration, the Internet was learning just how much damage Trump’s alt-right supporters had done to online communities and spaces.

Reddit, one of the largest hubs on the Internet, which claims its mission is “to help people discover places where they can be their true selves, and empower our community to flourish,” was experiencing a continued hostile takeover from The_Donald, one of its online communities. Twitter, after immense pressure, made antiharassment features widely available to its users, who’d been harassed for months by the alt-right and similarly aligned communities.

Facebook and Google assured the public that they would do more to keep misinformation, including campaigns that originated from trolls, off of their platforms. Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said it was a “pretty crazy idea” that fake news on Facebook could sway an election, while technologist Jonathan Morgan analyzed comments on Trump’s official Facebook page and found that the alt-right’s language was radicalizing the Republican Party’s online discourse as a whole.

Trump’s Army was larger and more influential than ever before, wielding its newfound power in unexpected ways. This included spreading conspiracy theories that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a child prostitution ring out of a D.C. pizza place and that Clinton orchestrated the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.

The Trump Administration benefited greatly from the chaos caused by such antics. While the administration’s first months were outwardly disastrous—with its sloppy executive orders and its failed health care bill—Trump’s Army was able to keep supporters engaged with deliberately created chaos: conspiracy theories, disinformation, and continuous attacks on the legitimacy of all non-rightwing media.

The imagery and vocabulary that developed around Trump online were also unusual. Trump’s Army referred to him as “God Emperor” which became GEOTUS (a play on POTUS) once he was inaugurated. Trump was frequently depicted in memes as a dictator, blessed by God or as a God-like figure himself. insinuation is that Trump rules by divine right, just as the neoreactionaries in Silicon Valley had been calling for.

Though rightwing evangelical Christians supported Trump, they weren’t as welcoming to his trollish friends. The Reverend Dwight McKissic, a conservative African American Southern Baptist leader who previously made headlines for likening same-sex marriage to horrific natural disasters, called on the Southern Baptist Convention to condemn the alt-right movement at its annual conference. Lifesite, one of the largest antichoice blogs online, continually warns readers that the alt-right and leaders like Richard Spencer do not share its values.

Trump’s Army seems largely indifferent to Trump Administration legislation. While the Trump White House promised Obamacare repeal, tax cuts, and an infrastructure package, the meme warriors never advocated for these bills. They were only interested in government when it could be used to victimize minority populations: building a wall at the Mexican border, or the anti-Muslim travel ban.

The disinterest wasn’t for lack of communication from the White House. Trump surrogates have frequently visited The_Donald to partake in “Ask Me Anything” exchanges, and Trump himself did one as a candidate.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama memes continue to flourish online, even though neither Clinton nor Obama holds public office or has much of a political presence. They’re still a convenient way for Trump supporters to express racism and misogyny, just as the President still uses these former officeholders in a similar way, accusing them of crimes and blaming them for his bad press.

“Whether they’re actively aware of it or not, the Trump Administration has benefited from the alt-right’s use of conspiracy theories as a communication strategy,” says Oliver Chinyere, a digital strategist and host of the Fake It Til You Break It Fake News podcast.

Chinyere notes that two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, “which is where the alt-right helps because if they get fake stories or conspiracy theories trending and circulating, what’s being said in the media starts to matter less and actually plays into Trump’s narrative that all mainstream media is ‘fake news.’ ”

Alabama was the last battleground of 2017. The special election to fill Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat seemed like a safe bet to remain in Republican hands. The last time the state voted to send a Democratic U.S. Senator to Washington was 1992.

Luther Strange, Alabama’s attorney general and a proven Republican stalwart, was appointed interim Senator. His candidacy was the choice of the GOP establishment.

President Trump initially endorsed Strange, but the alt-right forces commanded by Steve Bannon threw their support behind Roy Moore, the former Alabama supreme court justice and culture warrior known for things like placing a stone Ten Commandments monument in front of his courthouse and defying a federal order to allow same-sex marriage.

It was at a rally for Strange in Alabama that Trump delivered his racially charged attacks against NFL player protesters. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump followed this over the next couple of days with a string of tweets demanding that players who protested be fired, and calling on spectators to leave the stands.

Trump supporters had spent the last month defending the Confederate flag online, but had no trouble switching back to caring about the American flag once directed to by Trump. All it took was a little racial signaling about black athletes.

When Moore trounced Strange in the Alabama primary, Trump switched allegiances. The day after the primary, he deleted all his tweets supporting Strange. It was as if the endorsement had never existed at all.

Moore was now backed not just by the alt-right and evangelical Christians, but by the President.

The day after allegations that Moore was a predator who tried to date several underage girls surfaced, The_Donald launched The_Congress, which described itself as “working to elect a United States Congress that is pro-Trump and ready to MAGA,” the acronym for Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” The_Congress garnered nearly 30,000 members to support candidates in Republican primaries and the general election in 2018 with memes and targeted online campaigns.

The so-called alt-right was no longer a radical subculture. It had seized control of the Republican Party, led by President Trump and his army of supporters. The white nationalist neoreactionaries were now running the show, and so-called establishment Republicans showed no interest in opposing them. Former Presidents Bush and Obama, in speeches on the same day, warned that democracy was in danger as America was being torn apart by nativism and nationalism. Otherwise precious little political coverage and commentary acknowledged that antidemocratic forces now controlled the majority party.

The so-called alt-right was no longer a radical subculture. It had seized control of the Republican Party, led by President Trump and his army of supporters.

If Alabama Republicans signaled the GOP’s alt-right takeover, Alabama voters overall perhaps signaled the limits of America’s far-right flirtation. Alabama voters, led by African Americans, narrowly elected Democrat Doug Jones over Moore.

Therein lies the roadmap to defeating the so-called alt-right: mobilizing the same communities it is determined to keep from gaining political and cultural power. The alt-right might be willing to destroy democracy rather than relinquish power, but voters of color aren’t going to let it win without a fight.

It’s a lesson white progressives need to absorb, and it’s time to practice what we preach. After the Alabama election many white people thanked black women on Twitter. But thanks are not enough. They’ve been dealing with the forces that gave us Donald Trump for their entire lives. We need to cede much of our own political power and allow black women to lead the resistance.

A year into Trump’s presidency, the alt-right remains a force to be reckoned with, but perhaps Alabama’s special election illustrated the limits of its power. While it’s troubling that so many Alabama voters would cast their ballots for a white nationalist and predator of teenage girls, it’s heartening to know that even in a deep red state, Moore couldn’t eke out a win. Trump’s Army might have succeeded in radicalizing the Grand Old Party, but it hasn’t destroyed American democracy. At least not yet.

The Russian Connection

Donald Trump’s often baffling affinity for Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, has a parallel at home among members of the alt-right, a loose collection of white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

“Russia is our friend,” is a common chant for American neo-Nazis. Organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, had known sympathies and ties to Russia, including white supremacist leader Richard Spencer, who is married to a Russian propagandist. Russian bots and trolls on social media frequently amplify rightwing media, especially Breitbart. Several well-known social media accounts associated with the so-called alt-right have since been exposed as Russian in origin.

“Russian-linked networks on social media have continued to spread and amplify divisive content on social media in 2017,” says Laura Rosenberger, co-founder of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and creator of the Hamilton 68 dashboard that tracks Russian activity on social media. “From the NFL #TakeAKnee debate to the #BoycottKeurig movement, these networks amplify divisive content to turn Americans against one another, inject more extreme views or conspiracy theories into heated debates, or insinuate themselves into target audiences.”

Melissa Ryan authors Ctrl Alt Right Delete, a weekly newsletter. She’s spent a decade leading digital campaigns for nonprofits and political races, including EMILY’s List, Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, the New Organizing Institute, and Senator Russ Feingold.