Published: 7 May 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Three months inside alt-Right New York (Commune Mag)
An undercover antifascist descends through all nine circles of the alt-Right inferno.
During my three months inside New York’s alt-Right, The Daily Stormer Book Club never got around to reading any books. Instead, they plotted their move off the internet and onto the streets, drank beer, and shot the shit. Through the book club I entered a network of far-Right activists integrating the old guard of white nationalism with millennial internet trolls while drawing new recruits from the websites and podcasts of online youth culture. Much of their shadowy organising happens openly in New York City bars, sometimes within earshot of the “normies”.
This was early 2017. Trump’s victory gave white nationalists a boom akin to what Occupy did for the Left. In the year and a half since, the alt-Right has been beaten back by the combined pressure of antifascist streetfighters, PR-conscious tech companies, embarrassing internal scandals, the disaster in Charlottesville and, most importantly, a critical mass of ordinary white people rejecting openly-espoused white chauvinism - for now. But if the alt-Right has demonstrated one thing, it’s that ideological white supremacism, ingrained as it is within American society, can be remarkably versatile. When pushed back to the shadows, it won’t stay there forever.
Undercover with New York Nazis (Jewish Currents)
An interview with Jay Firestone
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Anti-Semitism is thriving in America (The Atlantic)
Deborah Lipstadt: I assumed that, after the Holocaust, the world recognised where anti-Semitic rhetoric can lead. I was wrong.
Photo: Members of the Proud Boys and the 211 Bootboys pose on Manhattan's Upper East Side after a gang assault on three Antifa protestors. Credit: Shay Horse
