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Alt-America
The Rise of the RadicalRight in the Age of Trump
David Neiwert
First published by Verso 2017
© David Neiwert 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-423-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-746-8 (EXPORT)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-424-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-425-2 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays
For Fionaand her generation
Trust, a mighty god has gone, Restraint has gone from men, and the Graces, my friend, have abandoned the earth. Men’s judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone revere the immortal gods; the race of pious men has perished and men no longer recognize the rules of conduct or acts of piety.
—Theognis of Megara, describing the fate of men after Pandora opened her box
Contents
1.Into the Abyss
2.Alt-America
3.Black Helicopters and Truck Bombs
4.9/11 and the Dark Invaders
5.A Black President and a Birth Certificate
6.Mad Hatters and March Hares
7.The Return of the Militias
8.The Bundy Pandora’s Box
9.Bad Days on the Malheur
10.The Alt-Right Reinvention
11.“Hail Emperor Trump!”
12.The Id Unleashed
13.The Aftermath
Afterword: Fascism and Our Future
Notes
Index
The day after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency, Dylann Roof walked into a Charleston, South Carolina, church with a gun and killed nine black people because they were black.
It was purely a coincidence that one act followed the other, hundreds of miles apart: Roof apparently knew little about Trump and was not known to be a Trump follower. Trump had never met nor had any interaction with Roof.
Yet the two acts were inextricably connected—by the events and acts that had preceded them, and by those that followed in the ensuing weeks and months. Most of all, both acts signaled, in different ways, a deep change in the American cultural and political landscape.
The American radical right—the violent, paranoid, racist, hateful radical right—was back with a vengeance. Actually, it had never really gone away. And now it had a presidential candidate.
Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, “When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you twenty-five dollars for a permit, and then you get fifty dollars for every confirmed kill.” That’d be one nice thing.
—Supporter of Donald Trump, interviewed in the New York Times
This robocall goes out to all millennials and others who are honest in all their dealings … The white race is being replaced by other peoples in America and in all white countries. Donald Trump stands strong as a nationalist.
—William White (a white nationalist), pro-Trump robocall to Massachusetts voters
The march to victory will not be won by Donald Trump in 2016, but this could be the steppingstone we need to then radicalize millions of White working and middle class families to the call to truly begin a struggle for Faith, family and folk.
—Matthew Heimbach, cofounder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Youth Network, at organization’s website
Get all of these monkeys the hell out of our country—now! Heil Donald Trump—THE ULTIMATE SAVIOR.
—Tweet from the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website
Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.
—White man in Boston who with another man beat a homeless Latino to within an inch of his life with a metal pole and then urinated on him
People who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.
—Donald Trump, when asked about the Boston hate crime
Most Americans surveying the wreckage of the American political landscape in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election are startled by the ugliness and violence that have crept into the nation’s electoral politics. And they can recognize its source: the sudden appearance of the racist far right as players.
Almost as blindingly
