Red Shield
Global Domination
Look harder at the map.
Yeah I see the iq line above Africa, shyt ain't slick. I'm just saying Stefan looks like an alcoholic
Let's Talk About the Radicalization of Young White Males Online
- Thread starter Trajan
- Start date
Yeah I see the iq line above Africa, shyt ain't slick. I'm just saying Stefan looks like an alcoholic
Red Shield
Global Domination
I mean shyt at this point, it's whatever. Black folk need to prepare for other things.. not trying to save America.
Free White & 21
AAGang
This is a good point. I was listening to The Daily Shoah recently and Mike Enoch said libertarianism is racism for whites who don't realize or want to admit their racist views.
Mike is a fukkin lightweight but that was pretty profound. If for no other reason than to confirm one of my theories about libertarianism
its always been about businesses going back to racism ultimately.
It never ends. How Fred Perry polos came to symbolize hate
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @houston911 @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty
HOW FRED PERRY POLOS CAME TO SYMBOLIZE HATE
The political history of Fred Perry, white supremacy’s favorite athleisure brand
PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
Zoë Beery
JUN—20—2017 11:55AM EST
At far-right rallies across the U.S., an English tennis champion named Fred Perry hovers, invisible to the men unwittingly representing him. For the last two years, members of the Proud Boys cult of masculinity have worn Perry-branded striped-collar polo shirts with a Wimbledon-inspired laurel insignia as they shout at anti-fascist protesters and take rocks to the head. In blog posts and tweets dating back to 2014, their patriarch Gavin McInnes has instructed them that this — a Fred Perry cotton pique tennis shirt, always in black and yellow — is the proper armor for battling multiculturalism.
The Proud Boys at most have a few hundred active members, but they are a fixture at fascist “free speech” events like this month’s anti-Muslim marches, where they mingle with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. McInnes is eager to point out that the Proud Boys accept people of color, Muslims, and Jewish people — so long as those members also “accept that the West is the best” and reject non-Western immigrants to America (McInnes is Canadian). But McInnes insists his followers are not themselves white supremacists, a clarification he has to make partially because Fred Perry polos have a history of popping up at racist skinhead punk shows and rallies across Europe and the Americas. The shirts have been a fixture in some form or another, in all their two-dozen-plus colorways, in both fascist and anti-fascist politics for fifty years, here in the States but especially in England, where both the brand and the skinhead subculture that co-opted it are from.
Two young mods in Woolwich, London in 1981. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
A young mod in Woolwich, London in 1981. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
MODERN ROMANCE
Young skinheads wear Fred Perry at a gig in 1981. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
In the mid-1960s, a movement emerged when first-generation Jamaican and Barbadian Brits, whose parents had been recruited by the tens of thousands to help rebuild England after WWII, introduced their white working-class friends to ska, rocksteady, and rude boy style at clubs around London’s council estates. “You could see the music was bringing these different cultures together, and it was suggesting a possible way forward through understanding our differences,” Don Letts, a filmmaker, DJ, and BBC Radio host, who was born in London in 1956 to Jamaican parents, told The Outline. In 2016 he produced the BBC documentary The Story of Skinhead, mostly to correct the record on skinhead culture’s non-racist origins. “Politics wasn’t really something that we talked about. That was on our parents’ level. We just wanted to bond over music, clothes, and girls.”
Amid England’s entrenched class consciousness, taking pride in looking nice as a working-class person inspired the white English kids to spin together their own heritage with their West Indian neighbors’ sleek suits, dress shoes, and generally smart style. “They went for things that were associated with the English upper class and looked clean and sharp but were more affordable, and Fred Perry was definitely one of those things,” Letts said. Paired with work boots and tight jeans, Perry’s designs for the tennis court became a subversive dig at English elitism. The look, which according to Letts appeared mostly on white kids but a few black ones, too, was also a response to flamboyant, middle and upper-class mod culture; before the term “skinhead” finally began appearing in the late ‘60s, the young white kids with short-cropped hair and crisp workwear were called hard mods.
As young people were working out this visual identity, white English adults had become convinced that black and South Asian immigrants were taking their jobs and ruining the economy. In 1968, conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered a now-infamous, vitriolic speech in which he warned white Brits that they would soon be an oppressed minority in their own country, punished by a politically correct government for daring to reject multiculturalism. “After that speech, I felt the atmosphere change immediately,” Letts said. “Race really came into the picture and the scene became more hostile.”
THE MORE OSTRACIZED AND FEARED THEY WERE, THE STRONGER THEIR IDENTITY BECAME.
Skinhead culture began migrating north, to predominantly white communities where football matches were the main source of distraction from a deteriorating economy. Fred Perry’s wide color range gave fans plenty of options to show which team they supported, and the look emanated a tough edge well suited to the violence simmering underneath football culture. Ensconced in white suburban bubbles, these boys became a natural target for the U.K. National Front, a rapidly growing white nationalist party founded in 1967 that often recruited outside football stadiums.
The party also opened social clubs across northern England that hosted live music, giving working-class kids — many of whom, proud of their class status, by then identified and dressed as skinheads — a place to congregate and commiserate about their dimming futures. “But you could only get in if you signed up to be a member of the National Front, and up north it was probably the only club, and so of course they wanted to go there and hear music,” Letts explained. “A lot of it came down to ignorance and just following the herd. These kids didn’t have any formulated political views.”
Megaphone: A Modern Podcasting Platform by Panoply
We discussed this story, and Gavin McInnes, on our daily podcast, The Outline World Dispatch.
As the ’70s progressed, mainstream media became fascinated with this young, fashionable, seemingly new strain of the far right. The skinheads loved it; the more ostracized and feared they were, the stronger their identity became. Like today’s Pepe trolls, any attention was a godsend. Even when framed as reprehensible, racist ideology aired in public forums exposed more people to the skinheads’ views and legitimized them as being worthy of discussion. After Margaret Thatcher brought the Tories’ isolationist, neoliberal policies to power in 1979, neo-Nazi rallies bloomed across England, and there were always skinheads in the ranks twitching to brawl with anti-fascist protesters who amassed in opposition.
Women wear Fred Perry at the annual Skinhead Reunion event in Brighton in 2014. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
Malaysian skinheads attend a show in Kuala Lumpur in 2015. Mohd Rasfan / Getty Images
With Reagan’s inauguration signaling a similar shift in the U.S., skinhead culture, including the Fred Perry uniform, found a welcome home stateside when it landed in the early 1980s, according to Heidi Bierich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “Neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideas already had a toehold in the US, and skinhead culture spread very quickly across the country,” said Bierich. In conservative strongholds like Orange County, California and in parts of northern Florida, angry white youth who were politically unwelcome amongst punk and hardcore’s overwhelming anti-Republicanism found the perfect solution in skinhead.
Since the SPLC began tracking racist skinheads in the late 1990s, Fred Perry has been a consistent enough presence that it’s one of only two clothing brands the SPLC includes in its skinhead glossary (the other is Dr. Martens). “What makes skinheads distinct is music and clothing, not necessarily their ideology,” Bierich said. “They’re very mobile and fluid. You’ll find them in white supremacist groups, in neo-Nazi groups, [and now] in ‘alt-right’ groups.”
A member of the Proud Boys wears Fred Perry at a rally in New York City. Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty Images
A member of the Proud Boys stands behind Gavin McInnes in a black and yellow Fred Perry polo, at a rally in Berkeley, California. Philip Pacheco / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
When I emailed McInnes to ask him why he tells his followers to wear the black and yellow polos as they trawl for anti-fascists, he warned me that “if you associate us with Nazi skinheads or any implication like that I will take you to court” but went on to explain that he wants to align his group with the working-class toughness of the late ’60s hard mods. “It plays into the idea of this being a rebellious, edgy movement against the status quo,” said Alice Marwick, a Fordham University researcher who has extensively studied social media and the far right. “When you say ‘white supremacy’ you think of something with a long history, like the KKK. When you say ‘alt-right’ it sounds like something new and alternative. In that newness, people feel that they’re part of sticking it to the man.”
A few days later, he released a ten-minute video excoriating media that criticizes the Proud Boys for their uncanny similarities to white supremacists. I asked him why, if he doesn’t want to be associated with racists, he tells the Proud Boys to dress like them. He replied, “I’m not going to let the media’s obsession with Nazis dictate what shirt we wear.” The more hated they are, the stronger their identity becomes.
@Y2Dre @Shook @Raymond Burrr @Red Shield @bdizzle @satam55 @houston911 @Sagat @Trajan @Sukairain @YouMadd? @Diasporan Royalty
HOW FRED PERRY POLOS CAME TO SYMBOLIZE HATE
The political history of Fred Perry, white supremacy’s favorite athleisure brand
PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
Zoë Beery
JUN—20—2017 11:55AM EST
At far-right rallies across the U.S., an English tennis champion named Fred Perry hovers, invisible to the men unwittingly representing him. For the last two years, members of the Proud Boys cult of masculinity have worn Perry-branded striped-collar polo shirts with a Wimbledon-inspired laurel insignia as they shout at anti-fascist protesters and take rocks to the head. In blog posts and tweets dating back to 2014, their patriarch Gavin McInnes has instructed them that this — a Fred Perry cotton pique tennis shirt, always in black and yellow — is the proper armor for battling multiculturalism.
The Proud Boys at most have a few hundred active members, but they are a fixture at fascist “free speech” events like this month’s anti-Muslim marches, where they mingle with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. McInnes is eager to point out that the Proud Boys accept people of color, Muslims, and Jewish people — so long as those members also “accept that the West is the best” and reject non-Western immigrants to America (McInnes is Canadian). But McInnes insists his followers are not themselves white supremacists, a clarification he has to make partially because Fred Perry polos have a history of popping up at racist skinhead punk shows and rallies across Europe and the Americas. The shirts have been a fixture in some form or another, in all their two-dozen-plus colorways, in both fascist and anti-fascist politics for fifty years, here in the States but especially in England, where both the brand and the skinhead subculture that co-opted it are from.
Two young mods in Woolwich, London in 1981. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
A young mod in Woolwich, London in 1981. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
MODERN ROMANCE
Young skinheads wear Fred Perry at a gig in 1981. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
In the mid-1960s, a movement emerged when first-generation Jamaican and Barbadian Brits, whose parents had been recruited by the tens of thousands to help rebuild England after WWII, introduced their white working-class friends to ska, rocksteady, and rude boy style at clubs around London’s council estates. “You could see the music was bringing these different cultures together, and it was suggesting a possible way forward through understanding our differences,” Don Letts, a filmmaker, DJ, and BBC Radio host, who was born in London in 1956 to Jamaican parents, told The Outline. In 2016 he produced the BBC documentary The Story of Skinhead, mostly to correct the record on skinhead culture’s non-racist origins. “Politics wasn’t really something that we talked about. That was on our parents’ level. We just wanted to bond over music, clothes, and girls.”
Amid England’s entrenched class consciousness, taking pride in looking nice as a working-class person inspired the white English kids to spin together their own heritage with their West Indian neighbors’ sleek suits, dress shoes, and generally smart style. “They went for things that were associated with the English upper class and looked clean and sharp but were more affordable, and Fred Perry was definitely one of those things,” Letts said. Paired with work boots and tight jeans, Perry’s designs for the tennis court became a subversive dig at English elitism. The look, which according to Letts appeared mostly on white kids but a few black ones, too, was also a response to flamboyant, middle and upper-class mod culture; before the term “skinhead” finally began appearing in the late ‘60s, the young white kids with short-cropped hair and crisp workwear were called hard mods.
As young people were working out this visual identity, white English adults had become convinced that black and South Asian immigrants were taking their jobs and ruining the economy. In 1968, conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered a now-infamous, vitriolic speech in which he warned white Brits that they would soon be an oppressed minority in their own country, punished by a politically correct government for daring to reject multiculturalism. “After that speech, I felt the atmosphere change immediately,” Letts said. “Race really came into the picture and the scene became more hostile.”
THE MORE OSTRACIZED AND FEARED THEY WERE, THE STRONGER THEIR IDENTITY BECAME.
Skinhead culture began migrating north, to predominantly white communities where football matches were the main source of distraction from a deteriorating economy. Fred Perry’s wide color range gave fans plenty of options to show which team they supported, and the look emanated a tough edge well suited to the violence simmering underneath football culture. Ensconced in white suburban bubbles, these boys became a natural target for the U.K. National Front, a rapidly growing white nationalist party founded in 1967 that often recruited outside football stadiums.
The party also opened social clubs across northern England that hosted live music, giving working-class kids — many of whom, proud of their class status, by then identified and dressed as skinheads — a place to congregate and commiserate about their dimming futures. “But you could only get in if you signed up to be a member of the National Front, and up north it was probably the only club, and so of course they wanted to go there and hear music,” Letts explained. “A lot of it came down to ignorance and just following the herd. These kids didn’t have any formulated political views.”
Megaphone: A Modern Podcasting Platform by Panoply
We discussed this story, and Gavin McInnes, on our daily podcast, The Outline World Dispatch.
As the ’70s progressed, mainstream media became fascinated with this young, fashionable, seemingly new strain of the far right. The skinheads loved it; the more ostracized and feared they were, the stronger their identity became. Like today’s Pepe trolls, any attention was a godsend. Even when framed as reprehensible, racist ideology aired in public forums exposed more people to the skinheads’ views and legitimized them as being worthy of discussion. After Margaret Thatcher brought the Tories’ isolationist, neoliberal policies to power in 1979, neo-Nazi rallies bloomed across England, and there were always skinheads in the ranks twitching to brawl with anti-fascist protesters who amassed in opposition.
Women wear Fred Perry at the annual Skinhead Reunion event in Brighton in 2014. PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
Malaysian skinheads attend a show in Kuala Lumpur in 2015. Mohd Rasfan / Getty Images
With Reagan’s inauguration signaling a similar shift in the U.S., skinhead culture, including the Fred Perry uniform, found a welcome home stateside when it landed in the early 1980s, according to Heidi Bierich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “Neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideas already had a toehold in the US, and skinhead culture spread very quickly across the country,” said Bierich. In conservative strongholds like Orange County, California and in parts of northern Florida, angry white youth who were politically unwelcome amongst punk and hardcore’s overwhelming anti-Republicanism found the perfect solution in skinhead.
Since the SPLC began tracking racist skinheads in the late 1990s, Fred Perry has been a consistent enough presence that it’s one of only two clothing brands the SPLC includes in its skinhead glossary (the other is Dr. Martens). “What makes skinheads distinct is music and clothing, not necessarily their ideology,” Bierich said. “They’re very mobile and fluid. You’ll find them in white supremacist groups, in neo-Nazi groups, [and now] in ‘alt-right’ groups.”
A member of the Proud Boys wears Fred Perry at a rally in New York City. Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty Images
A member of the Proud Boys stands behind Gavin McInnes in a black and yellow Fred Perry polo, at a rally in Berkeley, California. Philip Pacheco / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
When I emailed McInnes to ask him why he tells his followers to wear the black and yellow polos as they trawl for anti-fascists, he warned me that “if you associate us with Nazi skinheads or any implication like that I will take you to court” but went on to explain that he wants to align his group with the working-class toughness of the late ’60s hard mods. “It plays into the idea of this being a rebellious, edgy movement against the status quo,” said Alice Marwick, a Fordham University researcher who has extensively studied social media and the far right. “When you say ‘white supremacy’ you think of something with a long history, like the KKK. When you say ‘alt-right’ it sounds like something new and alternative. In that newness, people feel that they’re part of sticking it to the man.”
A few days later, he released a ten-minute video excoriating media that criticizes the Proud Boys for their uncanny similarities to white supremacists. I asked him why, if he doesn’t want to be associated with racists, he tells the Proud Boys to dress like them. He replied, “I’m not going to let the media’s obsession with Nazis dictate what shirt we wear.” The more hated they are, the stronger their identity becomes.
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I disagree. Running is what they'd want you to do.
Sensitive Christian Grey
The Fisher King
Keep an eye on someone called Thomas Baden-Reiss. He's not huge and I don't imagine him to become so in the future, but if he pops up on your timeline or something, know not to trust him
Red Shield
Global Domination
Who said anything about running.. I said prepare for other things.
National Review Wants Credit for Opposing the Alt-Right Movement It Helped Create
How National Review Helped Build the Alt-Right
The magazine laid the foundations for the movement it now opposes.
By Osita Nwanevu
National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and editor Rich Lowry gave the alt-right a platform and elevated ideas central to the movement.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by U.S. Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons, Gage Skidmore/Flickr CC.
Early in November, just a few days before the election, a gathering of white nationalists, heterodox academics, libertarians, and other misfits of the right convened in Baltimore. The H.L. Mencken Club was meeting for its ninth annual conference—a two-day affair featuring lectures, debates, and conversations about the future of American conservatism. November’s conference came amid surging interest in the alt-right, which owes its very name to the club. In 2008, a speech from the inaugural conference by its president, Paul Gottfried, was republished under the title “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right” in Richard Spencer’s Taki’s Magazine, the earliest prominent usage of the phrase. At November’s conference, Gottfried echoed that 2008 call for the marshaling of an “independent” and “authentic” right.
told Conservative Political Action Conference attendees last month. “They are not an extension of conservatism.”
Mainstream conservative outlets have denounced the movement as well, none more loudly than National Review, the flagship publication of the American right. Last April, National Review’s Ian Tuttle condemned Breitbart writers for downplaying the racism of the movement’s intellectual leaders, including Spencer and Jared Taylor, founder of the white supremacist publication American Renaissance. “These men have not simply been ‘accused of racism,’ ” he wrote. “They are racist, by definition. Taylor’s ‘race realism,’ for example, co-opts evolutionary biology in the hopes of demonstrating that the races have become sufficiently differentiated over the millennia to the point that the races are fundamentally—that is, biologically—different. Spencer, who promotes ‘White identity’ and ‘White racial consciousness,’ is beholden to similar ‘scientific’ findings.”
Tuttle’s characterization of Spencer’s and Taylor’s beliefs is entirely accurate. At the same time, it would apply equally to the views of three speakers of note at November’s Mencken conference: Robert Weissberg, John Derbyshire, and Peter Brimelow. All were onetime contributors to National Review. Despite the magazine’s disavowal of the alt-right, the platform it provided for these writers and its elevation—throughout its history—of ideas that have become central to the movement tie National Reviewto the alt-right’s intellectual origins. In truth, National Review can no more disown the alt-right than it can disown its own legacy.
During a debate on the final night of last year’s Mencken conference, Robert Weissberg offered thoughts on the problems plaguing the city of Detroit and its black population. “I actually attended a conference on Detroit,” he proclaimed, “which had a distinguished panel that talked about the problems for about two hours, and guess what never came up?”
“Brain size!” someone called out. The room erupted in laughter.
“Close,” Weissberg giggled. “What brave soul,” he said eventually, “would insist that economic progress is impossible in a culture that prizes criminality and sloth?”
His comment was a blunt reiteration of ideas he explored as an on-and-off contributor to National Review’s “Phi Beta Cons” blog from 2010 to 2012. “The indisputable evidence is that genetically determined IQ matters greatly, but since many liberals abhor this politically incorrect conclusion, they insist that the entire issue is ‘controversial,’ ” he wrote in one 2012 post. Weissberg was booted from the publication that year, though, when it emerged that he had delivered a talk at Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance conference.
The Talk: Non-Black Version.” The piece , a reference to “the talk” black parents often give their kids about how to navigate situations that could subject them to racism and police brutality, detailed advice he’d given his children about black people, including recommendations to “avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally” and avoid being “the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress.”
“Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer,” Review editor Rich Lowry wrote affectionately in a post announcing Derbyshire’s firing. “Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.”
Lowry’s characterization of Derbyshire’s prior “line-dancing” struck some commentators as odd given that Derbyshire’s bigotry had been pointed out long before his ouster—perhaps most cogently by John Derbyshire. “I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one,” he told a blogger in 2003.
The third prominent National Review alumni and Mencken Club speaker there that day last fall, Peter Brimelow, was a former editor at the magazine who had been canned in 1997. That was a key year for the publication, one which also saw the demotion of National Review editor-in-chief John O’Sullivan. Brimelow and others have concluded, reasonably, that the shake-up was the culmination of a gradual retreat from a stance on immigration both men shared, which, in Brimelow’s case, has since veered into more open racism. VDare, founded by Brimelow in 1999, regularly publishes articles on the purported biological inferiorities of minorities and is one of the most well-known online bastions of xenophobia. “Diversity per se,” its mission statement reads, “is not strength, but a vulnerability.”
As with Derbyshire, Brimelow’s racist commentary was a regular feature well before his ouster. His 1995 book Alien Nation argued that black crime could be easily explained because “certain ethnic cultures are more crime-prone than others,” warned against an incoming tide of “weird alien” migrants “with dubious habits,” and said that visitors to the waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service should expect to soon find themselves “in an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.”
In addition to these three, Paul Gottfried, leader of the Mencken Club, was himself ousted as a National Review contributor in the 1980s. But he believes that racism was not, ultimately, the cause of any of the firings. “They didn’t throw anybody out because they were racist,” Gottfried told me. It was the capture of the conservative movement by business and political interests supportive of immigration and multiculturalism, among other things, he alleges, that led to a series of purges of proto-alt-right figures such as himself. These were akin, Gottfried posited, to National Review founder and conservative icon William F. Buckley’s renunciation of the conspiratorial John Birch Society in the 1960s.
If Gottfried is right, the purges seem to have been incomplete. Victor Davis Hanson, a current writer for National Review and a frequent critic of multiculturalism, for instance, published a National Review piece about race and crime a year after Derbyshire’s firing that loudly echoed his offending column without similar repercussions, right down to the paternal recommendation to avoid black people. Jason Richwine, a researcher who left the Heritage Foundation after the discovery of his doctoral dissertation, in which he’d argued “the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent,” currently writes for National Review on, among other issues, Hispanic immigration. Charles Murray, whose 1994 book The Bell Curve promoted the idea of inherent racial differences in intelligence to wide controversy, wrote a defense of Richwine for National Review in 2013 and was a contributor as recently as last year.
As often noted in alt-right circles, National Review’s early years were characterized by explicit racism. American Renaissance resurfaced this history in the wake of Derbyshire’s firing in 2012 when it republished a 2000 essay by James Lubinskas lamenting National Review’s gradual “abandonment of the interests of whites as a group.” From that essay:
The early National Review heaped criticism on the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education, and people like Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King, whom it considered race hustlers. What used to be an important part of the NR message is now dismissed as illegitimate “white identity politics.”
Lubinskas went on to cite numerous passages detailing National Review’s erstwhile support for white supremacy: an article arguing the hopelessness of integration given IQ differences between whites and blacks and the threat of “attempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls.” An article condemning the forced integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’ Central High School. An article by conservative philosopher Russell Kirk defending apartheid in South Africa on the grounds that granting the black majority the right to vote “would bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization.”
These essays and others, spanning decades, mirrored the views of National Reviewfounder William F. Buckley, who famously defended the right of whites to deny black Americans the vote and maintain white supremacy in a 1957 Review editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail.” “The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
Buckley’s views on immigration, echoed through his magazine, also prefigured the alt-right. Though Buckley took pains to distance himself from the open white nationalism motivating some immigration restrictionists, he did back curbing immigration specifically to fight multiculturalism. Buckley also expressed skepticism of the “relative acculturability” of nonwhites. “The Ellis Island cultists resist plain-spoken reasoning,” Buckley wrote in 1997. “If pockets of immigrants are resisting the assimilation that over generations has been the solvent of American citizenship, then energies should go to accosting multiculturalism, rather than encouraging its increase.”
How National Review Helped Build the Alt-Right
The magazine laid the foundations for the movement it now opposes.
By Osita Nwanevu
National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and editor Rich Lowry gave the alt-right a platform and elevated ideas central to the movement.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by U.S. Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons, Gage Skidmore/Flickr CC.
Early in November, just a few days before the election, a gathering of white nationalists, heterodox academics, libertarians, and other misfits of the right convened in Baltimore. The H.L. Mencken Club was meeting for its ninth annual conference—a two-day affair featuring lectures, debates, and conversations about the future of American conservatism. November’s conference came amid surging interest in the alt-right, which owes its very name to the club. In 2008, a speech from the inaugural conference by its president, Paul Gottfried, was republished under the title “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right” in Richard Spencer’s Taki’s Magazine, the earliest prominent usage of the phrase. At November’s conference, Gottfried echoed that 2008 call for the marshaling of an “independent” and “authentic” right.
told Conservative Political Action Conference attendees last month. “They are not an extension of conservatism.”
Mainstream conservative outlets have denounced the movement as well, none more loudly than National Review, the flagship publication of the American right. Last April, National Review’s Ian Tuttle condemned Breitbart writers for downplaying the racism of the movement’s intellectual leaders, including Spencer and Jared Taylor, founder of the white supremacist publication American Renaissance. “These men have not simply been ‘accused of racism,’ ” he wrote. “They are racist, by definition. Taylor’s ‘race realism,’ for example, co-opts evolutionary biology in the hopes of demonstrating that the races have become sufficiently differentiated over the millennia to the point that the races are fundamentally—that is, biologically—different. Spencer, who promotes ‘White identity’ and ‘White racial consciousness,’ is beholden to similar ‘scientific’ findings.”
Tuttle’s characterization of Spencer’s and Taylor’s beliefs is entirely accurate. At the same time, it would apply equally to the views of three speakers of note at November’s Mencken conference: Robert Weissberg, John Derbyshire, and Peter Brimelow. All were onetime contributors to National Review. Despite the magazine’s disavowal of the alt-right, the platform it provided for these writers and its elevation—throughout its history—of ideas that have become central to the movement tie National Reviewto the alt-right’s intellectual origins. In truth, National Review can no more disown the alt-right than it can disown its own legacy.
During a debate on the final night of last year’s Mencken conference, Robert Weissberg offered thoughts on the problems plaguing the city of Detroit and its black population. “I actually attended a conference on Detroit,” he proclaimed, “which had a distinguished panel that talked about the problems for about two hours, and guess what never came up?”
“Brain size!” someone called out. The room erupted in laughter.
“Close,” Weissberg giggled. “What brave soul,” he said eventually, “would insist that economic progress is impossible in a culture that prizes criminality and sloth?”
His comment was a blunt reiteration of ideas he explored as an on-and-off contributor to National Review’s “Phi Beta Cons” blog from 2010 to 2012. “The indisputable evidence is that genetically determined IQ matters greatly, but since many liberals abhor this politically incorrect conclusion, they insist that the entire issue is ‘controversial,’ ” he wrote in one 2012 post. Weissberg was booted from the publication that year, though, when it emerged that he had delivered a talk at Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance conference.
The Talk: Non-Black Version.” The piece , a reference to “the talk” black parents often give their kids about how to navigate situations that could subject them to racism and police brutality, detailed advice he’d given his children about black people, including recommendations to “avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally” and avoid being “the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress.”
“Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer,” Review editor Rich Lowry wrote affectionately in a post announcing Derbyshire’s firing. “Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.”
Lowry’s characterization of Derbyshire’s prior “line-dancing” struck some commentators as odd given that Derbyshire’s bigotry had been pointed out long before his ouster—perhaps most cogently by John Derbyshire. “I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one,” he told a blogger in 2003.
The third prominent National Review alumni and Mencken Club speaker there that day last fall, Peter Brimelow, was a former editor at the magazine who had been canned in 1997. That was a key year for the publication, one which also saw the demotion of National Review editor-in-chief John O’Sullivan. Brimelow and others have concluded, reasonably, that the shake-up was the culmination of a gradual retreat from a stance on immigration both men shared, which, in Brimelow’s case, has since veered into more open racism. VDare, founded by Brimelow in 1999, regularly publishes articles on the purported biological inferiorities of minorities and is one of the most well-known online bastions of xenophobia. “Diversity per se,” its mission statement reads, “is not strength, but a vulnerability.”
As with Derbyshire, Brimelow’s racist commentary was a regular feature well before his ouster. His 1995 book Alien Nation argued that black crime could be easily explained because “certain ethnic cultures are more crime-prone than others,” warned against an incoming tide of “weird alien” migrants “with dubious habits,” and said that visitors to the waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service should expect to soon find themselves “in an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.”
In addition to these three, Paul Gottfried, leader of the Mencken Club, was himself ousted as a National Review contributor in the 1980s. But he believes that racism was not, ultimately, the cause of any of the firings. “They didn’t throw anybody out because they were racist,” Gottfried told me. It was the capture of the conservative movement by business and political interests supportive of immigration and multiculturalism, among other things, he alleges, that led to a series of purges of proto-alt-right figures such as himself. These were akin, Gottfried posited, to National Review founder and conservative icon William F. Buckley’s renunciation of the conspiratorial John Birch Society in the 1960s.
If Gottfried is right, the purges seem to have been incomplete. Victor Davis Hanson, a current writer for National Review and a frequent critic of multiculturalism, for instance, published a National Review piece about race and crime a year after Derbyshire’s firing that loudly echoed his offending column without similar repercussions, right down to the paternal recommendation to avoid black people. Jason Richwine, a researcher who left the Heritage Foundation after the discovery of his doctoral dissertation, in which he’d argued “the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent,” currently writes for National Review on, among other issues, Hispanic immigration. Charles Murray, whose 1994 book The Bell Curve promoted the idea of inherent racial differences in intelligence to wide controversy, wrote a defense of Richwine for National Review in 2013 and was a contributor as recently as last year.
As often noted in alt-right circles, National Review’s early years were characterized by explicit racism. American Renaissance resurfaced this history in the wake of Derbyshire’s firing in 2012 when it republished a 2000 essay by James Lubinskas lamenting National Review’s gradual “abandonment of the interests of whites as a group.” From that essay:
The early National Review heaped criticism on the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education, and people like Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King, whom it considered race hustlers. What used to be an important part of the NR message is now dismissed as illegitimate “white identity politics.”
Lubinskas went on to cite numerous passages detailing National Review’s erstwhile support for white supremacy: an article arguing the hopelessness of integration given IQ differences between whites and blacks and the threat of “attempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls.” An article condemning the forced integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’ Central High School. An article by conservative philosopher Russell Kirk defending apartheid in South Africa on the grounds that granting the black majority the right to vote “would bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization.”
These essays and others, spanning decades, mirrored the views of National Reviewfounder William F. Buckley, who famously defended the right of whites to deny black Americans the vote and maintain white supremacy in a 1957 Review editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail.” “The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
Buckley’s views on immigration, echoed through his magazine, also prefigured the alt-right. Though Buckley took pains to distance himself from the open white nationalism motivating some immigration restrictionists, he did back curbing immigration specifically to fight multiculturalism. Buckley also expressed skepticism of the “relative acculturability” of nonwhites. “The Ellis Island cultists resist plain-spoken reasoning,” Buckley wrote in 1997. “If pockets of immigrants are resisting the assimilation that over generations has been the solvent of American citizenship, then energies should go to accosting multiculturalism, rather than encouraging its increase.”
Buckley, like the alt-right, was particularly perturbed by Muslim immigrants and saw ominous signs of Muslim upheaval in Europe. “Western Europe has a Muslim problem,” he wrote in a 2007 column. Muslim migrants, he opined, had particularly become a threat to “the British way of life” commensurate with “a continental army threatening invasion or Nazi bombers darkening the sky.”
National Review planted its flag firmly in favor of culture-based restrictionism in 1992, with a 14,000-word cover essay on immigration written by none other than Peter Brimelow. The essay is an attack on nonwhite immigration that, in its fixation on America’s “shifting ethnic balance” and “the reality of ethnic and cultural differences,” hints at white nationalism. “Americans are now being urged to abandon the bonds of a common ethnicity and instead to trust entirely to ideology to hold together their state (polity),” Brimelow wrote. “This is an extraordinary experiment, like suddenly replacing all the blood in a patient’s body.”
Brimelow would expand upon his views in a 1995 episode of Buckley’s show Firing Line that saw him speak in favor of the debate position “Resolved: That All Immigration Should Be Drastically Reduced.” Over the course of the debate, Buckley endorsed the idea, proposed by Brimelow in his National Review essay and in Alien Nation, of pausing legal immigration. This past November, Richard Spencer himself endorsed a 50-year immigration pause.
Just a few short years after the Brimelow cover, the magazine started closing itself to rhetoric and argumentation on immigration that aligned it too closely with openly bigoted restrictionists. That move began with Brimelow’s firing and editor-in-chief John O’Sullivan’s demotion in 1997. National Review went on to adopt a stance described by Ramesh Ponnuru in a 2001 essay as “restrictionism that can succeed.” Even in that piece, however, Ponnuru praised Brimelow for “bravely and wittily” challenging “pro-immigration consensus and the taboos that sustained it” and criticized Brimelow’s rhetoric largely for its impracticality.
The magazine’s shift away from Brimelow’s brand of restrictionism was itself practically rather than morally motivated. Buckley, in a 2000 letter to Jared Taylor that Brimelow would later publish at VDare, said so himself:
It seems to me that the idea traditionally defended of endeavoring to maintain existing ethnic balances simply doesn’t work any more. A defense against the kind of situation portrayed by Raspail would seem to inhere in immigration laws, particularly in the idea of unrestricted immigration.
“Raspail” here is Jean Raspail, French author of The Camp of the Saints, a racist 1973 novel about the invasion of the West by murderous and sexually violent Third World migrants. The book has been praised widely for years by white supremacists, including American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor. Trump adviser Steve Bannon has also praised the novel repeatedly and Iowa Rep. Steve King recommended the book in a recent interview. In a 2004 National Review column on African migrants to Europe, Buckley would laud Saints as a “great novel.”
Clearly, Buckley and others at the magazine retained sympathies for Brimelow’s position on immigration that were deemed too embarrassing or too futile to continue to espouse as openly as they once had. Nevertheless, Brimelow, having been designated a liability, would found VDare in 1999 as an outcast, to continue promoting the line he advanced in his National Review essay. John O’Sullivan, demoted but still employed by National Review, would serve on the site’s board of directors. O’Sullivan’s position at VDare was revealed in 2012 in the wake of Derbyshire’s firing. O’Sullivan responded with a post in which he called white nationalism “silly” and claimed he had resigned from VDare in 2007. O’Sullivan was nevertheless listed as a member of the board in VDare’s nonprofit filings as late as 2010—the year the site gave more than $34,000 to Richard Spencer for the launch of the flagship publication Alternative Right.
Let it not be said that National Review has not tried to consider the origins of the alt-right, which now—fed by the rhetoric and proposals of the new president—seeks to doreal harm to the immigrants and minorities it hates. In a piece published last year, David French went as far as to identify a specific culprit for the alt-right’s rise. “Who ‘built’ modern white identity politics?” he asked. “White supremacists did, but along the way the Left has handed them the bricks and mortar to construct their edifice of hate.” Among the bricks that French alleged the left has handed to the alt-right are the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the activism of Black Lives Matter. “All my life I’ve been part of a conservative movement that has been struggling mightily to move the culture past the politics of race,” he wrote, “and into a politics of universal human dignity, with each of us created in the image of God.” Predictably, French declined to examine how National Review’s long record of publishing writers invested in race science, which continues to this day with Murray and Richwine, squares with the conservative movement’s putative promotion of “universal human dignity.”
For years, National Review has advanced the ideas of Robert Weissberg, John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, its founder William Buckley, and others for whom universal human dignity was a debatable proposition. Its writers now cast about, looking in vain for the source of a movement they say deeply troubles them. “We can cough politely and look away,” National Review’s Jay Nordlinger said of the alt-right in February. “Or stare it square in the face.” If and when National Review does the latter—and if and when the conservative movement itself decides to do so—the face they will find staring back at them will be quite familiar.
Laura Wagner contributed reporting for this piece.
Osita Nwanevu is a Slate editorial assistant.
David Brooks Almost Gets It
He’s right that elites should be sensitive to how their privilege alienates the working class. Here’s what he’s still missing.
By Osita Nwanevu
National Review planted its flag firmly in favor of culture-based restrictionism in 1992, with a 14,000-word cover essay on immigration written by none other than Peter Brimelow. The essay is an attack on nonwhite immigration that, in its fixation on America’s “shifting ethnic balance” and “the reality of ethnic and cultural differences,” hints at white nationalism. “Americans are now being urged to abandon the bonds of a common ethnicity and instead to trust entirely to ideology to hold together their state (polity),” Brimelow wrote. “This is an extraordinary experiment, like suddenly replacing all the blood in a patient’s body.”
Brimelow would expand upon his views in a 1995 episode of Buckley’s show Firing Line that saw him speak in favor of the debate position “Resolved: That All Immigration Should Be Drastically Reduced.” Over the course of the debate, Buckley endorsed the idea, proposed by Brimelow in his National Review essay and in Alien Nation, of pausing legal immigration. This past November, Richard Spencer himself endorsed a 50-year immigration pause.
Just a few short years after the Brimelow cover, the magazine started closing itself to rhetoric and argumentation on immigration that aligned it too closely with openly bigoted restrictionists. That move began with Brimelow’s firing and editor-in-chief John O’Sullivan’s demotion in 1997. National Review went on to adopt a stance described by Ramesh Ponnuru in a 2001 essay as “restrictionism that can succeed.” Even in that piece, however, Ponnuru praised Brimelow for “bravely and wittily” challenging “pro-immigration consensus and the taboos that sustained it” and criticized Brimelow’s rhetoric largely for its impracticality.
The magazine’s shift away from Brimelow’s brand of restrictionism was itself practically rather than morally motivated. Buckley, in a 2000 letter to Jared Taylor that Brimelow would later publish at VDare, said so himself:
It seems to me that the idea traditionally defended of endeavoring to maintain existing ethnic balances simply doesn’t work any more. A defense against the kind of situation portrayed by Raspail would seem to inhere in immigration laws, particularly in the idea of unrestricted immigration.
“Raspail” here is Jean Raspail, French author of The Camp of the Saints, a racist 1973 novel about the invasion of the West by murderous and sexually violent Third World migrants. The book has been praised widely for years by white supremacists, including American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor. Trump adviser Steve Bannon has also praised the novel repeatedly and Iowa Rep. Steve King recommended the book in a recent interview. In a 2004 National Review column on African migrants to Europe, Buckley would laud Saints as a “great novel.”
Clearly, Buckley and others at the magazine retained sympathies for Brimelow’s position on immigration that were deemed too embarrassing or too futile to continue to espouse as openly as they once had. Nevertheless, Brimelow, having been designated a liability, would found VDare in 1999 as an outcast, to continue promoting the line he advanced in his National Review essay. John O’Sullivan, demoted but still employed by National Review, would serve on the site’s board of directors. O’Sullivan’s position at VDare was revealed in 2012 in the wake of Derbyshire’s firing. O’Sullivan responded with a post in which he called white nationalism “silly” and claimed he had resigned from VDare in 2007. O’Sullivan was nevertheless listed as a member of the board in VDare’s nonprofit filings as late as 2010—the year the site gave more than $34,000 to Richard Spencer for the launch of the flagship publication Alternative Right.
Let it not be said that National Review has not tried to consider the origins of the alt-right, which now—fed by the rhetoric and proposals of the new president—seeks to doreal harm to the immigrants and minorities it hates. In a piece published last year, David French went as far as to identify a specific culprit for the alt-right’s rise. “Who ‘built’ modern white identity politics?” he asked. “White supremacists did, but along the way the Left has handed them the bricks and mortar to construct their edifice of hate.” Among the bricks that French alleged the left has handed to the alt-right are the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the activism of Black Lives Matter. “All my life I’ve been part of a conservative movement that has been struggling mightily to move the culture past the politics of race,” he wrote, “and into a politics of universal human dignity, with each of us created in the image of God.” Predictably, French declined to examine how National Review’s long record of publishing writers invested in race science, which continues to this day with Murray and Richwine, squares with the conservative movement’s putative promotion of “universal human dignity.”
For years, National Review has advanced the ideas of Robert Weissberg, John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, its founder William Buckley, and others for whom universal human dignity was a debatable proposition. Its writers now cast about, looking in vain for the source of a movement they say deeply troubles them. “We can cough politely and look away,” National Review’s Jay Nordlinger said of the alt-right in February. “Or stare it square in the face.” If and when National Review does the latter—and if and when the conservative movement itself decides to do so—the face they will find staring back at them will be quite familiar.
Laura Wagner contributed reporting for this piece.
Osita Nwanevu is a Slate editorial assistant.
David Brooks Almost Gets It
He’s right that elites should be sensitive to how their privilege alienates the working class. Here’s what he’s still missing.
By Osita Nwanevu