The Racist Right Looks Left

White Supremacists Discover Anti-Capitalism

This piece was originally published, in slightly different form, in The Nation in December 2017. But I think the points it raises about American fascists' attempts to court the left are more current than ever. Recall that some socialists and members of the far right are currently making common cause in such media ventures as "Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar," Compact magazine, American Affairs, and of course, Red Scare, The Grayzone, Jimmy Dore, and Chapo Trap House¹. A book by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, The Populist' s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Rising, explicitly made the case for a union between the left and the far right, as many of these other media ventures also do. As a socialist who fundamentally opposes white supremacy and fascism, my perspective is that these alliances are frightening, and that they must be opposed wherever they are formed.

On the way to Richard Spencer's top-secret white-supremacist conference in November 2017, a young African-American woman drove me in her Uber from DC into rural, rolling, wealthy Maryland horse country. On the peaceful drive past astonishingly large and beautiful estates owned by white people and surrounded by stone walls, she told me how she'd had to work three jobs — as a DHL courier, Amazon-warehouse deliverywoman, and Uber driver — just to continue to live in ever-higher-cost DC, where she'd grown up. When we finally got to the remote, holistic winery that Spencer's National Policy Institute had booked, Mike Enoch of The Daily Shoah, who promulgated the slur "dindu nuffins" for African-Americans, was holding forth on the horrors of "corporate neoliberalism."

Then Eli Mosley, of the campus group Identity Evropa, who calls Jews "oven-dodging… kikes," took Enoch one further: "We need to be explicitly anticapitalist. There's no other way forward for our movement." As 60 mostly young, male racists gathered round him to listen, Mosley confidently predicted, "2018 is going to be the year of leftists joining the white nationalist movement!"

Meet "socialism," Bizarro World style. That same afternoon, in an interview in the winery's freezing barn, Richard Spencer told me, "I support national healthcare. Becoming alt-right means… we have duties to our fellow [white] people. And the trillions spent in insane wars, I would much rather spend that on something that is immediately useful to whites." About the concept of a guaranteed minimum income provided by the government, Spencer says, "I actually really like this idea." Naturally, he would like to restrict it to whites only. In the no-Jews, no-votes-for-women fascist ethnostate that he is trying to create, Spencer told me, "We need to have a kind of altruism. We need to be willing to take care of people and not simply think of ourselves as individuals who can acquire as much wealth as possible."

A few minutes later, Spencer's co-panelists told the clandestine gathering exactly who "the capitalists" and "the corporations" were who were hurting "the people." "JEWISH interests," Enoch enunciated deliberately, biting off each word. "THIS COSMOPOLITAN CLIQUE OF ELITES," he boomed as Spencer giggled. "The left will not…name the people behind this… but we can!" And so he "revealed" that capitalists… were in fact Jews. He added, "We can… speak for white Americans who don't want to sacrifice any more of their children for Jewish wars!" Yes, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had become "Jewish" wars to the young white people in the barn, a few of them veterans. In fact, it seemed that any unnecessary, unjust, or imperialist war, to Enoch, had been viciously promulgated by Hebrews.

"This rootless! cosmopolitan! clique!" Enoch pronounced loudly, as Spencer nodded vigorously and laughed. On Twitter and his podcasts, Enoch frequently exhibits a sadistic streak when he goes after individual women, Jews, and people of color. (His other anti-Semitic podcast is called Between Two Lampshades.) But here, in addition to his usual sadism and bombast, Enoch spoke about the enormous misery that George W. Bush's wars had wrought. His voice quaking, the beefy, bearded founder of The Right Stuff said, "I'm against these wars, which… are not [in] our interests." Mosley, a veteran whose real name is Elliott Kline, added, "You want to know why there's so much PTSD, drug abuse, suicide… among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Because they come back and they don't know why. Why were we there, what did I do, why did my friends die? The answer is NO more of these wars!"

Then Kline turned the entire moment to shit by screeching, "Jewish wars!" Editor's note: two months after this article came out, journalist Emma Cott revealed in the New York Times that Kline had repeatedly lied about serving in Iraq. He had never been deployed abroad safe that; he had spent his entire National Guard service in Pennsylvania. The reality is that, as Cott noted, white supremacists lie; deception is a key part of their strategy.

Next, the white nationalists at the winery went after the Trump-backed Republican tax plan. "We need to reduce taxes on the Apple Corporation that is sitting on $200 billion!" Spencer mocked the GOP. "They just don't have enough money!" While Spencer blasted the plan as "stupid… Reaganite nostalgia," Enoch talked about how hard it is to live in this culture, where "everything" runs the risk of getting "corporatized and capitalized." The Upper East Sider said, sounding haunted, "Everything is empty and fake… One of the great struggles that everyone has in this corporate neoliberal world is for meaning in their life. Our struggle provides that for us. Everything else is empty… but our movement." Enoch's real surname, it was revealed in a doxxing earlier this year, is Peinovich, and he is married to a Jewish woman. Peinovich later divorced his wife to maintain his place in the movement.

***

So how did it come to this, that three of the most prominent American white nationalists were sitting in an unheated barn attacking what Spencer had once misspelled as "bourgeoisie capitalism"?  After Heather Heyer was killed when a neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of protesters at Charlottesville, where the entire country saw the alt-right marching openly with truncheons and guns, Internet companies finally acted against the openly racist sites they had merrily hosted for years. For months, NPI, Stormfront, Counter-Currents and others lost their websites, payment mechanisms, or Facebook pages, and became unable to communicate openly with the newbies they were hoping to attract. Most, including NPI, eventually found new hosting, but their ability to organize had been curtailed, and odd as this may sound to those who haven't been following white supremacists' successful attempts to cast themselves as respectable "white advocates" in recent years, their reputations had taken a huge hit.

The Reagan Federal Building in DC, where NPI had held three prior conferences, turned down the group's request to hold the confab there this year, citing the Unite the Right rallies in Charlottesville (in which Spencer, NPI, Peinovich, and Kline were major participants, and for which the three men are defendants in a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing them of seeking to terrorize and inciting violence).

In the wake of Heyer's murder and over thirty-five injuries from the violence at Charlottesville, private hotels in the DC area had also become loath to host white supremacist groups. Two days after rallygoers chanted "Jews will not replace us," both the Sofitel and the Willard rescinded permission they had given Spencer for post-Unite the Right press conferences at their sites, after receiving substantial public criticism.

In fact, the white nationalist movement had been so effectively de-platformed and delegitimized, and become so frightened of drawing protesters like the ones who turned out in huge numbers to mock Spencer from the audience of his recent speech at the University of Florida, that NPI's executive director, Evan McLaren, refused to tell reporters the conference's new location until half an hour *after* the meetup was scheduled to start on November 19.

When I finally arrived at the down-home, organic winery and cow and hog farm in Poolesville, Maryland, a full hour out of DC, I learned that NPI had not even trusted its own attendees with the conference location. Instead of allowing its sixty-odd followers to drive to the winery themselves or even learn its name, NPI made its adherents leave their cars behind and hand in their cell phones so they could not see where they were going and inform others. Instead, NPI monitors drove them in ten-person vans to Rocklands Farm, which turned out not to have known that the white supremacists were coming, either.

Though Spencer claimed there was "no deception" involved, NPI had hidden its identity from the winery. A third-party logistics firm had approached Rocklands Farm on the group's behalf and booked the droll barn/tasting room for what the firm said was a "corporate" event." No mention of the fact that the speakers would rail against miscegenation and "Hispanics coming in."

When the farm discovered they were hosting a white power group instead, they immediately asked NPI to leave. Though Spencer told the media afterward that the cancellation had come halfway through the event, in fact NPI was far less lucky. Amid the confusion and secrecy of trying to ferry all the registrants out to Poolesville and confiscate their phones, the conference had gotten started two hours late. There was only time for one conference session – the panel with Peinovich, Kline, and Spencer I mentioned above— and a socializing break before NPI executive director McLaren told everyone the jig was up, and that all the registrants needed to get back in the group's vans "expeditiously" and drive away. The man who was to have delivered the keynote address, Kevin MacDonald, a retired evolutionary psychologist from California State University who is the most prominent anti-Semitic writer in America, never got to deliver one of his famous diatribes calling Trayvon Martin a "hoodlum" and "thug." Spencer himself gave no major speech. Swedish mining tycoon and fascist publisher Daniel Friberg, a major ally of Spencer's and his partner in the website altright.com, didn't even show², though he, MacDonald, and Spencer had been announced as the headliners. The event was a bust.

***

The desire to embrace "anticapitalism" and reach out to the Left is not a new thing for the white supremacist movement. A disparate group of white nationalists — from the late Pat Buchanan advisor and slavery apologist Sam Francis, to Greg Johnson of the intellectual racist journal Counter-Currents, to the violent neo-Nazi group Traditionalist Worker Party —  have been chastising capitalism and attempting to recruit the left for many years. Chillingly, "anticapitalism" was one of the main points of agreement for the Nationalist Front, a coalition of six violent American neo-Nazi groups organized in 2016 by Matthew Heimbach of the TWP³.

In fact, as political scientist Joseph Lowndes wrote in the magazine Konturen, the contemporary alt-right was seeded in crucial ways by the formerly progressive critical theory journal Telos, whose New Left founder, Paul Piccone, was so arrested by the idea of traditional forms of "authenticity" that could combat capitalism that he eagerly published racists like Francis, "godfather of the alt-right" and Spencer mentor Paul Gottfried, and most importantly, Alain de Benoist, the French anti-egalitarian philosopher who has provided the intellectual backing for the European Identitarian movement and, after being translated into English for the first time by Telos, for the American alt-right.

Still, NPI itself has never focused on economic matters; until recently, neither did Peinovich or Kline. That they chose to spend so much time at the conferences only panel talking about "neoliberalism," and how, according to Peinovich, "We have to push a right-wing workers' movement," can partly be attributed to desperation. Kline suggested that the reason for the new focus was that "we've almost literally drained the market of libertarians" who had been the main source of new members. To find new customers, he suggested, white nationalists now needed to look left. As he helpfully noted to the other two, "Leftists are natural activists. That's gonna be a huge resource we can really tap into."

White nationalism's desperation comes not just from the activists' public shaming and de-platforming after Charlottesville, but from crazy, new levels of infighting in a movement that was already famous for it. Shortly after the conference, Kline was forced to step down as head of the racist campus group, Identity Evropa, some alleged because of his closeness with Spencer. The organization's new leader, Patrick Casey, said on an alt-right TV show that the change was made because the membership decided that "What happened in Charlottesville — how disastrously it turned out — really can't happen again." Among other things, he said, "We shouldn't be having rallies where people come and wave swastikas around." Also, said Casey, three "very serious lawsuits" against IE itself, Kline, and the group's founder, Nathan Damigo, following Charlottesville were a strong motivation to change. Editor's note: although Casey tried to promote a less overtly violent image, texts revealed in discovery showed Casey smirking, "Nathan should punch women more often," when Identity Evropa's membership ballooned after Damigo was filmed punching a progressive woman in the face. Casey seemed thrilled about the flood of members attracted by Nathan's violence; "Jesus, we're swamped!" he said.

Still, desperation was hardly the only reason the panelists at NPI talked so much about economic inequality. You could say that they talked about it because it's there. Even middle- and, yes, upper-middle-class white folks face rising rents, rising expenses, and increasingly inadequate and shoddy health insurance. Even they are dealing with ever rising work hours and the consuming need to increase income to fill the gaps. One lesson the left failed to take from the pioneering research of Thomas Piketty et al. is that “the 99 percent” means exactly that. Even white suburbanites are suffering from the restructuring of the economy to benefit the super-elite, they’re just not suffering nearly as much as poor working people, among whom people of color and immigrants constitute a disproportionately large percentage.

The white nationalists talked about economic inequality because it really does motivate them, along with roiling hatred of so many scapegoated groups it's hard to list them all: African-Americans, Latinx, Jews, Muslims, women, Asians, queer and trans people. In discussions of the alt-right, a common error leftist analysts make is to debate whether the movement is primarily motivated by anticorporate anger or race hatred: for us, the unpleasant and dangerous reality is, it's both.

Before and after the conference's only panel, the audience of young white men and some older ones lined up at an omelette station for a luxurious brunch of liquored fruit salad and scrambled eggs with house-smoked salmon and delicious vegetables. I interviewed a few there and in one of the vans that took the sixty racists back to Alexandria, VA, the gentrified, nearly lily-white DC-adjunct where NPI rents its offices above a ridiculously expensive chocolate shop called Blüprint Chocolatiers.

One, a twenty-eight-year-old named "Antiochus," said he'd been "in high school" when 9/11 happened, and "We were all wondering, why Iraq? What was the purpose [of that war]?" That war, one of the causes of millennials' dimmed prospects, had been launched by "Jewish interests," he was sure. His girlfriend, a twenty-six-year-old who said she had "done college online," told me "the greatest source of meaning in her life" was work to preserve "the environment," which she was sure was perfectly compatible with white nationalism. "I'm sure these big corporations are part of the problem," she said. About what she called "little corporations," the woman furious over "mass extinctions" of animal species wasn't sure. "I think buying from local sources is the most important thing, buy from a local farm!" Antiochus said he'd become "obsessed with Human Bio-Diversity," the fancy, progressive-sounding term for the old racist notion that there are, as he put it, "obviously subspecies of humans" and that he fell into the "subspecies" most intelligent, most moral, and most deserving of the few spoils left over after neoliberalism had finished wrecking the earth.

In our interview, Spencer sketched a similar future vision of white people controlling the spoils. In the state he’s hoping to create after deporting all Jews and people of color, he said, “We will know better for people. We will be a good elite. We will guarantee the health and safety” of white people only.

In JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Saruman is a wizard with seductive powers of persuasion. He delivers hateful, vicious messages to those with whom that method works, sweet messages of solidarity to those who need a warmer touch. Where he trips up is when his opponent finally finds a way to make listeners hear both the vile and wheedling parts of his spiel at once.

Spencer is the alt-right’s Saruman—often its most educated-sounding, coaxing, flattering voice. (A major reason white people join this movement is because it tells them they are smarter and more worthy than the majority of humanity.) But when he thinks no one in the mainstream media is listening—when he thinks that only his “subhuman” enemies or his fellow fascist converts can hear—Spencer delivers the bile: shouting the English translation of “Sieg Heil!” to his Nazi-saluting followers when he thought reporters had left the room; telling the black, British journalist Gary Younge, “You’ll never be an Englishman!” and that “Africans benefited from their experiences of” slavery; and using on Twitter anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi terms that are decipherable only to those already in the know, like the hostile, smirking triple parentheses around the names of Jews, or the term “ZOG,” which refers to our purportedly Jewish-controlled government.

In fact, the alt-right itself is a kind of Saruman—offering a grotesque caricature of social care, community, and the fulfillment of needs, predicated on the violent “cleansing” from society of people of color, Jews, and what the right terms sexual “degenerates,” and the complete subjugation of women. Fascism’s parody of the beloved community is predicated on the constant threat that even those within the magic circle of white malehood can be tossed out on a moment’s notice: Spencer is constantly gay-baited by other white nationalists, Peinovich and Kline viciously trolled by “comrades” who insist their names mean they are Jews. Another neo-Nazi left the movement because his peers made clear to him that they were not fond of his disabled son. Fascism must always find an "other" to dominate, and sometimes that other is internal.

What the left needs to do in this moment of doubt and danger is to put out our vision of care for all, mutual aid for everyone, a real beloved community. Instead of spending our last breath heaping scorn on our opponents, we need to launch long-term, grassroots campaigns of education in the sectors in which fascists organize, as well as everywhere else. We need to use what even our enemy claims are our superior skills in organizing to, well, organize: convince, persuade, excite with the vision of what a nurturing and mutual society would actually be like.

For more information on the far right's attempts to recruit the left, researcher Spencer Sunshine's writings are a great place to start. Check out his article for Political Research Associates, "Drawing Lines against Racism and Fascism." You can find more on his website,

If you'd like to hear me tell the story of what it was like to ride in a van with eight Nazis when I left the conference — an incredibly reckless decision on my part — you can listen on The Artichoke Storytelling Series' podcast here.

Apologies to those of you without Spotify — it’s the only place that seems to host this podcast :-)

1. See this excellent piece by Alexander Reid Ross, "These Dirtbag Left Stars Are Flirting with the Far Right," The Daily Beast, March 8, 2021.

2. I later learned that Friberg had been barred from entering the country by the US government.

3. The Traditionalist Worker Party broke up in 2018 because of a violent dispute between the two founders, one of whom was having an affair with the other's wife. But Matthew Heimbach is still on the scene, attempting to court the left by speaking at a left/right crossover "anti-war machine rally" in Washington and claiming to have renounced hate while still associating with Nazis.