The New York Review of Books: The Menace of Eco-Fascism

Across Europe, for example, a longstanding cultural relationship between Nature and Nation permeates environmental debate with a nativist sentiment stronger than is typically visible in the United States. In Germany, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, die Wandervögel (the hiking birds) began to coalesce around a disdain for modernity and a romantic conception of the nation’s Teutonic agrarian past. The Hitler Youth eventually appropriated a lot of the Wandervögel aesthetic—including its early use of the swastika and its militant Boy Scout look—and the movement’s ideological obsessions; the way it tied local ecology to ethnicity in a “Blood and Soil” mythology is still echoed today by many on the far right. (The German Green Party has been periodically plagued by this tension, sometimes leading to the creation of splinter groups such as the Unabhängige Ökologen Deutschlands, the Independent Environmentalists of Germany, whose platform pairs ecological goals with the protection of “cultural identity” and racial purity.)

Russia today is seeing the rise of a similar eco-nationalist homesteading movement, sometimes dubbed “Ringing Cedars” after a series of fantasy novels by the Siberian author Vladimir Megre, whose mysticism and Old World nostalgia inspired readers to go “back to the land.” The catalyzing force of a popular fantasy series is oddly something that the Ringing Cedars communities share with the United Kingdom’s mid-century Green movement, which arose in tandem with a largely conservative longing for the English countryside, rekindled by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. [...]

In that disturbing and carefully calibrated statement, Spencer clearly hoped to bridge the divide between those on the far right who believe that climate change is a hoax, that the environmental movement is a crypto-socialist bid for state intervention (effectively, the Koch-funded Tea Party line), and those who actually find the science undergirding environmental causes persuasive (even if they ultimately care more about intrusions into their own personal sphere, like GMO crops and fluoridated water, than international problems like rising sea levels and ocean acidification). Spencer’s goal here is to build a consensus on preserving the natural environment—for the privileged ownership, use, and pleasure of Western ethno-states. [...]

There’s a strain within environmentalism that shares this primordial outlook, holding fast to a belief in “climax” or “deep ecologies”—perfectly balanced states of nature that would be enduring and eternal were it not for the interference of man. The unresolved tension surrounding this concept has been a feature of ecological debates since at least the early twentieth century, when the English botanist Arthur Tansley sparred with American ecologist Frederic Clements over the latter’s view of the ecosystem as organism, striving for total symbiotic balance. Finally putting this to rest, with the help of decades of continuing research, will probably be an essential step toward saving the cause of environmentalism from one of its more dangerous foundational myths.

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The Atlantic: The White Nationalists Are Winning

From the looks of it, the Nazis lost the battle of Charlottesville. After all, Donald Trump’s handling of the aftermath of the rally, in which he said there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest, drew bipartisan condemnation. The attempted rebranding of white nationalism as the genteel and technologically savvy alt-right failed, the marketing campaign faltering after the murder of the counter-protester Heather Heyer and the attempted murder of several others revealed to the nation the logical conclusion of alt-right beliefs and arguments. The bloody outcome of that day foiled the white nationalists’ attempt to garner sympathy from the mainstream right, and in doing so, make themselves respectable. [...]

A year after white nationalists in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us!” their message has been taken up and amplified by Fox News personalities. Tucker Carlson tells his audience that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” Laura Ingraham says that “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of “massive demographic changes” as a result of “both illegal and sometimes legal immigration that progressives love.” They echo the white-nationalist claim that America is at risk because the nation is growing more diverse, an argument that treats the mere presence of nonwhite people, citizen or noncitizen, as an existential threat to the country. White nationalists like Cantwell are cheered to hear their beliefs championed on Fox. Cantwell wrote last year that Carlson “is basically telling white America to prepare for war as directly as he can get away with while remaining on Fox News.” [...]

White nationalists win by activating white panic, by frightening a sufficient number of white people into believing that their safety and livelihoods can only be protected by defining American citizenship in racial terms, and by convincing them that American politics is a zero-sum game in which white people only win when people of color lose. While this dynamic has always been present in American politics, it has been decades since the White House has been occupied by a president who so visibly delights in exploiting it, aided by a right-wing media infrastructure that has come to see it as a ratings strategy. It is not just the white nationalists who win when racialized fears surrounding crime, immigration, and terrorism shape the political behavior of white voters. Donald Trump also wins. And both the Trump White House and the men who rallied in Charlottesville for the cause of white power know it. [...]

Only when Americans render a political verdict against Trumpism and its racialized vision of American citizenship will that skirmish be won. Until that happens, the white nationalists know that despite their infamy and humiliation, their pathetic adherence to a genetic determinism they desperately hope will rescue their lonely lives from insignificance is slowly succeeding at remaking the country in their image.

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The Atlantic: The American far-right is crashing after its Trump victory high

Within the White House, the far right has been practically decimated. With Steve Bannon’s departure, and recent excommunication, the Breitbart faction has become marginalized. Clowns like “Dr” Sebastian Gorka have been kicked out, while others, including his wife, Katharine Gorka, work under the shadow of being purged, too. The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has fallen out of Trump’s favor, but remains influential within the Department of Justice and a continuing threat to the rights and protections of minorities. [...]

Outside the White House, the situation of the far-right movement is not much better. The extreme right, hiding behind the term “alt-right”, of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer has expressed great political ambitions, but has been unable to bring together more than 100 people since the deadly demonstration in Charlottesville in August. They remain an online troll army, which mainly survives because of the disproportionate attention of the (mostly liberal) media. They have no political relevance outside of their violent potential. [...]

Within the Republican party, longstanding radical right politicians like Dana Rohrabacher of California and Steve King of Iowa might have become even more open about their nativism and support for Vladimir Putin, but they remain fairly marginal within both Congress and the White House. At the same time, at the local and state level, many establishment Republicans now run radical right campaigns, hoping to profit from the illustrious Trump effect, but it is doubtful they will actually vote as radical rightists (if they get elected). And even if they do, it is doubtful it will be enough for the still radicalizing base, who in 2016 considered former “Tea Party warriors” as “establishment Republicans”.

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The Guardian: The Guardian view on white nationalism: a rising danger

The end of the second world war gave rise in the west to a very different ideal of nationhood. The European Union was built on the hope that national boundaries might become very much less salient, preserved as wrinkles on the gentle face of history rather than its fixed expression; and after the fall of the Berlin Wall it seemed that this pattern must in time spread east, even into the former Yugoslavia. If there was one lesson that every European – and not just Jewish ones – had learned from the first half of the 20th century, it was “never again”.

Never has that slogan sounded more hollow than on Saturday, when a white nationalist parade drew 60,000 people, mostly men, to Warsaw to march through the streets with most banners proclaiming “We want God” but others demanding a “White Poland”, “A holocaust for Muslims”, and “a brotherhood of white nations” – as if that had worked out after 1918. Of course, the breakdown of international order between the wars was blamed by the far right on Jews, whereas the threat now is supposed to be Muslims. But the present coalition extends to traditional antisemites, too. The organisers included groups who had been active in the antisemitic agitation of 1930s Poland, and Richard Spencer, the American neo-Nazi, had been invited, although he was kept out of the country by the merely authoritarian nationalist Law and Justice party.

Self-conscious Nazis are still a very small part of this movement. We are not seeing a straightforward return to the 1930s. But the slogans shouted today still wake disturbing echoes from 80 years ago. What we have once more is a growing cohort of men who know that the economy has no dignified use for them, and who feel this insult to their own personal self-worth is also an insult to the nation, the religion, or even the race, that they are proud to belong to. Their reaction brings shame on all three. These are dangerous emotions. When we watch these marches, we should remember the delirious enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of the war whose ghastly end four years later we still commemorate. The hard-won common sense of each generation is easily forgotten by the children to whom it is offered as a gift. The only counter to this kind of twisted idealism is an idealism of progress and decency which can carry an equivalent meaning and urgency, but values all people for themselves, not for their race or creed.

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The New Yorker: Birth of a White Supremacist

The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him—Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the over-all tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts—meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week. [...]

In January, a group of anti-fascist activists dug up his personal information and released it against his will—an Internet-specific form of retribution known as doxing. Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer who worked at an e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue: “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial and cognitively impaired. Perhaps most baffling of all, Mike’s wife, who was also identified in the dox, turned out to be Jewish. [...]

A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise. [...]

The idea of racial hierarchy seemed to hold enormous explanatory power. As a liberal, he had dealt with troubling facts—the achievement gap between black students and white students, say—by invoking the history of racial oppression, or by explaining why the data didn’t show what they appeared to show. As a Marxist, he had attributed unpleasant facts to capitalist exploitation; as a libertarian, he had blamed the state. But all those explanations were abstract at best, muddled at worst, and they required levels of context that were impossible to convey in a Facebook post. Now he was free to revert to a far simpler explanation: maybe white people had more wealth and power because white people were superior. After arguing himself out of every previous position, he had finally found the perfect ideology for an inveterate contrarian—one that presented such a basic affront to the underlying tenets of modern democracy that he would never run out of enemies.

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Haaretz: Israel Under Trump: Welcome to the New Home of Nazi Denial

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained silence over the U.S. president’s having equated neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members with the leftist counterprotesters who came under deadly attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, the prime minister’s hand-picked communications minister declared that Israel’s relations with the White House take precedence over condemning Nazis. [...]

“We need to condemn anti-Semitism and any trace of Nazism, and I will do what I can as a minister to stop its spread,” said Kara. “But Trump is the best U.S. leader Israel has ever had. His relations with the prime minister of Israel are wonderful, and after enduring the terrible years of Obama, Trump is the unquestioned leader of the free world, and we must not accept anyone harming him.”

Even for Israel, where Beyond Belief is another name for the place all of us live in all the time, there seems something impossible, something bordering on science fiction, about this country lending a home to, well, Nazi denial. [...]

And this is the same Richard Spencer who praised Trump for aiding in the “de-Judaification” of the Holocaust by omitting any mention of Jews from his statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. [...]

But the interview was far from the only instance of an abhorrent phenomenon in an Israel under the influence of Donald Trump. It is the rise of Nazi denial – the desire among certain political and media figures associated with Netanyahu to curry favor with the U.S. president by downplaying or dismissing the dangers of the KKK, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who took part in the violence in Charlottesville.

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Los Angeles Times: As he coddles neo-Nazis, Trump’s political isolation increases

And, indeed, it was a defining moment. It made crystal clear the truth that Donald Trump cannot shake his warm feelings for “blood and soil” racists who see him as their ally. White nationalist leader Richard Spencer is absolutely on target with his contention that, though Trump may not be ideologically in lock step with the movement, the president has a “psychic connection” with the alt-right. [...]

On Wednesday, Trump rushed to dissolve two highly-touted business advisory councils before all the CEOs on those panels quit. Business leaders had been bolting for the exits like an audience in a burning circus tent after Trump failed to make a distinction between the Nazi sympathizers who invaded Charlottesville and the people who showed up to protest their vile philosophy. On Tuesday, Trump slammed the departing CEOs as “grandstanders” and said he could easily replace them, but, by Wednesday, the president must have realized no prominent businessman in his right mind now wants to ruin his reputation by colluding with him.

In another dramatic move, five top military leaders — the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and National Guard — made strong statements condemning racism and Nazism. The Army chief of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, sent out a tweet that said, “The Army doesn’t tolerate racism, extremism or hatred in our ranks. It’s against our values and everything we’ve stood for since 1775.” Such pointed comments from the military’s top brass are highly unusual and are a sharp, if indirect, rebuke to the commander in chief. [...]

But Trump still has his base. And he will cling to them and coddle them, even if some among them are Nazis and white supremacists. It is a twisted neediness that makes Donald Trump blind to obvious evil.

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Vox: Everything you were afraid to ask about white nationalism’s new place in American politics

At a time when unabashed racists are elated at the possibility that the president-elect will take action to create the “white country” of their fantasies, and people who share their policy views but have no hate group affiliation are being empowered, the current battle of words is an important one. Fueling it is the risk that the wrong language choices could cloud Americans’ understanding of what’s actually happening. Complicating things is the sobering reality that the threats nonwhite people face don’t change depending on what we call the people responsible for them. [...]

But there was a twist: Bannon insisted he was not a white nationalist but rather an “economic nationalist.” Trump went even further, telling the New York Times that Bannon was neither racist nor “alt-right.”

Another tug of war over labels followed when Spencer made it known that he wasn’t fond of the terms “racist,” “Nazi,” and “white supremacist” being applied to him. Instead, Spencer, who led the “Hail Trump!” Nazi salute and heads a group that promotes “America for white people,” told the Washington Post he prefers to be called an “identitarian” — a reference to a movement that has more momentum in Europe but all the same associations with racism and xenophobia. [...]

Bjork-James’s concern about the term “alt-right” is based on similar thinking: It creates the risk that more white people may become radicalized by the group. “If we help to normalize these ideas as just part of the political spectrum, then it can make it seem less radical than they are and less connected to racial violence — because if people espouse racist ideas and racial rhetoric, there’s always some kind of a correlation to racist violence,” she said. “And if we don’t describe them for what they are, we’re kind of giving other white people a path to think these are legitimate ideas and a chance that more white people will become radicalized in adopting these ideas.” [...]

The New York Times’s Amanda Taub pointed out a similar distinction, explaining that what makes the alt-right different from white nationalism is that many of its members’ first priorities and entrees into the group aren’t related to race. “The alt-right is ideologically broader than white nationalism — it also includes neoreactionaries, monarchists, and meme-loving internet trolls,” she wrote.

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