Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
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an infiltrating function by blending more seamlessly into online search
results. At the same time that Nordiska förbundet used Metapedia to pen-
etrate the digital media and education landscape, they were also working
to craft an alternative to online social networking. In 2007, the organi-
zation opened Nordic— an online community page marketing itself as a
“portal for Nordic identity, culture, and tradition.” Users created accounts
with names and often profile images and thereby gained access to on-
line games, radio, and discussion threads ranging on topics from politics
to homework assistance and second- hand shopping. It aimed, in other
words, to allow users to disconnect from sites like Myspace and satisfy
all of their online social needs in an ideologically friendly environment.
Both Metapedia and Nordic strove to expand beyond the Swedish con-
text. The online social networking sites were mostly in Swedish, but they
were marketed to and occasionally included threads for other Scandinavian
language-
users. The online encyclopedia, though originating with a
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Swedish page, began expanding to other languages immediately— first
to Danish, then German and English. And while Metapedia and Nordic
appealed to the cultural mainstream, Nordiska förbundet continued to ad-
vance its highbrow intellectual campaign as well. In 2009, it established
an annual seminar series called Identitarian Ideas/ Identitär Idé.
That same year, in what seemed a retrospective or mere formality at
that point, Nordiska förbundet posted its declaration of a metapolitical
agenda. A statement on their website coauthored by Friberg concludes:
To forge a metapolitical avant garde— and thereby an essential
complement to every political initiative— is Nordiska förbundet’s
mission. We see metapolitics as a multidimensional, flexible, and
dynamic force with potential to capture the essence of key issues
and expose perspectives that undermine and deconstruct the po-
litically correct malaise and the guilt that today burdens the Nordic
peoples.
But metapolitics isn’t only about undermining and deconstructing.
It creates, encourages, inspires, and exposes. In total, our
metapolitics strives to set an identitarian movement in motion, a
cause growing in strength both through our own channels as well
as those of the partially censored channels of the establishment.
A cause that, when it has reached a critical mass, will determine its
own path to fundamentally transform today’s shackling public space
and prepare the way for a Nordic cultural and folk renaissance— the
rebirth of a new Nordic golden age.16
It was a good time to make such a declaration. By 2009, Nordiska
förbundet’s metapolitical campaigning seemed ascendant. Projects like
Motpol and identitarian Ideas were satisfying the aims of crafting a more
refined space and ideal for the radical Right cause. And if they provided
intellectual depth, Nordiska förbundet’s other initiatives were achieving
remarkable breadth. Metapedia quickly spread throughout Europe and
North America, expanding its pages from Swedish, Danish, English, and
German to include Spanish, French, Hungarian, Romanian, Estonian,
Croatian, Slovenian, Greek, Czech, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Dutch.
Combined, these pages produced nearly three hundred thousand arti-
cles.17 The social networking site Nordic likewise grew rapidly, reaching
twenty thousand registered users from throughout Sweden, Norway,
and Denmark by the same time, and serving as the main online hub for
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nationalist activists of various kinds, from populist party politicians to ter-
rorist Anders Behring Breivik.
Arktos
The curse of the postwar radical Right— infighting— would be the death
of Nordiska förbundet. Simmering conflicts over ideology led to purges,
and clandestine saboteurs even managed to cause the organization signif-
icant financial losses. These developments, combined with the heavy cost
of buying the rights for the Nordiska förlaget’s signature translation—
Culture of Critique by Kevin MacDonald— made for a dire economic situa-
tion. Friberg assumed sole ownership of Nordiska förbundet in 2009, and
that same year he ceased its operations while allowing Metapedia, Nordic,
and Motpol to continue. “It was all just as well” Friberg told me, thinking
back. Nordiska förlaget in particular had been born too close to the old
white- power skinhead scene, in his mind, and it revealed those roots in
its shrunken, but ever- present body of products celebrating Nazism and
decadent youth subculture. “I wanted to have a fresh start that was more
in line with the project I envisioned from the beginning with Nordiska
förbundet,” an initiative that was radical, but intelligent, welcoming, re-
spectable, and innovative. He wanted something with the ideological pro-
file of his blog portal Motpol— something grounded in the French New
Right and Traditionalist perspective— but a publishing house, something
with a wider reach to complement the spread of Metapedia internationally.18
In October 2009 Friberg sat at a meeting in Aarhus, Denmark, to-
gether with a Norwegian politician and two Danes to establish the pub-
lishing house Arktos, which became a reality in 2010. Absorbing both the
inventory of Nordiska förlaget and the Danish company Integral Traditions
Publishing, Arktos would emerge as the foremost producer of English-
language Traditionalist and New Right literature, featuring authors like
Evola, de Benoist, and Faye, as well as international authors like Alexander
Dugin, and Paul Gottfried. Various figures from the Scandinavian radical
Right would enter and exit Arktos throughout the following years, but
Friberg assumed the role of CEO and served as its organizational pillar
along with American John Morgan as chief editor.
By multiple measures, the venture succeeded. The publishing house
appears to have become the largest retailer of radical Right literature in
the world during the 2010s, attracting a large (though somewhat artifi-
cially inflated) social media following in the process. Arktos would also
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assume the role as hub for Friberg’s other projects in much the same way
that Nordiska förlaget did before, but operating internationally beyond
the Nordic region and in English. It became the sponsor of the annual
identitarian Ideas seminar that, by 2013, was becoming a major inter-
national gathering for antiliberal philosophers, politicians, and political
commentators.
The metapolitical impact of these efforts registered internally within
the radical Right in Northern Europe. As I have noted elsewhere,19 one
can see an iconography of books and other emblems of learnedness
surfacing in radical Nordic nationalists’ self- depictions in online social
media at this time, with individual activists choosing to take profile photos
of themselves standing in libraries or in front of packed bookshelves.
Friberg’s desire for a new standard for social capital within the radical
Right seemed to have spread. Likewise, writing, both for blogs as well
as for book- length publications, grew as an insider practice even among
younger generations of activists. And identitarian Ideas became the main
annual meeting place for intellectually ambitious participants in var-
ious types of rightist organizations. This marks a major lifestyle change,
replacing an old anti- immigrant activist prototype based in skinheadism,
music production, and decadence with one of academic refinement and
orderliness.
The Alt Right and Internationalization
Despite his successes, however, Friberg’s goal was not only to reform ex-
isting activist circles or to cater exclusively to those aspiring to a cultural
elitism. He wanted access to the international online media market— one
that, if not low- brow per se, was at least accustomed to commentary in bite-
sized formats suited to distribution in social media. To pursue these ends
alongside his other initiatives, Friberg and his partners established RightOn.
net in early 2015. The outlet featured articles by a handful of authors, video
commentary streaming through YouTube, and two semiweekly podcasts—
one by the American Matt Forney, and the other by Friberg along with John
Morgan and the Swedish white nationalist Jonas De Geer.20
RightOn.net’s slogan, “Putting the Action in Reactionary,”21 revealed
a nascent Zeitgeist shift coming to all of Friberg’s projects that year, one
whereby the defensive, recuperative pose of his early metapolitics was
giving way to a new one, on the offensive. On a Motpol blog post in July
2015, Friberg issued a call seeking distance from the principle of “riding
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the tiger,” the strategy Evola described for post– World War II antiliberals
in the West whereby activism could only consist in remaining conspic-
uous and avoiding explicit proselytizing and conflict while waiting for
the tiger of modernity to run its course and wither of old age. That final
stage of modernity, Friberg thought, had come, and nonintervention
and withdrawal were no longer survival tactics for the rightist dissident;
they were cowardice squandering opportunity. Such opportunity, the
sign of fatigue from the tiger of modernity, showed itself in the electoral
victories of European populist parties, in the strength of Vladimir Putin’s
antiliberalism, in the nascent campaign of Donald Trump, and in general
dismay in Europe relating to the 2015 refugee crisis. Friberg wrote:
Even if “riding the tiger,” to use Evola’s terms, was once a healthy and
necessary strategy during the latter half of the past century, it isn’t
any more. Europe is bleeding, but the tiger— liberal modernity— is
dying as well. It is time to climb off and strangle it while a European
civilization still exists.22
“Strangolare la tigre” (strangle the tiger) became a brief rallying cry in
Right social media thereafter. Just what strangling the tiger meant— what
transitioning away from secretive activism entailed— the article didn’t
clarify. But for Friberg, the statement seemed a declaration of his ongoing
move into public discourse. If careful, subversive metapolitical strategy
involved concealing one’s identity and its association with radical politics,
Friberg would now break that dogma in what was for him unprecedented
fashion.
In 2015 he published his first book, The Real Right Returns ( Högern
kommer tillbaka). The impetus for this book was his conviction that the
regime of liberalism in the West that had previously made open resist-
ance suicidal was losing its hegemonic position, and that an explicit rad-
ical Right could now enter the public space without fear of devastating
repression. A sort of handbook premised on that very account of history,
the text outlines strategies for activists to conduct politics in public while
counteracting the challenges of the liberal establishment. Publishing a
book under his own name was for him an unprecedented move, and so
too was his speech in 2015 at the eighth identitarian Ideas conference23—
the background figure and organizer was becoming a public personality.
That same year, he began giving interviews in rightist media like Europa
Terra Nostra, Red Ice Radio, and Greg Johnson’s Counter- Currents. But
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notoriety and new metapolitical opportunity awaited Friberg as he began
to seize on a new transnational movement, about to reap unprecedented
rewards.
In January 2017, in anticipation of the ninth identitarian Ideas
conference to be held the following month, Friberg entered into a
partnership together with Richard Spencer and his National Policy
Institute, and the Swede Henrik Palmgren and his media outlet Red Ice
Creations, to form the Alt- Right Corporation. This initiative, coming
on the heels of Brexit and the American presidential election the pre-
vious year, was conceived as a flagship effort to unify major players in
the transatlantic white- identity movement. It centered on the formation
of a website, AltRight.com, which in many ways replicated the format
of Friberg’s previous platform RightOn.net, but which now harnessed
the media reach and— in the context of Far- Right activism— exceptional
production quality of Palmgren’s Red Ice Creations, as well as Spencer’s
celebrity.24
Aligning with the Alt Right at a pseudo- administrative level was in
keeping with many aspects of Friberg’s past activism. The American
movement had grown in part from some his own initiatives: to the extent
that it channeled ideals of the French New Right, that intellectual engage-
ment relied on the distribution of English translations of thinkers like de
Benoist and Faye— many of which spread through Friberg’s publishing
companies. Indeed, Spencer credited Arktos with having increased intel-
lectually inclined white nationalist Americans’ access to the French New
Right and identitarianism.25 Likewise, the world of anonymous bloggers,
Twitter users, meme crafters, and YouTube video producers that make
up the Alt Right rank- and- file trafficked in references to ideas channeled
in Friberg’s publications, be they the Archeofuturism of Faye or the
antimodernism of Evola.26 But the Alt Right also represented resounding
affirmation of rightist metapolitics more broadly. Mainstream political
commentators had credited the American movement in part for Donald
Trump’s landmark election to the US presidency in 2016. Such narratives
endorse a standard metapolitical script: first cultural interventions
transformed public conversations, then political behavior (in form of
voting) sh
ifted. The Alt Right at once offered Friberg recognition of the
spread of his initiatives as well as the opportunity to carry his brand of ac-
tivism to a wider population.
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Conclusion
Though his career eventually gained an international scope, Friberg’s most
tangible metapolitical achievements are to be seen in his home political
milieu. While white- power skinhead subculture lives on in Central and
Eastern Europe, it is all but dead in Scandinavia. Brandishing swastikas
and screaming “Sieg heil!” in public just seems so 1990s today. There
are multiple reasons for the subculture’s downfall, but Friberg can take
credit for having replaced it with something: being a good nationalist in
the region now entails— much in line with his early wishes— fluency in a
body of radical Right intellectual thought and aspiration toward personas
of erudition and professionalism. This development was enabled directly
by his metapolitical initiatives, Nordiska förbundet in particular.
Friberg’s international impact is less easily measured. It is difficult to
gage the success of his efforts to expand the circle of white nationalist
sympathizers. How many individuals throughout Europe and North
America were converted to the cause by stumbling across Metapedia
articles online? Only dubious answers await such questions, we can be
certain that Friberg’s efforts shaped and strengthened the global expo-
sure of a select radical rightist intelligentsia, and in this respect his influ-
ence abroad resembles that in Scandinavia. Not only have his publishing
houses been the avenues through which Alt- Right activists accessed the
French New Right and radical Traditionalism, but the same presses as well
as his various lecture series bolstered the international profile of writers
like MacDonald, Gottfried, and Dugin. Those efforts helped craft what
today appears a new intellectual canon in the global radical Right, and
Friberg’s publicizing talents meant that his projects became the forums
and supplied the language for activists to engage with a celebrate that body
of thought. White nationalist Twitter trolls traffic in French New Right or
tradionalist- inspired hashtags like #archeofuturism and #kaliyuga, while