by Robby Soave
Conservatives are often parodied as disproportionately white and disproportionately male—thus the stereotype of the College Republican frat bro—but the summit included plenty of young women and people of color. I heard one Latino teen from New York City explaining to his friends that some of his relatives were illegal immigrants, and he wondered if he should call ICE on them. Despite her Trumpian immigration views, Rachel told him not to be a snitch.
These were very conservative kids: not just on immigration but on the economy and abortion as well. They were more mixed on gay marriage; when speaker Dave Rubin reminded the audience he was gay and asked if that mattered to them, their loud cheering seemed to confirm that it did not. Many also shared the libertarian perspective that at least some drugs should be legalized. Some were staunchly faith-inclined; others were atheists. When I asked Kashuv whether he was religious, he replied, “Not quite.”
One gets the sense from talking with these kids that the most important issue—aside from illegal immigration, perhaps—is political correctness. Fearful that social media mobs would come for them, their sense of victimization was as palpable as that of anyone on the intersectional progressive left. The issue of “shadow banning”—also called “stealth banning” or “ghost banning”—was of paramount importance to them. That’s when a social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter takes steps to prevent people from seeing a user’s posts and content but does not block or ban the person in ways that would be obvious. For instance, Twitter’s search function has been accused of obscuring content from prominent Republicans. (Twitter denied that it was doing this, but its denial—“You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow, although you may have to do more work to find them”—actually seemed to confirm the practice.)20
The issue has drawn attention from President Trump himself, who tweeted, “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”21 Twitter, though, is a private company, and the federal government meddling with its internal speech policies would be an obvious First Amendment violation. In any case, Trump is widely loved by these teens: he’s the Zillennial conservatives’ political icon, as President Ronald Reagan was for the generation of conservatives who came of age during the 1980s.
Of course, many of these kids hold political views that are still in flux. When I asked Kashuv what kind of conservative he was, he admitted that he was still developing his viewpoint. In the meantime, I should consider him “just a big constitutional guy,” he said.
Like so many young conservatives of his generation, Kashuv was heavily influenced by Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. The latter has become something of a mentor to Kashuv, giving him tips before television appearances and speaking engagements. The former is more like a life coach.
“I think Peterson is actually resulting in a massive change in our youth today, especially with the male youth,” Kashuv told me. “He’s giving them hope, and he’s telling them how to better their lives, and he’s actually influencing thousands of people every day.”
TPUSA was founded by Kirk in 2012, when he was eighteen. The organization’s mission is to educate students about free markets and conservative principles, and counter the left-wing bias on university campuses. Kirk has rapidly built an impressive organization with a multimillion-dollar budget. The billionaire Foster Friess, a well-known funder of conservative causes, provided the organization with its initial funding.
TPUSA had a breakout year in 2016. That’s when Kirk debuted his “Professor Watchlist,” which is exactly what it sounds like: a list of liberal professors across the country who produced some scholarship, or made statements in class, implying a leftist worldview. The idea is to counter in-class bias. A representative entry for a politics professor at Virginia Tech University highlights her view that burning fossil fuels is “a reassertion of white masculine power on an unruly planet that is perceived to be increasingly in need of violent, authoritarian order.”22
That might be a silly way to frame the renewable energy issue, but does this professor—and hundreds of others like her—really deserve to be named and shamed, absent any real evidence that she is actually biased against conservative students?
Policing professors for dissident leftist views is not exactly in keeping with a commitment to the ethos of free speech, which is one reason the watch list has drawn criticism from more principled advocates for campus free expression. Sarah Ruger, director of free speech initiatives at the Charles Koch Institute—the charitable foundation run by the libertarian Koch brothers—has described such efforts as “McCarthyism 2.0” and “entirely antithetical to who we are.”23
The conservative Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a rival organization that has existed since the 1960s, has likewise criticized TPUSA. In a leaked internal memo, YAF warned that “the long-term damage TPUSA could inflict on conservative students and the Conservative Movement can no longer be ignored.”24 Kirk’s defenders slammed the memo as nothing but sour grapes.
Criticism has also come from students formerly affiliated with TPUSA. Kaitlin Bennett, an organizer for TPUSA’s Kent State University chapter who resigned in fury during the fall 2017 semester, accused Kirk of throwing her under the bus after a stunt gone wrong. The chapter had organized a mock safe space—complete with a grown adult in a diaper—in order to protest the concept, but the diaper-wearing person looked so ridiculous that the tactic backfired. Bennett claimed that Kirk initially congratulated her, saying, “Keep up the triggering, good job,” but then turned on her after people began tweeting pictures of diapers at him.25
Many on the right believe TPUSA is too obsessed with attacking the left. At the leadership summit, both UN ambassador Nikki Haley and education secretary Betsy DeVos gave speeches imploring the teens to focus on trying to persuade liberals, not just trolling them.
It’s good advice; whether the TPUSA network will take it is another matter. During the summit, audience members frequently broke into trollish cheers of “Lock her up!” with reference to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. When they did so during Sessions’s speech about the importance of free speech on campus, the attorney general repeated the line and laughed.
— EIGHT —
BLEACHED
SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE ALT-RIGHT
The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., might seem like an awkward place for white nationalists to hold a rally—racists can’t really claim President Abraham Lincoln, liberator of slaves, as an alt-right forefather. But maybe that’s the point. For the new young far-right white nationalist activists, much of what they do is deliberately ironic: a joke, intended to “own the libs” (i.e., infuriate liberals). But these jokes are a cover for a truly disturbing belief system.
In June 2017, members of the racist alt-right gathered near the Lincoln Memorial to hear speeches from leaders of their movement, including the militantly anti-PC YouTube personality known as Baked Alaska (who, in a previous life, was a videographer for BuzzFeed until the over-the-top political correctness of his colleagues drove him into the arms of the alt-right) and forty-year-old alt-right intellectual leader Richard Spencer.1 Spencer’s event took place next to the reflecting pool; leftist protesters organized a counterdemonstration on the steps of the memorial, well within shouting distance. I covered both events, interviewing attendees about their reasons for coming.
I had scarcely set foot in the alt-right rally zone when someone called my name—an old acquaintance from college recognized me, and came over to say hello. Let’s call him Daniel.
Daniel looked different than he had the last time I saw him: he had bleached his brown hair blond and wore it long on top, buzzed on the sides. He was also beginning to grow a beard. His attire was equally notable: khaki pants and a T-shirt depicting Donald Trump standing atop a tank, wielding a machine gun, flanked by an American flag and an eagle with a rocket launcher.2
I had known Daniel a
s a friendly, polite, thoughtful kid with moderately conservative or libertarian tendencies. And yet here he was at a Richard Spencer rally. I asked him—not too pointedly—why he had come. He was “just checking it out,” he told me.
As we chatted, I learned that Daniel had recently gotten married: to a Muslim woman, in fact. I asked what she thought of Daniel being here. He explained that she was supportive and had even wanted to come herself, but Daniel had talked her out of it—due to an unspoken concern for her safety, I gathered.
Another rally attendee came up to us. I didn’t know this young man, but Daniel evidently did. I’ll call him Adam. He was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat and holding a sign featuring a drawing of a helicopter and the message “Free rides for commies,” a reference to the extrajudicial killings of political dissidents that occurred under fascist regimes in South America. The alt-right makes this reference approvingly: it’s good to throw their enemies out of helicopters, or at least funny to joke about it.
The strangest moment of this meeting occurred when Adam took note of Daniel’s new hair color and said, “You look like a fashy Eminem”—“fashy” not as in “fashionable” but as in “fascist.” The remark was clearly intended as a compliment.
What is the alt-right? Simply put, it’s a movement of young social-media-savvy white nationalists who think conservatism is a better home for them than liberalism due to the latter’s affection for multiculturalism, which they consider anathema. But mainstream conservatism is scarcely better in this regard, and so the radicals needed to supplant the right as it currently exists. Thus the alt-right: an alternative to the right that’s neither more nor less conservative but something else entirely.
I’ve cautioned previously that we shouldn’t overstate the Zillennial left’s size and influence—most people are politically indifferent, and we can’t judge an entire generation based on its most extreme members. The same holds true for the weird movement known as the alt-right. The June 25 rally involved at most two hundred people, not all of them devout followers. This is a radical fringe movement with blessedly little power to affect public policy. “While the alt-right is real and visible, there’s no reason to believe it’s a very vast group or one that will stick around for very long,” wrote the journalist Olivia Nuzzi in the Washington Post.3
The movement itself sees things differently, and cites Trump’s victory as proof that its ideas are gaining traction. Trump isn’t a member of the alt-right, of course, but he speaks their language more closely than any other major Republican figure. Trump adviser-turned-occasional-rival Steve Bannon is well aware of the alt-right’s existence, and under his leadership, the conservative website Breitbart intentionally catered to this audience. The alt-right is still very much a fringe movement, to be sure, but it’s one that occupies a place of increasing energy on the right.
That’s especially true when one considers just young people—the subject of this book. Conservatives constitute a minority of politically interested young people, who are themselves a minority of Zillennials. But among this minority within a minority, the alt-right is ascending. Its members are surprisingly young, well read, and college educated.
As we have seen throughout this book, leftists wield significant influence on some college campuses. The alt-right doesn’t have a comparable base of power, but its members have played an important role in infesting social media sites and making them miserably toxic places. Their campaigns of harassment against people they deem inferior—blacks and immigrants, but also Jews and Muslims, women, and Democrats—make them well worthy of study.
As was the case with the extreme anti-capitalist left, readers will be struck by the weirdness of alt-right lingo and habits. The alt-right’s mascot is a cartoon frog named Pepe that originally had nothing to do with racism or even politics. Its members would like to live in a fictional country called the Republic of Kekistan, where political correctness would be outlawed. A day in the life of an alt-right-affiliated young man (the movement is overwhelmingly male) might involve waking up, logging on to Twitter, and sending rape threats to feminist writers, genocide jokes to Jewish writers, and trolling criticism to journalists in general. Such acts of provocation and abuse are called “shit-posting” in Internet meme culture. When Twitter retaliates and bans the harassers from its platform—something the social media company has the absolute right to do—alt-right activists complain that overly sensitive liberals are trampling their free speech rights. Many think social media should be considered a public utility rather than a private entity.
It can be hard to believe that there are actual people hidden behind the frog avatars and Holocaust humor. But they’re real. While I was at the rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, I overheard one attendee tell another: “I’m working so many hours now I don’t even have time to shit-post.”
What began for some as politically incorrect humor morphed into something far, far darker. The alt-right activist Christopher Cantwell—derisively dubbed “the crying Nazi” when video footage surfaced of him shedding tears after being repeatedly pepper-sprayed during a scuffle with antifa—recalled for me an incident that took place before his conversion to white nationalism, when he was engaged in an argument about feminism on Twitter. Cantwell’s opponent, a black man, eventually branded Cantwell a misogynist.
“I just hate those stupid accusations,” Cantwell, a bald, bulky thirty-seven-year-old who speaks with a thick New York accent, told me in an interview. “So I say, ‘Well, if you think my misogyny is bad, wait until you get ahold of my racism.’ And I called him a nigger. I just thought this was funny.”
Identitarians
The intellectual precursor to the alt-right was “paleoconservatism,” a movement that took shape in the 1980s but can trace its own intellectual development to the conservative noninterventionism of earlier twentieth-century figures such as Senator Robert Taft, who opposed America’s entry into World War II. Like traditional conservatives, paleocons stressed the importance of limited government and social conservatism. But they were inclined toward isolationism when it came to issues involving foreign countries: immigration, free trade, and war.
This was not exactly an odd mix of opinions for a strain of conservatism to hold. Republicans in the mold of President William McKinley, the first twentieth-century president, supported tariffs on grounds that they protected American industry from unfair foreign competition. And it was not until recent times that the Republican Party became synonymous with a hawkish foreign policy: World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War were all joined or escalated under Democratic administrations.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s massive electoral victories elevated the status of conservatism. But by this time a rift was apparent between the paleoconservatism of Pat Buchanan, who served as Reagan’s director of communications from 1985 to 1987, and a more hawkish conservatism. This split became much more apparent in subsequent Republican administrations; in the early 2000s, the dominant strain of conservatism became known as “neoconservatism,” which advocated robust military intervention abroad in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Buchanan unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, and by 2000 he had bolted for the Reform Party. In 2002, he cofounded the American Conservative as a paleoconservative alternative to more hawkish conservative opinion journals such as National Review and the Weekly Standard.
Today the American Conservative remains a well-respected publication. But, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews noted, the magazine is “basically alone in that” among explicitly paleo-sympathetic outlets.4 (Having written favorably about Ron Paul and Rand Paul, the American Conservative also has a pronounced libertarian streak.) Other facets of the paleoconservative movement became gradually more accommodating of white supremacy, xenophobia, and even Holocaust denial. Commentary friendly to these ideas proliferated at fringe sites including American Renaissance and VDARE, which is named after Virginia Da
re, the first white settler born in the British colonies in North America. (Dare vanished with the rest of the Roanoke colonists.)
“I started out as a paleoconservative,” Kyle, a thirty-two-year-old attorney and alt-right member, told me in an interview via email. “I read Pat Buchanan’s and Ann Coulter’s books … I am how I am because I am well read.”
But it would be wrong to suggest that the alt-right draws solely from the remnants of the paleocon movement. Some once called themselves libertarians and learned about the alt-right through the presidential campaigns of Ron Paul, whose noninterventionist foreign policy appealed to both groups. Others were libertarians who became active on college campuses, only to find their events continuously disrupted or shut down by leftists. Some of these libertarians radicalized in response, and their ideology morphed from “equal rights for all” into “destroy feminists and race activists as thoroughly as possible.” Corrupted, you might say, by the dark side of the campus PC wars.
Before joining the alt-right, Cantwell—the “crying Nazi” mentioned earlier—had quite the intellectual journey. Two decades ago, his views were in line with Fox News, the only cable news network he watched. He dated black, Asian, and Latina women—he almost had a child with at least one of them, he told me—and harbored zero racial animosity. In 2009, he was arrested for driving under the influence, and started searching the internet for legal help. This search brought him into contact with the philosophy of libertarianism, which describes police officers (correctly, in my view) as an extension of the government that ought to be limited in their ability to disrupt people’s lives, in keeping with the protections from unjust searches and seizures mandated by the Bill of Rights.
Eventually, this led him to get involved with the Ron Paul campaign, where he met anarcho-capitalists. Anarcho-capitalism, a more extreme version of libertarianism, holds that nearly every function of the government is illegitimate, and the state ought to be abolished so that all property can be privately owned. The rules for society would vary from fiefdom to fiefdom: on my property, my rules, on your property, yours. Cantwell came to find this position persuasive.
