gay Swedish antifascist spent a year undercover with white supremacists

A gay Swedish antifascist spent a year undercover with white supremacists. Here’s what he found.
One wants Adolf Hitler on European banknotes by 2050.

LUKE BARNE

link: https://thinkprogress.org/a-gay-sweedish-antifascist-spent-a-year-undercover-with-white-supremacists-heres-what-he-found-92d070611ed9/?fbclid=IwAR1kehuUrLaWsPz5_ttTRr85fURjRbksyze8XRGcbQMC9FLaNA_DqtJWFHU

During an extensive undercover investigation of the far right by openly gay Swedish antifascist activist, white nationalists bragged about their connections with the White House and said their movement would end with “concentration camps and expulsion and war.”

Patrik Hermansson, 25, spent a year pretending he was writing a masters thesis about the suppression of right-wing free speech. Working undercover for British advocacy group Hope Not Hate, his investigation took him from Sweden to London to Washington D.C. and finally Charlottesville.

“I presented myself as a political refugee from the left-wing dictatorship of Sweden,” Hermansson told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. “I talked about no-go-zones. That Sweden was collapsing under mass immigration. Many fascists worship Viking-Sweden, the idea of clean white race and a pure, original masculinity.”

One of Hermansson’s most interesting encounters during his time undercover was with Jason Reza Jorjani, an academic who until recently sat on the board of directors of AltRight.com, a website designed to foster cooperation between different white nationalist groups. (Prominent neo-Nazi Richard Spencer serves as its American Editor.) Jorjani is of Iranian-American descent and describes himself as a “long-time student of the glorious history of the Aryan nation of Iran”.

Hermansson met with Jorjani at an Irish bar in midtown Manhattan in June, where the two talked about a future in which Europe embraces fascism. “It’s going to end with the expulsion of the majority of migrants including citizens, who are of Muslim descent, generally” Jorjani said. “That’s how it’s going to end. It’s going to end with concentration camps and expulsion and war. At the cost of a few hundred million people.”

“We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great,” he continued. “And Hitler will be seen like that: like Napoleon, like Alexander, not like some weird monster who is unique in his own category — no, he is just going to be seen as a great European leader.”

Jorjani went on to brag that he had had “contacts” with the Trump administration and that he was the “link man” with the White House via Steve Bannon, who at that point was still serving as Trump’s chief strategist. “We had connections in the Trump administration,” Jorjani bragged. “We were going to get things done.”

Jorjani’s claims of contacts with the White House appear to be somewhat exaggerated. When approached by the New York Times about his White House “connections” Jorjani cagily clarified that he only meant he’d been “in touch” with people who had a direct line to Trump.

Jorjani has also now left AltRight.com – despite his name still being on the website’s masthead – to focus on bringing about the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But the fact remains that these white nationalist groups, once thought to be fringe internet movements, had managed to draw close to the inner circle of the Trump administration. (Bannon publicly bragged that his website, Breitbart.com, was the “platform for the alt right,” a euphemism for white nationalists.) The president’s hesitancy to condemn the white nationalist movement in the wake of Charlottesville also points to the continued threat.

“Fascism is the largest threat to the society I want to live in,” Hermansson said. “And fascism is growing, which is dangerous. It’s not just racist, it wants to break down every element of democracy.”

==

Undercover With the Alt-Right
A Swedish graduate student goes undercover in the alt-right movement for nearly a year.

link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/opinion/alt-right-white-supremacy-undercover.html?mcubz=3

Last September, Patrik Hermansson, a 25-year-old graduate student from Sweden, went undercover in the world of the extreme right. Posing as a student writing a thesis about the suppression of right-wing speech, he traveled from London to New York to Charlottesville, Va. — and into the heart of a dangerous movement that is experiencing a profound rejuvenation.

Mr. Hermansson, who was sent undercover by the British anti-racist watchdog group Hope Not Hate, spent months insinuating himself into the alt-right, using his Swedish nationality (many neo-Nazis are obsessed with Sweden because of its “Nordic” heritage) as a way in. It wasn’t always easy. “You want to punch them in the face,” he told me of the people he met undercover. “You want to scream and do whatever — leave. But you can’t do any of those things. You have to sit and smile.”

What he learned while undercover is one part of a shocking, comprehensive new report from Hope Not Hate that sheds light on the strange landscape of the alt-right, the much discussed, little understood and largely anonymous far-right movement that exists mostly online and that has come to national attention in part because of its support for Donald Trump.

As a result of the growing influence of the far-right social-media ecosystem, once-moribund hate groups in both the United States and Europe — groups that mostly existed long before “alt-right” entered the vernacular — are enjoying a striking uptick in recruitment.

This latest wave of potential members is young — teenage and 20-something men (they’re mostly men) appear to be exhibiting interest in far-right ideas in numbers that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. These young men are being radicalized largely through the work of a popular group of new far-right internet personalities whose videos, blog posts and tweets have been consistently nudging the boundaries of acceptable conversation to the right — one of the explicit goals of racist extremists everywhere.

And while “globalist” may be one of the alt-right’s favorite slurs, Hope Not Hate conclusively shows that the alt-right is itself now a global movement with regular interaction among far-right figures from Scotland to Sweden to Seattle.

Mr. Hermansson’s story offers vital insights into these groups’ tactics and their sometimes bizarre practices. During his time undercover, he hung out with heavily armed Holocaust deniers and attended gatherings where extremists drank mead from a traditional Viking horn and prayed to the Norse god Odin. In Charlottesville, he marched alongside hundreds of young neo-Nazis and white supremacists before he was sprayed with Mace by a counterprotester and witnessed the car attack that killed Heather Heyer.

In Britain, Mr. Hermansson attended a private dinner of extremists where Greg Johnson, a reclusive leading American far-right figure who is editor in chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, explained the need to “mainstream this stuff — or, more precisely, we need to bring the mainstream towards us.”

An alt-right leader describes his ideal society of ethnically defined homelands and sterilization.
Mr. Johnson later expressed confidence that this process is working. “I see the upward curve in web traffic, and the upward trend in quality and quantity of younger people getting involved,” he told Mr. Hermansson in conversation captured on hidden-camera footage. (During that same chat, he said he believed in ethnic homelands and favored telling Jews, “You need to go to Israel or we’re going to freeze you out of our society.”)

This goal of mainstreaming is an abiding fixation of the far right, whose members are well aware of the problems their movement has had with attracting young people in recent decades. At one point in Mr. Hermansson’s footage, Colin Robertson, a far-right YouTube personality who goes by the name Millennial Woes, explained to an older extremist the importance of putting forward a friendly, accessible face: “If we don’t appear like angry misfits, then we will end up making friendships with people who don’t agree with us,” he said.

Some of Mr. Hermansson’s most arresting footage comes from a June meeting with Jason Reza Jorjani, a founder, along with the American white nationalist Richard Spencer and others, of the AltRight Corporation, an organization established to foster cooperation and coordination among alt-right groups in Europe and North America.

Jason Reza Jorjani, a co-founder of a prominent alt-right media group claimed to have had contact with Steve Bannon when Mr. Bannon was in the Trump administration. Mr. Jorjani also laid out a future of expulsions, concentration camps and war in Europe.

Mr. Hermansson and Mr. Jorjani met at an Irish pub near the Empire State Building, where the baby-faced Mr. Jorjani imagined a near future in which, thanks to liberal complacency over the migration crisis, Europe re-embraces fascism: “We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great. And Hitler will be seen like that: like Napoleon, like Alexander, not like some weird monster who is unique in his own category — no, he is just going to be seen as a great European leader.”

More shockingly, Mr. Jorjani bragged about his contacts in the American government. “We had connections in the Trump administration — we were going to do things!” he said at one point. “I had contacts with the Trump administration,” he said at another.

“Our original vision was the alt-right would become like a policy group for the Trump administration,” he explained, and the administration figure “who was the interface was Steve Bannon.” Unfortunately, he told Mr. Hermansson, the political establishment was “disconnecting us from the Trump administration, almost completely.” (In June, Mr. Bannon hadn’t yet left the White House and returned to Breitbart, the popular and ardently pro-Trump far-right outlet he had led before his time working for Mr. Trump.)

When I called Mr. Jorjani, he was cagier about his “connections” and “contacts” in the White House. All he meant, he said, was that he had been in touch with people who had a direct line to President Trump, though he wouldn’t say who. Asked to comment, a White House spokeswoman said, “We have no knowledge of any conversations or contact with this person.”

Either way, Mr. Jorjani said, with the ousters of Michael Flynn in February and then Mr. Bannon in August, he now views the alt-right’s efforts to carve out a place in the White House as having failed. (Mr. Jorjani resigned from the AltRight Corporation in August.)

If Mr. Jorjani wasn’t exaggerating to Mr. Hermansson, and he did have a relationship with White House officials, that would certainly be alarming. But even if he was exaggerating, it’s still important to understand how messages like his could travel from the far reaches of the right-wing internet and all the way into — or close to, at least — the White House.

The extreme alt-right are benefiting immensely from the energy being produced by a more moderate — but still far-right — faction known as the “alt-light.”

The alt-light promotes a slightly softer set of messages. Its figures — such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich — generally frame their work as part of an effort to defend “the West” or “Western culture” against supposed left-liberal dominance, rather than making explicitly racist appeals. Many of them, in fact, have renounced explicit racism and anti-Semitism, though they will creep up to the line of explicitly racist speech, especially when Islam and immigration are concerned.

This apparent moderation partly explains why they tend to have much bigger online audiences than even the most important alt-right figures — and why Hope Not Hate describes them as “less extreme, more dangerous.” Alt-light sites like Breitbart, formerly home to Mr. Yiannopoulos, as well as Prison Planet, where Mr. Watson is editor at large, draw millions of readers and are key nodes in a hyperkinetic network that is endlessly broadcasting viral-friendly far-right news, rumors and incitement.

Fluent in the language of online irony and absurdism, and adept at producing successful memes, alt-lighters have pulled off something remarkable: They’ve made far-right ideas hip to a subset of young people, and framed themselves as society’s forgotten underdogs. The alt-light provides its audience easy scapegoats for their social, economic and sexual frustrations: liberals and feminists and migrants and, of course, globalists.

The alt-light’s dedicated fan base runs into the millions. Mr. Watson has more than a million YouTube followers, for example, while Mr. Yiannopoulos has more than 2.3 million on Facebook. If even a tiny fraction of this base is drafted toward more extreme far-right politics, that would represent a significant influx into hate groups.

According to researchers, the key to hooking new recruits into any movement, and to getting them increasingly involved over time, is to simply give them activities to participate in. This often precedes any deep ideological commitment on the recruits’ part and, especially early on, is more about offering them a sense of meaning and community than anything else.

Intentionally or not, the far right has deftly applied these insights to the online world. Viewed through the filters of alt-light outlets like Breitbart and Prison Planet, or through Twitter feeds like Mr. Watson’s, the world is a horror show of crimes by migrants, leftist censorship and attacks on common sense. And the best, easiest way to fight back is through social media.

The newly initiated are offered many opportunities to participate directly. A teenager in a suburban basement can join a coordinated global effort to spread misinformation about Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, in the hopes of helping far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Anyone who wants to do so can help spread the word about supposed mainstream media censorship of the Muslim “crime wave” the far right says is ravaging Europe.

These efforts — a click, a retweet, a YouTube comment — come to feel like important parts of an epochal struggle. The far right, once hemmed in by its own parochialism, has manufactured a worldwide online battlefield anyone with internet access can step into.

And if you’re one of those newcomers happily playing the part of infantryman in the “meme wars” that rage daily, maybe, along the way, one of your new online Twitter buddies will say to you, “Milo’s O.K., but have you checked out this guy Greg Johnson?” Or maybe they’ll invite you to a closed online forum where ideas about how to protect Europe from Muslim migrants are discussed a bit more, well, frankly. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll eventually discover a whole new political movement to join.

All of which can explain why members of the hard-core alt-right are watching the explosive success of their more moderate counterparts with open glee, unable to believe their good luck. “I’m just fighting less and less opposition to our sorts of ideas when they’re spoken,” Mr. Johnson, the Counter-Currents editor, told Mr. Hermansson. His optimism, unfortunately, appears to be well founded.