Everything you love will.., p.26
Everything You Love Will Burn, page 26
Matthew said he heard.
We took the Metro to Capitol South, where Matthew’s Republican contact, who wished to remain anonymous, invited everyone to dinner before the meeting. The man was older, perhaps in his late sixties, with the restless, opportunistic air of a huckster. Over burritos at a noisy Mexican restaurant overlooking the Congressional Library he described being there when Governor Wallace got shot and how the murder was probably connected to the Deep State and that we should all watch how the Deep State would probably try something against Trump too. He claimed to have been a friend of Barry Goldwater and to have spent his career in the wings of the GOP party, seemingly trying to bring back the racist heydays of the Dixiecrat era.
“Today is a big day,” he said. “Make no mistake about it. This is the time to mobilize. The left are bringing two hundred thousand people to DC tomorrow, and we need to be able to do the same. We need to bring thousands of people into the movement.”
Matthew’s source said that the movement needed money, the GOP needed the movement, and today would be the first step in bringing the nationalists and the GOP together. “A few years ago the GOP wouldn’t be able to even sit in the same room as you, but things have changed, and now we need each other. This is a big day.”
He threw a hundred-dollar bill on the table and took Matthew with him to the Capitol Club, where he said many people were excited to meet him.
Miles, Scott, Robbie, and Katherine waited for a couple of hours, finishing the cocktails Matthew’s friend had bought them, and walked around the Capitol as the crowds began to head home. Then they sat on the curb outside the Capitol Club and watched as Republicans in khakis and blazers and suits arrived and went through the doors. They tried to get in, but Matthew’s contact had said it was for Matthew only, promising them “next time.” A middle-aged woman in a large, flowing dress with green and blue flowers came through, holding a young, blonde girl by the hand. The woman was wearing a Trump hat with the words “Make America Great Again” written across the front.
I wondered what Matthew had to say to this crowd and whether the Republicans could possibly understand him. I wondered, too, why this well-dressed group of elite Republicans needed Matthew—if Matthew’s contact was to be believed. The GOP were certainly no strangers to race-baiting, having hinged much of their southern electoral strategy in the sixties, seventies, and early eighties on the implicit racism of the so-called “southern strategy,” in which they used loaded terms rather than explicit racism to win the votes of those still skeptical about desegregation and civil rights. Lee Atwater, legendary GOP strategist and campaign consultant, explained,
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
FINALLY MATTHEW CAME BACK. He was elated. The meeting had gone well. In a room full of GOP strategists and state legislators he had been introduced as “the next president of the United States,” and things had only improved from there. He said that he made no attempt to hide who he was, his politics, or his affiliations and that no one seemed to have a problem with it. He said he’d spoken at length about the white working class, their problems, and how to strengthen the GOP’s hold over them. When he finished, he had been given resounding applause.
The group got back on the Metro toward Virginia. “It’s crazy,” Matthew said on the train. “Remember how only a year ago we were sitting in a pizza restaurant in Kentucky, hardly ten members in our party? Today, a year later, I’m giving a speech in the most important Republican club to a group of Republican operatives. Things are happening. I can feel it.”
“I always believed it,” said Miles. “We’re president now.”
We called Spencer a few more times but got no reply. Matthew, still excited about how the GOP had embraced him, was suddenly less interested in helping Spencer.
“That guy’s a douche,” he said. “We don’t need him. After today we’ll have much better allies than Spencer.”
Miles was tinkering on his phone. “Whoa,” he said suddenly. “Hey guys, something happened to Spencer!”
Everyone crowded around the phone and watched a video play on the small screen. Spencer was being interviewed when someone off camera asked him about his lapel pin. Just as he finished explaining how Pepe the Frog had become a symbol of the alt-right, a masked figure burst onto the screen and punched Spencer hard in the face.
“Holy shit!” Matthew said. “Did that just happen?”
We watched as the assailant ran off while Spencer clutched his jaw and straightened his hair.
“That’s crazy,” Matthew said. They all seemed to get a tiny amount of joy from watching the guy who had snubbed them all day and who, by the looks of it, had never been in a fight in his life, meet the realities of Antifa.
“I mean Spencer is kind of a dick, but damn, no one deserves getting sucker punched like that. Play it again, Miles.”
CHAPTER 12
The College Boys
The Constitution was written by white men alone. Therefore, it was intended for whites alone.
—National Socialist Movement website, undated
The first hundred days of Donald Trump’s presidency came and went with no cataclysmic, world-ending events but rather an unending chain of scandals, screw-ups, and indignities. Trump took office amid a flurry of executive orders, lawsuits, and allegations of foul play, and his agenda floundered in the face of the realities of governing and the infighting among his band of political outsiders. Some hardline nationalists, including Matthew, voiced their disgust and indignation as Trump failed to uphold even the most basic of campaign promises, but most on the far right were happy to pin his failures on Democrats and the media.
Matthew quit his job at Amazon and moved to Tennessee, where he made deliveries for a company sympathetic to the cause run by Captain Culpepper in the NSM. Brooke, pregnant with their second child, and little Nicholas would stay in Paoli until Matthew had enough money for a down payment on an apartment in Tennessee. Meanwhile he had work to do. He and Jeff had settled on a campground in Kentucky for their upcoming rally, and Matthew was busy making overtures to groups that might be interested in joining them. He was talking to his old friends in the League of the South, a secessionist group, as well as others, like the white nationalist group Identity Evropa. It was starting to feel like a coalition of groups, a coming together of people whose views on the nuts and bolts of nationalism might differ but who nonetheless shared a profound belief in the urgency of the cause.
Spencer, who had decided against running for congress, found that being punched in the face twice—he was punched again later on Inauguration Day—was the best career move he could have made. Being bloodied by Antifa gave him the respect of the elements in the movement who up until then had found him too soft. He began remaking himself into a leader and a rabble-rouser, giving speeches with his shirt sleeves rolled up and railing against the barbarians he had fought in the streets.
Dan Elmquist and Doll Baby, whose son, Odin, was born in early 2016, left the Virgil Griffin White Knights and relaunched the Nordic Order. Dan wanted his to be an organization like the Klan had been in the old days, completely rejecting the modernism of politics and any softening of their agenda. “I don’t want anything to do with all this talking,” he told me. “I think it’s time for the Klan to go back to doing what we do best: we need to be a militant organization that people fear.” At that moment it was all hypothetical though, as the members of Dan’s new group had a tendency to leave and form Klan groups of their own. It was a betrayal that Dan constantly griped about, and he would often call me and grumble about “Klan justice coming their way.” Shortly after Dan and Doll Baby’s wedding a police officer shot Gary Delp. On the evening of October 24, 2015, Delp’s house caught fire. As his old, wooden house burned around him, Delp at first refused to leave. Finally he emerged on his stoop wearing nothing but underwear and holding a pistol. He charged toward the cops who had arrived on the scene with the fire department, and they shot him. Delp survived, but being shot inevitably takes a toll on an old body, and he was never the same after. Dan worried about him a lot until he passed away in the summer of 2017.
As it turned out, Trump’s election wasn’t the apotheosis of the nationalist movement in America, but there were signs that his presidency had impacted the mood of the country. The SPLC reported that the number of anti-Muslim hate groups had tripled from 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016. According to the FBI’s hate crime statistics, attacks against Muslims were up 67 percent in 2015 compared to the year before, and hate crimes in general were up 6 percent. Although there was no way to prove that Trump’s ascendance caused this uptick, Trump supporters and “deplorables” all over the country were self-deputizing in the name of Trump. He may not have delivered on his campaign promises, but to many the very fact that he was president was a sign that America belonged to whites.
The far right and Antifa settled into a comfortable routine of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, setting up a war of convenience that both sides used to recruit new members. The alt-right used the opportunity to claim the implausible mantle of championing free speech. This was, of course, a highly dubious claim, as the free speech they advocated only included their right to be “honest” about Jews, blacks, and other minorities, but it was a relatively simple case to make in the face of screaming, masked, and armed antifascist protestors. What’s more, some elements of the alt-right—such as Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, who had made many of its causes their own—booked high-profile speaking engagements at prominent universities only to see their events cancelled in the face of public outcry. These cancellations not only solidified the far right’s belief in its own persecution but also made the argument that the speakers were indeed victims of censorship, whose First Amendment rights were being trampled, more palatable to those who would otherwise reject the content of their messages, such as moderate conservatives and even moderate liberals.
Despite Matthew’s years of bridge-building efforts and outreach, it was Antifa who did more than anyone else to bring the far right together. They had been a regular feature at countless far-right rallies in the past, but Donald Trump’ election energized the radical left and brought a host of new members to their ranks. The amped-up presence of Antifa at rallies as well as the sense that the left was attacking not only them but also a president who for the first time spoke up for white people galvanized the members of the far right, many of whom increasingly felt that the skirmishes with Antifa were the precursors of larger battles to come between left and right. As difficult as it was for the various factions of the right to agree on much, their shared loathing of Antifa seemed adequate to build some sort of coalition on. Even groups who shared little ideologically with the alt-right—such as the Oath Keepers, a group of former law enforcement and military personnel who dedicated themselves to make sure that the Constitution, at least their interpretation of it, was upheld—started showing up to far-right rallies in order to “provide protection to the First Amendment.”
“Right now it seems that organizing to neutralize the Antifas is a big attraction, and I hope it continues,” Brad Griffin, the blogger who runs the popular alt-right Twitter feed and blog Occidental Dissent, told me. “Once it hits critical mass, more people will come to real-world events. It won’t stay corked up online in the long term. It isn’t as fun.”
IN LATE APRIL Richard Spencer announced that he would be giving a talk at the campus of Auburn University in Alabama, and it immediately and quite predictably set off a flurry of threats and counter-threats. The Antifa website itsgoingdown.org breathlessly announced, “Racist ‘Alt-Right’ leader Richard Spencer and his goons had decided on a show of force in the South, threatening to overrun the campus of Alabama’s Auburn University with white power combatants armed with ‘safety gear.’” In response, a group calling itself a “White Student Union at Auburn” and that until recently had been going under the impressively serpentine acronym WAREAGLE—Whites of the Alt-Right Educating Auburn Gentiles for Liberation and Empowerment—took it upon themselves to plaster Auburn with earnest warnings of the dangers of the antifascists. “We don’t mind if you disagree with us, we just want you to be safe,” the flier said with maternal concern. The night before had seen a big brawl between nationalists and Antifa at Berkeley, and everyone was expecting a rematch, which is why the university informed Richard Spencer that he would not be welcome at their campus after all, to which Spencer replied that he would come anyway because Auburn is a public school and First Amendment Laws applied. He would just hold his speech outside—in front of God, Antifa, and everyone.
Simultaneously he and Cameron Padgett, the soft-spoken Georgian who had rented the venue and invited Spencer, quickly sued. They enlisted the services of Sam Dickson, an attorney with ties to several far-right causes, including the KKK, who argued that public safety concerns weren’t enough to override the First Amendment. The judge agreed, and Spencer would again be allowed into the actual university building to speak.
Matthew called me a couple of days prior and said that Mike Enoch, the disgraced agitator behind the website TheRightStuff.biz, the podcast the Daily Shoah, and now Spencer’s top lieutenant, had contacted him on behalf of Spencer and asked if he would bring some guys down for protection. Matthew hadn’t heard from Spencer since the inauguration snub but still seemed happy to be asked and promised to bring a handful of Traditionalist Workers down. I arrived before anyone else, and Matthew asked me to get the lay of the land because it would be their job to hold off Antifa in a public space, and they would prefer that space to be easily defended. I told him I really wasn’t comfortable picking the battleground for the latest alt-right/Antifa skirmish but did let him know that the cops were out in force already, so they would probably be fine regardless of where they were.
Auburn University is situated on a picturesque campus, and the only indication that it isn’t a northeastern liberal arts school is its students’ distinct conservative bent. Even so, Richard Spencer’s brand of nationalism is too much for most of the student body, and on the morning of the speech many of them were gearing up to protest, drawing up signs of “Love Trumps Hate” and “No Fascists at Auburn.”
I stopped at a coffee shop just off the main drag, populated with earnest-looking students working at an impressive stack of signs. I asked a young woman about what she knew about Spencer. She described him as a Nazi who got punched in the face once. I asked her if she thought there would be violence today, and she said she’d heard rumors that people were coming in to fight but that most kids at Auburn just wanted to voice their displeasure. “I wouldn’t mind punching that asshole in the face myself,” she said, “but I’d just as soon let him talk and then get out of town.”
I walked back up toward campus along South College Street and spotted a couple of black-clad kids pulling PVC pipes out of bags. Antifa were here, but so far no sign of Spencer or Matthew.
A small group of guys were lounging in the shade of a leafy tree on the quad, conspicuous in their uniforms of tanned khakis, crisp white polo shirts, and the fact that they were equipped much like a destitute lawn hockey team who had been forced to settle for whatever protective gear they could scrounge up at Goodwill. Some wore BMX helmets, others had lacrosse helmets, and others had to make do with surgical facemasks. They were uniformed only in the sense that they all looked completely ridiculous in similar manners. One had opted for a T-shirt rather than a polo and had written the words “Commie Filth” on the back. Having miscalculated the width of the T-shirt, the T-shirt read “COMMIE FI,” with the rest of the phrase bunched up illegibly on his right shoulder. Still, he displayed it proudly as he waved around a cross on a stick. “We’re just concerned dudes,” one of them, who, like the rest, introduced himself as Chad in what they probably believed was a clever spin on the hacktivist mantra “We Are Legion.” The alt-right is Chad, apparently. “We don’t want commies to start any trouble on campus,” Chad continued, “and we want to make sure that Spencer gets his First Amendment rights. That guy’s a goddammed hero.”
This was another new face of the alt-right under Donald Trump. Freed from the burden of political correctness, white frat boys could now explain to the world how white frat boys were the true victims of feminism, affirmative action, and other forms of anti-white persecution and could, with a straight face, stand up in public and rejoice in someone finally fighting for their rights as white, affluent college guys. I thought of the phrase, “With friends like these, who needs enemies” and wondered how rich white guys complaining of unfair treatment could be anything but a millstone around the alt-right’s neck. In a way I understood the complaints of Matthew’s constituency (if not Matthew himself). They were white, but they were also poor, undereducated, underrepresented, and living in a part of the country where economic opportunities were almost nonexistent. The warriors of WAREAGLE were young men in their early twenties and students at a fine university where the cost of attendance ranged from $30,000 to $50,000 per year. This isn’t to say that a college education automatically buys you happiness or secures you economic stability, but they were hardly systematically oppressed.
