Conservative institutions in the Donald Trump era have often sought to portray themselves as shocked and appalled by the so-called “alt-right.” White nationalists have also engaged in their own efforts to differentiate themselves from the neoconservatives who dominated the GOP for decades. But neither narrative is true. The reality is that a host of supposedly veritable right-wing institutions have become a safe haven for the far-right.
Indeed, there is a burgeoning underground network of group chats, message boards, and email chains serving as the breeding ground for incubating white nationalist ideas, and as a forum to strategize around how to launder those ideas through mainstream conservative publications. And, judging from a large series of messages from one of those email groups obtained by Splinter, it’s working.
...
the Daily Caller, the conservative publication co-founded by Tucker Carlson, who
stepped down from his role as editor-in-chief in 2016. Even since the “alt-right” rose to prominence during the 2016 election, the site has been sucked into its own game of
“Who goes Nazi?” Since Trump’s election, numerous Caller employees have come under fire for their semi-secret white nationalist affiliations. For instance, Andrew Kerr, an investigative reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation,
was outed as having appeared on a number of programs with far-right conspiracy theorist Brittany Pettibone. (Pettibone—wife of European white nationalist leader Martin Sellner, a man who recently
sparked outrage for corresponding and accepting thousands of dollars in donations from the perpetrator of the
Christchurch massacre—has
branded herself as one of the most prominent “experts” of the
Pizzagate conspiracy theory.)
In September 2018,
The Atlantic exposed former Caller editor Scott Greer, who wrote under the pseudonym “Michael McGregor,” as the managing editor to Richard Spencer’s white nationalist
Radix Journal, using emails
provided by former
Breitbart editor and “alt-right” member Katie McHugh. (McHugh also worked for the
Caller but
has since publicly left the “alt-right.”) Still, the
Caller has appeared to ignore what the Southern Poverty Law Center
referred to in 2017 as its “white nationalist problem.”
...
a trove of emails from a private white nationalist group chat, which were recently obtained by Splinter, sheds new light on those links. Among other things, the emails show how a former Caller employee named Jonah Bennett repeatedly used his perch at the site to launder far-right viewpoints into an ostensibly mainstream publication. They also show that he is part of a wider network of white nationalists who have steadily increased their influence within the conservative media infrastructure—most prominently, a man named John Elliott.
...
The thread was steered in large part by Elliott, who, at the time, had recently left a job as director of the journalism program at the libertarian, higher-education-focused
Institute for Humane Studies. (Elliott now works at the Minnesota-based
Charlemagne Institute, which describes itself as an educational institution “rooted in the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman tradition” which is working “to defend and advance Western Civilization.” The institute also runs the conservative website
Intellectual Takeout.)
The group began coalescing on October 13, 2015, when Elliott drew together a few former mentees via email to organize so-called “hateups,” or in-person meetings to discuss racism.
That’s when Elliott also rattled off the code words the thread used in its chats: “Hawaiians” was a stand-in for “Hebes,” an anti-Semitic slur referring to Jews; “Alaskans” for “N’s” (the n-word); “our good friend” for “AH” (Adolf Hitler); and “our good friend’s son” for Trump.
Bennett’s first interaction with the thread came on December 17, 2015. One of the participants in the thread introduced Bennett to the crowd, saying he was “a good boy who knows the issues.”
“Jonah . . . [t]his is our safe space to be edgy online before God Emperor Trump penetrates the internet,” the participant continued, filling Bennett in on the list of code words.
As if to prove he belonged, Bennett responded, “although my first name may insinuate otherwise, I am not, in fact, a Hawaiian.” In other words, he wasn’t Jewish.
...
Bennett previously ran a blog under the pen name “Aimless Gromar.” The archived blog demonstrates that Aimless Gromar began blogging in 2013, where he billed himself as a “neoreactionary” with a Christian bent. Among Aimless Gromar’s
stated influences were an array of conservative philosophers and theologians, as well as a number of white nationalist and white nationalist-adjacent thinkers, such as “alt-right” pseudo-intellectual
F. Roger Devlin, the “scientific” racism proponent who writes under the name HBD (short for
“human biodiversity”) Chick
...
And Bennett was a frequent participant in the “Morning Hate” thread, which proved a safe space for budding young conservative journalists of a certain bent, even though it constituted just a small portion of D.C.’s underground white nationalist scene. Anti-Semitism was plentiful and crude. “Take a shower, Jew Boy,” read the subject line of one of Elliott’s emails about a
Daily Kos article called “Why Trump voters are not welcome in my house this holiday.”
Subtlety often fell by the wayside. “I VAS THREE YEEES OLD WHEN THE NAHZEES CUT OFF MY SCHMECKLE OYY,” Bennett wrote in response to
a CNN article about an Austrian Holocaust survivor warning his fellow citizens about the rise of the far-right in the country. Many people on the thread spoke frequently about the “JQ,” or “Jewish Question”—a term used by racists and anti-Semites, including
Hitler himself, to refer to the idea that Jews pose an existential threat to whites. Praise for Hitler was also plentiful, as were anti-Semitic memes commonly associated with the “alt-right,”
such as (((echoes))).