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AnthonyScaramucci, the former hedge fund manager who very briefly served as the White House communications director, is continuing his feud against President Donald Trumps top adviser Steve Bannon. The man known as The Mooch is essentially blaming the ex-Breitbart News CEO for the controversy thats surrounded the president for his weekend-long refusalto denounce white nationalists after one was accused of murdering a woman with his car over the weekend.

In a Sunday interview with ABC News, Scaramucci essentially called Bannon a member of the white supremacistalt-right movement. He also accused Bannon of tolerating racists, an offense which Scaramucci deemed inexcusable.

There are elements of the alt-right I mean people are not going to like me saying this there are elements of the alt-right that I think have actually been quite beneficial, Scaramucci said in an effort to damn Bannon with faint praise as he called the former Breitbart News chief a great speech writer.

Later on in the interview, Scaramucci slightly backed off on his accusation.

Ive never sat down with Steve Bannon and said, Hey are you a white nationalist or a white supremacist? But I think the toleration of it by Steve Bannon is inexcusable, he said.

Scaramucci argued that Trump should have been more vocal in condemning racism in light of the neo-fascist rally in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted inthree deaths.

He needed to be way tougher with the white supremacists thing. Anybody that has experienced any level ofracism, any level of prejudice, knows that this is disgusting. Its un-American and it cannot be tolerated, he said.

Scaramucci was fired last month afteronly 10days on the jobafter New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza reported on an on-the-record conversation that the two had in which Scaramucci used vulgarities to criticize Bannon and other Trump figures.

In his ABC interview, the former communications director also accused Bannon of leaking confidential information to reporters.

Thepresident has a very good idea of who the leakers are inside the White House. The president has a very good idea of the people who are undermining his agenda that are serving their own interests, hesaid.

Scaramucci, who supported Democrats before flipping to Trump shortly before the 2016 election, also urged the president to move toward the center with his policies.

Hes got to move more into the mainstream. Hes got to be more into where the moderates are and the independents that love the president, so if he does that hell have a very successful legislative agenda, the former communications director said, calling the nationalist-oriented Trump wing of the party a snag on the president.

Bannons former employees at Breitbart News responded sharply to Scaramuccis criticism running an article headlined Anthony blows whatever was left of his credibility with Trumps base. In the piece, written by political editor Matthew Boyle, the site accused Scaramucci of being a turncoat.

The tune he is singing now is in almost every way exactly the opposite of what he was saying just a few weeks ago, during the beginning of his brief tenure as White House communication director, Boyle wrote.

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Anthony Scaramucci lashes out at Steve Bannon, calls him alt-right - Salon

On Saturday, at a Charlottesville rally populated by alt-right activists and white supremacists, a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer . The man arrested in connection with the murder, James Alex Fields, Jr., had previously posted white nationalist symbols, alt-right memes, and even a photo of Hitler as a baby to his Facebook page. Now, alt-right message boards and leading figures are attempting to disown not just Fields, but Saturdays violent gathering as a whole, in part by going into full damage control mode.

For months going on years, online forums like Reddit and 4chan have fostered a growing contingent of disenfranchised, young, (mostly) white men who have railed against calls for diversity and inclusion. In the process, they have demonized minorities and progressive values. In practical terms, this has meant flirting withif not directly embracingwhite supremacy as the solution to their problems. The alt-right cant disavow the events of the Unite the Right rally, because that rally was a product of an environment theyve spent years making.

"There's no question that the conditions by which people feel emboldened, the condition under which people's attitudes are supported and elevated on these types of forums, certainly create the conditions that makes this type of violence possible," says Charlton McIlwain, an associate professor at New York University who focuses on race and digital media.

Fields appears specifically connected to Vanguard America, a group that the Anti-Defamation League defines as "a white supremacist group that opposes multiculturalism and believes that America is an exclusively white nation." You might have seen one of several videos floating around of Vanguard America members, who all donned white polos and khakis in Charlottesville Saturday, chanting "blood and soil" as they marched through the streets. The phrase refers to a defining Nazi ideology that emphasized the idea that German blood belonged on German soil. In Vanguard America's case, it represents the notion that the blood of white people somehow has a "special bond" to American soil.

Vanguard America issued the following statement late Saturday evening: "The driver of the vehicle that hit counter protestors today was, in no way, a member of Vanguard America. All our members had been safely evacuated by the time of the incident. The shields seen do not denote membership, nor does the white shirt. The shields were freely handed out to anyone in attendance. All our members are safe an [sic] accounted for, with no arrests or charges."

Regardless of whether Fields was an official member, he was clearly involved enough to know about the meeting place, the chants, and the dress code. The group also made no attempt to denounce Fields, nor did it express remorse for the lives that were lost. Currently, Vanguard America's pinned tweet reads , "Stand up, White man. This is your fight. Become a man of action, become a part of the Vanguard. #VanguardAmerica."

But even beyond the actions of Fields, or any specific white supremacist group, the rhetoric of alt-right groups online both promoted the Charlottesville rally and, by extension, the confrontations that arose. On Sunday, the alt-right Reddit group r/The_Donald attempted to distance itself from the previous days events. One post in particular declared that those who weren't present at the rally could in no way be complicit in what happened there.

But the entire week prior to the event, that same subreddit promoted the rally with a thread stuck to the top of the page.

The front page of r/The_Donald as of August 5, 2017, via archive.is.

The original post itself was deleted at some point Saturday, but archived versions of it survive on both Internet Archive and Archive.is .

Archive version of Unite the Right promotion on r/The_Donald via archive.is.

In the post, user John3Sobieski notes that while "many of the people who will be there are National Socialist and Ethnostate sort of groups," he does not "endorse them." However, he then goes on to say, "In this case, the pursuit of preserving without shame white culture, our goals happen to align. Ill be there regardless of the questionable company because saving history is more important than our differences."

Archived version of Unite the Right promotion on r/The_Donald via archive.is.

Another (now deleted) post from Reddit user WeLoveTrump2016 asserts that attending the rally and standing up to "radical leftist terrorism" is a moral imperative: "It is one thing to say you believe in Free Speech. It is another to stand up for the first amendment in the face of thousands of violent Marxists. If the leftists can shut down this event, then they will shut down ours too through the same intimidation and literal terrorism. This rally is a matter of Civil Rights and preserving American History and Heritage. ... We cannot allow BLM and Antifa terrorists to succeed in demolishing our rights to speak and peacefully assemble." (' Antifa ' is technically a group that opposes fascism, though the alt-right uses the term as a pejorative to describe any organized left-wing group.)

Simply deleting these threads doesn't remove the r/The_Donald's association with what happened. It also doesn't erase the cumulative posts that target minorities and advocate for white supremacy.

"It's something that we saw over and over again happening throughout Donald Trump's campaign," says McIlwain. "Not calling out racism and white supremacy, not actively trying to voice concerns about itmuch less ramping it up by contributing in terms of language or making room for overt and explicit displays of racismall of those figure into the picture that contributes to what we saw Saturday. All of that contributes to an environment that makes those types of actions possible, that makes them kind of likely."

The argument, too, that r/The_Donald only supported some ideologies and not others, that its version of white nationalism differed from that version, is disingenuous at best, and useless in practice.

"It shouldnt be a surprise that a lot of the nuance that some of these organizations were trying to think through and communicate would be lost, and that people would devolve to a lowest-common-denominator kind of thinking, which is an America for white Americans versus all others," says Safiya Umoja Noble, assistant professor at USCs Annenberg School of Communication and the author of The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online .

Over on 4chans politics board , which has often acted as a sort of catch-all for opinions and ideas that are too unsavory even for Reddit, explicit discussions about preserving the white race are a daily occurrence, as are the racial slurs and pejoratives that follow.re

As recently as June 29, one 4chan user recommended that another join Vanguard Americathough the user warned the organization isn't really into street combat. Another user offered, If you want to stomp some Antifa, you are going to have to meet people IRL in an antifa-infested area. These sorts of comments are rarely (if ever) condemned, and more often than not encouraged.

But in the wake of Charlottesville, the focus shifted to deflection. Both 4Chan and Reddit also embraced the notion that Charlottesville was a "false flag," a staged effort by shadowy forces to effectively frame the alt-right for violence. And in a thread titled " DMG CONTROL alt right," users explicitly sought ways "to stand up and show that the MSM [or mainstream media] narrative is false. It's the only way of getting normies back onto our side."

One option: Fake empathy. "Screaming 'false flag' RN is stupid and no one actually believes it," wrote another 4chan. "It's a reach. We're better off having people commemorate her death, acting apologetic just for the PR." Meanwhile, the site shows few (if any) sentiments of sincere remorse, with little demonstrated desire to distance itself from white nationalism even after Saturday's events.

Screenshot of a 4chan thread discussing damage control via archive.is.

In that same damage-control thread, one user laid the alt-right connection to white nationalism out in relatively explicit terms: "The Alt-Right is an attempt to rebrand WN. Using ironic memes and terms that don't mean anything to our enemies but normies find funny and actually lead people to develop a race-based political consciousness is what it is all about. If you are arguing that we should always be pragmatic and open minded and we should bully larpers [live action roll-players] into fucking off then nobody in the modern movement really disagrees with you."

On Sunday, Reddit threads titled things like "Painting Trump supporters and the right as violent white supremacists IS AN ORGANIZED, DELIBERATE SMEAR CAMPAIGN by leftist smear groups such as Media Matters. The fake MSM are all a part of the campaign" and "REMINDER: Antifa are literally showing up at Trump rallies disguised as 'Trump supporters' giving Nazi salutes" have been garnering significant support. The latter currently has over 7,000 upvotes.

In a video posted Saturday entitled , "EXCLUSIVE: Virginia Riots Staged To Bring In Martial Law, Ban Conservative Gatherings," Alex Jones, the man Donald Trump praised as having an "amazing reputation," explains, "It's in the Wikileaks that they want to cause a race war, the Democrats, because they're losing. The Republican leadership is just as bad; they're a part of it." According to Jones, globalist elites staged the violence in Charlottesville in order to trigger a national emergency that will eventually allow them to enact martial law and stop any sort of demonstration from ever happening again. All of which is to say, according to Jones, none of this is the alt-right's fault. In fact, they were set up.

4chan, too, has grasped on to the idea that the deaths at Saturday's rallies might have been planned by the left or, in some instances, the CIA. One user wrote that it "appears to be the perfect set-up to win sympathy for the violent left, while demonizing the right."

But try as the alt-right might, it can't dissociate itself from the death of Heather Heyer, nor any other violence that might follow. The rhetoric it has wielded, and the ideas it has espoused, all contributed to Saturday's tragedy.

"Its a false distinction to say what happens on the internet isnt happening in the real world," said Noble. "People are acting on their beliefs always, in various different moments of their lives. Of course we should continue to expect to see people like Dylan Roof, and people like Milo Yannapolis, Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, we should expect to see people who have used these internet and online spaces to think and ideate, we should expect to continue to see people doing and acting in the world upon those ideas."

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The Alt-Right Can't Disown Charlottesville - WIRED

You can choose to ignore it, you can choose to enlist support from groups normally targeted by the alt-right, or you can simply choose to hold a "joyful" peaceful protest.

Whatever you do, you should deny the speaker a "spectacle" or "heated confrontations."

The guide came out just a few days before the clashes and confrontations sparked by the weekend's planned "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the University of Virginia. Lecia Brooks, SPLC director of outreach, said she thinks the guide could have been helpful in that situation, because it could have helped single out the violent groups that went to Charlottesville for the rally.

The SPLC is an Alabama-based nonprofit organization that monitors hate crimes and hate speech across the country. It released the guide because it believes students are not adequately prepared to deal with the influx of alt-right speakers that have started to flood college campuses throughout the country.

The term alt-right has become intertwined with the term white nationalism, which originated as a euphemism for white supremacy, the belief that white people are superior to all other races and should therefore dominate society, according to Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.

Though people who hold these beliefs may go by names like alt-right, identarians or race realists, this is simply a rebranding: "a new name for this old hatred," Segal said.

Reflecting what observers say is a glaring nationwide trend, many college campuses have seen increasing tensions -- in some cases outright confrontations -- surrounding controversial speakers and programs in recent months.

The SPLC guide is "meant to educate the students in advance," said the SPLC's Brooks. She said college administrators and leaders of college groups were ill-equiped to deal with these speakers.

"What often happens is [these speakers] will present themselves as conservative thinkers," Brooks said. "They don't really identify themselves as white nationalists."

The guide is being distributed by the SPLC's on-campus program. It is being sent to over 2,000 schools across the country, including historically black colleges and universities.

On the receiving end are student unions, student groups and college administrators.

Aside from identifying and explaining the main actors behind the alt-right movement, it also offers tips on how to address the situation before the speakers come to campus.

It encourages students to speak to their classmates, make a YouTube video or print out a pamphlet. Other ideas include passing out buttons and making T-shirts.

The guide also suggests enlisting college leadership, faculty and others for help.

Brooks said white nationalism began to grip college campuses throughout America around 2012, with the first "White Students Union."

The union was founded by Matthew Heimbach at Towson University in Maryland. Since then, various other alt-right speakers, such as Yiannopoulos and Spencer, have had successful campus tours. College is a formative time and these speakers normally thrive in that atmosphere, according to Brooks.

For Brooks and the SPLC, the guide isn't about radical new ideas to combat the alt-right and white nationalism, it is more of a way to introduce Yiannopoulos and Spencer to the average college audience and explain that behind the "conservative" speaker is really a white nationalist mentality.

"Students often don't know who they are," Brooks said, and college administrators find themselves in a tough situation trying to protect free speech and also curb hate speech.

The guide's most crucial piece of advice is to not engage directly with the speaker or resort to violence.

"There are many other ways to challenge the beliefs of this movement." it reads.

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SPLC issues college student's guide to dealing with the alt-right - CNN

The alt-right movement has sought over the past two years to rebrand white nationalism, lifting it out of the obscure corners of the website Stormfront and elevating it into the mainstream political discussion.

In some ways the effort succeeded. President Trumps campaign offered white nationalists a political home in the mainstream. They heard Trumps hardline anti-immigration stances and repeated refusals to disavow racists as a dog whistle. The alt-right itself was media- and internet-savvy and appealed to a younger demographic. Its leaders became household names. Hillary Clinton even gave a speech about the movement.

How Will the Church Reckon With Charlottesville?

Two incidents over the past year show why the alt-rights pivot failed. One is the infamous speech given by alt-right leader Richard Spencer at a conference last year, where The Atlantic recorded attendees giving Nazi salutes. The other is what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, where a white-nationalist Unite the Right rally starring several of the alt-rights leading lights turned violent. At the end of the day, three people had died, and at least 19 more were injured. The photos from Charlottesville show Confederate flags, Nazi insignia, and militia members with guns. David Duke was there. In the end, the alt-right never shed its association with older fascist and white-supremacist ideas and movements, and arguably never really tried.

Spencer was eager to distance himself from the chaos of Charlottesville when I spoke to him on Saturday night.

Going forward were going to have more tightly controlled rallies and demonstrations, he told me by phone from an alt-right afterparty for the event. Spencer said this was not his event. I accepted an invitation, he said, from the rallys organizer, Jason Kessler. Spencers name was on the flyer for the event.

I dont think that adopting the garb of a movement from 70 years ago is going to be very productive, Spencer said. I certainly evoke the past in a lot of my aesthetic but Ive never tried to engage in live-action role-playing reenactmentI dont think thats ever going to be positive. Spencer was on stage in November when his conference attendees began giving Nazi salutes, and he said Hail Trump in his speech. He excused this to me later as a moment of utter exuberance and craziness.

Kessler declined to be interviewed on Saturday night, saying he felt it would be biased. But he disputed the claim that Nazi symbols had been an important element of the march, saying there had been just one guy with a Nazi flag. (Photos from the march show a swastika armband on a featured speaker, T-shirts quoting Hitler, and other Nazi iconography.)

Over the past year a schism had already taken place among the alt-right, particularly after Spencers conference. Some right-wing activists who had once called themselves alt-right began peeling off, favoring terms like new right. The blogger and Twitter personality Mike Cernovich, who has clashed with Spencer, is one of these. Cernovich has revamped himself as a key figure in the pro-Trump media sphere, which has become obsessed with rooting out globalist enemies of Trump rather than advancing overtly racial politics.

These alt-right people are so scared of people calling them a cuck they walked with them, Cernovich said, referring to the neo-Nazis. Those dumb motherfuckers, are you kidding me? Theyre gonna let themselves be in pictures with the Nazi flag?

Thats all the alt-right stands for, is white nationalism, he said. They are now indistinguishable. Worse than that, they are now associated with domestic terrorism.

Their dream is over as of today, he said of the alt-right. As of salute-gate, it was over.

Were on the winning side for the first time in my experience.

James Alex Fields, the man suspected of driving his car into a crowd of people protesting the rally and killing one, was photographed earlier that day with the Vanguard America group. The fact that the alt-right is now associated with the political violence he perpetrated is a turning point.

I certainly hope that white advocacy does not become irrevocably linked in the publics mind with violence and confrontation, said Jared Taylor, the founder of American Renaissance, who hosts a white-nationalist conference every year and who Spencer has credited with red-pilling him, or converting him to the movement. Taylors conference has attracted an increasing number of young alt-right attendees in the past couple years; when I went last year, there was a large contingent of MAGA-hat-wearing young men.

You cant control who comes to a public rally, Taylor said. Whether or not they invited certain groups, I dont know whether or not they were welcome, but youd have to ask Jason Kessler.

I try to set boundaries but you have to ask them, Taylor said.

The paradox of the alt-right in this moment is that just when it had seemed to achieve political legitimacy beyond its wildest dreams, it has also shown it cant figure out how to bring itself out of the darkest corners of political thought. Some ideas are considered beyond the pale for a reason. Members of the alt-right and people sporting Nazi symbols attend rallies together for a reason.

Spencer told me last year that were on the winning side for the first time in my experience. In one sense, hes still right. Their preferred candidate won, and as president he is still reluctant to disavow the white nationalists who support him, going out of his way to blame many sides for the violence on Saturday. Hundreds of torch-bearing white nationalists marched the night before the rally through the University of Virginia, not wearing masks or hoods, unafraid to show their faces. But the events in Charlottesville the next day unmasked them anyway.

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The Alt-Right's Rebranding Effort Has Failed - The Atlantic

After a chaotic 24 hours in Charlottesville, Virginia, people on both sides of violent clashes are describing this as a pivotal moment for Americas future.

White nationalists who gathered for the Unite the Right rally blame those who turned out to stop them. Theyre damn communists, says Andrew Dodson, a 33-year-old inventor who calls himself a racial realist and says he is fighting to save white America.

Ive talked to a lot of people like Dodson in the past year. In 2016, I produced a documentary on Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who has become an icon for the alt-right.

The movement was once an umbrella for many far-right, pro-Trump groups. But once Spencer and others began speaking publicly about their beliefs of white supremacya turning point was at a conference I filmed, in November, when attendees broke out in Nazi salutesmany previously in Spencers camp began to distance themselves from the movement.

Today, the alt-right is unabashedly white nationalist, and unafraid to share their views. Richard Spencer fantasizes about a white ethno-statea vision he told me would be like the Roman empire. Many in the movement go even farther, calling for mass deportation and ethnic cleansing for Jews and people of color. Though the alt-right is well versed in the language and humor of the internet communicating in forums like 8chan and Gab their politics are consistent with previous white supremacist groups.

Charlottesville is now the epicenter of the struggle for white America, Dodson told me. And just because Saturdays violence seemed to have been contained, the alt-right will continue to give them hell in the city.

Dodson seemed annoyed, more than anything, at the news that a car had rammed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one of them. (Two Virginia state troopers were killed in helicopter crash nearby, in a separate incident.) According to Dodson, the car incident gave the police justification to shut down a large area and end the alt-right's peaceful assembly. He and his friends were stuck hanging out in a hotel room nearby as a result, he said.

Along with Dodson and his friends, high-profile anti-fascists have descended on Charlottesville this weekend. Daryl Lamont Jenkins, who is known for doxxingor revealing the identities ofanonymous white supremacists, was hanging out by the First United Methodist Church in Charlottesville when he picked up the phone to take my call.

Jenkins sounded frustrated. No one can pat themselves on the back after today, he told me. The way Jenkins sees it, the city took too long to intervene. Officials let the alt-right do whatever they wanted until the protests got violent.

But, hes still optimistic. This is the beginning of the end of the alt-right, that's for sure, he said. Todays violence will wake liberals out of their idleness, he said. But is awareness enough to stop violent clashes in the future?

Not if Dodson and his crew have anything to say about it. To him, and to other members of the alt-right, the chaos proves a point. This is a phenomenal victory, he said.

Our ideas are so powerful, that the cops have to break the law and use violence against us to shut us down, he said in a text message after our initial conversation. This shows just what an unbelievable threat we are to the system.

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Alt-Right Members in Charlottesville Vow Not to Back Down - The Atlantic