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So says the wealthy fringe Republican bankrolling white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Lance Williams, RevealJul. 21, 2017 6:00 AM

A white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in May.Allison Wrabel/The Daily Progress/AP

This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Long before Donald Trumps election ushered in an era of resurgent white nationalism, a disaffected Republican named William H. Regnery II was brooding about the demographic plight of white people and plotting their rescue. Like Trump more than 20 years later, Regnery, the wealthy scion of a famous GOP family, had an increasingly dark view of a changing America: As he wrote, the United States had become a crime-ridden society with bad schools, high taxes, an intrusive government, and a penchant for political correctness that was morphing into an intellectual tyranny.

Worse, a flood of immigrants were changing the look of America from a palette (sic) of prime colors to a third-world monochrome, he wrote in a rant that would be at home on the bookshelf of Trumps chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Instead of a lingua franca, the country clanged with many foreign tongues.

By 1999, Regnery had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States.He began consorting with Ku Klux Klan apologists, Holocaust deniers, eugenics boosters, and immigration foes. He set up two white nationalist nonprofits and steered money into them. He published fringe-right journals and books. Through his familys famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.

Now, hes back. Working behind the scenes, the retired Chicago business executive has played an important role in making his ultra-right views a part of Americas political conversation in the era of Trump. In what he has described as his crowning political achievement, Regnery discovered Richard Spencer, the mediagenic agitator who invented the term alt-right. In 2011, Regnery made him the frontman for his white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, providing Spencer the platform to launch the alt-right movement.

Fast-forward to 2016. As the Trump campaign gained momentum, Spencer, with Regnerys support, emerged as the omnipresent face of the American far right: a glib talking head whose views on issues of immigration and race at times seemed only slightly more extreme than what you could read onBreitbart Newsor hear from Trump himself.

Turn on the TV or go online, and there was Spencer: holding forth on white identity politics on yet another talk show; crying, Hail Trump! in a fiery post-election speech; getting sucker-punched by a leftist demonstrator at Trumps inauguration; and, most recently, leading a torchlight march to protest the planned removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Regnery speaking at an NPI event after Trumps election.

Screen shot

Regnery has played a vitally important and indispensable role in building the alt-right movement, Spencer said in an interview. He has provided substantial donations and big-picture advice, Spencer said. They talk every week, sometimes every day. I dont think I would do a big thing without consulting him, Spencer said.

Regnery, 76, declined to be interviewed. But in public, he has expressed delight with Spencer for leveraging Trumps election to obtain a flood of media attention for his extremist views. As Regnery told white nationalists at the Washington, DC, conference he hosted in the days after Trumps election, he believes his place in history has been secured by the simple decision to put Spencer in charge.

I am now persuaded that with your courage,he said,the alt-right side of history will prevail.

Just one year beforeTrump began running for president, Spencer and Regnery were struggling to jump-start their political movement. In 2014, they planned to convene what they called a European Congress of the white nationalist movement. When they descended on Budapest, Hungary, the result was chaos and humiliation.

According to their plan, the grand imperial facades of the Hungarian capital would be the backdrop for an international conference of white racial realists in a Europe roiled by waves of refugees fleeing the Middle East. Regnery, Spencer, and Jared Taylor, the self-described racialist editor of a white nationalist website, were scheduled to speak. Joining the Americans on the podium would be a Russian fascist known as Putins brainAlexander Dugin, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

No heat was anticipated from the government: Hungarian voters had just handed another supermajority to the European Unions most right-wing leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, a Putin ally. But it all unraveled. The Hungarian Interior Ministry banned the event, declaring it openly racist. Regnery was intercepted at Budapests Ferenc Liszt Airport, held overnight and deported. Dugin was denied an entry visa. Spencer entered the country by train, then was picked up in a police raid and handed over to immigration authorities.

The government thought that it was a CIA plot, a source with inside knowledge of Hungarian counterintelligence said in an interview. They are completely paranoid, and when this conference was announced, they were convinced that this was an American action, the source said. They guessed that US intelligence services set up this conference so they can say Hungary is a home for right-wing extremist activists and then blackmail them in the international media.

It was a preposterous suspicion, given Regnerys own profound alienation from his homelands political establishment. The Regnery familys political story starts with his grandfather and namesake, William H. Regnery, a Chicago textile magnate. He was a New Deal Democrat, but in 1940 he helped found the right-wing America First Committee, which sought to stop the United States from going to war against Nazi Germany. The committee, which attracted Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites, disbanded when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

The America First name, meanwhile, has experienced a renaissance as one of Trumps leading mottos for his presidency.

After World War II, Regnerys uncle, Henry Regnery, made the family a power in GOP politics through his publishing house, which was subsidized by inherited wealth. He printed the works of writers whom he called giants of American conservatism: William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale), Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind), and Robert Welch, co-founder of the John Birch Society. Regnery booksanti-communist, anti-big-government and pro-businesshelped define what it meant to be a Republican in postwar America. Upon his death in 1996, he was eulogized as the godfather of modern conservatism.

William Regnery IIs cousin, Alfred Regnery, was an official in the Reagan administrations Justice Department and then became president of Regnery Publishing. The imprint still exists, under new ownership: Among its recent best-selling authors are Ann Coulter (Adios, America!) and Trump (Time to Get Tough). Regnery himself plunged into conservative politics at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. As he wrote in his 2015 memoir, Left Behind, he joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit set up to recruit Republican activists on college campuses. His family helped endow the institute, and Regnery remained involved for more than 40 years. On the institutes board, he associated with GOP stalwarts, including former US Attorney General Edwin Meese, Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, and Buckley, founder of the National Review.

After college, Regnery worked in the family textile business. Court records show he was forced to resign as president in 1981 when the firm ran into financial trouble. After that, he grew disenchanted with the GOP, running for Illinois secretary of state in 1994 on the ticket of the fringe Term Limits & Tax Limits Party.

In his memoir, Regnery dated his alienation to a 1993 meeting of the conservative Philadelphia Society. Speakers were celebrating the collapse of world communism and the rise of free-market economies worldwidetriumphs of American conservatism in the age of Ronald Reagan, as they saw it. For Regnery, there was little to celebrate: He feared that the wave of nonwhite immigration that was swamping America would surely doom white people to minority status and impotence.

In a 1999 speech at a right-wing conference in St. Pete Beach, Florida, Regnery went public with his racial fears. White couples werent having enough babies, he declared, and the government was allowing in hordes of nonwhite immigrants as if to hasten our demise. His solution: a reconfigured continent broken up into separate racial and religious enclaves.

Soon after that, Regnery founded a nonprofit dedicated to providing a cultural home for our childrens children, as he wrote in a founders statement. It was called the Charles Martel Society, commemorating an 8th-century Frankish king who turned back an Arab invasionand thus, in the view of white supremacists, saved European civilization almost before it began. Regnery packed the societys board with men who shared his racial concerns. They included the late Sam Francis, a former Washington Times columnist who suggested that white people could solve racial problems by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites.

Feel confident identifying as white became the motto of the Martel Societys magazine, the Occidental Quarterly. Its editor, Kevin MacDonald, has written that American Jews are allied with African Americans and Latinos to promote a suicidal wave of non-White immigration into the United States.

Last year, the Occidental Observer website published a book review asserting that the Treblinka concentration camp was anything but an efficient apparatus for killing Jews. (The review was taken down.) Recent articles in the Occidental Quarterly have titles such as The Case for Eugenics in a Nutshell, and Donald Trumps Candidacy Is a Game ChangerPeople Are Waking Up.

The society spends about $190,000 per year, tax returns show. Nonprofits are not required to identify donors, so money from Regnery isnt noted. But Regnery also served on the board of a charity associated with the familys textile business, and over the years that nonprofit has donated about $85,000 to the Martel Society, records show.

In 2004, perhaps looking to expand the Martel Societys reach, Regnery told Occidental Quarterly subscribers that, for the survival of our race, he was setting up a dating website for heterosexual whites of Christian cultural heritage.

But he didnt follow through. The following year, using $380,000 from the Martel Society, Regnery established the think tank that would eventually bring a notorious white nationalist to prominence alongside the rise of Trump.

Spencer and Regnery in 2016

Courtesy of Daniel Lombroso/The Atlantic

In 2005, the National Policy Institutepromised in a press release to research how white people were being harmed by affirmative action, illegal immigration, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights nonprofit that has called both the Martel Society and the institute active hate groups. The institute publishes books and reports, some of them touted as academic studies. Regnery himself co-wrote a study predicting that in the 21st century, the worlds population of blacks or sub-Saharan Africans would explode, while the percentage of white people would drop to single digits. Like the Martel Society, the institute was a low-budget operation, spending about $170,000 per year, according to tax documents. In addition to the cash from the Martel Society, it obtained about $90,000 from Regnerys family foundation. The Pioneer Fund, a nonprofit founded in the 1930s by promoters of the eugenics movement, has donated about $30,000, records show.

Even as his politics drifted to the edge, Regnery still had ties to mainstream conservatism through his work on the board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the organization he joined in college. The final break came in 2006, after he gave yet another racially charged talk about immigration and demographics, this time in Chicago.

The white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity, he warned the audience. Later he remarked, Whites are unique in welcoming racial aliens into their midst.

As Regnery recounted in his memoir, an anonymous letter alerted the institute that Regnery was promoting people and ideas of the most vile nature. Fearing scandal, the institute asked Regnery to resign. When he refused, he was voted off the board, with such GOP luminaries as former attorney general Meese and the Heritage Foundations Feulner supporting his ouster. His cousin, the former Reagan official, abstained.

Aggrieved, Regnery blamed the velvet tyranny of political correctness for his expulsion. It was all the more painful because he had known the people who voted against him for decades.

Until 2010, Regnery relied on Louis Andrews to run his National Policy Institute. A retired mortgage broker, Andrews believed public school for most black children should end after eighth grade because they couldnt benefit from it. When Andrews became gravely ill with cancer, Regnery turned to a young right-winger he had met at a private event the previous year: Richard Spencer.

Like Regnery, Spencer was a child of privilege. His father was a wealthy physician in Dallas, and, as Reveal has reported, through inheritance Spencer is part owner of Louisiana cotton fields worth millions of dollars.

Spencer had received an expensive liberal arts education. His last academic stop was Duke University, where he pursued a Ph.D. in European intellectual historyand where,as he told Mother Jones, he was radicalized by reading white nationalist literature. In 2007, Spencer dropped out of Duke to pursue a life of thought-crime, as he put it. He worked briefly at the American Conservative, a journal co-founded by former Richard Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, and then was managing editor of a libertarian website published by a jet-setting heir to a Greek shipping fortune. Later, he set up his own site, AlternativeRight.com.

Spencer said he told Regnery that he hoped to use the National Policy Institute to make a dramatic break from the conservative movement by emphasizing white identity politics. After Spencer took over, he moved the think tanks headquarters to his mothers luxury home near a ski resort in Whitefish, Montana. Spencer drew no salary from the institute for his first two years. In 2014, the year of the abortive Budapest conference, his annual pay was $7,900.

Especially after the disappointment of Budapest, there was little reason to believe that alt-right ideology as pushed by the National Policy Institute would break out into the mainstream. But as Spencer recognized, Trumps emergence as a presidential candidate prefigured a paradigmatic shift in American politics.

Trumps views on immigrationcalling Mexican immigrants killers and rapists, vowing a ban on Muslimstracked with alt-right rhetoric. He even retweeted posts by a white supremacist with the handle WhiteGenocideTM. His campaign director was Bannon, the Breitbart executive who had declared that his news service was the platform for the alt-right.

When political reporters, seeking to understand this new phenomenon, reached out for comment from the alt-right, Spencer was happy to help. In his writing and public statements, Spencer has seemed in perfect sync with Regnerys nightmare vision of an endangered white minorityand with Regnerys dream of creating a white North American homeland.

By 2042if nothing else changeswhite people will become a minority, Spencer told Reveal last year. Also, the majority of births right now are actually to non-white people. So there is a dramatic transformation taking place.

As to the white homeland, he said, What the ethnostate is, is an ideala new type of society that would actually be a homeland for all white people.

Freelance reporter Dan Nolan contributed to this story from Budapest. It was edited by Andrew Donohue.

Lance Williams is a reporter with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Email him at lwilliams@revealnews.org.

Mother Jones is a nonprofit, and stories like this are made possible by readers like you. Donate or subscribe to help fund independent journalism.

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The Alt-Right Side of History Will Prevail Mother Jones - Mother Jones

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Friday, July 21, 2017, 5:00 AM

The bombshell emails exposing Donald Trump Jr.s meetings with Russian officials are proving Hillary Clinton's campaign right about the extent of foreign meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Yet the Russians werent the only bad actors whose support for Trump sparked a prophetic warning from Clinton last year.

Clinton also sounded an alarm about a threat whose origins were wholly domestic: right-wing, nationalist groups that were emboldened by Trumps rise. In August, she devoted an entire speech to outlining how Trumps campaign was luring this so-called alt-right movement out from the darkened corners of the internet.

At the time, alt-right was not a household term, and Clintons attention to this fringe elicited head-scratching from some. But six months into Trump's presidency, the groups comprising this movement are becoming dangerously mainstream.

The latest worrisome incident occurred just this weekend. For years, a remote Muslim settlement in the Catskills, known as Islamberg, has been the subject of unfounded rumors fanned by the right wing that the village of a few dozen families is a terrorist training camp. State and local police have openly refuted these allegations and asserted that the village, founded in 1980 by African-American Muslims seeking to escape crime and crowding in New York City, is peaceful and cooperative with authorities.

But right-wing activists, clad in militia-style uniforms, descended on the town Saturday anyway and staged a rally intimidating the Muslim community there.

This followed protests last month across dozens of U.S. cities that were nominally devoted to protesting sharia law, but seemed mainly designed to scare Muslims.

Among the ringleaders of these types of demonstrations is a group called the Proud Boys. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, has called the Proud Boys a new fight-club fraternity of young white, pro-Trump men. The Proud Boys controversial founder, Gavin McInnes, is a frequent contributor to the pro-Trump, alt-right site known as InfoWars.

Among McInnes more offensive social media postings is a YouTube rant entitled Ten Things I Hate About Jews. In the video, he calls the Hebrew language spit talk and bemoans Israelis whiny, paranoid fear of Nazis. Others of his videos have been criticized for comments on women, Native Americans and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Much as InfoWars founder Alex Jones lawyer recently claimed in Jones divorce case that his work is satire, McInnes commentaries contain just enough ironic detachment for him to claim his purpose is not to actually promote bigotry.

But the Proud Boys embrace of violence is far less subtle or coy. Its initiation rituals include violent hazing. One ally, Kyle Chapman, has branched out to form an armor-clad, vigilante organization called the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights. Its goal is to provide security for right-wing activists at street demonstrations, but critics say the Alt Knights show up spoiling for a fight.

This is a war, McInnes has written in one of his online columns.

As a candidate, Trump courted this movement. As President, he mostly condones it. But the rest of us shouldnt just accept it as a new normal.

In the aftermath of the shooting at a baseball practice involving several members of Congress last month, there were widespread calls for return of civility to our public dialogue. Political differences among Republicans and Democrats are unlikely to subside anytime soon, but we should at least be able to mutually condemn groups that sow division and plainly glorify violence.

Elected leaders besides Trump should be confronted about whether they will disavow these groups activities. Advertisers that provide revenue to these right-wing figures propagandistic media companies should be boycotted. And social media platforms like Twitter should be pressed about continuing to allow them to post incendiary content and attract followings.

The rise of these groups is one of the more insidious trends in Donald Trumps America. Clintons early warning about these groups was treated as just another political swipe at Trump last summer, but it deserves heed now.

Fallon, a Democratic strategist, was press secretary for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

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Hillary Clinton's alt-right warnings prove apt - New York Daily News

Duke believes in the primacy of visual culture, and most right-wing figures, he says, dont take enough care to make themselves look good. Newt Gingrich, he tells me, is disheveled; Steve Bannon is a schlub; Trumps hair is problematic. At the same time, he thinks left-leaning media outlets which is to say, just about anything other than Breitbart News and The Drudge Report go out of their way to present the right in a negative way. Recently, he drew my attention to New York magazines March cover story on Kellyanne Conway. Though he hadnt read the article, Duke was bothered by Martin Schoellers clinically lit portrait, the equivalent of being rendered by a fax machine, he griped in an email.

Theres no Vanity Fair for the right, Duke told me, and such an assertion hints at the rather quixotic nature of his project. Within the alt-right, a loose-knit movment of online reactionaries, Duke is seen as a kind of hidden-hand figure, doing his part to influence the movements image from the shadows. During the election, for instance, Duke worked behind the scenes as the creative director for MAGA3X, a nebulous and now defunct coalition of Trump supporters who believe they helped elect the president, in part, by propagating online memes. Duke often doles out imaging advice to those in his orbit; he persuaded Cernovich, for example, to quit wearing Under Armour and put on a collared shirt. Dukes subjects seem to appreciate his input; most of them have used his portraits on their social-media profiles.

Dukes goal is to get the American public to view his subjects the way he does. Whether such a goal is realistic or not, his project inadvertently exposes the inner workings of the alt-right mind-set its pathologies, its obsessions laying bare the depth of the movements distrust of the mainstream, its finicky need to conquer reality and construct alternative versions of everything.

Duke seems to think the rights negative image is solely a matter of perception a faith in the power of the superficial that dates, perhaps, back to his days of shooting clothing and apparel ads for department-store catalogs and glossy magazines. From the late 1970s to the early 90s, Duke captured a number of models and actresses on their way to fame, including Drew Barrymore, Sunrise Coigney, Sharon Stone and Milla Jovovich, whose career he helped launch. But he always felt somewhat alienated in the fashion industry, particularly during the AIDS crisis, which claimed a number of friends. People would bad-mouth Reagan, said Duke, who believes that President Ronald Reagan was treated unfairly. Since the 80s, Duke believes, the left has only grown more extreme, which has pushed him into a defensive crouch. He thinks that Joseph McCarthy is an American hero and that progressives are communists by another name. As a gun owner, he sees it as an infringement on the Second Amendment that he isnt allowed to carry his Beretta, which he bought during the Obama presidency, to his local Starbucks.

But Duke didnt feel entirely comfortable making his views known until he met Andrew Breitbart, the firebrand conservative and eponymous founder of the news site. Duke first encountered Breitbart, who died in 2012, at a meeting of the Pacific Palisades Republican Club in October 2011, and he was impressed by his musings on politics and the media. Duke shot Breitbarts portrait that day. It became the first installment in Dukes collection, and also a statement of intent. In the image, Breitbart is dressed, raffishly, in a dark blazer and white button-down, his chest hair exposed; it looks as if hes making a point, or about to, and raising an index finger.

One of Breitbarts central ideas was that the left uses Hollywood as a sort of cudgel to assert its superiority over the right. Politics, Breitbart believed, is downstream from culture, and for Duke, that oft-repeated dictum became a rallying cry. I got a wild hair up my ass, Duke told me, and I said, I want to start taking pictures of our side and making our side look heroic.

In 2014, Duke found a test case in Charles Johnson, the 28-year-old conservative journalist with a reputation for online trollery. Johnson runs GotNews.com, a sensationalist website on which he has posted a number of false allegations, and WeSearchr, a crowdfunding platform that functions like a kind of vindictive Kickstarter for the right; rather than funding projects, users raise bounties on information that could be damaging to their ideological opponents. Looking him up on Facebook, Duke found his appearance lacking but figured he could use Johnsons bright-red mop and thick, scruffy beard to his advantage. I said, You look like a muppet, and I want to make you look like a rock star, Duke recalled. He said, You can do that? Duke shot him outside the Los Angeles Gun Club, looking casually defiant in his Wayfarer-style sunglasses, metal rings, and gray T-shirt. He really gets my essence, said Johnson, who now allows only Duke to photograph him. Not long after that, Duke shot Johnson in more formal attire on the same day Johnson, on GotNews, sought to out the anonymous University of Virginia student at the center of Rolling Stones now-discredited gang-rape story. (He identified the wrong woman.)

Through Johnson, who is now a close friend of Dukes, Duke connected with several more subjects, including Cernovich, the right-wing social-media personality who helped spread the PizzaGate myth, which imagined a vast child-sex ring run by powerful Democrats out of a pizza restaurant in Washington. In December, Duke took his portrait at a protest in Los Angeles. Cernovich was sweating through his shirt when Duke found him, so he mopped him down and snapped a few shots, one of which Cernovich has used as his Twitter profile head cropped within the frame and tilted at an angle, his slightly wet-looking hair brushed jauntily to the side and his squinting blue eyes matching his collared shirt. My intention, Duke said, was to make him look like a strong, forceful personality.

Duke had a similar idea in mind on a tranquil afternoon in February, as he photographed Anthime Gionet, the right-wing provocateur better known by his digital stage name, Baked Alaska. Wearing ripped black jeans and a camouflage T-shirt and cap, Gionet was situated before a seamless white background at a spacious studio with high, lofted ceilings in Culver City, Calif. He was squatting, froglike, and staring off into the distance. Chin up, said Duke, camera in hand, prostrate on the floor. There you go, he said, peering through the viewfinder and chuckling. Be the frog, man, be the frog. Duke clicked away.

Gionet, who is 29, was channeling Pepe the Frog, the cartoon amphibian appropriated as a symbol of the alt-right. Like Pepe himself, the Anchorage native was in need of an image reboot. During the election, Gionet found some fame orchestrating pro-Trump flash mobs (along with releasing a string of seemingly earnest rap videos with titles like MAGA Anthem and We Love Our Cops). But he had recently gotten himself into trouble over a series of coded anti-Semitic tweets. (Jews control the News, he wrote in one; in another he referenced the JQ, or Jewish question.) Duke didnt care about that. As he saw it, Gionet was a victim of a politically correct culture. At the photo shoot, he handed Gionet a Barbie doll covered in fake blood and nailed to a cross of wooden blocks. This is a symbol of me, Gionet said approvingly. I am the sacrificial lamb.

Later, Duke pulled out a black pitchfork, onto which he had mounted a laser sight, and told Gionet he could use it to go after crooked politicians. Staring menacingly into the camera, Gionet clutched the pitchfork in a pose reminiscent of Grant Woods American Gothic. Revolution! he yelled.

A few months after the shoot, I would find that one image from the shoot that day had made it onto the cover of Gionets self-published book, Meme Magic Secrets Revealed.

Before we met, Duke and I had been corresponding for a month or so about media coverage of right-wing figures, and every so often, when I came across a photo, I would send it his way to get his read on it. At one point, I asked him in an email for his take on Time magazines cover portrait of Steve Bannon craggy skin, red nose, lazy eye published in early February. He responded by sending back a five-year-old head shot of me, publicly available online, which hed edited on Photoshop to make my face look ghoulish and depleted. His point, at least as I understood it, was that its easy to make someone look bad. It seemed like an obvious thing to say, but it was still disturbing to be on the receiving end of it.

Theres this kind of, I think, phony idea that things are objective when you push the button, thats the objective reality, and I just dont think thats true, Duke told me, not long ago, on our early evening walk along the bluffs. Duke sees photography as a kind of weapon in the culture wars, and in a way, it may be the perfect medium for a movement like the alt-right, which wants to refashion reality on its own terms. Pictures are, after all, factually malleable vessels that do not present reality as it is but suggest an alternative one as the photographer sees it.

As the sun set on the Pacific, Duke asked me if I wanted my picture taken. I initially declined, skeptical of his intentions. But high on the cliff, I decided to trust him. It looks pretty nice right here, he said reassuringly. I can make you look good. As he leaned down for a better angle, adjusting the ISO on his camera, I was surprised to find his presence somewhat calming; the shutter of his camera fluttered gently as he made off-handed remarks between shots. I could imagine, in the moment, how he would pull the humanity out of his subjects.

A few days later, Duke sent me the photo in an email attachment. Examining my expression, I couldnt help but think that I looked profoundly uneasy, and even slightly disgusted. But I wasnt sure if that was my doing or his.

Matthew Kassel is a writer living in Brooklyn.

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The Annie Leibovitz of the Alt-Right - New York Times

JTA Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor, uses Twitter as a platform to joke, kibbitz with friends and colleagues, and, as he does on his show, The Lead, to call out deviations from what he sees as basic American values like tolerance and free speech.

One of his best-known encounters of the latter kind came last year, when he pressed candidate Donald Trump to disavow an endorsement by David Duke, the anti-Semite and racist. (Trump did, eventually.)

So it was odd to see Linda Sarsour, the feminist and Palestinian-American activist, say on Twitter on Tuesday that Tapper had joined the ranks of the alt-right.

It was part of a fraught exchange between a Muslim American well known for her friendship with some liberal Jews and for her clashes with the Jewish establishment she endorses the boycott Israel movement and a celebrity who makes no secret of his Jewishness. But it was one in which Jews never came up, at least explicitly.

So what started it all?

Tapper earlier on Wednesday criticized Sarsour and the Womens March which she helped found for celebrating the birthday of Assata Shakur, a black militant convicted in the 1973 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. She was jailed in 1977 and escaped in 1979, eventually fleeing to Cuba, where she lives today. Tapper responded to Sarsours birthday greetings by tweeting, Shakur is a cop-killer fugitive in Cuba. This, ugly sentiments from @lsarsour & @dykemarchchi Any progressives out there condemning this? He linked to a Womens March tweet marking Shakurs birthday.

The Womens March, in an extensive thread, had said that it was feting Shakur because of her role in repudiating sexism in the black nationalist movement, and did not endorse her role in the murder of the trooper.

Sarsour rejoined on Twitter, first with her gibe about Tapper joining the alt-right and then asking him directly: Please share my ugly sentiments? Unapologetically Muslim? Unapologetically Palestinian? Pro-immigrant? Pro-justice? Shame.

Tapper, replying, referred to Sarsours attacks on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the onetime Muslim who is now an outspoken critic of Islam. Ali has at times said her focus is only on militant Islam, but at other times has targeted the faith more broadly, earning herself a reputation in some quarters as an Islamaphobe.

In a now deleted 2011 tweet, Sarsour, comparing Ali to anti-Islam activist Brigitte Gabriel, had said: Brigitte Gabriel=Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Shes asking 4 an a$$ whippin. I wish I could take their vaginas away they dont deserve to be women. (Asked about the tweet recently, she said, People say stupid shit sometimes.)

That, Tapper said, was pretty vile addressed to Ali, a survivor of female genital mutilation.

So, nothing in this fight is Jewish, right?

Yair Rosenberg, the Tablet blogger, noted on Twitter that Tapper a graduate of Akiba Hebrew Academy in suburban Philadelphia who frequently celebrates his Jewish upbringing came in seventh among Jews in an Anti-Defamation League tally of journalists abused by the alt-right.

Beyond that, there are some hints of a Jewish subtext that Tapper was coming at this from the perspective of Jewish experience, and that Sarsour understood this. Certainly, Sarsour seemed, by lumping Tapper in with the alt-right, to be seeking to wound him in the way that some folks belittle some black men by referring to them as Uncle Toms.

Activist Linda Sarsour speaks during a Women For Syria gathering at Union Square, April 13, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images via JTA)

And Tapper, in his initial tweet pointing out progressive excesses, called out the Chicago Dyke March, for also wishing Shakur a happy birthday. Chicago Dyke Marchs only known controversy of late was its ejection of three Jewish marchers for bearing flags marked with the Star of David.

(Sarsour did not reply to a request for comment, and CNN did not reply to a request to interview Tapper.)

On the other hand, Tappers overarching outrage at the happy birthday greeting would appear to stem not from any animus toward Sarsour or anti-Zionists, per se, but toward Shakur. As an ABC reporter in 2011 he aggressively pursued a story about how unhappy New Jersey cops were that then US president Barack Obama had invited the rapper Common to the White House; Common had recorded a paean to Shakur. As recently as last year Tapper urged fellow journalists travelling to Cuba to ask Shakur if she wanted an interview.

Added bonus irony? Tapper, now reviled by US President Donald Trump and many of his followers who consider CNN hopelessly biased, earned kudos in 2011 from conservatives for holding Obamas feet to the fire.

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Linda Sarsour calls Jake Tapper 'alt-right' - The Times of Israel

Jack Posobiec, a prominent alt-right activistand promoter of right-wingconspiracy theories, on Thursday posteda video attheAuschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in responseto a list the Anti-Defamation League compiled associating him withthe so-called alt-right movement.

It would be wise of the ADL to remember the history of what happened the last time people started going around making lists of undesirables, Posobiec said in the video posted on Twitter.

To make those accusations on the hallowed ground of Auschwitz is offensive and twisted and, unfortunately, proves the point about our research, an ADL spokesperson told TPM by email.

Posobiec, who describes himself on Twitter as a filmmaker, and recovering political operative and promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, took exception to the ADLs listassociating him with thefar-right movement.

The ADL described the so-called alt-right movement as a segment of the white supremacist movement consisting of a loose network of racists and anti-Semites who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of politics that embrace implicit or explicit racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist ideology.

It listed Posobiec as a member of the alt lite, a loosely-connected movement whose adherents generally shun white supremacist thinking, but who are in step with the alt right in their hatred of feminists and immigrants, among others.

Posobiec railed against the list on Twitter, where heaccused the ADL of targeting Trump supporters with hate lists and called the whos-who a death list.

Josh Mandel, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, on Thursday accused the ADL of becoming a partisan witchhunt group by publishing the list and declared solidarity with Posobiec and Mike Cernovich, another Twitter troll included on the list.

Comparing those who disagree with him to Nazis is not a new tactic for Posobiec, who accused audience members ata New York production of Shakespeares Julius Caesar starring a figure resembling President Donald Trumpof making minister of propaganda for the Nazi regime Joseph Goebbels proud.

In May, Reuters reported that Posobiec received White House press credentials.

A Republican member of Congress apologized earlier in July for usingthe gas chambers at Auschwitz as a settingto promote the U.S. military.

This post has been updated.

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'Pizzagate' Promoter Responds To ADL's Alt-Right List With Video From Auschwitz - TPM