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Betrayed by Trump, the alt-right has been casting about for a new direction. Some, like Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker Party, have been thinking about getting into electoral politics. Spencer has been considering not only fielding hand-picked candidates for elections, but also running himself. Trumps domestic policies have been just one lame shit burger after another, Spencer said. Hes become a normal president, and we cant trust him anymore. Still, it presents us with an opening. We can be the vanguard we always wanted to be, and vanguards are powerful.

To this end, the alt-right has realized that there is only so much that can be achieved through Twitter and other internet forums, long its favorite mode of organizing. There has been a surge of interest in real-world events. Auburn was one of them, meant to drum up support among white voters who might also be disappointed in Trump.

A group of guys had gathered under a tree on the quad, conspicuous in their matching khakis and crisp white polo shirts. They were equipped much like a destitute lawn hockey team that had been forced to settle for whatever protective gear they could scrounge up at Goodwill. Some wore BMX helmets, while others had lacrosse helmets. A few had to make due with surgical facemasks. One had written the words COMMIE FILTH on his shirt, though he had miscalculated the space he would need, leaving him with a small LTH bunched up illegibly on his right shoulder. I suspected that these were the boys of WAR EAGLE, although they all insisted on being called Chad and refused to admit to any sort of affiliation. Im Chad, they said and snickered. This is my friend Chad, and thats Chad over there. Were just concerned dudes. We dont want commies to start any trouble on campus, and we want to make sure that Spencer gets his First Amendment rights. That guys a god dammed hero.

Heimbach showed up, too. Mike Enoch, founder of the alt-right website The Right Stuff, had asked him to bring down a few members of his neo-fascist party to serve as protection in case there was trouble at Spencers speech. Heimbach brought nine guys, many of them carrying heavy, wooden shields emblazoned with the Traditionalist Worker Partys white logo, a four-pronged pitchfork inside a cog. Heimbach and Spencer are as much rivals as alliesthe two had made plans to meet in Washington, D.C., during Trumps inauguration, but Spencer snubbed himbut Heimbach disliked Antifa more. He figured it would be a good way to not only bury the hatchet, but also show that his party was to be counted on when it mattered.

Everyone was a little on edge after a big fight between fascists and Antifa in Berkeley the night before that left several people injured. The fight between fascists and Antifa is decades old. The two groups feed off each other to rally morale and sympathy. Lately, the alt-right has been able to use this feud as a tool to get supporters away from their computer screens and into the real world. Right now, it seems that organizing to neutralize the Antifas is a big attraction and I hope it continues, Brad Griffin, 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 wont stay corked up online in the long term. It isnt as fun.

Heimbach brought his guys over to the Chads, where a group of onlookers had gathered. What is it that you want? a young woman asked the Chad with the COMMIE FILTH t-shirt. I want Jesus and I dont want Commie Filth, Chad retorted. Whats so hard to understand about that?

Her question was a good one, though. The alt-rights platform had been deeply intertwined with Trumps platform, and now that they were splitting up it was hard to figure out whose stuff belonged to whom. When Trump unveiled a budget that would disproportionately hurt many of the white working class people who voted for him, I asked Heimbach if he was disappointed. Heimbach explained that he basically didnt care about anything Trump said or did, so long as he built the wall and kept the country out of war. Now that he had bombed Syria and was vacillating on the wall, the alt-right was scrambling to reclaim the anti-war, closed-borders mantle.

A screaming match ensued in the quad between a protester and one of the Chads. Youre supporting rape! she shouted into into his lacrosse helmet. What youre saying is that youre basically supporting rape! The Chad, not to be outdone, accused her of loving Sharia law. Antifa showed up, then quickly left. All of them were wearing some kind of armor and facemasks, and the police, citing a law against concealed faces in public, made them unmask, prompting them to leave with promises to come back later.

The girl and the Chad in the lacrosse helmet were still arguing, now surrounded by people filming the showdown on their cellphones. In the extreme rights war, no weapon is more powerful than the meme, and a few hours later the showdown would be posted online with captions that proved ... whatever it was the poster wanted to prove. I dont know why youre a libertarian. Libertarianism is dead, man, one of the Chads said to a kid in the crowd. There is no center anymore. Just be a nationalist already.

How can you say that? the girl implored. American is the land of the free! Chad shook his head, seemingly unable to fathom how someone could be that nave. America is the rape and AIDS capital of the world, he said.

When he found out that Auburn was trying to prevent him from speaking, Spencer, along with Cameron Padgett, a soft-spoken Georgian who had been the one to invite Spencer, quickly sued. Padgett and Spencer, along with Mike Enoch, enlisted the services of Sam Dickson, an attorney with ties to several far-right groups including the KKK. They argued that public safety concerns werent enough to override the First Amendment. They won, a federal judge intervened, and so the speech was reinstated to one of the campus halls.

Shortly before Spencer was to begin speaking, Heimbach and his guys took seats along the aisle, prepared to jump out in case someone tried to storm the stage. Just as an FYI, Heimbach said. If anyone tries anything, just deck them with your shields. Also, if were going to chant, remember that our chants come in threes. No tapering off after two. He turned to me. Did you hear Im suing Trump? he asked.

Heimbach had been particularly disgusted by Trumps attack on Syria. As a proud Russian Orthodox he was enraged by the betrayal. He was also a co-defendant with Trump in a lawsuit brought by a Black Lives Matter activist who alleged that Heimbach shoved her at a Trump rally and that Trump had incited the violence. Now Heimbach wanted nothing to do with his co-defendant, going so far as to sue him for directing supporters to remove protesters from his rallies. Impeach the bastard, Heimbach said. It just proves that if you want anything done you have to do it yourself.

Spencer took the stage with a buoyant Oh yeah! that seemed to catch the audience off guard. As fashion-conscious as ever, he was wearing a blue suit, but this time he theatrically took his jacket off and, in a metaphor lost on no one, rolled up his sleeves.

I later learned it was a new persona he was trying out. No longer content to be an intellectual force on the fringe right, the break-up with Trump was pushing him to become a retail politician. That wasnt the intellectual Spencer that sits and writes stuff, he told me after the speech. The movement needs an enigmatic, badass leader. Sometimes my role needs to be a bit of the entertainer.

Fractured and scattershot as the movement is, he believes it is beginning to coalesce around him. He was inspired by a notorious conference in Washington, at which the audience was captured on video giving Nazi salutes to a grinning Spencer. At Auburn he was building on this momentum, creating a public figure out of the vacuum that Trump had left.

Spencer slinked across the stage, switching it up from earnest to serious to incredulous when he talked about sexual identity. Im a woman this week. Now Im a tranny, now Im gay. Buy this, buy that. This is whats known as the End of History. He ranted about consumerism and football, about how they were filling a gaping hole where our white identity used to be. He railed against the manufactured guilt produced by the Holocaust and Jim Crow, proclaiming that it was holding whites back from being heroes and reentering history. The front rows were filled with Chads and other supporters. The rest of the hall, the overwhelming majority, ranged from skeptical to outraged. Spencers shtick is a mix of history lesson, political science lecture, motivational speaking, and pure trolling. There is something explicitly white in challenging someone to a fair fight, he mused. Someone in the back said, Tell that to the colonies, but Spencer didnt hear him.

The exact extent of the alt-rights impact on the 2016 election remains unclear. But if the divorce between Trump and the alt-right holds in the 2020 election, then we will get a better picture of its influence. In the minds of Spencer, Heimbach, and many others in the alt-right, Trump was a mere trial balloon for their ideas. Now that the world has seen the power of populism and ethno-nationalism, they are ready to take their act solo. We need to have the intelligence to know when to dump Trump, Spencer told me. He might still be able to redeem himself, but its hard to see how. Once youve gone down the path of cuckery, its almost impossible to come back.

Our values, and the ones that helped get Trump elected, cant be compromised on, said Heimbach. Nationalism is basically faith, family, and folk, and you cant just do 50 percent of that. Its everything or nothing. Trump is a spectacular failure, but getting him elected proved that people are ready for nationalism.

The alt-rights biggest fear is that they will become like the Tea Party. Once the Tea Party established itself as a grassroots force, it was for the most part sucked into the superstructure of the GOP. This terrifies every single member of the alt-right. Were not going to go back now, says Spencer. And were only getting more radical and more loud. The only difference is that we have a presence now. Trump allowed us to reach a new plateau and that is a great thing. This weekend Heimbach will hold a rally with many other alt-right groups in Pikeville, Kentucky. He said it might be one of the largest far-right gatherings in the country in years. Nobody could have predicted this four years ago, he said. The far-right is finally coming together and its a beautiful thing. Antifa has said it will be there.

The crowd of protesters had swelled during Spencers speech. Heimbach and his people formed a tight phalanx as they pushed their way through the crowds. They made it past the police barricade and found themselves alone, surrounded by screaming protesters. A scuffle broke out, and Heimbach, thinking one of his boys was in trouble, charged in. One of his followers, Scott, charged after him, waving his shield and screaming, Sieg Heil! The scuffle turned out to be nothing and the nationalists were soon on the move again. The crowd followed. Suddenly people were running. It was hard to tell who started running first, but in an instant Heimbach and his guys were sprinting across the campus lawn with hundreds of students bolting after them. Soon the crowd swallowed them up. A herd of Chads were waylaid and punched before cops broke it off. Heimbach and his crew managed to lose their pursuers and lay low in an alley. The crowd chased down every Chad and fascist it could find, literally running them out of town.

The next day I met Mike Enoch at the airport. He had not heard of the chase until I told him. Weird, he said. They should have just come with us. We had a police escort.

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The Alt-Right and Donald Trump Get a Divorce | New Republic - New Republic

White nationalists and the alt-right were dismayed by President Trumps remarks at a Holocaust remembrance speech on Tuesday, seeing in the speech further evidence of a betrayal to their cause.

You can never appease the Jews, wrote Benjamin Garland at the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. Give them an inch and they want a mile. The only way to deal with them is to ignore them and/or tell them to shut their filthy mouths.

Garland bemoaned what he saw as a turnaround for Trump. Months ago he was a man who knew how the Jews operate and as a man with enough self-respect to not be publicly humiliated by them by bowing to their every whim and demand.

But Jews have their ratlike claws deep in him now, Garland wrote.

Former Ku Klux Klan head David Duke also railed against Trump in the hours after the speech and decried the fact that the Holocaust is remembered annually.

Why is the so called Holocaust the only atrocity to receive its very own Remembrance Proclamation? Jewish privilege, he wrote on twitter.

Do you not have any power? Duke went on, directing his message at Trump. Why are you surrounding yourself with the enemies of the American people?

Duke is no longer a member of the KKK but is seen as an elder figure in white supremacist or nationalist circles and has more than 30,000 Twitter followers. Not all white nationalists or members of the alt-right are as focused on so-called Jewish supremacy as Duke, who dedicates much of his Twitter feed to the theme.

Like the most anti-Semitic elements of the alt-right, Duke now sees Trump as a sort of Jewish puppet.

Alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer, who calls himself a white nationalist or an Identitarian had much more tempered criticism. Spencer, unlike some on the alt-right, is not a Holocaust denier and has even praised Zionism as a form of nationalism he admires.

Did Trump crib his speech from a History Channel DVD? Sounds like it. Every 90s Holocaust clich was sounded, Spencer wrote on Twitter.

For some, the Holocaust remembrance was seen as part of a broader trend and tied to Trumps recent strikes in Afghanistan and Syria, which they see as being spearheaded by Jared Kushner, Trumps Jewish son-in-law, and his daughter Ivanka Trump. They also criticize Trump for choosing Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, as an economic advisor.

On the blog Occidental Dissent, Brad Griffen, who runs the website and goes by the name Hunter Wallace, also wrote that Trumps Holocaust remembrance was a betrayal.

We voted for Make America Great Again, he wrote. We wanted an independent country. Instead, we got Jarvanka, Gary Cohn and a bunch of globalist neocons foaming at the mouth to start new wars.

Trump has publicly disavowed both the alt-right and Duke specifically, but many supporters in these circles have held out in the hopes the administration would still bolster their loosely-organized movement.

Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

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Trump Gives A Holocaust Speech And The 'Alt Right' Feels Betrayed - Forward

Lena Dunham, with Jenni Konner: Its when I thought I was being misunderstood by other women who shared my politics that things were really hard. Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival

When the season finale of Girls aired on 16 April, it was received with exactly the amount of division that fans of Lena Dunhams work have come to expect.

Girls, which Dunham directed, wrote and starred in, has been lauded for its groundbreakingly complex and multifaceted representation of women but through its six seasons, as Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner discussed at a Tribeca film festival event on Wednesday night, it was never far from criticism.

Lovers and haters of the show would hash it out in a seemingly endless array of thinkpieces, comment threads and forums, which ranged from thoughtful (if angry) critiques of the show and its creators white privilege brand of feminism, to straight-up misogynistic vitriol. Most, the pair tried to ignore. But some hit home.

In the panel, which was moderated by Ugly Betty star America Ferrera, Konner spoke of one male journalist at a screening who sent her into a rage spiral blackout with a question he spat out from the audience: Why do you show your body so much?

It was that hostile, and I lost my mind, she said. Also it was a screening of the third season I was like, Dude, Google it. Weve answered this question.

Dunham and Konner admitted that while they tended to avoid the comment sections, some criticisms hit harder than others particularly when they came from people who they admired.

I can take whatever the alt-right wants to say, thats fine I cant even understand what theyre saying, its insane, and everyone that I know and love knows its insane, said Dunham, who campaigned with Ferrera for Hillary Clinton last year. Its when I thought I was being misunderstood, or willfully misunderstood, by other women who shared my politics that things were really hard.

Most recently, Dunham was the subject of a media furore after an episode of her podcast Women of the Hour, in which she joked: I still havent had an abortion, but I wish I had. During the episode, Dunham had been talking about how women like her still internalise stigma about abortion; she later apologised, calling the joke distasteful but the renewed vitriol from all corners of the internet had become increasingly difficult to ignore.

Im not even going to say I was taken out of context I made a joke and people had a really negative reaction to it, Dunham said on Wednesday. As someone who has devoted a lot of their adult life to reproductive choice, justice and freedom, to be misunderstood by other pro-choice feminists was like hell to me. That was when I started thinking I really need to be more strategic [about what I say].

It was a particularly prescient controversy considering the series surprising season finale, which leaves Hannah in upstate New York with a baby on her breast. That was a real litmus test for people, Dunham said. There were people to whom it seemed totally natural that Hannah would keep her child, and there were people who seemed almost more scandalised than if she had made the other choice.

Another critique which made the creators take a step back was levelled at the shows casting and limited focus. Girls centres around four privileged white women living in New York a city that, in reality, looks very different. It wasnt like we didnt know, but [those criticisms] opened a conversation for all of us to have that we really appreciated, Konner said.

Dunham said that conversation was the impetus behind Lenny Letter, an e-newsletter the pair launched in 2015 as a platform for young women from all backgrounds. On Tuesday they announced the Lenny Letter: America IRL tour, a variety show of comedy, reading, poetry and music which will bring nine Lenny contributors to non-coastal cities around the country, with a proportion of profits going towards supporting young women in the arts.

You learn a lot from a smart thoughtful person letting you know where they think your blindspots are, Dunham said. You dont want to tone police people, but its like [Muslim activist] Linda Sarsour said recently: nobody ever learned from being shamed. So it felt like there was this fine line between these really thoughtful criticisms and this desire to sort of shame us out of having a voice

When I would look at the comments, it was this big generalised sort of, When will she fucking stop! and thats something I know that a lot of women have experience with. Somehow, certain sections of the internet think that if they just direct enough negativity at you youre gonna retreat, and they can move on to their next whack-a-mole target.

Although Dunham has previously distanced herself from lead character Hannah Horvath, she revealed on Wednesday that she did once have what she called a Hannah Summer, after she graduated from college in May 2008.

I spent a year after graduating [where] I really lost sight of the part of myself that felt connected to making things I felt really far away from myself. And I remember working at the childrens clothing store and I became more I behaved deplorably. I lived with my parents, I misused their cookware and ruined my mums La Creuset pot then threw it in the garbage on the corner, I drove my dads car without a license, I was verbally abusive when I was caught doing it, I had sex with the very wrongest people I was just on this tear, and I was like, How far can this go? And then at the end of August my back went out because thats who I am, she said, laughing.

The two weeks Dunham spent lying still in recovery gave her the space she needed to recognise what shed left behind and she took that energy into the script for her first film, Tiny Furniture. Thats what kind of brought me out of that phase, she said. And so a lot of Hannahs darkest moments or the most gauche, horrible things shes done literally came out of a year and a half of my life.

Konner and Dunham also revealed that if the first season had panned out as they had initially planned it, the first episode would have been the one to feature Jessas abortion.

They [HBO] were like, We might want to get to know the characters before theyre throwing an abortion party, Konner said. I remember [executive producer] Judd [Apatow] being like, Its as if Kramer killed a puppy in a pilot.

Dunham added: For me it was so obvious that none of these characters would ever keep a child [at this stage], and that all of them would be coming from a liberal arts school and wouldnt have any particularly strong emotions about it and Judd was like I think youre not quite properly estimating Americas feelings on this one.

And by the way they let us do it second, Konner said. It wasnt like they fought us on it; they were just like, How about we have another one first.

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Lena Dunham: 'I can't even understand what the alt-right is saying' - The Guardian

Kyle Chapman, a California activist arrested earlier this month in a clash in Berkeley between anti-fascist protesters and pro-Trump demonstrators, announced this week he is forming the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights (cleverly called FOAK).

Chapman, who uses the Internet meme Based Stick Man, says his new militant, highly-masculine group will be the tactical defensive arm of the Proud Boys, another group that shows up at pro-Trump rallies looking to rumble with counter-protesters.

We dont fear the fight.We are the fight, Chapman said in a recent social media post announcing FOAKs formation.

Im proud to announce that my newly created Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights will be partnering with Proud Boys, Chapman said, with the full-approval of its founder, Gavin McInnes.

McInnesis a co-founder ofVice(although he and the magazine severed ties 10 years ago)and more recently has been a frequent guest on FOX News and a contributor for the racist site VDARE where he denigrated Muslims and called Asian Americans slopes and riceballs.

Now described as a neo-masculine reactionary, McInnes calls his Proud Boys a pro-West fraternal organization.

Others describe it as the military arm of the Alt-Right.

And now theres FOAK, which Chapman proudly describes as a fraternal organization, a Proud Boys affiliate chapter, with its own bylaws, constitution, rituals and vetting processes.

Although there initially arent any overt racist themes, the new Alt-Right group of street fighters sounds quite similar to a neo-Nazi fight club called the DIY Division. Members of that white supremacist group showed up last month in Huntington Beach, California, mingling with an estimated 2,000 Trump supporters.

The Proud Boys reportedly have a four-step initiation process. It starts with a prospect declaring himself a Proud Boy, suiting up in Fred Perry polo shirts with yellow stripessimilar to those worn by skinheads.

The second degree is a cereal beat-in during which the new member is punched and beaten by current members until the plebe can rattle off the names of five cereals (you know, Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Cheerios!)

The third degree reported involves adhering to the masturbation regimen and getting a tattoo, blogger Will Sommer wrote in a recent post.

Since then, a fourth-degree has been added to the initiation ritual brawling with antifascists at public rallies.

Chapman said his Proud Boys affiliate, Alt-Knights, are ready to take it to the streets.

Our emphasis will be on street activism, preparation, defense and confrontation, he said. We will protect and defend our right wing brethren when the police and government fail to do so.

Chapman says his organization is for those that possess the Warrior Spirit. The weak or timid need not apply.

More:
New Alt-Right Fight Club Ready for Street Violence - Southern Poverty Law Center

Alexander Dugin says Trumps a traitor to the alt-right because of his unforgivable attack on Syria, and Putins a big disappointment. But Dugin still digs Bannon.

MOSCOWThe Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin is banned from traveling to the United States because his calls for violence helped inspire the pro-Moscow insurgency in eastern Ukraine in 2014. But if Americas leading ideologue today, Steve Bannon, were to visit Moscow, Dugin, a 55-year-old with a long beard and ultra-conservative views, would gladly sit down and talk with him. Dugin says he sees Bannon, President Donald Trumps chief strategist, as his ideological ally.

One day would not be enough for them to cover all the geopolitics they have in common, Dugin told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview. First their conversation would be purely philosophical, Dugin imagined, as Bannon and I read the same authors, we are united by the entire treasury of European conservative culture and history.

Dugin, famous in Russia for his deep disrespect for the worlds liberals, looks at Bannon as his last hope in Washingtons conservative political circles.

For a long time, Dugin said he had counted on President Donald Trump as he could see Bannons hand all over the presidential campaign. But Dugins scenario for Russias future ties with the United States crumbled on the day the mad neo-con Trump authorized firing Tomahawk missile at Syria.

Dugin, who forgave Trumps tough on Russia comments, and even Trumps expectations of Russia to give Crimea back to Ukraine, said he tolerated, supported Trump, while many here gave up. But not any longer.

In the interview, Dugin insisted that unlike liberals, who forgave Barack Obamas failed promises, conservative politicians were now turning away from Trump. That is the main difference between liberals and conservatives. We have a deep sense of dignity: The moment the right-wing politicians Marine Le Pen [in France] and Matteo Salvini [in Italy], and all of the alt-right supporters [in the U.S.], saw that Trump was a puppet, they stopped supporting him.

Dugin agreed with a recent Newsweek piece describing his deep ideological connections with Trumps strategist Bannon. Newsweek quoted Bannons words (originally reported by BuzzFeed) at a Vatican conference in 2014. We, the Judeo-Christian West, really have to look at what [Putin] is talking about as far as traditionalism goes, particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism, Bannon said. When you really look at some of the underpinnings of some of [Putins] beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism.

Russians associate Eurasianism with Dugins name. He was using the term long before Bannon.

So, even though the two never had a chance to meet, Dugin told The Daily Beast, I connect with Bannons focus of the entire presidential campaign: the denial of globalism, rejection of Americas hegemony, the return of religious and national interests, his criticism of liberals and respect for traditional values, Dugin said. Bannon is a bright personality, his team published my books in the United States, including The Fourth Political Theory.

It was never easy to catch up with Dugins viewshe sometimes says things that, when pressed, he denies later. Readers of his English language website, geopolitica.ru, might think that the ideologue of the Russian Spring lives with the West on his mind. But Dugin celebrates the gap between Russian and Western development, insisting that Western civilization is death and mocks Europeans as Euromonkeys: We should throw away the entire Wests racism, we are people of Asia, of Eurasia, we should stop heading towards European culture.

As leader of the Eurasian movement, Dugin likes to call for destruction of everybody who did not support traditionalist values. He also mocked supporters of Western human rights.

His unforgettable face and Rasputin-like beard have been seen for decades at Russian ultra-nationalist rallies, where he pronounced big, radically anti-Western words into the microphones.

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Dugin is talking about creating some new cross-cultural nation [of Slavs and Turkish people] of anti-Atlantic, traditional ideologyhis theory often sounds like a pretty fascist approach, said Alexander Verkhovsky, director of Russian SOVA, a Moscow-based NGO monitoring ultra-nationalist groups. He said and wrote a lot, calling for a war in Ukraine; many Russian nationalists who listened or read Dugins texts actually joined the insurgencies in Ukraine afterward.

In April of 2014, I reported on pro-Russian protests and the so-called Novorossiya Movement in Odessa, a city in the south of Ukraine. One of the movements leaders, Yegor Kvasnyuk, explained to me that long before the Kremlins officials began to speak about the Russian Spring and Novorossiya, new Russia, he had heard the words from the Eurasian revolutionary Alexander Dugin: As early as last September, during a meeting in Russia, Dugin told us that Novorossiya, a sovereign republic, should have devoted, honest Russians to lead it to revive our Russian roots. Kvasnyuk called Dugin the greatest predictor of Russias future.

The same month in 2014, Vladimir Putin spoke about Novorossiya along Dugin lines: Here is Novorossiya: Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev, Odessa were not a part of Ukraine during the Tsars times, all these territories were passed to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet government. Putin spoke about a referendum to decentralize power in these regions.

In his public speeches during the first weeks of the war in Donbas, Dugin promised that hundreds of thousands of people would come out in all Novorossiya cities in support of pro-Russian militants. But that did not happen, and Dugin started to fall out of Putins favor.

Now, according to Anton Shekhovtsov, a Vienna-based expert on right-wing movements, Dugin is not connected with the Kremlin at all, otherwise he would have never been fired from Moscow State University.

Shekhovtsov notes that even Russian businessman Anton Malofeyev, a major supporter of the Ukraine rebels got rid of Dugin entirely.

Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin ideologue working on political tactics around the world, says he understands why Dugin failed to become a mainstream figure in Russia.

Dugin never bends, never compromises, and that is why political elites cannot forgive him, Markov tells The Daily Beast. But somehow he always manages to slip in and leave a trace: On my recent trip to Ankara, officials referred to Putins adviser Dugin visiting them recently.

Dugin admitted that Trump was not his only disappointment latelyVladimir Putin has also made unforgettable mistakes for Dugin, the true believer.

When Putin walks away from the right politics, I do not support him, as we conservatives do not support opportunists, Dugin told The Daily Beast. The most serious contradictions began when the Kremlin disowned Novorossiya. We should not have stoppedI reject the decision of freezing the conflict, Dugin said. By giving up on Novorossiya, they failed the dignity challenge, but unfortunately, Putins supporters have a slaves mentality, and live by the principle, Whatever Master orders is the law.

Dugin added that he was not in the opposition, but that he would rather down-size to some remote part of Russia and out of the spotlight, than bend to Putin.

Earlier this month, Dugin wrote on his website about yet another war: What happened on April 7th, 2017 could be the beginning of a Third World War, he commented on the U.S. attacking Syria with cruise missiles. As a rule, nobody wants war, but, alas, wars happen, and sometimes world ones. Therefore, I posit that first and foremost, as in the case of any disaster, it is necessary to remain calm and gather ones thoughts.

It looked like for now Dugin was not leaving the spotlight, he was working in his office on Moscows main Tverskaya Avenue, making predictions and political forecasts, so if Bannon stops by, they would have plenty of time to talk.

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Russia's Alt-Right Rasputin Says He's Steve Bannon's Ideological ... - Daily Beast