THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Everything about Trump's discourse--the words he uses, the things he is willing to say, when he says them, where, how, how many times--is deliberate and intended for consumption by the new right. When Trump repeatedly accuses a reporter of "racism" for questioning him about his embrace of the term "nationalist," he is deliberately drawing from the toxic well of white supremacist discourse and directly addressing that base. Trump's increasing use of the term "globalist" in interviews and press conferences--including to describe Jewish advisers such as Gary Cohn or Republican opponents like the Koch brothers--is a knowing use of an anti-Semitic slur, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League, "a code word for Jews." Trump's self-identification as a "nationalist," especially in contrast to "globalists" like George Soros, extends a hand to white nationalists across the country. His pointed use of the term "politically correct," especially in the context of the Muslim ban, speaks directly to followers of far-right figures such as William Lind, author of "What is 'Political Correctness'?"

Trump is methodically engaging in verbal assaults that throw fuel on his political program of closed borders, nativism, social exclusion, and punitive excess. Even his cultivated silences and failures to condemn right-wing violence, in the fatal aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, for instance, or regarding the pipe-bombing suspect Cesar Sayoc, communicate directly to extremists. We are watching, in real time, a new right discourse come to define the American presidency. The term "alt-right" is too innocuous when the new political formation we face is, in truth, neo-fascist, white-supremacist, ultranationalist, and counterrevolutionary. Too few Americans appear to recognize how extreme President Trump has become--in part because it is so disturbing to encounter the arguments of the American and European new right. But we must--and we must call Trump out for deploying them to gain power. 

Building on the ugly history of white supremacy in this country, and on European far-right movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, a new right has emerged in America. The central tenets of this American new right are that Christian heterosexual whites are endangered, that the traditional nuclear family is in peril, that "Western civilization" is in decline, and that whites need to reassert themselves. George Shaw, an editor at a leading new right publishing house and the editor of A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders (2018)--a collected volume intended to give voice to the self-identified "alt-right," including well-known figures such as the co-founder of AltRight.com Richard Spencer, the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, the founder of American Renaissance Jared Taylor, and a 2018 candidate for the Republican nomination for the US Senate seat in Florida, Augustus Invictus--opens his introduction on the race question: "If alt-right ideology can be distilled to one statement, it is that white people, like all other distinct human populations, have legitimate group interests."

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