HOW DO YOU INFILTRATE WHAT YOU DOMINATE?:

As Paul Gottfried, a far-right political theorist, observed in the 2008 speech that is widely credited as birthing the term "alternative right," "we must try to do what is possible rather than what lies beyond our limited material resources." This new right, Gottfried said, could only win by conquering the institutions that neoconservatives then dominated. It needed the institutions it sought to annihilate to thrive. (Gottfried, who once told a journalist that he co-created the term "alt-right" with Richard Spencer, has since sought to distance himself from his former collaborator, though he has also mounted defenses of the overall movement on far-right websites.)

Trump has emboldened the "alt-right" to seize upon once ostensibly staid conservative institutions for its own purposes. (The term, which came to the attention of the mainstream around the 2016 presidential election, served as a means for internet-savvy white nationalists and white supremacists to downplay--or whitewash, you could say--their racist and antisemitic beliefs. It is used throughout this piece to refer largely to a specific clique with ties to the Washington, D.C. media and think tank scene.)

Campus conservative groups like Turning Point USA have been a target both of external coups and their own racist representatives who used them as a means to legitimize their beliefs. Figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, the once-beloved conservative commentator and far-right troll, found refuge in havens such as Breitbart. Despite their prevailing view that much of the GOP constituted "cuckservatives," numerous white nationalists have sought to use the party to propel them out of obscurity.

And then there's the Daily Caller, the conservative publication co-founded by Tucker Carlson, who stepped down from his role as editor-in-chief in 2016. Even since the "alt-right" rose to prominence during the 2016 election, the site has been sucked into its own game of "Who goes Nazi?" Since Trump's election, numerous Caller employees have come under fire for their semi-secret white nationalist affiliations. For instance, Andrew Kerr, an investigative reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation, was outed as having appeared on a number of programs with far-right conspiracy theorist Brittany Pettibone. (Pettibone--wife of European white nationalist leader Martin Sellner, a man who recently sparked outrage for corresponding and accepting thousands of dollars in donations from the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre--has branded herself as one of the most prominent "experts" of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.)

In September 2018, The Atlantic exposed former Caller editor Scott Greer, who wrote under the pseudonym "Michael McGregor," as the managing editor to Richard Spencer's white nationalist Radix Journal, using emails provided by former Breitbart editor and "alt-right" member Katie McHugh. (McHugh also worked for the Caller but has since publicly left the "alt-right.") Still, the Caller has appeared to ignore what the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to in 2017 as its "white nationalist problem."

The website quietly prevented one of its investigative reporters from attending a conference at the H.L. Mencken Club--the same club associated with the birth of the term "alt-right"--in late September 2018 after being contacted for comment by the SPLC. Several months later, the Caller's managing editor, David Brooks (not that one), was fired in spring 2019 for bragging about his own connections to white nationalists.

The links between these current and former Caller employees and the white nationalist movement have mostly been unearthed in pieces. But a trove of emails from a private white nationalist group chat, which were recently obtained by Splinter, sheds new light on those links. Among other things, the emails show how a former Caller employee named Jonah Bennett repeatedly used his perch at the site to launder far-right viewpoints into an ostensibly mainstream publication. They also show that he is part of a wider network of white nationalists who have steadily increased their influence within the conservative media infrastructure--most prominently, a man named John Elliott.

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