Undercover With the New Alt-Right
For 11 months, I pretended to be a far-right extremist. I discovered a radical youth movement trying to infiltrate the Republican Party.
I attended more than a dozen extremist and conspiracy events and went to ostensibly mainstream Republican conferences, including the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the annual gathering of Republican activists, politicians, and hopefuls, and Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, and witnessed a radical youth movement trying to take over the GOP. Like a parasitic pilot fish, a robust fascist community follows the big Republican events into every town. They host shadow parties, receptions, and speeches as they work to recruit new members. The conservative establishment benefits from the presence of these farther-right gatherings; the extremists are often younger, well-dressed, and social-media savvy. While the more mainstream GOP organizations occasionally ban the most overt racists from a featured event, their attempts often feel half-hearted, and there are always other extremists who step up and fill the role as intermediaries between the white nationalists and normie conservatives.
Some of the neo-Nazis and fascists I met undercover in 2020 are working as congressional campaign staffers and helping to form congressional caucuses. They are meeting with leaders of far-right political parties in Italy and Hungary. They are leaders in their local Young Republican organizations. They have access to elected GOP officials at the national and local level.
https://www.thenation.com/article/societ...alt-right/
For 11 months, I pretended to be a far-right extremist. I discovered a radical youth movement trying to infiltrate the Republican Party.
I attended more than a dozen extremist and conspiracy events and went to ostensibly mainstream Republican conferences, including the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the annual gathering of Republican activists, politicians, and hopefuls, and Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, and witnessed a radical youth movement trying to take over the GOP. Like a parasitic pilot fish, a robust fascist community follows the big Republican events into every town. They host shadow parties, receptions, and speeches as they work to recruit new members. The conservative establishment benefits from the presence of these farther-right gatherings; the extremists are often younger, well-dressed, and social-media savvy. While the more mainstream GOP organizations occasionally ban the most overt racists from a featured event, their attempts often feel half-hearted, and there are always other extremists who step up and fill the role as intermediaries between the white nationalists and normie conservatives.
Some of the neo-Nazis and fascists I met undercover in 2020 are working as congressional campaign staffers and helping to form congressional caucuses. They are meeting with leaders of far-right political parties in Italy and Hungary. They are leaders in their local Young Republican organizations. They have access to elected GOP officials at the national and local level.
https://www.thenation.com/article/societ...alt-right/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"