The alt-right, and the radicalisation of young America

Who were the seemingly ordinary, clean-cut young people who marched with the Ku Klux Klan in Charlottesville last month? Terrence Mccoy interviewed six white supremacists to find out what drove their adoption of a hate-filled ideology “They learn not to f

For all that he did in Charlottesville – chanting anti-semitic slogans, carrying a torch across the University of Virginia campus – he wasn’t even aware that the alt-right existed one year ago. It wasn’t until Hillary Clinton condemned the movement in a campaign speech last August that he first learnt of it, and from there the radicalisation of William Fears, 29, moved quickly.

He heard that Richard Spencer, the man who coined the name “alt-right”, was speaking at Texas A&M University in December, and drove the two hours to hear him speak. There, he met people who looked like him, people he never would have associated with white nationalism – men wearing suits, not swastikas – and it made him want to be a part of something. Then Fears was going to other rallies across Texas, and local websites were calling him one of “Houston’s most outspoken neo-nazis”, and he was seeing alt-right memes of Adolf Hitler that at first he thought foolish – “people are going to hate us” – but soon learned to enjoy. “It’s probably been about a year,” he said, “but my evolution has been faster and faster.” Last month’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which ended with dozens injured, a woman struck dead by a car, a president again engulfed in scandal and another national bout of soul-searching over race in America, was a collection of virtually every kind of white nationalist the country has ever known. There were members of the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and neo-nazis. But it was this group, the group of William Fears, that was not so familiar. The torch-lit images of the Friday night march revealed scores like him: clean-cut, unashamed, young men – very young. They almost looked as though they were students of the university they marched through. Who were they? What in their relatively short lives had so aggrieved them that they felt compelled to drive across the country for a rally? How does this happen?

The answer is complicated and unique to each person, but lengthy interviews with six young men, aged 21 to 35, who travelled hundreds of miles to Charlottesville to the rally, reveal common themes. For these men, it was far from a lark. It was the culmination of something that took months for some, years for others. There were plot points along this trajectory, each emboldening them more and more, until they were on the

streets of Charlottesville, ready to unshackle themselves from the anonymity of their online avatars and show the world their faces.

From New Orleans, one man journeyed 965 miles. Another arrived from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania – 247 miles away. Another drove all night, more than 20 hours in all, from Austin, Texas – 1,404 miles. A third travelled from Dayton, Ohio – 442 miles.

The road to Charlottesville, 540 miles away from his home in Indiana, began decades ago for Matthew Parrott. At 35, he calls himself “the first alt-righter”, referring to a small and decentralised movement of extreme conservatives, many of whom profess white-supremacist and anti-semitic beliefs and seek a whitesonly ethno state.

Parrott was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at 15, he says. So his family pooled their money and got him a computer with access to the internet – a rarity in his neighbourhood made up of mobile homes – which he came to see as his “secret portal in my bedroom”. In chat rooms, he developed a taste for intellectual combat, always taking the contrarian side, obsessing over how to dismantle progressive arguments until, as he puts it, he “ended up self-radicalising”. That radicalisation was rooted, he says, in his own feelings of alienation, which intensified when he went to Indiana University and confronted an elite he soon came to disdain. “They made fun of my accent and overbite and they called me white trash and hillbilly. I was never able to identify with a single person.”

He dropped out after his first semester, and his disillusionment festered until, at the age of 23, he went to the national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a whitenationalist organisation based in St. Louis. He considers this moment, when comparing what white nationalism once was and what it has become. “I was the youngest one in the room,” he says. Old men “asked me, ‘Whose grandson are you?’ They were baffled… And now those guys are too frail to understand what’s going on.” What was going on? The same alienation and purposelessness that once defined his life had come to characterise that of so many others. An economy

capsized, a job market contracted, a student-loan crisis erupted, and feelings of resentment and victimisation took hold among some members of Parrott’s generation.

“This is not some hypothetical thing,” says Parrott, who soon established the white nationalist Traditionalist Youth Network and started recruiting. “This is, ‘I’m stuck working at Mcdonald’s where there are no factory jobs and the boomer economy is gone and we have got this humiliating degrading service economy…’ They feel the ladder has been kicked away from them.”

And who was to blame for all of this? Those who joined the alt-right did not view impersonal economic factors or their own failings as culprits. “In some respects, it’s not that different from Islamist extremists,” says Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Centre. A similar set of conditions – disaffected young men, few jobs for them and a radical ideology promising answers – have fuelled recruitment for the alt-right movement. These young men, Lenz says, were told “they were sold a raw bill of goods. The government is working against them and doesn’t give a s**t about white people, and they were told this during a period when the first African American president was in the White House.”

Peyton Oubre, 21, of Metairie, Louisiana, perceived it after graduating from high school when he was looking for a job. “Where I live, go to any Mcdonald’s or Walmart, and most of the employees are black,” said Oubre, who is unemployed. “And I could put in 500 applications and receive one call. Every time I walked into Walmart, there were no white people, and how come they are getting hired and I can’t. White privilege”, he says. “I’m still waiting on my privilege.”

For Tony Hovater, 29, of Dayton, Ohio, it came after he had dropped out of college and was touring with his metal band, for which he played drums, and passed through the small towns of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. He started thinking that so much of the national narrative focuses on the plight of poor, urban minorities, but here was poverty as desperate as any he had seen, and yet no one was talking about poor whites. “You see how a complete system failed a group of people and didn’t take any responsibility for it and has done nothing to help,” he says.

For Connor Perrin, 29, of Austin, who grew up [in a middleclass family], it was during college when he felt campus liberals were ostracising his fraternity because it was white. “If only people would stop attacking us,” he said. “I can’t say anything just because I’m white. I can’t talk about race, and I can’t talk about the Jews because I’ll be called an anti-semite, and I can’t say I want to date my own race.”

For Eric Starr, 31, of Harrisburg, who has been convicted of disorderly conduct for fighting and possession with intent to manufacture or deliver, it was growing up white in a poor black neighbourhood. “I got bullied and I got made fun of and I got beat up,” he said. “Cracker, whitey, white boy.”

And for William Fears, who has been convicted of criminal trespass, aggravated kidnapping and possession of a controlled substance, it happened while he was behind bars. “I don’t think any race experiences racism in the modern world the way that white people do in a jail,” he said. “In jail, whites come last.” From these disparate geographies, social classes and upbringings – rich and poor, rural and urban, educated and not – they converged on a single place last month, Charlottesville, with a shared belief that they, white men, are the true victims of today’s America. “I wanted to be in the fight,” says Perrin. “I need to be more aggressive,” says Parrott. “We never fight for anything,” says Fears.

The violence that they would mete out and receive on the streets of the picturesque college town was the most pivotal moment to date in the evolution of the alt-right movement, the men interviewed believe. The alt-right has always been a diffuse movement, but it has also been intensely communal. People make and share memes that glorify President Trump and make jokes of Hitler and the Holocaust. They discuss events on sites such as 4chan, Reddit and Discord. They get to know one another despite a distance of hundreds of miles. They learn not to fear being called a racist or a Nazi, and, in fact, some start to find those descriptions liberating, even “addicting”, as Parrott describes it.

However, Charlottesville represented an opportunity to further transcend what they called confining social taboos. Many came prepared for violence. Fears was wearing a blue business suit, a helmet, gas mask and goggles. He rode in a van with a group of other alt-right members, and described it as “being transported into a war zone”. Bottles burst against the van’s windows, he recalls. People hit the van. It stopped before Emancipation Park, and everyone started yelling to get out as quickly as possible. Gripping a flag like a weapon, Fears strode to the front and melted into the melee. He threw punches. He took punches. He felt disgust. “Someone hit me in the head with a stick,” he says, “and it split my goggles off.” “Little savages,” says Starr of the counter-protesters. “Subhuman,” Perrin says.

Neither the day’s events leading to the car crash that killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others in Charlottesville, nor the condemnation from politicians and people across the country that followed, have persuaded those interviewed that their beliefs are wrong. For some, it has only confirmed their sense of victimhood. They feel silenced and censored, deprived of their rights. They feel as if the death of Heyer has changed everything, and uncontrollable forces have been unleashed. “It was like a war… it was an eerie feeling,” Fears says. “Things are life and death now, and if you’re involved in this movement, you have to be willing to die for it now, and that was the first time that had happened.”

Soon after the rally, Fears started the long trip home to Houston, where he is a construction worker. He talked to his family, who “pretty much agree with me”. He tried to calm down his little brother, who was “shaken up by it”. And he started to think about what would happen if he were to be killed. “If I’m killed, that’s fine,” he says. “Maybe I will be a martyr or something, or remembered.” He knows there will be another Black Lives Matter event soon, and he has plans to go. “I’ll take a megaphone and see what they have to say,” he says. “I would like there not to be more violence… But it might be inevitable, so let’s get this out of the way. If there is going to be a violent race war, maybe we should do it, maybe we should escalate it.”

A longer version of this article first appeared in The Washington Post © 2017 The Washington Post.

“Disaffected young men, few jobs and a radical ideology promising answers have fuelled recruitment for the alt-right movement”