Varieties of White Nationalism

How RIchard Spencer Is Rebranding as the GOP Moves Right

Shane Burley

December 23, 2025

doi.org/10.63478/QBAHYAJF

While Richard Spencer has long popularized modern white nationalism, he is not a key intellectual of the movement despite positioning himself as one. He has never written a book of his own, instead acting as the movement’s savvy promoter and serving as editor, interviewer, podcast host, and emcee—which means one must look at the company he promotes to parse out his intentions. His goal was to rebuild American fascism by picking up bits and pieces of different dissident right movements and uniting them under a common banner of antimodern, traditionalist, and inegalitarian radicalism. His work is, and has always been, a branding exercise. Consequently, Spencer’s work has always been shaped by a central question: how can we make the old seem shiny and new for those who feel left down by the failed promises of expired insurrectionaries?

Spencer’s inner circle dwindled since the beginning of the decline of the alt right in 2018 and he has recently realized he needed to build a new core of followers and reconnect with old collaborators.¹ He’s doing just that by launching Alexandria—a reconstructive imperial pagan cult for the intellectual far right —in an attempt to renew his relevance as the GOP shifts further rightward and becomes one of his primary competitors for recruits. Spencer’s attempted rebrand is part of the ever-shifting cycle of the far right and shows that few of the movement’s leaders are ever truly dead and that old ideas can find new life when concealed in the right packaging.

Spencer’s new, very online cadre are now helping create an aggressive, white nationalist, Greco-Roman pagan alternative to the Christian nationalism that dominates what he calls the dissident right, the term commonly used to describe the post-alt-right (new right is also common). Spencer’s Substack publication for Alexandria hit thousands of subscribers and he has built a new library of evocative material supporting his own increasingly specific incarnation of racial politics. He also started to repair relationships with white nationalists who have held onto their audiences (such as Nick Fuentes) and has even reached out beyond those confines by hosting people like known conservative commentator Richard Hanania (who had written for Spencer under a pseudonym in years past). This all means that Spencer is back, in a sense, and is offering a similar model of radicalization he did in the early 2010s before successfully launching the largest white nationalist renaissance of the twenty-first century.

Based on a talk from paleoconservative figure Paul Gottfried in 2008, Spencer launched AlternativeRight.com as a webzine in 2010 as a way of grouping together the various strands of an emerging far-right movement, with everyone from “race realists” and esoteric fascists to European far-right philosophers welcome under his dissident tent. These efforts grew into a constellation of its own and Spencer produced one of the most successful rebrands of white nationalism in years. The alt right inculcated an entire generation of right-wing people who felt abandoned by mainstream politics and American decline.²

Yet over the last few years much of the alt right faded from view, and those remaining spoke in a language comfortable to a Trump-led GOP. Today, the politics of the alt right are now built right into the Republican machine, with the MAGA movement, National Conservatives, and well-funded organizations like Turning Point USA making their same political arguments with more finesse and acceptance than Spencer ever could. With explicit Christian nationalism becoming the rallying cry that radicals and the mainline GOP could agree on, Spencer had less of a clear role.

Groyper leader Fuentes, whose ideological entry point was Christian nationalism, was the most obvious survivor in this new political reality. Fuentes successfully connected the GOP base with the edgier Internet-inflected young reactionaries that would have been a part of the Alt Right, but with language familiar to the Christian traditionalism they see reflected in the larger right-wing political world.³ By contrast, Spencer’s vision of the alt right had more in common with the European new right and the identitarian movement: countercultural, quasicritical of capitalism and Americanism, and foundationally hostile to Christianity due to its universalism and Judaic origins.⁴

But while these subcultural elements have made Spencer less relevant to the mainstream far right, it has also distinguished him in a way that grants him outsized importance to a smaller group of disaffected militants who would otherwise never choose to be a part of the mass political right. Despite Spencer’s declining influence, it would be a mistake to let his work continue unchallenged. Just as in the early years of Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com, the absence of attention can provide the cover necessary to build a movement that can be just as threatening as the alt right was. Moreover, ignoring Spencer to focus on the mainstream white nationalists in power ignores both the connection that the mainstream right maintains with its fringes and the fact that Spencer and the alt right have been victims of their own success: Spencer’s own movement has contributed significantly to the radicalization of mainstream conservativism. This radicalization has, in turn, galvanized the extreme fringes.

Almost fifteen years later, the white nationalist movement is redeveloping a language, “dog whistles,” and strategies to mask their real intentions, Spencer has built an entire pseudoreligious glossary of terms to suggest that White supremacist antisemitism is the most effective way to explain how the world works and what white people need to do to fight back.⁵ Just as importantly, he has shifted into the language of liberal urbanity and elitism, focusing on appealing to disaffected radicals looking for an outsider identity ostensibly critical of established trends on the left and right. Spencer, like so many others in the white nationalist world, has been forced to justify his existence by carving out a hyperspecific niche. As the alt right was further marginalized and the GOP more blatantly adopted white nationalist politics, many of the fascist leaders of the past have adopted a few key principles to bring their ideas renewed salience. To recruit they stress ostensible liberalism, spirituality, in-group coherence, and an evolving and aggressive form of antisemitism. In doing so, they are trying to create a generational shift to a new way of doing fascist politics and to take as many as possible a step further into the fascist politics they hope to make into reality. And just as open fascists have always done, they have found a way to distinguish themselves from the pack, disguise the more disgusting implications of their ideas, and tap into the growing consensus radicalism fed by rampant capitalism, ecological collapse, and global imperial conflict.

Making the Post-Alt-Right

Into 2020, Spencer’s organization, National Policy Institute (NPI), had two primary projects that represented different parts of the White nationalist movement: publishing eugenic and pseudoscience books through their Washington Summit Publishers and the cultural journal Radix. NPI’s respective projects also had two different collaborators, and the one who remains in 2024 illustrates which of these pathways has paid dividends for Spencer in the post-alt-right period.⁶ Spencer’s pseudoscientific publishing increasingly hinged on the fringe online figure Edward Dutton, an anthropologist who publishes racial pseudoscience as academic work under the banner of “Human Biological Diversity” (HBD). HBD is now a popular term used for what used to be called “race realism” and is scientific racism based on the idea that different races have different levels of intelligence and personality types. For example, Dutton explained to me in an email that Ashkenazi Jews are so smart because the Holocaust was a “mass eugenic event” and that their religion institutes eugenic breeding practices. Dutton provided Spencer racial project the necessary veneer of academic credibility and connected it with the defense of “free speech” and “scientific inquiry.” He was a key author of Spencer’s publishing house, but Dutton told me in a different email, “I’m not collaborating with Spencer anymore, no, and I never will again,” citing broken promises.⁷ Dutton has over one hundred thousand followers on YouTube, a sign he has gained a more mainstream following than either his politics or academic work would normally license. But Dutton’s intensive focus on race and IQ no longer differentiated him from the rest of the right-wing sphere, which has started to edge into that direction.

With the prohibition against open racism breaking down, the distinctiveness that transgression offered Spencer and others on the white nationalist right has disappeared. In turn, they have leaned more heavily into other channels, like religion, that they likely see as having more to offer.

For years HBD was the element that separated groups like NPI or American Renaissance from the conservative pack, even when they aligned on issues like immigration. Race and cognitive ability was a central theme in alt-right writing before 2020, so much so that almost every single chapter of Arktos Books’s seminal 2018 anthology A Fair Hearing was on race and used the language of science rather than culture, spirituality, or simple politics.⁸ Over the last decade, this previous distinguishing factor has become mainstream for the conservative right. Consider the first major controversy involving Richard Spencer in 2013, when it was revealed that Heritage Foundation immigration researcher Jason Richwine has written for Alternative Right and had published race science in his Harvard doctoral dissertation.⁹ This has even become a standard part of the right-wing playbook at the publication Quillette, which, while often hailed for its heterodox positioning, built its identity on delving into the world of sociobiology and featuring ideas that were historically more comfortable on the far right.¹⁰

With the prohibition against open racism breaking down, the distinctiveness that transgression offered Spencer and others on the white nationalist right has disappeared. In turn, they have leaned more heavily into other channels, like religion, that they likely see as having more to offer.

Enter Apollo

With Dutton’s exit from Spencer’s organization by 2021, Spencer pivoted to his Substack publication (which was formerly under his Radix Journal branding) to focus on “culture, history, politics, spirituality, and society.” Spencer had long suggested that race realism was not enough to motivate the great reactionary movement he wanted to inspire, which he thought was about the soul of European whites rather than simply their intellects. As he said to me in 2016, he believed race realism “wasn’t political” (presumably since he thinks its just evidently true), and he wants to shift the values and perspectives of white people to an identitarian, hierarchical, and inegalitarian spirit.¹¹

The figure who would help generate this spirit was Mark Brahmin, who had begun collaborating with Spencer in the mid-2010s by providing articles for Radix Journal and regularly appearing on Spencer’s various podcast ventures starting in 2020.¹² Brahmin is now the regular cohost on Spencer’s podcast, which operates mostly as multihour Zoom calls for his thousands of paying Substack subscribers.

The centerpiece of Brahmin’s—and now Spencer’s—fanaticizing political project is presenting their racial politics through religion. Religion is playing an outsized role both within the remnants of the alt right and across the far right more generally, even compared to just five years ago. With Christian nationalism as the new standard, figures like Nick Fuentes have risen to prominence by leaning into that model of religiosity rather than trying to invent a full-scale alternative faith, as Richard Spencer once did. This proved to be a successful strategy when the movement emerged in 2019, just as the alt right was beginning to decline. They took the same edgy energy that had driven that the alt right and translated it into a religious framework legible to the majority of young male fascist recruits.

Fuentes first rebranded his white nationalism as “American nationalism,” a move mirrored by others like Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin and Counter-Currents publisher Greg Johnson. This aligned with the “America First” rhetoric of MAGA politics, but it also angered enough explicit white nationalists to create a split between the two camps.

The second shift was the embrace of explicit Christian—and specifically Catholic—nationalism as the movement’s lynchpin. By building relationships with figures of color such as commentator (and eventual American Renaissance speaker) Michelle Malkin and rapper Kanye West, they tried to suggest that their racial politics were not motivated by hatred. Yet they built much of their reputation by heckling Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk for their support of Israel, using anti-Zionism—rooted for them in antisemitism—as a way to distinguish themselves from the GOP mainstream.

Fuentes’s strategy, however, created a fundamental problem. It failed to offer anything religiously distinct from what the GOP already provided—especially after converted Catholic traditionalist J. D. Vance became vice president in 2025—yet carried all the baggage of open association with white nationalists. As with earlier figures like David Duke, the appeal of Fuentes, the Stormer, and Counter-Currents was quickly undercut when mainstream politicians could simply look to what Pat Buchanan once called “Duke’s portfolio of winning issues” without the stigma of Duke’s past and conflicts with GOP positions.¹³ As of 2025, just as far-right scholar George Hawley predicted, their influence is waning; they have little unique left to offer.¹⁴

Feeling the same pressures to distinguish themselves, Brahmin and Spencer’s turn to religion makes similar use of antisemitic conspiracy theories, but packages them in metaphorical paganism and a romantic nostalgia for Greco-Roman imperialism. Brahmin believes different racial groups speak to their communities using subconscious symbols injected into art, religion, and literature, which then instruct their audiences on how to build identities and forge positive futures. The problem, Brahmin insists, is that one Semitic ethnic group has, throughout the centuries, used their own covert messaging to confuse Aryans. Thus, Aryans have been convinced to work against their own interests and are now controlled by this alien race.

Brahmin’s term that Spencer seems to have adopted for this strategy is “Apolloism.” The range of Apolloism allows Spencer to work metapolitically, which Spencer understands as providing a framework for making sense of and intervening into the world. Like the “third positionist” European New Right, Spencer’s distinctive strategy builds up far-right philosophy, art, and discourse— that is, the “meta” commitments and sensibilities that are more important than “policy” or street activism.¹⁵ Only by crafting high far-right theory and art can the right sow a new consciousness in the white masses and prepare them to respond when material conditions evolve.

This “Apolloism” rebrand, though distinctive in the far-right ecosystem today, is far from new. There has long been a trend in white nationalism that is deeply critical of Christianity for its non-European, Jewish roots; its belief in “turning the other cheek” and universal salvation; and its allegedly deleterious effects on white consciousness.¹⁶ European paganism has long been a particularly favorite alternative for the European and American far right. Starting in the early 1970s, figures associated with the European new right (ENR) like Alain de Benoist argued that paganism offered a type of archetypal European racial consciousness, the revival of indigenous European spirituality that could act as a counterforce to the homogenizing, capitalist influence of modern Christianity. Even further back, Nazi-adjacent figures like Elsie Christiansen tried to revive Odinism as a distinctly racial religion, building on Carl Jung’s work on racialized archetypes as the manifestation of a distinct ethnic consciousness. This evolved into a whole world of primarily Nordic spiritualities coded as “folkish”: they believe that worshiping the Germanic Gods is only for people of Northern European descent. This created much of the base for white nationalist dissenters from Christianity, from the Wotanism of 1990s neo-Nazis to the more coded ethnic paganism of the Asatru Folk Assembly and the Asatru Alliance.¹⁷

This model of spiritualizing racial politics has only become even more attractive, and has been the basis of projects like the Wolves of Vinland and Operation Werewolf (its outreach project), that creates tribal male groups built on the model of a motorcycle club, engage in mysticism and magic, and believe ancient European tribes would have used to dominate their enemies. This helps to unite the male tribalism of the manosphere with the alienated quest for spiritual fulfillment by offering close friendships in the form of gang alliances.¹⁸

This brings together multiple strands that make up the intersectional fascist movement—male supremacy, racialism, imperialism and tribalism—and attempts to sync them in intellectually coherent ways. Scholar of the far right Josh Vandiver describes Apolloism and its antecedents as a type of “palingenetic ultramasculanism,” meaning it is a form of radical, antimodern, and rebirth-oriented masculinity designed to create a cult of men.¹⁹ Brahmin believes that other religious and ideological systems, including Nordic paganism, have failed to elicit strength and eugenic benefits for Aryans, and so following the Greco-Roman model of Apollo would better lead to the type of Aryan identity that would “not only…reverse the fortunes of the Aryan race but…launch its conquest of the globe.”²⁰ While Brahmin’s contributions to this discourse have been essential—in terms of the organization of Alexandria, chain of command, and authority with followers—Spencer remains its sovereign leader, with Brahmin acting more as a nebbish helping to construct their underlying theory.

While the fascists often push the Overton Window of acceptable opinion for the mainline right, in this case the center’s refusal to cross certain lines has actually pushed the fringes further into complex antisemitism.

At the moment, Christian nationalism remains the most binding religious option for the white right. Yet as it increasingly fills the ranks of National Conservative conferences, it has become harder to justify the radical “outsider” status that white nationalist groups traditionally hold to. Given their need for that outsider status, white nationalist groups that made up the alt-right surge might be hesitant to return to Christianity and remain open to Spencer’s rebrand.

Indeed, Spencer was far from alone in pursuing this strategy. Every major alt-right institution has shifted into the direction of spirituality, from Arktos Media to Counter-Current Publishing (with their focus on books by Julius Evola, pagan thinkers, traditionalists, occultists) and those now packaging their right-wing politics in religious language. The space for carving out a distinct brand, however, remains between those who are Christian and those who choose a different path, as Spencer did.

Similarly, the far-right accelerationists have themselves devolved into types of religiosity. Historically, the kinds of accelerationist religious voices that have been most threatening and violent were Christian Identity believers, often the culprits behind “lonewolf” violent attack and terror plots. But today, more arcane occultic beliefs are playing a role, such as the Satanic neo-Nazi cult The Order of Nine Angels. Developed first in the 1970s by a British neo-Nazi, this “theistic satanist” consortium believes in breaking the hold of standardized morality (often through child pornography or acts of brutal terrorism) so that they can bring down all of civilization and reinstate a cruel racial empire built on what they assume are satanic principles. This trajectory has developed even further in recent years as more breakaways from groups like Atomwafen have formed, such as Temple ov Blood and No Lives Matter. These breakaways are even more dedicated to hedonistic sadism and pedophilia, and are linked to frenzied killings like the the Maniac Murder Cult drawing headlines in Russia and Ukraine for their butchering of unhoused refugees. This trend has led to a rapidly growing body count and a near industrial scale creation of child exploitation networks (particularly using blackmail schemes in message boards and children’s games like Roadblocks), just as it led the movement’s founder to convert to an expressly antisemitic form of Islamism and support Jihadist terrorism.²¹ Even amongst neo-Nazis this sort of spiritual nihilism remains marginal, but using the valence of spiritual justification for their blinding hatred and psychosexual bloodlust also allows them to differentiate themselves so completely from more “mainstream” versions of the far right.

Outside this Christian-nationalist space, the far right’s ostensibly secular sectors are also turning toward forms of spiritual quasireligiosity. Born out of Silicon Valley, the neoreactionary movement (NRx) promotes suspicion of democracy, fetishizes monarchy, and combines deregulated capitalism with technological accelerationism. It has grown increasingly influential amid the ongoing tech realignment and now often expresses itself in religious or mystical terms. Far-right philosopher Nick Land is a key example. He interprets artificial intelligence and capitalist destruction as part of a kabbalistic process leading humanity toward a kind of Christian eschatology—one that we must embrace rather than resist, since it represents the inevitable decentering of human subjectivity in history.

What all these movements discover—although not always self-consciously—is that expressing their own form of religiosity helps fanaticize their followers. This fervor gives each ideological strain its own momentum, ensuring staying power. Whether it’s Spencer’s Greco-Roman “Faustianism,” the desire for imperial expansionism, the resurgence of traditionalist Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, or a settler-inflected National Zionism, these subcultural faiths root their political language beyond reason. That spiritual veneer keeps their audiences loyal long past the movements’ logical expiration dates. As fascists continue trying to distinguish themselves to the right of the GOP, they will increasingly depend on this religious distinctiveness to pursue their political goals.

Jews and the Morals of the West

While explicit and recognizable antisemitism has become increasingly normalized in the GOP’s more conspiratorial areas, particularly amongst followers of figures like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson, it remains a line that much of the party refuses to cross. Moreover, the defense against antisemitism has become one of the primary rhetorical strategies the Trump administration has used to attack democratic norms and punish his enemies, which has been especially visible in recent attacks on universities like UCLA.²² So as Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues, the more virulently antisemitic segments of the right have had to move to the fringes. In doing so, they have found an audience of dissident far rightists adopting increasingly volatile antisemitic views. This ready-made audience want their leaders to openly acknowledge their antisemitism and let it drive their revolutionary approach to reordering the world.

Depending on who you ask, the right’s views on Jews have either changed or not. Beginning with the creation of the conservative movement by William F. Buckley and the formalization of National Review in 1955, open antisemitism was a bridge too far and those who expressed it were expelled. This led to some of the major assaults against the John Birch Society’s antisemitic, anticommunist conspiracy theories. However, antisemitism was also the accusation leveled more generally against white nationalists in the Conservative Movement because open racism was both too common and too accepted to justify the expulsion. This “purge”—to use the words of alt-right cofounder Paul Gottfried—made the GOP a more consistent and popular party, but it was never authentic.²³ As David Austin Walsh notes in Taking America Back, antisemitism remained a consistent—albeit increasingly coded—force in the GOP for years.²⁴ Antisemitism’s centrality stems from the essential role conspiratorial populism and antidiversity ideas played on the right. As scholar John S. Huntington wrote, the far right was always contained by the conservative movement: they were never at odds and were often one in the same at their ideological core.²⁵ The ambivalent “purge” of antisemitism in modern conservative movement meant that one could express contempt for antisemitism while simultaneously expressing pretty vile antisemitic ideas, as evidenced by Pat Robertson and many Christian Zionists.²⁶

Despite this overlap, the coded antisemitism of the more mainstream right was always different than “naming the Jews,” and in this period white nationalists became increasingly more volatile and directed in their antisemitism as they developed the notion that the United States was a Jewish controlled “Zionist Occupation Government” (ZOG). There thus remained a relatively clean distance between the mainstream and fascist right made most obvious by the mainstream’s discourse about Jews and the conservatives regular attempts to integrate Jews into their Americanist, capitalist project under appeals to “Judeo-Christianity” and an alliance with Israel.

The mainstream’s distance from antisemitism is eroding as figures like Tucker Carlson break with Christian Zionism; express complex conspiracy theories involving Israel, kabbalah, occultism and child sacrifice; and open Jew hatred can be found from incredibly popular figures on the right like Elon Musk. While the fascists often push the Overton Window of acceptable opinion for the mainline right, in this case the center’s refusal to cross certain lines has actually pushed the fringes further into complex antisemitism.

Despite Fuentes and much of the right integrating more obvious antisemitism into their politics, Spencer’s new philosophy puts Jews directly at the center of what he sees as a global war for the soul of Gentile whites.²⁷ The larger right-wing world has simply misunderstand the Jewish Question according to Spencer, and are therefore unable to conceive of a compelling theory of global politics (Fuentes simply wants the GOP to go further). Among eugenicists, it’s not exactly news that lineage matters—but it’s something researchers of the right don’t discuss enough. Brahmin’s seemingly largest influence is from white nationalist psychologist Kevin MacDonald, the key theorist of modern white nationalism’s pseudoscientific antisemitism. MacDonald claims a unifying theory for the far right, arguing that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” containing eugenic breeding practices that allowed Ashkenazi Jews to acquire an unnaturally high “verbal” IQ and a preference towards ethnocentrism.²⁸ Ultimately, MacDonald believes that Jews are responsible for most revolutionary forces in the twentieth century—Freudianism, Marxism, Critical Theory, Boasian anthropology, the left in general—all to destabilize Aryan civilization and give Jews more power.²⁹

Brahmin seems to accept MacDonald’s work as a given (though he has criticisms of it). But Brahmin takes it a step further by building his own unifying theory: an entire alleged human history of Jewish influence and strategies to undermine it. Brahmin uses a concept he terms “REM theory (Racial Esoteric Moralization),” which suggests that racial groups have encoded messages throughout human history, including through ancient religions and media. In other words, as one YouTube video propagating this theory says, REM purportedly is “a web of carefully crafted hidden messages embedded within art for the purposes of positively moralizing one group and demoralizing another.”³⁰ According to Spencer and Brahmin, Western ideologies, mythologies, and art have been captured by what he calls “Jewish Esoteric Moralization” (which they shorten to JEM): cultural memes that build up Jewish confidence, identity, and “moralization,” while burying and demoralizing Gentiles.³¹ Thus antisemitism once again plays an outsized role for Spencer’s new right in disseminating reactionary ideas across the political spectrum, and it has to become even more extreme and foundational if it is to stand out against the now common prevalence of antisemitic conspiracy theories on the mainstream right.

The Apollonian Strategy and its Antisemitism

In an unpublished book leaked to Spectre, Brahmin outlines his theory of JEM by analyzing both historical myths and dissecting how Jewish ideas purportedly have been inserted into them, leading Jews to capture Western consciousness. JEM “inspires a sort of psychological strength among Jews, empowering them to dominate Gentiles in the ethnic conflict invariably waged between them,” writes Brahmin.³² To combat the apparently viscous and corrosive influence of JEM, Brahmin and Spencer argue for creating “Gentile Esoteric Moralization” (GEM) or “Aryan Inner Moralization” (AID): asserting positive Aryan imagery through mythologies.

Because the god Apollo serves as a positive, assertive, and imperial hero, they argue that their cadre should identify as “Apollonians” who model themselves on this allegedly Aryan titan. Spencer says Apolloism starts a “critique of Christianity and Judaism…and how these have evolved and spread into the creation of more modern concepts like liberalism and human rights.”³³ In Brahmin’s writings, the god Apollo is portrayed as a Lightbringer, not unlike the “solar” spirituality offered by manosphere figures like Jack Donovan and Marcus Follin (also known as “the Golden One”). Apollo offers truth, life, beauty, and striving—an alternative to other chthonic gods who represent what he says is a more “semitic” personality tied to the Jews.³⁴

Concern over environmental collapse, fears over vaccines and modern medicine, and various typs of nationalist anticapitalism can all fit together neatly in the model of racial paganism or even more radical forms of Christian nationalism, even creating a pathway to ostensibly liberal positions in an otherwise fascist worldview.

Spencer and Brahmin’s movement is composed largely of their followers who interact with them online and at Alexandria events. They emulate the Apollonian myth as a projection of what Spencer and Brahmin see as a purer form of Aryan man.³⁵ “Apollo, in the same way, represents us. In the way that Yahweh represents Jewry,” says Brahmin, suggesting Apollo’s fierce qualities of leadership, innovation, and civilizational strength belong uniquely to his people. This leads to a general “anti-Yahweh” or antisemitic position of their group.³⁶

Spencer explains Apolloism as a new methodology to reclaim the white race around a messaging system that supports their goals and combat the negative messages they believe are coming from a Judaic source. “It’s combatting things on a symbolic or you could say emotional…level. It’s about demoralization and moralization,” says Spencer.³⁷ By deconstructing everything from Jewish texts to blockbuster movies and comic books using JEM, Apollonians can first unravel these unexamined messages by using the “intergenerational symbolic system” and then use GEM to fight them.

Spencer suggests that it’s not enough to make a political or scientific argument and that people are most swayed by religious fervor. Consequently, he is projecting his vision into the religious language of Apolloism to cultivate committed followers.³⁸ Brahmin has taken a significant lead in building up content, blogging extensively at Alexandria and his own website The Apollonian Transmission. He also leads an incredibly active (though relatively small) private Telegram channel called Stammtisch, where contributors debate issues like race and intelligence or what qualifies as JEM, make racist jokes, and critique other parts of the dissident right.³⁹ They have helped to capture the elements of the right that have not bought into the shift towards Christian nationalism.

This model also helps to link up various dissident strands, both those that find their natural home on the right and some anxieties about modern state society often disconnected from the clear left-right ideological binary. Concern over environmental collapse, fears over vaccines and modern medicine, and various typs of nationalist anticapitalism can all fit together neatly in the model of racial paganism or even more radical forms of Christian nationalism, even creating a pathway to ostensibly liberal positions in an otherwise fascist worldview. Because many of these alternative medical “cures” match well with nontraditional, “earth based” spiritualities like paganism or are motivated by the rejection of modernity, these disparate strands find a common metaphysical narrative with the far-right fetishization of a supposed natural order of inequality and ethnic communitarianism.⁴⁰

Spencer’s ideas may seem fringe—and they are—but they’re not unlike the kinds of antisemitism circulating in the intensely online world of neo-Nazi philosophy. In recent years, the drive to find an ever more extreme form of antisemitism combined with the growing use of spiritually charged rhetoric has revived everything from “esoteric Hitlerism” to strains of gnosticism that cast Jews as the cosmic enemies of the Aryan people. While antisemitism has always been a core pillar of white nationalism, the version increasingly defining the fascist right constructs a cosmically demonic image of Jewish influence—no longer viewing Jews merely as a racial, religious, or political threat, but as a transdimensional force endangering Aryan survival and moral purity. This framework helps justify the violent radicalism of many on the neo-Nazi right and also drives efforts to build alliances in nonfascist spaces where conspiracy theories or latent antisemitism might take root.

Neo-Nazis still present the most profound break with the mainstream right and are a natural fit for those who want to unequivocally distinguish themselves from even the radical fringes of the GOP. They do this most explicitly around racial antisemitism. The explosive anger towards Israel’s genocide in Gaza provides a new social fracture from which they can draw people in to their deformed Jew hatred. We have seen the dramatic growth of groups like the Goyim Defense League, Blood Tribe, Patriot Front, White Lives Matter, as well as accelerationist groups like Atomwaffen Division and its breakaways, which all position Jews as the central cosmic enemy of white humanity. This central positioning of Jews makes mainline right-wing projects appear tame and captured, and thus reinforces the stated significance of what are often small and politically insignificant neo-Nazi projects.

Fuentes, for his part, has been a vanguard in introducing open antisemitism to the Christian right, and may have had a more significant influence on the mainline right’s youth recruits than party leaders are wont to admit. He has continued to push more mainstream MAGA figures on Jewish issues and this will remain his strategy, which ultimately may cost him his significance depending on whether existing brightlines will be crossed.

By May of 2023, Spencer’s Radix was renamed Alexandria, syncing his branding with his ALEX University courses and his conferences along Greco-Roman aesthetics. “In my wild fantasy we would probably adopt the Greco-Roman religion. It’s a religion of the state, it’s a religion of power, it’s a religion of ruling, it’s a religion of order,” Spencer told me in 2016, breaking even then with the common White nationalist preference for Nordic paganism.⁴¹ At the time, he had not emphasized this distinct spiritual vision in his public persona, presentation, or activism. However, in his break with the alt rght Spencer jumped head first into Greco-Roman spirituality and these ideas only became more important as he struggled to maintain his relevance by distinguishing himself from other white nationalists.

From West Coast White Nationalism to the Red-Brown Alliance

Much of the early alt right frame their demands for an ethnostate, ethnic separatism, or “traditionalism” in terms offered by European new right philosophers like Alain de Benoist and the “identitarian” movement.⁴² This assumed that national, cultural, and ethnic separatism should be conducted in ultimately peaceful ways that avoid “nationalist chauvinism.”⁴³ But by the mid-2010s, Spencer was arguing for a more imperial approach built on Aryans’ supposed Faustian spirit.⁴⁴ “For us, as Europeans, it is only normal again when we are great again,” shouted Spencer at the 2016 NPI conference, directly before screaming “hail victory” against a flurry of Nazi salutes.⁴⁵ In a 2017 audio that followed the violent Unite the Right rally collapse, Spencer revealed his true feelings as he screamed racial slurs and that people of color and Jews should “get ruled by people like me.”⁴⁶ This puts his claims of “peaceful ethnic cleansing^”in a different light since he believes, as he said in that speech, that [Gentile] whites are “strivers” and “conquerors.”⁴⁷ This rhetoric marked a shift in the self-presentation of white nationalists, who for years had claimed that they merely wanted separation from nonwhite people and Jews, but here openly celebrate domination and genocide.

These extreme positions sit incongruously next to the more centrist veneer Spencer adopts in many public communications. When attendees listen to one of Spencer’s hours-long Zoom meetings, he comes across as a rather moderate liberal. He supports abortion rights (largely for eugenic reasons); hates Donald Trump; supported a Biden Presidency; supports Medicare for All; opposes small-scale ethnic nationalism; is horrified by antivaccine, Q-Anon, and other far-right, populist and conspiracist movements; deplores Trump and Elon Musk’s attack on the federal government and lack of support for Ukraine and NATO; and he finds the attacks on universities, urban elites, and institutions of knowledge appalling.⁴⁸ He is the first to say that the alt-right’s behavior was vile and that he has more in common with educated progressives than conspiracy minded Trump voters. When the official Department of Homeland Security (DHS) account started sharing “Mac Tonight” memes about deportations, which was a neo-Nazi meme usually found on The Right Stuff forums or The Daily Stormer, Spencer called it “cringe,” while in an earlier incarnation he would have seen it as prime evidence of his movement’s success.⁴⁹ The alt right’s heyday is not the image he supports any longer. As Spencer wrote in Radix in 2023:

Five years ago, as the face of the Alt-Right, I had the feeling of riding high. I genuinely cared about the monument issue—and I, of course, cared about self-promotion—and told myself a few rotten apples wouldn’t spoil the bunch, or that I could overcome any ‘bad optics’…But I wasn’t being entirely truthful and self-critical. The regrettable reality is that I more than tolerated the rotten apples: I largely played to them as a political base. This dynamic brought out the worst in me. And I take moral responsibility for inspiring bad actors, angry young men, and the mentally ill.⁵⁰

At the same time, Spencer is openly transphobic; supports Trump’s attempts to end birthright citizenship, eliminate affirmative action, and “[police] criminal illegal immigrants”; and approves of Trump’s bluster about bringing Canada and Greenland into the United States, which fits within this support for large white empires.⁵¹ Until 2024, he even sometimes found himself at odds with post-alt-right leaders like Fuentes, but has now increased his interactions with Fuentes by joining him on various Twitter Spaces (online video or audio chats) and inviting him onto the Alexandria podcast for a conversation about Jews and Israel.⁵²

The allegiance to the cultural values of liberalism and its benefits alongside a fascist political program is something that white nationalist Greg Johnson called “West Coast White Nationalism.” He located this as white fascists who had high IQs, were concerned with environmental issues, and were critical of global capitalism. These West Coast nationalists were not necessarily Christians, may be tolerant of queerness, and were less concerned with subethnic divisions found across Europe.⁵³ This is not disconnected from the major influence Silicon Valley has had on the right, where technofuturism and authoritarianism as imagined by figures like Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel depend on a type of urbanism and a faith in scientific progress.

The ability to brand white nationalism in some of the trappings of American liberalism comes, in part, because of the space created by what some call the “heterodox sphere” and what Aaron Huerstas titled “reactionary centrism.”…These figures present themselves as disaffected liberals, simply confronting the allegedly illiberal streak on the left and correcting its excesses; yet they offer opinions and critiques most often found on the far right.

Some on the fascist right have even tried to create explicit synthesis with the radical left, usually by finding ostensible areas of agreement such as around US foreign policy. This is not entirely new and was a feature of crossover spaces like Lew Rockwell’s Antiwar.com or more esoteric, conspiratorial websites claiming the mantle of true anti-imperialism. This was even the defining rhetoric of some far-right activists, who argued that their nationalist politics actually led to increased peace, claimed solidarity with anticolonial movements, supported multipolarity, and found affinity with authoritarian leaders known for distributist economic policies like Muamar Gaddafi or Stalin. This was how white nationalist Matthew Heimbach often presented his views across his years in the white nationalist movement, and it was the continuity he pointed to when he claimed he had abandoned neo-Nazism for Marxism-Leninism. Heimbach formed the Patriotic Socialist Front at the end of 2022 as a synthesis of ethnic nationalism and authoritarian socialism. The group attempted to take national socialist politics directly into the antiwar movement by focusing on the alleged critics of capitalism and imperialism found in fascist politics, while the entire Arktos Media project is dedicated to finding dissident areas of social movements usually associated with the left where they can inject their ultimately racialized political sensibilities.⁵⁴ This synthesis is not exactly new, and has been a part of the major discussion about the growth in conspiracy theories and the far right. A frequently popular pathway is through alternative medicine, organic food, alternative spiritualities, and other elements that have been historically coded as “on the left,” despite there being no necessary connection between these subcultural interests and left-wing politics. Even more longstanding is what has been called the “Red-Brown Alliance,” the frequent connection between the left and the far-right on issues they have shared.⁵⁵ This idea first emerged during the early years of fascism’s rise with projects like the National Bolshevik movement in Russia, which synced up Russian nationalism with Stalinist socialism, or the Strasserite wing of the Nazi Party that integrated a left-wing social critique.⁵⁶ This tacit alliance has been even more prevalent amongst anti-imperialist circles that grant tacit support to authoritarian far-right leaders around the world because of their role in fighting against Western hegemony. These conditions often facilitate the pathway from left to right, often through conspiracy theories (and, by connection, antisemitism), and their self-presentation as “beyond” the simple binaries of conventional politics; this branding allows them to seem as radical dissidents rather than conventional fascists. In the world of shifting alliances and national populism presenting itself (falsely) as a threat to capital, this has become one of the most important ways in which far-right politics are rebranding themselves in the twenty-first century.⁵⁷ This has been a feature of European politics for years and has found new life in the United States with organizations like the Jackson Hinkle’s American Communist Party and the trend of Donald Trump supporting “MAGA Communists” who mix social conservatism, conspiratorial anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and Stalinist-adjacent theories of capital.⁵⁸

The New Strategy’s Dissemination

This “postpolitical” rebranding plays an important role in disseminating racial ideologies like HBD to those who do not see themselves on the extreme right of the political spectrum. The point put forward by people like Spencer and Steve Sailer is that the proper application of liberal principles of free inquiry, universities, public research, and free discourse in the sciences would ultimately support their views on racial differences in capacity. This is another way of saying that their conclusions are postideological. Proponents of HBD would then create a political structure that emanates from their allegedly neutral commitment to knowledge, which would look like a socially stratified authoritarian state system that privileges the “right” class of people. Like modern liberals, fascists like Spencer present their ideological commitments as the natural conclusions of their observations and study of the world. So, while Trump’s brand of American nationalism has been built on obscurantism, the movement’s anti-intellectualism separates crude Trumpists from what Spencer considers the true believers of the white nationalist right.

Spencer’s biggest boost, however, has been reaching out to livestreamers and YouTubers, particularly those on the edges of the online debate world known as “blood sports,” which is where controversial figures engage in heated, multihour arguments. Spencer believes that these livestreamers are an important part of how young adults are forming political sensibilities, and therefore models his work around these types of Internet celebrities.⁵⁹ “The headspace has shifted over and there’s this whole world of livestreaming, creating original content, talking with each other, kind of getting into these arguments over politics…it’s something that’s very different than the top-down produced content of yesteryear,” said Spencer in a 2023 conversation with the streamer Stardust.⁶⁰ While these collaborators are not from the far-right world themselves and many claim to be intellectuals, they see the potential for tabloid interest in partnering with white nationalists under the guise of dialogue. This conjunction of politics and new media has produced a new class of recruits that have merged radically different ideological trends, such as the online commentator “RadFem Hitler”—a cutesie mix of racial identitarianism, TERF-adjacent feminist discourse, and modern criticisms of patriarchal modernity, all of which is the kind of heterodox formulation most right-wing politics (and left-wing politics, for that matter) could not make heads or tales of.

The ability to brand white nationalism in some of the trappings of American liberalism comes, in part, because of the space created by what some call the “heterodox sphere” and what Aaron Huerstas titled “reactionary centrism.”⁶¹ These figures present themselves as disaffected liberals, simply confronting the allegedly illiberal streak on the left and correcting its excesses; yet they offer opinions and critiques most often found on the far right. The best-known example is Bari Weiss and her well-funded publication the Free Press, which has been at the forefront of questioning the legitimacy of trans people, denying the genocide in Gaza, and defending Trumpism. The attack on minorities and the left under the guise of protecting a “free society” has become a common tactic on the far right—particularly as movements like the English Defence League in Britain and PEGIDA in Germany have used similar arguments to advance violently Islamophobic politics and opposition to nonwhite immigration. As society becomes more accustomed to this discourse—promoted by outlets like UnHerd or Quillette and podcasts such as The Fifth Column and Blocked and Reported—it becomes easier for explicit fascist movements to exploit these same equivocations and make their political trajectory appear illegible. In doing so, figures like Richard Spencer can present themselves as moderates by mixing their racial nationalism with ostensibly progressive positions on healthcare and taxation, further confusing an audience whose sense of political identity has been compromised by a mediasphere devoted to packaging reactionary ideas as enlightened liberalism.

Building a Future

Spencer’s vision requires not only followers, but also donors and proselytizers. Movements need participants willing to help build the structure of organization and provide the funds to do so. New microprojects are popping up across the right, often finding tools like Substack or subscription platforms with looser terms of service. Former Identity Evropa leader Patrick Casey has used Substack as a way of rebranding and gained some crossover popularity with he larger conservative movement from his podcast. This would have been previously unthinkable since deplatforming, like that seen in 2018, was previously devastating—something that completely obliterated a far-right figure’s access to the large-scale communications platforms they relied on.⁶² But as social media has further fragmented and with platforms like Rumble and Bitchute having built their entire brand on featuring dissident and banned content, these groups have been able to pick up steam so long as they were authentic and distinct enough to rise to the top.

Rebuilding on these platforms is just the beginning, as the goal of these movements has always been an online-to-offline model; they need to meet in person. Spencer held his first conference for this new project on January 27–28, 2023 in Las Vegas (to be held twice yearly). An elite caste of selected attendees (not exceeding seventy-five) was personally vetted over Zoom and charged as much as $1,395 to attend a private dinner and mini conference. The alt right found the transition from the online world to the “IRL” model of in-person activism challenging.⁶³ Spencer is using a slow pattern with well-vetted in-person conferences to navigate these challenges and to avoid scaling too large too quickly. This strategy has the dual effect of attracting only the more committed people that could form the vanguard of the new movement’s leadership while also ensuring that the conference—given the high fee for attendance, and the professional demeanor and dress code— remains a rather elite affair. Spencer is currently surveying his members about where they want their next in-person event to be.

This time around Spencer has leaned further into Internet celebrities, livestreamers, and various hangers-on that have their own presence on sites like X and Substack…All these figures bring together a form of nontraditional far-right politics—a new hodge-podge that intermixes certain concessions to progressivism, whether in the form of certain types of radical feminism or support for social safety net policies, and then brings them into the larger racialized, sexist, antitrans, anti-LGBTQ, antisemitic and thoroughly fascist politics of the movement.

While the production of knowledge is the brand, as with so many fringe political movements, the creation of a committed fanbase is the ultimate product. This is based around the cultivation of the kind of devotion that only comes with the granting of what scholar of conspiracy theories Michael Barkun calls “stigmatized knowledge”: you are special by finding out the truth hidden from so many.⁶⁴ This model of organizing is as true of the rest of the white nationalist movement as it is of Spencer. The American First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) has continued as a centerpiece for Fuentes’s groyper movement, and it is likely he wouldn’t have maintained his influence (or his sizable checks for livestreaming) if he didn’t continue this in-person event modeled on Turning Point’s annual conference or the larger CPAC that Fuentes was banned from. Meeting IRL is what makes movements work, creating an insular community where cultic subservience is supplemented with the kinds of committed relationships that keep and sustain people. Groups like the American Nazi Party, various Ku Klux Klan organizations, the National Alliance, the Patriot Front, and Blood Tribe keep their members by funneling them out of the broader world of organized advocacy and into a deeply insular but socially connected project.

Spencer and Brahmin hope to build up an intellectual elite that can act as a vanguard of white nationalism.⁶⁵ “We have to start forming a group…a nascent aristocracy or nobility that would manage the world globally in a healthy and productive direction. We are either globalists or we are the slave of globalists,” says Brahmin. Brahmin only wants the highest quality people to be Apollonians.⁶⁶ In other words, they are looking for quality rather than quantity, which makes the consumer of this cult feel as though they are part of a revolutionary inner circle.⁶⁷ This also plays into an ALEX University project that offers classes on subjects like Nietzsche, Plato’s Republic, and the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.⁶⁸

Spencer and Brahmin encourage their inner circle to believe they are a part of that nascent elite by softening the boundaries between leaders and followers as discussions invite open participation and those who prove themselves on forums and Zoom calls are asked to become moderators in the same venues. Just as he did with previously unknown voices at AlternativeRight.com fifteen years ago, Spencer has cultivated his new class of fascist ideologues, helping them establish podcasts and Substack newsletters.

This commitment to social connection is present too in organizations like, for example, the Wolves of Vinland, whose associates include Paul Waggener and Kevin DeAnna. These groups create tightly bonded male gangs where interpersonal ties take precedence over other parts of life. This has centered on in-person institutions like Devotion Jiu-Jitsu (the martial arts gym run by the Waggener brothers) and their compound near Lynchburg, Virginia (called Ulfheim, Old Norse for “home of the wolves”).⁶⁹

Many projects take this model further by building permanent, in-person communities where white nationalists try to construct a tangible alternative to the larger world. This is not new. White nationalist separatist compounds have existed across the United States for years: the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho; Elohim City in Oklahoma; and the more recent, failed attempt by neo-Nazis to take over Leith, North Dakota. The appeal of such communities is especially strong when fused with religion, which is why the racist “Christian Identity” movement proved so effective at organizing separatist enclaves around a violently millenarian spirituality that imagines a cosmic channel between God’s “chosen” (white people) and the demonic forces of “the Jew.”⁷⁰ This old strategy has reemerged as white nationalists are looking to appeal to disaffected radicals who want an alternative.

Most recently a movement calling itself Return to the Land (RTTL) has begun advertising itself as a “whites only” community for people of “European ancestry” (read: not Jewish) on a 160-acre settlement in Ravenden Arkansas with a promise to franchise in other plots around the country, including a plan to move to Missouri next. They are legally able to do this by establishing “private membership associations” (PMA), which allows them to determine individually who can be a member and inhabit privately owned land without being flagged by antidiscrimination laws.⁷¹ “In language that has become incredibly common across the right, RTTL’s founding description claims: “We will return to the land to separate ourselves from a failing modern society, and we will make positive cultural changes in ourselves and in our ancestral communities.”

For decades, talk of secession from the broader world and a commitment to a spiritually inflected social order, has flourished on the right. Since the 1970s, Christian nationalists have urged “right-thinking” people to withdraw from modern society and form their own enclaves. That impulse has hardened alongside a recent shift from urban centers to red states, as far-right families look for what they consider more traditional places such as Texas, Florida, and Idaho. From 2022 to 2023 there was a large inflow to states like Texas and Florida, while New York, California, and Illinois saw the biggest declines.⁷² The pattern continued from 2023 to 2024, with North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee among the top population recipients and several blue states again losing residents.⁷³ High taxes and remote work are often cited, but we are also seeing an intentional consolidation of ideologically driven, right-wing communities that aim to build tight bonds around traditionalism. This is evident in Florida’s use of school-choice scholarships, overwhelmingly chosen by conservative parents seeking communal alternatives and now used by around half a million students. The state has also expanded religious-school options and eased charter rules, and a likely slate of court cases—given the composition of today’s courts—could further entrench these religious alternatives. While these moves are often framed in religious rather than explicitly racial terms, the politics of separatism create openings that white nationalists have long exploited, often using religiously inflected language to justify intentional communities. Together, these trends build a rhetorical and logistical framework that white nationalists can leverage, adopting mainstream right language around homeschooling or rejecting conventional medicine and finding a ready base of recruits. Despite their differences in scope, spirituality, and appeal, these separatist communities share Spencer’s drive to build a white nationalist future in real life around an insular and increasingly cultic following.

Rebranding, Yet Staying the Same

On the surface, Spencer’s break with the larger post-alt-right appears as a severe change of ideology. However, these moves are still relatively consistent for Spencer’s brand of heterodox fascism. Spencer may be a dissident when compared to his alleged colleagues, but his internal logic is built on a coherent and consistent fascist worldview. “I think there is actually a lot of continuity in terms of what I was doing at AlternativeRight.com, say, and Radix after that, even Taki’s Magazine, and what I’m doing now,” said Spencer in a June 2023 meeting with his private Alexandria subscribers that was later broadcast as a podcast episode. “I don’t think I’ve really fundamentally changed my worldview.”⁷⁴

The past two years have been an attempt by Spencer to leave behind his previous white nationalist image, saying to a Jezebel reporter he no longer identified with that label—to the extent of identifying his political views as “moderate” on the dating app Bumble.⁷⁵ Many white nationalists find the label particularly limiting as they look for ways to influence a new generation and are currently trying to redefine themselves using new jargon and obfuscations. For example, Matthew Heimbach declared himself a former white nationalist in 2020, participating in a program from the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) group Light Upon Light.⁷⁶ Yet it was quickly revealed that his views had not changed significantly.⁷⁷ The same can be said for Spencer, who spent a lot of time attacking former allies in the National Justice Party, Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, everyone associated with the Daily Wire, and (for a while) Fuentes. Underneath these attacks on his peers, Spencer maintains the same racialist, hypermasculine and antisemitic ideology that the alt right was built on.

This time around Spencer has leaned further into Internet celebrities, livestreamers, and various hangers-on that have their own presence on sites like X and Substack, rather than players on the established white nationalist circuit or the edges of the conservative movement. This new wave of recruits include Substacker Walt Bismarck (known for hosting a blog he describes as “a safe space for racist theater kids”), neoreactionary Raven Connolly (also a primary collaborator with former neoreactionary and eugenic transhumanist figure Rachel Haywire), and the previously mentioned RadFem Hitler.⁷⁸ All these figures bring together a form of nontraditional far-right politics—a new hodge-podge that intermixes certain concessions to progressivism, whether in the form of certain types of radical feminism or support for social safety net policies, and then brings them into the larger racialized, sexist, antitrans, anti-LGBTQ, antisemitic and thoroughly fascist politics of the movement.

However, the radicalization of mainstream conservatism has done little to diminish the militants on the fringes; rather, it has galvanized these radicals who retain the ability both to influence the base (and therefore those in power) and to carry out catastrophic acts of violence against the left. To leave them unchallenged under the assumption that only state power matters, is to fundamentally misunderstand both fascist politics and its operations.

As the alt right’s recent and brief history has shown, an unimpeded movement will move from conferences and podcasts to street action rapidly if they are allowed to build. Spencer is now set to juggle his new image, relationships, and strategy without some of the allies that built the “big tent” of the alt-right. This version looks a lot like the alt right’s 2010 iteration; as such it will continue to generate content and do intellectual work to support the larger white nationalist movement as it moves towards street level and political action. The only difference is that it has respawned itself as a new religious movement, something Spencer is open about.⁷⁹ Apollo is the future, one that will lay waste to the Semitic god of the past.

Spencer is not the only one, as dozens of major figures and movements try to refashion themselves. Many of these white nationalists have accumulated thousands of followers with little said from the opposition. While the assumption has been that people like Spencer are figures of the past, there is no reason to believe this is so. The twentieth century was the story of fascist reinvention: whether it was the constant return of British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley or the decades of relevance that the National Alliance’s William Pierce or figures like William Carto, leaders of the movement rarely disappear permanently.

The relation of this reiteration of the alt right to the mainstream right is also more of the same. To be sure, the most important shift in right-wing politics has been the adoption of fascist ideas, imagery, tactics, and goals within the GOP itself, particularly since Trump’s 2025 return to the White House. However, the radicalization of mainstream conservatism has done little to diminish the militants on the fringes; rather, it has galvanized these radicals who retain the ability both to influence the base (and therefore those in power) and to carry out catastrophic acts of violence against the left. To leave them unchallenged under the assumption that only state power matters, is to fundamentally misunderstand both fascist politics and its operations. The left has made this mistake for decades and this omission has contributed as much as anything to the tremendous pull the alt right had in the mid-2010s and, ultimately, to the energy that Trump harnessed to reshape the right. As these movements evolve and conceal themselves from the now-trained eye of antifascists, it’s vital to reject the confident assumption that fringe fascist politics no longer matter compared to the senators speaking at National Conservative conferences. The mainstream right depends on the most fringe parts of the radicals. Both the party and the Nazis are significant—and both demand a response.

Spencer, along with white nationalists such as livestreamer Christopher Cantwell, filed an appeal for the Sines v. Kessler ruling that found Spencer and others civilly liable for the violent Unite the Right rally in 2017.⁸⁰ The amount of money that Spencer could owe would hamper his efforts to rebuild. However, since he comes from a wealthy family and lives in a family-owned home in Whitefish, Montana, there is every reason to believe that he is stable enough to continue his growth plan.⁸¹ This stripped-down model seems to be where Spencer sees his future, returning to the intellectual roots he found with AlternativeRight.com.

Daniella Pentsak (a former TPUSA staff member and current conservative operative) has been joining Spencer’s Zoom calls, an example of the successful pipeline that funnels Spencer’s ideas into the larger America First sector of the GOP. Some on the edges of the groyper movement continue to maintain an affinity for Spencer, especially those associated with the European American Community, which has cohosted events with mainline conservative organizations.⁸² Even without their own organizations becoming a dominant political faction, this fascist vanguard can have an outsized effect on politics by seeding their ideas among their more mainstream right-wing counterparts.⁸³

Spencer’s strategy has always been focused on this model: to focus less on tight membership organizations and instead on creating a broad social movement where he can have both influence and plausible deniability when things go wrong. The explosive rise of the alt right is what emerged from his earlier attempts at this, where Spencer could seed the ideas and watch them grow, mutate, and respawn across Internet image boards, Telegram channels, and podcast networks. What followed was a mass deplatforming, demonetization, and dissolution of many of the more organized networks that sustained the alt right. Now the question becomes if Spencer can generate a viable structural and economic path to keep producing propaganda. JEM/GEM can play role similar to that of Kevin MacDonald’s pseudoscientific antisemitism, which acted as a unifying theory that others can build on while hiding behind pseudoscholarly respectability.

As of 2024 Spencer has allowed for an escalating donation system beyond the standard monthly subscription fee ranging from $25–$750, and he also has thousands of subscribers to his own personal Substack account, which also charges. Spencer’s followers can also donate via the web service Donorbox, with the most expensive option named the “Hyperborean Level” after the mythological home of ancient Aryans at the North Pole. This higher payment also gains entry to “business” calls where, according to Spencer, they will be “‘getting down to business’: project ideas, timelines, and holding us accountable.”⁸⁴ As time progresses, those who listen to Spencer are taking a more active role, participating in the conversations that become the podcast and offering edits on their upcoming book, REM Vol. I, The Birth of Tragedy, and growing Alexandria. The finances have been sufficient for Spencer to hire a new paid administrator, and he confirmed that “Substack will be the basis for everything going forward.” The goal is clear because Spencer has declared it openly: “REM analysis and Apolloism will be developed as a school of thought, and that will culminate in institutionalization.”⁸⁵ This means that, more than anything, they expect to build a growing movement to spread his ideas about JEM/GEM to the world. A similar process is happening across the far-right world, even as projects like Counter-Currents or The Right Stuff—which were more successfully kicked out of the mainstream internet and payment processors—stabilize their finances and grow their ranks.

While efforts to deplatform these figures have been successful in the past, they are largely insulated by the new world of Web 3.0 pay-to-play platforms like Substack, Entropy, and Rumble, which are less likely to ban even explicit white nationalist content and have become a relatively stable financial resource for them.⁸⁶ This avenue has ultimately become the most severe dividing line for white nationalists looking to define themselves for this new media reality, either cultivating a more media-friendly image and establishing themselves on a subscription platform, or pushing into “IRL” and cultic relationships that take them off the platforms entirely. Those that have become most successful use a combination of both, starting online and moving them into offline, real-world relationships.

Spencer’s build and Apolloism have begun to spread slowly and surely across the far-right Internet and amongst areas of the “IRL” Dissident Right where Spencer has maintained a foothold. A pilot social media platform built on this ideology independent from Spencer called Apollotree has appeared. According to it’s “About” page, Apollotree “stands as a timeless tradition, harmonising respect for the past with a visionary outlook for the future.”⁸⁷

“Radicals”

Directly before the election in November, journalist Amanda Moore revealed that Spencer podcast cohost Alberto Barbarossa was in fact Luke Meyer, a 24-year-old Trump campaign staffer for Pennsylvania (he was subsequently fired by the campaign).⁸⁸ Associations between fringe movements like Spencer’s and the mainstream right have turned out to be less than rare, as a series of other right-wing figures have caused controversies after their recent relationship with Spencer, including popular conservative writer Richard Hanania (who had been outed as a white nationalist in the past).⁸⁹ While this story did ultimately lead to a termination of that staffer, the associations between GOP mainliners and white nationalism are so common today that they rarely cost a job or derail a career. Instead, the greatest threat for white nationalists on the outside is not their lack of influence, but the fact that the culture may not need them when their ideas infect the body politic.

The killing of Charlie Kirk sent shockwaves both through the mainstream and fascist right as a new opening for dissident voices became available. Fuentes had made his name trolling Kirk for his Zionism, but after Kirk’s death he went to Rumble to share his condolences. Things shifted further when Tucker Carlson started to fill that gap on Kirk’s podcast and both he and Candace Owens invited Fuentes to their Platforms, which brought with it a new rash of energy towards the “groypers.” Carlson and Owens have both helped to normalize conspiracism, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism amongst conservatives, bringing them much closer into alignment with Fuentes. This may be intentional: courting Fuentes’s audience may be a part of the way that figures like Carlson help to create a big far-right tent that will shift his supporters to himself. The close of 2025 was a particularly high moment for Fuentes popularity, and he is either poised to enter the mainstream or further segment himself from the Owens and Carlsons of the world. The actual result of this has yet to be seen, as the Republican Party itself is breaking apart on whether support for Israel can fit within their America First nationalism. Fuentes, as much as anyone, has helped to normalize this attitude amongst the party’s young base.

For the post-alt-right…Spencer’s quick ability to create a comprehensive brand and trademarked ideology…could be what’s necessary to reconvene the network.…The question now is as the white nationalist movement regroups, rebuilds, and rebrands—perhaps with Apollo as their guide—whether their nucleus will be able to grow unimpeded.

Fuentes seems to see the vulnerability that his expanded fame and acceptance imposes on him and he publicly denounced Owens shortly after appearing on her show, thus breaking the potential audience crossover.⁹⁰ His instability—like that of the white nationalist movement at large—may be the site of his most profound vulnerability, unless he can once again move away from the territory Carlson now operates and find a newly minted authenticity with the young radicals he hopes to claim. But as the Republican Party enters a potential civil war over issues like Israel, healthcare, and whether Trump can live up to his populist claims, there could be more and more disaffected people looking for an idiosyncratic form of political syncretism.⁹¹ This is not entirely new and the “heterodox sphere” has done a great deal of work to normalize this syncretism—from watching figures like Glenn Greenwald jump into the right-wing fray to liberal-left commentators like Bari Weiss repeating far-right talking points—but this process could create the structural break that thought unthinkable a decade ago.

As of the time of this writing (December 2025) Fuentes is at the peak of his fame and is as influential as the entire alt right in 2016–18—a feat that is unprecedented.⁹² It has even helped to launch an incredible civil war in the Republican Party, one that hit its zenith at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, the first convention they held since Kirk’s death. This was a chance for the organization, and the movement, to chart it’s future, and it is clear that Fuentes still plays an outsized role and is dictating a plurality of its youth energy.⁹³ And yet, there is a fragility to his broadcasts, a frantic quality, which may indicate a fear of what is to come. We often consider “counterinsurgency” as a way of crushing a rebellious movement. But a historically common strategy was to actually invite the insurgents in and to moderate them—that is, to turn these outsiders from the party of armed struggle to the party of the coalition government. Fuentes’s ideas are no longer his own, nor are they particularly radical, so he’s looking for ways to poke holes in his ostensible allies and to evolve his criticism to make his demands appear even less meetable.

Spencer, however, never wanted the crossover fame Fuentes “enjoys” and found value in obscurity. He’s using inconspicuous language, creeping behind paywalls, and citing and producing pseudoscholarship with the hopes none of it will make news until he is ready—just like he did in 2016 when he first emerged from the backchannels of the internet to become the most famous white nationalist leader of the decade. And this may not be as far off as we thought. As Spencer himself has observed, Elon Musk’s far right political turn is in line with his alt right political turn of the mid-2010s and with X’s shift towards openly racist content: the era of the alt right troll and “meme magic” may be back.⁹⁴ For the post-alt-right—a diffuse collection of movements that were once crowded under a big tent—Spencer’s quick ability to create a comprehensive brand and trademarked ideology (like Apolloism and GEM/JEM) could be what’s necessary to reconvene the network. As he does this, we see his Substack members and Vegas dinnergoers—once the background audience—take up more time as speakers, writers, and voices of the movement. The question now is as the white nationalist movement regroups, rebuilds, and rebrands—perhaps with Apollo as their guide—whether their nucleus will be able to grow unimpeded.

On December 12, 2025, Spencer had Fuentes back on Alexandria for what is turning into a yearly conversation. Across nearly three hours, they discuss Fuentes’s recent trip through the media circuit, starting with far-right figures like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Dave Smith, and Stephen Crowder before culminating in a bizarre conversation with Piers Morgan. By this point, Spencer and Fuentes’s hostility has melted into a serene mutual appreciation—two figures with strong personalities and allegedly sophisticated wit who have been through enough to be charmed by each other’s criticism.

The crux of the conversation was, ultimately, a sense of agreement: a feeling of disillusionment with the ability of their revolutionary dreams to come to fruition, a deep animosity toward the Republican mainstream, and an underlying feeling of superiority about the rightness of their unalterable positions. And, despite that, their strategy has been effective in as much as it moves the goal post, organizing others to take on their mantle for them. As Fuentes pushes the Overton Window, just as Spencer once did, his primary focal point is the same media figures he recently joined on air and helped push toward antisemitic, racist, and anti-immigrant positions. Fuentes can move Tucker, and Tucker can thereafter cannibalize Fuentes.

Both Spencer and Fuentes laughed at the absurdity of Candace Owens’s recent battles with Erica Kirk, the late Charlie Kirk’s wife, over her belief that a global Jewish cabal had killed him. Fuentes had just finished a two-part exposé of Carlson, one that Fuentes claims pushed Carlson to finally call him on the phone, their first contact after Carlson’s soft-ball interview. But more than anything, the fragments of the GOP’s most radical fringe are simply making the same mistakes as the rest of the conservative movement: They are hedging, they are careerists, they are stupid, they are cowards.

Both Spencer and Fuentes leaned into a type of accelerationism, suggesting that this all may have to collapse for their side to win, or even for it to be desirable for the average white person (themselves included). “Everyone’s unhappy, but there’s no real utopian vision,” said Spencer, to a nodding Fuentes. Fuentes even evinced some of the almost liberal-appearing ambivalence about Trumpism that Spencer himself has expressed, particularly the ineffectual meanness of it. Trump’s movement engages in a type of public cruelty that is meant to evade the fact that he is not delivering on his demographic promises. Fuentes wants even more deportations, but the public display and mockery is unnecessary. “All the anger, the performative cruelty…it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing,” says Fuentes.

Just as liberals believe that sounding more unhinged makes their beliefs more radical, conservatives have come to use “performative cruelty”—such as posting deportation memes or laughing about dead children in Gaza—as a substitute for being revolutionary. And while they have pushed much further into racialist positions, they are not offering any fundamental break with multinational capitalism. For Fuentes and Spencer, this gets at their fundamental contradiction: they don’t want right-wing politics based on spurious conspiracy theories, bad science, or open hostility; they want a polite, erudite, and friendly white nationalist imperialism— one that does not relish suffering but also does not care about its enactment. The contradiction of the white nationalist project is always in its tacit utopianism—its suggestion that they have found the perfect prescription for suffering. People like Spencer and Fuentes are the critics of the critics: they hate a right-wing Eurasianist Russia for critiquing imperialism just as much as they hate American capitalism for suppressing regional racial distinctions in favor of vapid consumerism. In this way, they promise to revive a kind of universal folkish perfection, one that will heal all wounds, if only we could get over our addiction to Disney+, Internet pornography, and even our own anger.⁹⁵

This is how they will maintain their relevance—by creating a problem too big to solve, pushing those on the edge to self-destructive violence, and constantly moving their own standards to present them to a disaffected audience as something “authentic” or “transgressive.” Their revolution may never come, and that’s fine since their product depends not on success, but on endless repetitions of failure. In the wake of it they continue to be an effective agent of the planet’s implosion and suffering, all while railing against elites for not going far enough.

Notes & References

Shane Burley, “The fall of the ‘alt-right’ came from anti-fascism,” Salon, April 15, 2018, com/2018/04/15/the-fall-of-the-alt-right-came-from-anti-fascism_partner/.
The best book written about the alt right is Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019).
Tess Owen, “From Charlottesville to Mar-a-Lago: Nick Fuentes’ White Nationalist Journey,” Vice, December 1, 2022, com/en/article/epz7wa/who-is-nick-fuentes.
George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/wentk/9780190905194.003.0006.
Molly Jung-Fast, “A Taxonomy of Right-wing Dog Whistles,” Atlantic, March 4, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/taxonomy-right-wing-dog-whistles/622930/; Steven Petrow, “The coded language of the alt-right its helping to power its rise,” Washington Post, April 10, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-coded-language-of-the-alt-right-is-helping-to-power-its-rise/2017/04/07/5f269a82-1ba4-11e7-bcc2-7d1a0973e7b2_story.html.
Washington Summit Publishers published what they called “race realist” and “human biological diversity” books—that is tracts espousing racial differences in intelligence, eugenic histories, and other forms of pseudoscience. Radix was a journal and publishing imprint mostly focused on culture, literature, and religion.
Dutton is the author of over a hundred peer-reviewed academic papers in journals like Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences and nearly two-dozen books (many of which are available for free on Kindle Unlimited).
George T. Shaw (ed.), A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right In the Words of Its Members and Leaders, (Budapest: Arktos Media Ltd, 2018).
Elspeth Reeve, “Jason Richwine Says He’s No Racist, Has Tough Time Spotting Racism,” Atlantic, May 13, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/05/jason-richwine-says-hes-no-racist-has-tough-time-spotting-racism/315330/.
Shane Burley, “White Nationalists Are Splitting Over Laura Loomer, and These Reveal the Growing Cracks in the Far-Right,” Maiseh Review, September 1, 2022, https://maiseh-review.ghost.io/white-nationalists-are-splitting-over-laura-loomer-and-these-reveal-the-growing-cracks-in-the-far-right/; Christopher Mathias, “Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym,” Huffpost, August 4th, 2023, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/richard-hanania-white-supremacist-pseudonym-richard-hoste_n_64c93928e4b021e2f295e817; Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, “Sailer Socialism w/ Steve Sailer,” May 7, 2024, in Red Scare, produced by Red Scare, Podcast, MP3 audio, 202:56, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sailer-socialism-w-steve-sailer/id1364798971?i=1000654838786.
Donna Minkowitz, “Why Racists (and Liberals!) Keep Writing for ‘Quillette’,” Nation, December 5th, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/quillette-fascist-creep/.
Richard Spencer, interview by Shane Burley, September 14, 2016.
For example, see Mark Brahmin, “The Speech,” Radix Journal, March 7, 2017, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20170315233142/http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2017/3/7/the-speech.
Patrick Buchanan quoted in FAIR, “Buchanan and Duke Playing the Same Hand,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, March 1, 1992, https://fair.org/extra/buchanan-and-duke/.
George Hawley, “The ‘Groyper’ movement in the US: Challenges for the post-Alt-right,” in Contemporary Far-right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, ed. A. James McAdams and Alejandro Castrillon (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 225–41, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003105176-17.
Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 13; Patrik Hermansson et al., The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2021), 119, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429032486.
See Damon T. Berry, Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017).
See Matthias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822384502.
Greg Johnson and Paul Waggener, “Counter-currents Radio Podcast No. 319: Paul Waggener,”January 19, 2021, in Counter-Currents Radio, produced by Counter-Currents, Podcast, MP3 audio, 1:01:26 https://counter-currents.com/2021/01/counter-currents-radio-316-paul-waggener/.
Josh Vandiver, “‘Apollo Has Saved Us!’: Global Ambition and Metapolitical Warfare in Alt-Right Religion.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 16, no. 1 (2022): 136, https://doi.org/10.14321/jstudradi.16.1.0135.
Shane Burley, “Total Life Reform: The Real Consequences of the Far-Right’s Self-Help Grift,” Political Research Associates, November 9, 2020, https://politicalresearch.org/2020/11/09/total-life-reform; Vandiver, “‘Apollo Has Saved Us!’” 139. Spencer and Brahmin also believe that the pagan religions most often utilized by white nationalists, such as Nordic neopaganism in the form of Odinism or Asatru, are also Jewish constructs. They argue this framework is meant to poisons the Gentile mind and make him more pliable to be recruited in the Christian cult, which is also understood as a Jewish plot to trick Europeans into worshipping a Jew and to value weakness over strength.
Jacob C. Senholt, “THE SINISTER TRADITION POLITICAL ESOTERICISM & THE CONVERGENCE OF RADICAL ISLAM, SATANISM AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM IN THE ORDER OF THE NINE ANGLES,” Paper at Satanism in the Modern World, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, November 19–20, 2009, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20161116103642/https://regardingdavidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/senholt-the-sinister-tradition.pdf.
Olga R. Rodriguez and Collin Binkley, “Trump administration freezes $339M in UCLA grants and accuses the school of rights violations,” Associated Press, August 1st, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/trump-ucla-research-grants-civil-rights-60d9d370ac7a1fb648752e06d4f655c3.
Shane Burley, “Paul Gottfried’s Career Smuggling Fascist Politics into the Academic Canon,” Full Stop, June 20, 2024, https://www.full-stop.net/2024/06/20/features/shane-burley/paul-gottfrieds-career-smuggling-fascist-politics-into-the-academic-canon/.
David Austin Walsh, Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2024).
John S. Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennslvania Press, 2022).
Shane Burley, “A Friend of the Jews,” Maiseh Review, July 31, 2023, https://maiseh-review.ghost.io/a-friend-of-the-jews/.
Shane Burley, “Christ is King,” Maiseh Review, March 29, 2024, https://maiseh-review.ghost.io/christ-is-king/; Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin, “Esoteric Homosexuality,” Alexandria (substack), April 20, 2023, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/esoteric-homosexuality#details.
Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples (San Jose: Writers Club Press, 2002), 50–83.
See Kevin Macdonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, Connecticut and London, Praeger, 2004).
“REM Theory: Part #1,” YouTube video, 11:06, posted by “REM Theory Video Series,” January 3, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8jCyVA1R2A.
Brahmin has created a glossary with various terms and concepts for his theories, including examples such as “Semitic Bride Gathering Cult,” “Caducean Conflict,” “Ingrained Symbol Response,” and over two-dozen others. The purported demoralization of Gentiles is what they call “Racial Esoteric Demoralization (RED)” or “Aryan Esoteric Demoralization (AED).” The opposite is Gentile Esoteric Moralization (GEM), which are positive images that validate Gentile self-conception and challenge JEM. See Mark Brahmin, “A Glossary of Terms,” The Apollonian Transmission, accessed December 15, 2025, https://theapolloniantransmission.com/a-glossary-of-terms/.
Mark Brahmin, “The Webslinger” (Unpublished Manuscript), 6.
Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin, “Submission,” Alexandria (substack), June 20, 2023, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/submission. Spencer’s argument here is almost identical to that of European new right (ENR) figures like Alain de Benoist, who argue that liberalism and human rights are simply extensions of the allegedly egalitarian and antinationalist Christian ideology. Spencer, however, is focusing on Christianity as a Jewish ideology repositioned to transform Gentiles—a theory popular in white nationalist pagan circles. For more on the ENR’s critique of Christianity, see George Hawley, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 231–32, https://doi.org/10.1353/book44730.
Brahmin, “The Webslinger” (Unpublished Manuscript), 16.
This model of pagan gods as archetype to be emulated has been a far-right standard for decades. This is the central idea of the Benoist’s foundational ENR book, On Being a Pagan, which suggests that Europeans not necessarily believe in these deities but instead to follow them as moral paragons for the development of authentically European culture, rituals, and traditions. Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan (Arcana Media LLC, 2018).
Richard Spencer, Mark Brahmin, and Neema Parvini, “Beyond Your Borders,” Alexandria (substack), February 6, 2024, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/beyond-your-borders.
Spencer and Brahmin, “Submission.”
Richard Spencer, interview by Shane Burley, September 14, 2016.
It’s important to note that the Stammtisch format of discussion, debate, and community is not inherently a far-right or racialized practice, and has a rich cultural history in German-speaking cultures.
See Stewart Home, Fascist Yoga Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness (London: Pluto Press, 2025). This is of particular importance in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement around Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which is bringing medial suspicion into alignment with Trumpism. See Shane Burley, “MAHA and the End of American Modernity,” Jacobin, September 25th, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/09/maha-modernity-kennedy-food-vaccines.
Richard Spencer, interview by Shane Burley, September 14, 2016.
Hermansson et al., The International Alt-Right, 66.
Daniel Rueda. “Alain de Benoist, ethnopluralism and the cultural turn in racism,” Patterns of Prejudice55, no. 3 (2021): 213–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2021.1920722; Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (Oakland: PM Press and Kersblebedeb, 2018), 63.
Richard Spencer, “Faustian Identity,” Alexandria (substack), November 14, 2014, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/faustian-identity-610. Spencer’s white nationalism became more and more explicit as time went on. Now the imperial quality is the center of what Spencer thinks an ethnostate would mean.
“Rebranding White Nationalism,” YouTube video, 11:08, posted by “The Atlantic,” December 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVeZ0_Lhazw.
“White Nationalist Richard Spencer Exposed by Leaked Audio,” YouTube Video, 6:18, posted by “The David Pakman Show,” November 5, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0ivVo5ZTQc.
Richard Spencer quoted in Ben Schreckinger, “The Alt-Right Comes to Washington,” Politico, January/February 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/alt-right-trump-washington-dc-power-milo-214629/; “Rebranding White Nationalism,” YouTube video, 11:08, posted by “The Atlantic,” December 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVeZ0_Lhazw.
As Spencer tweeted, “I’m voting for Joe Biden—dementia and all! The nomination of JD Vance had reminded me what the GOP really is,” said Spencer on.” Tweet by Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), X, July 16, 2024, last edited 7:19 p.m., https://x.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1813352808587973081. He has also characterized QAnon as “nonsense.” Tweet by Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), X, April 29, 2021, 3:49 p.m., https://x.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1387856596626120707; Richard Spencer, “Cultivated Helplessness,” Alexandria (substack), April 27, 2023, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/cultivated-helplessness.
Richard Spencer, “SOTU Watch-Along,” Alexandria (substack), March 5, 2025, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/sotu-watch-along; Spencer believes much of the money that was used by USAID was “money well spent” due to its cultivation of soft power, and specifically supported the research on “transgender mice,” as Trump described it, because he thinks that this research could lead to identifying a medical cause for trans identity. Tweet by Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), X, March 5, 2025, 1:33 a.m., https://x.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1897535949904732258.
Spencer has also tweeted in defense of Zelensky and has characterized Trump and the US right as the threat against NATO. Tweet by Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), X, March 3, 2025, 4:54 p.m., https://x.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1896680613744378195; Tweet by Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), X, February 20, 2025, 1:51 a.m., a.m, https://x.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1892467183969587615.

Tweet by Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), X, October 2, 2025, 7:11 p.m., https://x.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1973888624652661046.
Richard Spencer, “The End of the Road for MAGA,” Alexandria (substack), March 14, 2023, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-road-for-maga.
Tweet by Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), X, January 22, 2025, 12:26 a.m., https://x.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1881936553989333397.
Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin, “Future Past (Full Video),” Alexandria (substack), November 30, 2023, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/future-past-full-video.
Greg Johnson, “West-Coast White Nationalism,” Counter-Currents, December 10, 2010, https://counter-currents.com/2010/12/west-coast-white-nationalism/.
Shane Burley, “Fascists Are Attempting to Win Followers by Rebranding as Antiwar,” Truthout, March 19, 2023, https://truthout.org/articles/fascists-are-attempting-to-win-followers-by-rebranding-as-antiwar/; Shane Burley, “How White Racists Dream: Metapolitics and Fascist Publishing,” Full Stop, February 24, 2020, https://www.full-stop.net/2020/02/24/features/shane-burley/how-white-racists-dream-metapolitics-and-fascist-publishing/.
Jordy Cummings, “From the Socialism of Fools to Social Democracy in One Country,” Spectre, July 21, 2020, https://doi.org/10.63478/NPFKBXDY.
Nicola Guerra, “Red meets brown: investigating the antiliberal political convergence of Italy’s extremes,” Modern Italy 30, no. 4, (2025): 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2025.3.
Vagabond “An Investigation into Red-Brown Alliances: Third Positionism, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, and the Western Left,” Ravings of a Radical Vagabond (blog), January 15, 2018, https://ravingsofaradicalvagabond.noblogs.org/post/2018/01/15/an-investigation-into-red-brown-alliances/.
Tess Owen, “‘A deranged fringe movement’: what is Maga communism, the online ideology platformed by Tucker Carlson?” Guardian, May 24, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/24/what-is-maga-communism.
Mark Brahmin, Richard Spencer, and Stardust, “The Troll Storm,” Alexandria (substack), March 10, 2023, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/the-troll-storm#details.
Brahmin, Spencer, and Stardust, “The Troll Storm.”
Aaron Huertas, “We Need to Talk About Reactionary Centrists,” Aaron Huertas (blog), April 25, 2018, https://www.aaronhuertas.com/we-need-to-talk-about-reactionary-centrists/.
See Shane Burley, “How Deep Does Substack’s Far-Right Problem Run, Really?” Inkstick Media, June 21, 2024, https://inkstickmedia.com/how-deep-does-substacks-far-right-problem-run-really/.
See Shane Burley, “Alt-Right 2.0, Salvage, July 6, 2017, https://salvage.zone/alt-right-2-0/; Shane Burley, “The Autumn of the Alt Right,” Commune, February 21, 2020, , https://communemag.com/the-autumn-of-the-alt-right/.
Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 2.
Spencer and Brahmin, “Esoteric Homosexuality.”
Spencer and Brahmin, “Esoteric Homosexuality.”
Koki Mendis and Shane Burley, “The Organizational Psychology of the Far Right with Shane Burley,” May 23, 2024, in Inform Your Resistance, produced by Political Research Associates, Podcast, MP3 audio, 45:00, https://politicalresearch.org/2024/05/23/organizational-psychology-far-right-shane-burley.
Richard Spencer, “ALEX university restarts this weekend,” Alexandria (substack), January 7, 2023, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/alex-university-restarts-this-weekend.
Burley, “Total Life Reform.”
See Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press: 1997), 225–42.
David Gilbert, “Inside the ‘Whites Only’ Community in Arkansas,” Wired, August 12, 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/whites-only-community-arkansas/.
Tampa Bay Economic Development Council, State Net Migration U.S. Census July 2022-July 2023 (Tampa: TAMPA EDC, 2024), available at https://tampabayedc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2022-2023-State-Net-Migration.pdf.
Lance Lambert and Meghan Malas, “Net domestic migration: Which states are gaining—and losing—Americans,” ResiClub, January 8, 2025, https://www.resiclubanalytics.com/p/net-domestic-migration-which-states-are-gaining-and-losing-americans.
Spencer and Brahmin, “Submission.”
Laura Bassett, “Richard Spencer Listed Himself on Bumble as Politically ‘Moderate,’” Jezebel, June 14, 2022, https://www.jezebel.com/richard-spencer-bumble-dating-profile-moderate-1849062955.
Burley, “Fascists Are Attempting to Win Followers by Rebranding as Antiwar.”
Shane Burley, “Can You Ever Trust a Former White Nationalist?” Political Research Associates, May 11, 2022, https://politicalresearch.org/2022/05/11/can-you-ever-trust-former-white-nationalist.
Richard Spencer, Raven Connolly, and Alberto Barbarossa, “Quoth the Raven, ‘Better Score’,” Alexandria (substack), May 8, 2024, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/quoth-the-raven-better-score.
Richard Spencer, Raven Connolly, and Alberto Barbarossa, “Beyond Good and Hitler,” Alexandria, July 9, 2024, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/beyond-good-and-hitler.
Hawes Spencer, “Spencer, Cantwell appeal Sines v. Kessler verdict,” Daily Progress, April 11, 2023, https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/spencer-cantwell-appeal-sines-v-kessler-verdict/article_f42d1ccc-d8aa-11ed-adf6-239b21f1f360.html.
Lance Williams, “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Gets His Money From Louisiana Cotton Fields—and the US Government,” Mother Jones, March 17, 2017, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/richard-spencer-cotton-farms-louisiana-subsidies/.
Amanda Moore, “Undercover with the New Alt-Right,” Nation, August 22nd, 2023, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/undercover-maga-alt-right/.
Richard Spencer and Alberto Barbarossa, “Middle Class Mediocrities,” Alexandria (substack), June 7, 2024, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/middle-class-mediocrities.
Richard Spencer, “New Year’s Resolutions,” Alexandria (substack), January 1, 2024, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/new-years-resolutions.
Spencer, “New Year’s Resolutions.”
Web 3.0 is a term often used to describe the evolution to profit sharing or commercial social media that allegedly democratizes media access. This would be the form of social media-esque platforms that include financialization including Patreon, Substack, X Premium, SubscribeStar, Rumble, and YouTube.
“About,” Apollotree, https://www.apollotree.org/about.html.
Amanda Moore, “A Trump Field Director Was Fired for Being a White Nationalist,” Politico, November 4, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/04/white-nationalist-trump-campaign-00187282.
Richard Spencer and Richard Hanania, “The Summit of Richards,” Alexandria (substack), September 19, 2024, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/the-summit-of-richards.
Panama Jackson, “Nick Fuentes called Candace Owens a ‘Uncle Tom’ ‘DEI hire’ before Charlie Kirk’s death— here’s what it reveals about right-wing infighting,” Yahoo News, September 17, 2025, https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/nick-fuentes-called-candace-owens-171938009.html.
Shane Burley, “The Growing Fight Over Zionism in the Heart of the GOP,” Inkstick Media, December 11, 2025, https://inkstickmedia.com/the-growing-fight-over-zionism-in-the-heart-of-the-gop/.
Shane Burley, “The GOP’s Groyper Fringe Became Its Future,” Jacobin, November 27, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/11/fuentes-groypers-republicans-white-nationalism.
Shane Burley, “AmericaFest Battleground in the GOP’s Civil War,” Maiseh Review, December 22, 2025, https://maiseh-review.ghost.io/americafest-battleground-in-the-gops-civil-war/.
Richard Spencer, “Return to Kekistan: Musk H1Bs, and Alt-Right History,” Alexandria (substack), January 1, 2025, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/return-to-kekistan.
Richard Spencer, “Spencer & Fuentes,” Alexandria (substack), December 12, 2025, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/spencer-and-fuentes.

Fascism/Antifascism, Nationalism, Social Movements, White supremacy

Shane Burley

Shane Burley is a journalist and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He is the co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide for Fighting Antisemitism (Melville House, 2024) and the author and editor of three other books on the far-right and antifascism. His journalism and writing has been featured in places such as NBC News, Al Jazeera, In These Times, Truthout, Jewish Currents, Waging Nonviolence, MSNBC, Political Research Associates, The Baffler, The Daily Beast, and Oregon Humanities. He has published on fascism, antisemitism, Israel-Palestine, and Jewish Studies in places such as the Oregon Historical Quarterly, The Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, Fascism, Patterns of Prejudice, multiple academic anthologies, and edited a special issue of the Journal of Social Justice in 2019 on “Antisemitism in the 21st Century.” He can be found on X @shane_burley1 and Instagram @shaneburley.

¡Ningún Ser Humano Es Ilegal! Resistiendo los Ataques Contra los Migrantes de Trump

Ashley Smith

Frente al resurgimiento del Trumpismo, un organizador de Vermont que lucha por los derechos de la comunidad migrante nos recuerda que la verdadera justicia nace de la solidaridad y la organización desde abajo.

Queer Is Total, Baby!

Ira Hybris and Ricci Galiano

Ira Hybris and Ricci Galiano argue that true communist revolution demands embracing the full diversity of the proletariat—queer, racialized, disabled, feminized and beyond—as essential to building a liberatory politics of totality that leaves no one behind.

Varieties of White Nationalism

How RIchard Spencer Is Rebranding as the GOP Moves Right