Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right

By Brendan O’Connor

An engaging and reflective look at how austerity and the billionaire class paved the way for Trump's presidency, the rise of the "alt-right," and the caging of migrants children and adults in detention centers across the country.  For all of the energy that the far right has demonstrated-and for all of the support that they receive from institutional conservatives in the GOP and affiliated organizations-the United States is experiencing an upsurge in left-wing social movements unlike any other in the past half-century, with roots not in the Democratic Party but Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

Drawing on his original reporting as well as archival research, O'Connor investigates how the capitalist class and the radical right mobilize racism to defend their interests, while focusing on one of the most pressing issues of our time: immigration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Jan 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642593815

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© 2023 Brendan O’Connor

Published in 2023 by

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This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation, Wallace Action Fund, and Marguerite Casey Foundation.

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Cover design by Jamie Kerry.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my grandparents, Bob and Rita,

who left home to make a new life

in an unfamiliar place

CONTENTS

Preface to the 2023 Edition

Preface to the 2021 Edition

Chapter One: The Fear Is Always There

Chapter Two: Only Strong Measures Will Suffice

Chapter Three: Think Boots, Not Books

Chapter Four: It’s the Birthrates

Chapter Five: Every State Is a Border State

Chapter Six: Same Struggle, Same Fight

Further Resources

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

PREFACE TO THE 2023 EDITION

O n January 6, 2021, just a week before the hardcover edition of this book was published, hordes of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, seeking to interrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. In the months between the election itself and Congress’s certification of the result, a coalition of far-right groups coalesced around the idea that the election itself had been fraudulent, Trump had won in a landslide, and Biden could not be permitted to assume office. A series of demonstrations across the country culminated in the Stop the Steal rally outside the White House on the morning of January 6, 2021, which Trump himself addressed. You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong, he said. We will not be intimidated into accepting the hoaxes and the lies that we’ve been forced to believe. ¹

Before Trump had even finished speaking, scores of his supporters began to march on the Capitol, pushing police back past one barrier after another. The crowd continued to grow, surging forward up the steps, clambering up walls, eventually breaking into the building and flooding its hallways. In the violence and chaos, 138 police officers were injured. Two later died by suicide.² One Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was shot and killed while attempting to break into the Speaker’s Lobby.³

Members of Congress and their staff and administrative and maintenance workers withdrew farther into the confines of the Capitol building while Trump supporters fought with police, reveling in the chaos. Some came prepared for violence. Some were caught up in the moment. Images from the day show participants transfixed as much by the joy of transgression as by race hatred or nativist bigotry.

Most of the rioters did not have any formal affiliation to far-right political organizations. Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—including some of the very same individuals I spoke to while writing this book—functioned as cadre, leading a ragtag army of middle managers, white-collar professionals, and off-duty cops, collectively animated by the idea that they were protecting American democracy from the great replacement.⁴

Unwilling, in the end, to cast his lot with Trump, vice president Mike Pence certified Biden’s victory. Trump refused to attend the inauguration and has continued to maintain that the election was fraudulent. In the day’s immediate aftermath, I anticipated that the door had been opened to a period of proliferating, stochastic political violence.⁵ Instead, the Biden Justice Department moved quickly: dozens, then scores, then hundreds of rioters were identified and arrested, including some on the Civil War–era charge of seditious conspiracy.⁶ Congressional Democrats formed a select committee, identifying the threads connecting representatives of the Trump White House, organizers of the Stop the Steal rally, the wife of a Supreme Court justice, and members of the security state. Across the country, the organized element of the far right went underground. For a time, anyway.

Between the criminal cases and the congressional committee, it has become increasingly clear that January 6 was, in fact, an attempt by Donald Trump to remain in office, appealing to the eternal sanctity of democracy while simultaneously putting a stake through its ailing heart. As he had told the crowd, We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.⁷ It was for this that Ashli Babbitt gave her life and became a martyr.⁸

Democratic control of both the White House and Congress notwithstanding, the Biden legislative agenda founders on the shoals of centrism and the tide of reaction continues to rise. Now is a time of moral panics. The object of panic is ever shifting, ever evolving: in the right-wing media, from undocumented immigrants voting in elections, to the sex-trafficking deep state, to transgender people anywhere and everywhere; in the liberal media, from kids in cages (at least when Trump rather than Biden is the one caging them), to January 6, to dis-and misinformation, propaganda networks, and the production of alternate political realities. On one thing, everyone agrees: the police cannot be defunded; in fact, Biden has proposed adding one hundred thousand more.⁹

Liberals’ response to January 6 has been to lean ever more heavily on the repressive apparatuses of the state to deliver justice and to protect the institutions of bourgeois democracy—which is ironic, given how pervasive contempt for those institutions is within the repressive apparatus. The left in the United States, meanwhile, appears ambivalent: torn between wanting to dismiss any concern over Trump’s political maneuvering as symptomatic of liberal hysteria and a kind of grudging admiration for the joyfully transgressive spectacle of laying siege to the Capitol building.

After all, where was the left on January 6, 2021? Watching at home, like everyone else. The militant antifascist and antiracist struggles of years preceding, which sharpened under the Trump administration and peaked with the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor police brutality protests in the summer of 2020, had reached a point of exhaustion. Facing intense state repression and the pacifying dynamics of what Olúfé.mi Táíwò calls elite capture, this movement failed to reproduce itself and grow. As the 2020 election drew closer, voting Trump out of office became the only permissible political task, tactic, and strategy. Much was made of organized labor’s efforts to form a bulwark against a stolen election, working in coalition with Democratic Party–aligned NGOs and some segments of capital.¹⁰ Clearly, they succeeded: Biden is in the White House. But the streets of DC and other cities were ceded to the far right, motivated as much by fear of Black-led rebellion as enthusiasm for Trump.

The durability of Trump’s hold as an individual on the wider Republican Party remains to be seen. Even if he were to run for president again in 2024 and reclaim the party’s nomination, it is uncertain whether he could defeat Joe Biden or another Democrat. (At present, it’s not even clear that he would win the nomination: far-right propagandist and long-time Trump supporter Alex Jones has broken with the former president, throwing his endorsement to Florida governor Ron DeSantis.¹¹) The deeper, more troubling possibility, however, remains that Trump’s presidency is both symptomatic of and a catalyst for the further unraveling of neoliberal hegemony. Such an unraveling might not itself be such a bad thing except for the likelihood that something worse lurks around the corner.

In this sense, there is a note of nihilistic accelerationism in leftist jeering at liberal panic over January 6: it may be a fascist coup, but at least it’s something different. Forced to stomach yet another humiliating defeat by the Democratic establishment, those who put their faith in Bernie Sanders are liable to let their resentments drive them. After all, who doesn’t want to see one’s enemies suffer? The absurdity, the joy, the fun that participants had in desecrating symbols of liberal democracy may have appealed to those who oppose neoliberalism’s hegemony, but the spectacular catharsis of their transgression is not without political meaning and content of its own. Every act of destruction is also an act of creation—here halting and abortive, there growing and expanding. On January 6 and in the months before, the insurrectionists demonstrated to the country and to themselves their willingness to take what they believed to be theirs and to do with it what they would. This is not an experience easily forgotten.

Even if Trump as president cut a mostly frustrated figure—outside of immigration policy, at least—his administration opened space for the fascist right (in some forms explicit, in others nascent) to move, experiment, and grow. This did not happen in isolation from but in dialectical relationship to the carceral liberalism of the Democratic Party. The party’s co-optation and demobilization of the uprising for Black lives—which took back the streets from the reactionary anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine demonstrations of the early pandemic—allowed Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Blue Lives Matter proto-fascists, and other paramilitary formations back into public space.

The ongoing process of realignment within the GOP that Trump’s election heralded is not necessarily an ideological one but a strategic one: aspirations to majority appeal have largely been cast aside, and the embrace of minoritarian rule is effectively complete. In a liberal democracy, with its claims to universal rights and equality, minoritarian rule requires both legal and formal restrictions on rights as well as a regime of political violence enforced by the state and by para-state actors. As these contradictions deepen, the dominant elements of the ruling class double down on their strategy for managing them, thus deepening the contradictions further. As neoliberalism’s legitimacy is shattered, it comes increasingly to rely on punitive and coercive measures. Its anti-democratic tendency, which seeks to insulate capital from democracy—especially mass, multiracial democracy—comes to the fore.

•

If neoliberal governance is still the order of the day, that is only because no alternative political movement has yet been strong enough to supplant it. Consent has been abandoned. Domination is the rule. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, Antonio Gramsci famously observed. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.¹² In Blood Red Lines, I identified a unity among the morbid symptoms, which I call border fascism. I grounded my argument in an understanding of fascism as a conjunctural phenomenon, thus sidestepping the necessity of identifying fascism with a historically specific policy platform, aesthetic, or rhetorical mode while simultaneously raising the much more challenging possibility of misapprehending the conjuncture. In other words, the validity of the fascism thesis—or my fascism thesis, at least—hinges on the question of whether neoliberalism is, in fact, in crisis.

Both issues have been the subject of much debate in activist spaces, journalistic outlets, and academic literature. However useful neoliberalism might be as an analytical category, given the proliferation of modifiers—post-neoliberalism, zombie neoliberalism, mutant neoliberalism, authoritarian neoliberalism, neo-illiberalism—the concept is clearly an unstable one.¹³ Studies on the history and development of neoliberalism make clear that it is not a singular, monolithic set of ideas but a broad political movement organized around a few key values—none higher, though, than lowering labor costs. The decades-long political assault on the organized labor movement, the erosion of workers’ rights and the state institutions intended to protect them, and the disruption of efforts to build and sustain solidarity across racial, gender, and national divisions have coincided with the effort to roll back the gains of the civil rights era and restore the untrammeled power of white supremacy in the United States.¹⁴ The anti–New Deal and anti–civil rights movement programs, in other words, are not just parallel but convergent. This has created the conditions for the growth of new kinds of antisystemic movements. The question of where power ultimately lies has been returned to the center of political discourse: the people, yes, but which people?

The crisis of neoliberalism is not simply a political one, centered on ideological legitimacy or electoral viability. It is also an organic crisis driven by overaccumulation and surplus state capacity. Even before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, corporate America and the capitalist class were flourishing, thanks to an uneven recovery from the 2007–08 financial crash and the Trump tax cuts.¹⁵ Since March 2020, this has only accelerated—the most powerful and wealthiest have become more powerful and wealthier—while the rest have been left behind.¹⁶ The tech sector in particular has flourished.¹⁷ Surplus capital must be put into motion, and without anywhere to go, the pressure builds.

The fusion of financial, extractive, and digital capital with the military-, prison-, and border–security industrial complexes offers capitalists a tentative solution to the crisis of neoliberal hegemony, though only through the pursuit of increasingly aggressive forms of domination and repression. Hence the escalating reliance on both ultranationalist ideologies and ever more violent and technologically sophisticated policing tactics, refined in imperialist adventures, redeployed at the border, and then applied to domestic unrest. Such selective repression requires ideological innovation. Nationalism—white, brown, or yellow—is no longer an end but a means, a means to the democratic installation of anti-democratic regimes, argues the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai.¹⁸ Ethnonationalist politicians may come to power on promises of purification and restoration, but what they are really after is the consolidation of the state’s ability to sort, select, and suppress.¹⁹

In addition to ensuring capital’s mobility across borders, neoliberalism degraded working conditions in particular sectors and industries that are less easily uprooted, actively seeking to replace citizen workers with migrants.²⁰ The capitalist class recognizes migrant labor as necessary and productive, especially when it is criminalized and deportable. As neoliberalism fragments, moral panics proliferate and combine: fears of an invasion of migrants, who threaten to strain a frayed social safety net, at the border, which is itself constantly in crisis.

Such panics demand a response, which is almost inevitably repressive. The nature of that repression and its secondary effects, however, may shift. In contrast to the neoliberal enforcement practices of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, for example, Trump’s immigration enforcement regime was characterized as much by its visibility as by its brutality. This public performance of state violence was paired with grassroots, popular violence, motivated by the drive to impunity, which Appadurai defines as the right to brutalize others with the near guarantee of no legal consequences.²¹

While, in the 1960s and 1970s, political violence was primarily a tactic of the far left, mostly targeting property, political violence today is overwhelmingly perpetrated by the far right, targeting people. Perpetrators are not isolated, alienated lone wolves but people with jobs, families, and children—churchgoers and community activists, not to mention elected officials and police.²² This decades-long trend has accelerated recently, with attitudes among Democrats and Republicans toward political violence shifting quickly as the 2020 presidential election approached. In January 2020, nearly half of Republican voters agreed with the idea that a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands, while a year later, after the January 6 insurrection, more than half agreed that if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent action.²³ The narrative of the fraudulent or stolen election has opened new wounds in the already tenuous legitimacy of liberal democracy in the United States, creating ideological justifications for the Trumpist base to take matters into their own hands.

This ideology has been gaining strength—somewhat unevenly, it should be said—since the end of the US war in Vietnam. The white power movement that emerged from this era drew on the history of white supremacist organizing in the United States but took on new forms in reaction to the gains made by the social movements of the civil rights era. Rather than defending the state’s interests, white power activists, many of them veterans of the war in Vietnam, targeted it, ultimately declaring war on the federal government and those they perceived to be under its protection.

The bloody legacy of this movement was present in the massacres committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo and Utøya, Dylann Roof in Charleston, Robert Gregory Bowers in Pittsburgh, Brenton Harrison Tarrant in Christchurch, and Patrick Wood Crusius in El Paso.²⁴ In May 2022, yet another gunman traveled to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, where he massacred ten people at a grocery store with a rifle inscribed with the names of other mass shooters and the words The Great Replacement.²⁵ In August, Ricky Shiffer, a US Navy veteran, was killed when he attacked an FBI office in Ohio following an agency raid on Mar-a-Lago.²⁶ These individuals were radicalized online, where a digital social movement built on memes, in-jokes, and esoteric theories of race and nationhood brought them to the most brutal conclusions.²⁷

The Trump era, however, has also seen the emergence of a significantly more organized movement capable of collective political violence. The January 6 insurrection was not simply the act of an autonomous individual taking matters into his own hands but that of a mass of people, sharing a political subjectivity, seeking to remake the world. Veterans and active-duty members of the military, as well as off-duty police, moved among them.²⁸ Simultaneously emboldened by unequivocal support from right-wing proponents of law and order like Trump and anxious about left-wing social movements and demands for police reform or even abolition, police have come to exert political autonomy, sometimes even going so far as to reject the legitimacy of the state they ostensibly exist to defend. And a revitalized Christian nationalism opens new political horizons for a post-Trump American fascism.²⁹

Just weeks after two brutal mass shootings, in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, accelerating the restriction of women’s autonomy and opening the door to the further rollback of civil rights gains.³⁰ Far-right activists and militants have escalated a homophobic and transphobic campaign against schools and libraries across the country.³¹ Dozens of union picket lines and racial justice demonstrations have been attacked by drivers in cars—including police officers—stirring up memories of the deadly August 12, 2017, attack on marchers in Charlottesville.³² (As part of a wave of legislation targeting protestors, Republican state legislators have passed bills exempting drivers who injure or kill protestors with their cars on public roads from liability.³³) More than a year and a half after Trump left office, the rhetoric of an invasion at the US–Mexico border continues to resonate deeply.³⁴ Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, more than half of Republican candidates for House, Senate, and statewide office denied the legitimacy of the last presidential election.³⁵

And while these new forms of reaction may look different than the fascisms of the classical period, echoes of the past ring in the present. After all, it was in Istria and Venezia Giulia—the regions surrounding the diverse border city of Trieste—that fascism came into its own as a political movement. During a visit to Venezia Giulia in 1920, Mussolini recognized the particular character of border fascism, as its adherents had come to call it: the fascist project there was more delicate, more sacred, more difficult, more necessary, the most necessary, Mussolini said. Dealing with ethnic minorities like the Slavs, an inferior and barbarous race, would require the club.³⁶ It was the burning of the Narodni Dom in Trieste, a cultural hub for the city’s large Slovene minority, that signaled the true birth of fascism—not in the Roman capital but in the borderlands.³⁷

•

As I have reflected on the work that went into this book and the two years since its release, I must admit to feeling a certain amount of ambivalence regarding its focus, even as the forces of reaction continue to gather strength. Amadeo Bordiga and Gilles Dauvé’s critiques of antifascism have lately been ringing in my ears. The essence of anti-fascism consists in resisting fascism by defending democracy: one no longer struggles against capitalism but seeks to pressure capitalism into renouncing the totalitarian option, Dauvé argued.³⁸ Or, as Bordiga put it even more provocatively: The most sinister effect of the Fascist phenomenon would be the rise of the anti-fascist bloc.³⁹

In other words, when all else is subordinated to the struggle against the far right, the struggle between capital and labor—between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians—becomes obscured by the conflict between fascism and democracy. The left is forced to make common cause with some class enemies to impede the progress of others who pose an even greater threat. Doing so, in this view, only prepares the ground for the left’s own defeat—either by strengthening the moderates, centrists, and liberals, or by failing to stop the fascists, who history shows the moderates, centrists, and liberals will ultimately accommodate.

My first response to this argument is revulsion. The most sinister effect of the fascist phenomenon, surely, is the things that the fascists have done—not the efforts made to stop them. But then, from a certain vantage point, the widespread antifascist organizing of the past decade or so does seem to have strengthened the powers and capacities of security forces and the police state while legitimizing the Democratic Party as the party of antifascism. Liberals have deftly used the January 6 insurrection to their advantage, reinscribing the sanctity of the state and the institutions of liberal democracy through the stagecraft of the Congressional select committee’s hearings. However, even if Congressional committees may be able to shed light on how something like January 6 could have happened—the donor and activist networks, the links between party and para-party organizations, the role of militias and paramilitary groups and their relationships with law enforcement and the military—the why will remain elusive. Herein lies the value of a book like Blood Red Lines.

What we must seek to do—what I have tried to do in Blood Red Lines, and continue to try to do—is to cultivate an understanding of the struggle against fascism as necessarily anticapitalist: that it is capitalism that produces the conditions in which fascism takes root, that turns to fascism when it cannot maintain itself and its contradictions through other means, when hegemony begins to fracture, consent is abandoned, and domination is all that remains.

The left is incessantly told that we need to fight to protect our democracy, it is true. But our democracy is neither ours nor democratic in any meaningful way. Democracy barely exists in this country at all. Should the fight for democracy, then, be abandoned altogether? No: the antifascist struggle, for the left, needs to be understood as the struggle not simply to defend democracy against the fascist threat but to do so by expanding democracy beyond its bourgeois guardrails, to deepen people’s experience of democracy beyond elections into all aspects of their lives—for true, proletarian democracy: a society organized and governed by the workers, the poor, and the oppressed.

How does this happen? Through organizing: the mundane, perennial, quotidian work of stitching together a new social fabric, binding people together in communities of solidarity and struggle, challenging them to think their lives democratically. It is the dis-organization of the working class, aided and abetted by bourgeois liberals, that has allowed fascism to present itself as a solution to the ongoing crises of capitalism; therefore, it is at this level that the struggle against fascism must first and foremost be undertaken. To call for a revolutionary antifascism is to call for an antifascism that does not fixate on the fascist spectacle, that does not concern itself with the norms and sanctity of bourgeois institutions, that above all does not look to the repressive and carceral apparatuses of the state for succor but begins to forge a new world in people’s everyday lives. The fight begins long before it spills into the streets.

PREFACE TO THE 2021 EDITION

One must take history as it comes, whatever course it takes.

—Rosa Luxemburg

O n February 28, 2020, as the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 spread across the world, a group of congressional Republicans sent a letter to officials in the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security articulating their concern that sufficient action was being taken to protect US citizens from the disease, which they worried would spread across the border with Mexico. Given the porous nature of our border, and the continued lack of operational control, they wrote, it is foreseeable, indeed predictable, that any outbreak in Central America or Mexico could cause a rush to our border. This, they warned, would impose a new burden at our southern border that will threaten the safety and health of individuals in the United States and cause a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions along our border and at detention facilities. ¹

In fact, the virus was more likely to spread from the United States to Central America than the reverse—due in large part to the ongoing US policy of mass detention and deportation. What is more, there already was a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions along the US-Mexico border and in immigration detention facilities. Health and sanitation conditions in the migrant camps outside border towns, swollen with asylum seekers forced to remain in Mexico while their applications were processed (thanks to policy changes made under President Donald Trump), were poor even before the global pandemic.² A doctor, himself an asylum seeker, predicted that a COVID-19 outbreak at the 2,500-person migrant and refugee encampment in Matamoros would be catastrophic.³ Another doctor, detained at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, warned that many people will die if we are not released.⁴

Fearing arrest and detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, undocumented immigrants working on the precarious fringes of the US labor market began to withdraw from what few social services were available to them.⁵ Estimates vary, but of the approximately three million farmworkers employed in the United States, making on average between $17,500 and $20,000 a year, at least half are undocumented immigrants.⁶ The pandemic hit just as peak harvesting seasons began for many crops that have to be picked by hand, often by workers living in cramped housing provided by their employers—ideal conditions for the virus to spread. In California, for example, strawberry growers were switching from paying an hourly rate to a piece rate, as they do every year. Such shifts are meant to incentivize working faster, but they also mean that time spent on precautions to wash one’s hands or maintain six feet of distance was money lost.⁷ We won’t stop working, Luis Jimenez, a dairy worker and organizer with the Alianza Agricola in New York State, said. We’re willing to risk the virus. But I didn’t come here to die. I came so that my family in Mexico will live. We don’t know what will happen to those who get sick. How will we pay our bills and send money to help our families survive?⁸ Just across the border with Mexico, the virus spread through US-owned factories, known as maquiladoras, killing workers as companies ignored federal orders to close.⁹

At the same time, ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) escalated their surveillance efforts in so-called sanctuary cities—that is, cities that have made some token effort not to comply with federal deportation proceedings—deploying heavily armed tactical units to flood the streets, as one official put it.¹⁰ In New York City, immigration arrests doubled.¹¹ As panic over outbreaks spread through detention centers, many of the immigrants held within rebelled, rioting and organizing hunger strikes.¹² Guards at a detention center in New Jersey dismissed detainees’ requests for more toilet paper and soap with disdain. They don’t do anything, Ronal Umaña, a thirty-year-old detainee from El Salvador said. They only yell at us and tell us that if we complain—that ‘unless we see you get really sick, or you really have a high fever, we can’t do anything with you.’ So we say, ‘If we have a bad fever, and lots of us are sick, we can die here,’ and they say, ‘Well, you’re going to have to die of something.’¹³

Years before the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, Trump, a notorious germaphobe, was using the language of national hygiene to agitate his supporters. In 2015, not long after declaring Mexican immigrants drug dealers and rapists, Trump warned that tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border thanks to immigration.¹⁴ In the fall and winter of 2018, as attention turned toward caravans of asylum seekers traveling en masse from Central America to the United States, a former ICE agent, David Ward, warned Fox News viewers that these migrants were carrying diseases such as smallpox, leprosy, and [tuberculosis] that are going to infect our people, despite the fact that the last known case of smallpox occurred in 1977.¹⁵ Just a few weeks later, Tomi Lahren, a far-right commentator and Fox Nation host, warned her viewers that asylum seekers would bring tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, chickenpox, and hepatitis to their communities.¹⁶ A framed photo of Lahren with US Border Patrol officials hangs in the agency’s DC headquarters.¹⁷

I began reporting on the US far right at the beginning of 2016, my attention captured by the militia members who seized control of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Learning about the history that led to that moment, I was fascinated by the celebrity of the Bundy family, the movement’s simultaneously amateurish and sophisticated use of social media, and, above all, the proliferating political tendencies, shifting alliances and affiliations, and changing orientation toward state power. While antigovernment sentiment had defined the so-called Patriot movement under the Obama administration, far-right activists of various stripes, including the much younger cohort of the alt-right, were recuperated into mainstream politics through Trump’s insurgent campaign for president. I found myself repeatedly returning to the question of the relationship between the policy makers (elected and unelected), wealthy donors, and intellectuals of the ruling class and the reactionaries making their presence known both in tweets and in the street. This was, I came to believe, another way of articulating the question of the relationship between capitalism and white supremacy.

When I started down this path, I was writing for Gawker, a New York media gossip website that had transformed itself into one of the internet’s most high-profile antagonists of the twenty-first-century power elite. For better or for worse, Gawker would pick a fight with anyone. This, among other things, had made it a target for the very kinds of people I was interested in: billionaires and fascists. Harassment and death threats were part of the job at Gawker Media, which included similarly acerbic websites like Jezebel, Deadspin, and Gizmodo. (Jezebel’s overwhelmingly female staff still endure terrifying misogyny.) As the 2016 primary proceeded, however, the virulence escalated, driven in part by reactionary glee at Gawker’s impending demise: a lawsuit brought by the professional wrestler Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hulk Hogan—and secretly funded by Trump-supporting Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—bankrupted the company. Not long after Trump received the Republican Party’s nomination, Gawker ceased publication.

Shortly thereafter, the hosts of an influential alt-right podcast invited me on their show to talk about Gawker shutting down. Unable to ignore my sense of morbid curiosity, I accepted. I did think there might be some journalistic value in it, too. At the time, many of us who were writing about the alt-right still were not sure quite what to make of it. I certainly wasn’t. Perhaps that was naive. By the end of the conversation, however, it became clear to me that these people were fascists: not just edgy internet trolls trying to get a rise out of people, but deeply, terrifyingly sincere political actors trying to make their way toward a world where anyone who did not fit into their vision of strength, beauty, or worth was