The alt-right was a version of white supremacy that attracted a much younger crowd through the internet, and it aimed to work within mainstream politics to advance racism. And for a moment, it seemed like it was working — that the movement was moving from the internet to real life.
But after the Unite the Right rally in 2017, their efforts were slowly crushed. By mid-2018, its leaders told me they could no longer hold public rallies that were announced in advance. Many groups disbanded because of infighting, or because their internal communications were infiltrated by anti-fascists, or because their leader was humiliated in scandal. A longtime troll told me last month that talking about current events in that world was considered “cringe,” meaning embarrassing.
White nationalism still exists. The Department of Homeland Security says it is the greatest terror threat in the United States. But it is not spreading through the movement that called itself the alt-right.
This happened because the alt-right was hammered on three fronts — social, financial and legal. It’s important to understand how these three elements worked together, because there are early signs the same pattern is happening with the Trump movement and the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The blowback came in three parts.
As their faces circulated on social media, they lost their own accounts. White power advocates were kicked of Twitter, Facebook, etc. Alternative social media sites like Gab popped up. But some complained to me that using Gab was pointless. Elliot Kline, then head of the now-defunct group Identity Evropa, told me there were no journalists on Gab. They couldn’t use it to spread their message outside the echo chamber.
This was the aftereffect of Charlottesville that most Americans could see best, but it wasn’t the most important.
The second part was the money. They lost the power to raise it. Fundraising sites such as Patreon and GoFundMe kicked them off. White power programmers tried to make their own versions — Hatreon, GoyFundMe — but that didn’t work, because then payment processors dropped them.
The civil rights advocacy group Color of Change had been pressuring financial services companies to stop processing the payments of White nationalists well before Charlottesville. Color of Change president Rashad Robinson told CNN that at the time, he thought it was absurd that it was so easy to give White nationalists money.
“We started going to the credit card companies and processors, and they’d say you have to go to the banks. The banks would say you have to go to the credit card companies,” Robinson said.
“A lot of enabling happens because people in powerful positions are not seeing this as a threat against them and their families,” Robinson said. “They could make intellectual arguments about slippery slopes, but what they were doing was creating an out so they didn’t have to make hard decisions — decisions that should not have been hard in the first place.”
PayPal was the only company that worked well with Color of Change to cut off White power groups, Robinson said. “And then Charlottesville happened.”
“Magically they could do something they couldn’t do before — and no law had changed.”
In the fall of 2018, Chris Cantwell, who I’d interviewed in the Vice documentary about Charlottesville, told me he’d been dropped by nearly every payment processor. He complained he could still get money through Bitcoin — but few people used it, and it had no mechanism for recurring payments. At one point, alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer told me he could get money only through paper checks.
(In a sign of how the pressure has caused the White power movement to eat itself, in September, Cantwell was found guilty of extortion. Cantwell had threatened a White supremacist that he’d rape his wife unless the man gave Cantwell the personal information of a third White supremacist whom Cantwell was angry with.)
The alt-right defendants have not been able to find legal representation with a comparable resume.
In fact, they’ve struggled to find lawyers at all. Six of the remaining 18 defendants, including Richard Spencer, are now representing themselves in court. In a hearing this spring, Spencer’s lawyer asked to withdraw from the case because Spencer hadn’t paid him. Spencer told the judge the case had been “financially crippling.” The judge allowed the lawyer to quit.
The trial is scheduled for April, but it may be pushed to October because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Will QAnon and the pro-Trump mob face something similar? There are early signs the answer is yes. Activists and law enforcement are working together to find the identities of people pictured inside the Capitol.
Thousands of QAnon accounts have been removed from social media. They’ve tried migrating to Parler, but Amazon stopped providing services to Parler, effectively kicking it off the public internet. Apple and Google removed it from their app stores. On eBay, sellers are trying to take advantage of less tech-savvy Trump fans, offering mobile phones with Parler already installed for more than $1,000.
Trump is certainly in a stronger position, in terms of power and money, than even the most affluent marchers in Charlottesville. But that also means he has more to lose. Especially legally.