The Fascist, White Identitarian, Paleo-Conservative Menace of the American Fringe Right
Back in the mid-2010’s, the American radical right coalesced under the umbrella term “Alt-Right” which was coined by Richard Spencer in 2009, six years before he mobilized the National Policy Institute to support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign. Use of the term “Alt-Right” has fallen out of favor after the events following the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville which broke the union asunder, but the radical right movement as a whole continues to operate in its usual decentralized, provocative fashion in what it sees as an existential racial struggle against all the non-white races in the entire world, most particularly Jews.
The Threat They Pose
White supremacism and quasi-fascist ideology have terrorized the laboring masses of the United States from the day the Declaration of Independence was signed by the country’s founders. As a nation built on slave labor and violent expansionism in service to its capitalist class, the United States has contributed to the ideological foundations of the radical far-right worldview as a matter of official policy. The tradition of racial exclusionism and religious patriotism meant in days prior to justify such criminal policies as race-based chattel slavery and Manifest Destiny find their legacy today in the fringe politics of the American radical right.
Despite Donald Trump’s fearmongering about Islamist terrorism threatening the United States public with suicide bomb campaigns intended to establish Shariah Law worldwide, the vast majority of deadly terrorist attacks that actually take place in America come from the radical right. The following comes from Dr. Pip Marie Cowley in her dissertation on Richard Spencer’s fanatically pro-Trump and white supremacist political think tank, the National Policy Institute: “According to the 2020 brief issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, not only have the majority of terrorist incidents in the United States since the mid-nineties been committed by right-wing groups, but the total number of right-wing terrorist incidents in the last six years has increased significantly and is still growing. ‘Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.’”[1]
Not content to terrorize the masses with murderous crime sprees in pursuit of a delusional fantasy world where neo-Nazi fascist bloodshed leads to a sudden collapse of the allegedly Jew-controlled US government,[2] these rabid dogs of the right have spent decades engaging in suit-and-tie agitprop in connection with the US Republican Party, starting with former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader David Duke’s bid for the US presidency and successful election into the Louisiana state legislature in the late 1980s, continuing with the 2000s mainstream television news broadcasts featuring live interviews with Don Black, another Klansman,[3] the well-known Richard Spencer and his “Alt-Right” movement from around 2009 to the year 2017, leading to today’s America First movement headed by Nicholas Fuentes, a man whose choice words about women and minorities wouldn’t feel out of place on an incel (involuntary celibate) web forum.
Where They Come From
Although today, the differences between the various decentralized groups of far-right, white identitarian (their term), woman-hating losers are largely a matter of tactics, this group’s ideological ancestry goes back along two main threads that don’t meaningfully start to converge until the 1980s.
Most Americans have heard of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), an organization founded in Polaski, Tennessee in 1865 by ex-Confederate soldiers after the end of the Civil War. This is not the starting point of white supremacist ideology in America. The idea of “British Israelism”, the idea that white Europeans are God’s chosen people as described in the Old Testament, and the so-called “mudpeople” of the world are less than human, goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, and the idea of a “Jewish sect” of the Illuminati, Freemasons, and Order of the Templars conspiring to infiltrate institutions of European governance goes back even farther. (Cawley, 2021) This is a section of old fringe-right doctrine that isn’t widely considered as particularly foreign to America by most people’s reckoning. Fascism and Nazism come much later.
Benito Mussolini founded the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in Italy in the year 1919. According to Benito Mussolini, the Fascist ideology, in opposition to “Socialism”, “Democracy”, and “Liberalism”, is the only truly revolutionary ideology, one which prescribes a complete personal dictatorship of the fascist political party over all the economic, cultural, and personal lives within the nation as the most effective treatment of the social and political ailments a nation suffers as a result of materialist, liberal decadence. By having the state take full authority over the people, complete class collaboration is established, every member of the nation’s people is made to conform to a grand fascist ideal defined by the state, and all this is in national collective pursuit of constant military expansion and conquest, which according to the Fascist core philosophical framework, is the most important sign of national vitality and health. The German Fascists – known better as the Nazis – did much the same thing, except that they changed their definition of what constitutes membership to the German nation so that while this membership doesn’t require German citizenship, it does require German ancestry. Both the Italian and the German Fascists see the state as the embodiment of their respective peoples’ collective wills on a profound, metaphysical level, and see the nation as the combination of the state and people which is the physical expression of this collective will.[4] The Italian Fascist movement was ended abruptly in 1943, when Mussolini (at that point having been disgraced and forced to serve Hitler as his puppet in German-occupied Italy) was captured by Italian communist partisans and killed, and the Nazi movement famously ended in 1945, when General Alfred Jodl surrendered to the Allied powers of World War Two after Hitler committed suicide in response to the Red Army capture of Berlin.
Fascism in America can be traced back to 1933, when German-American immigrant and naturalized citizen Fritz Julius Kuhn, with the help of Rudolf Hess in Germany, founded the Friends of the New Germany organization. Kuhn had alleged himself to have been involved in the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed attempt at a Mussolini-style coup against the Weimar German government. After Rudolf Hess had the organization disbanded over violence committed by the American public, especially its Jewish population, against it, Fritz Julius Kuhn created the German-American Bund in 1936. The purpose of the Bund was to promote Nazi ideology and manipulate public opinion in favor of Nazi Germany. In 1937-38, the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered that Fritz Kuhn had embezzled funds to the amount of $14,000 – well over $300,000 in today’s money – from the Bund’s financial accounts to pay for his nationwide network of mistresses. Kuhn was arrested for grand larceny and forgery, and served 2.5-5 years in Sing Sing Prison. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered the Second World War, and passed legislation which required non-citizens to register with the federal government. The German-American Bund, unable to survive this legislation, dissolved shortly after Germany declared war on the United States.[5]
The John Birch Society and The American Nazi Party
The John Birch Society, whose organization could boast fanatical neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce (more on him later) among its members, was founded by Robert W. Welch Jr., a wealthy businessman, in December 1958 along with other wealthy businessmen who were staunch conservatives and anti-communists. They professed that the United States government had been infiltrated by communists under the direct guidance of the Soviet Union. It still exists today as an extreme paleoconservative and constitutionalist organization. The John Birch Society joined Senator Joseph McCarthy in accusing President Dweight Eisenhower of being a communist infiltrator, and later went on to propagate that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was a communist plot to destabilize the country.[6]
In 1959, a World War Two veteran named George Lincoln Rockwell who served in the Navy on both the Pacific and the Atlantic fronts[7] founded the American Nazi Party (ANP). William Luther Pierce was also a member of the ANP after finding the John Birch Society too liberal. George Lincoln Rockwell used to speak publicly at colleges which would host his speeches while his ANP members would wear uniforms modeled after the German Sturmabteilung, and his ANP had published a magazine called The Storm Trooper. They would also heckle and counter-protest at Civil Rights demonstrations. Rockwell was murdered at a laundromat parking lot in 1967 by a former editor of The Storm Trooper who was evicted from the ANP for hate speech against dark-haired Nazis. The ANP did not survive Rockwell’s death, but a number of splinter groups did form, some of which have survived to this day.[8]
The KKK also saw its third resurgence in popularity, the previous two occurring during the American Reconstruction period and the Roaring Twenties, during the American Civil Rights Movement. This was the first meaningful interaction between the neo-Nazi and the non-Nazi strains of American far-right politics. The Christian Identity movement, with its main ideological basis in the old British Israelism, was also becoming prevalent in this time. Although the KKK and the Christian Identity movement initially had very little to do with each other, George Lincoln Rockwell encouraged the two far-right constituencies to intermingle with each other, resulting in an ideological fusion between the KKK and Christian Identity trends.
The American Fringe Right After Civil Rights
In the year 1970, the Youth for Wallace organization, whose membership included William Luther Pierce and a man named Willis Carto, was reorganized into the National Youth Alliance. Willis Carto and William Luther Pierce had a falling out after Carto accused Pierce of stealing one of his mailing lists, and in 1974, the organization split between the two. Pierce, who had inherited the larger portion of the organization, renamed his section the National Alliance, which would go on to become the largest neo-Nazi organization in America, with a dues-paying membership of more than 1,400 people and a $1,000,000 yearly revenue from its sales of books and music records in conjunction with the regular income earned by membership dues. The National Alliance suffered a sharp decline when Pierce died in 2002, as the succeeding leadership proved insufficiently competent to run the institution.[9]
A related organization, the Aryan Nations, was founded in the mid-1970s by Richard Butler, a World War Two Air Force veteran who was introduced to Christian Identity theology by William Potter Gale, a retired colonel who was an aide to General Douglas MacArthur and leader of the militia California Rangers. The Aryan Nations was reformed out of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, a Christian Identity organization. In the early 1980s, a time when the KKK was experiencing its fourth and final resurgence in popularity, an association of KKK, Aryan Nations, and National Alliance splinter groups formed a pseudo-military militant organization called The Order. Taking inspiration from The Turner Diaries, a novel published by William Luther Pierce in 1978 under the pen name “Andrew MacDonald”, The Order went on a crime spree in 1983-1984 with the intention to raise funds which were to finance a guerilla war against the United States government which would result in its ultimate collapse. This would create a power vacuum that The Order would then fill with its own imposition of a white Aryan fascist government. After allowing the organization to collect about $8 million from armored car robberies and murder several dozen people, the FBI infiltrated it and traced its leadership to a house in Whidbey Island in Washington State, the FBI initiated a firefight where every Order member was either killed, or arrested and incarcerated on counts of murder and armed robbery, among other crimes. (Cawley, 2021)
During the 1990s the World Wide Web started coming to widespread public use, and the American far-right was quick to adopt it as their primary means of public outreach, being much cheaper to use to disseminate information than printed periodicals or magazines. In 1995, another top-ranking KKK member Don Black created Stormfront, a self-proclaimed white nationalist web forum. Having been unique in its day as an online message board for members of the lunatic fringe right, Stormfront was quick to attract mainstream media attention. In the early 2000s, when the website could boast as many as 23,000 members, Don Black could be seen on televised corporate media channels, espousing his white supremacist dogma in the absolute most polite and (by neo-Nazi standards) quite eloquent language you could imagine. This marked an essential milestone for the political opportunist suit-and-tie thread of the far-right American movement started by David Duke, the other thread being the violent accelerationist one whose lineage can be traced back to The Order and Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance.
Richard Spencer, Donald Trump, and the “Alt-Right”
According to Dr. Cowley, “the Alternative Right or Alt-Right is an umbrella term for contemporary groups and individuals who have right-wing ideations but reject the mainstream conservative movement. The Alt-Right has no unifying principle or canon.” (Cowley, 2021) (It should be noted that the American far-right, particularly Tom Metzger, had deduced from the FBI infiltration of The Order that organizations with strict hierarchical structures were too easily infiltrated by law enforcement to be useful to their agenda, and there is a noticeable lack of centralized leadership in the white supremacist movement after William Luther Pierce died in 2002.) Richard Spencer had coined the term in 2009 while he worked for Taki’s Magazine. That same year, he quit his work for Taki’s Magazine, and he went on to join the National Policy Institute (NPI) soon after.
The NPI was established in 2005 by a well-known anti-Semite called Samuel T. Francis, and a wealthy far-right donor by the name of William Regnery II. In 2011, Richard Spencer took over as President and Creative Director. Jointly with NPI, he created AltRight.com, RadixJournal.com, and Radix Journal, which were engines for white nationalist propaganda that took on the trappings of academic literature by, among other things, exchanging their usual inflammatory phrases for more scientific-sounding ones like “human biodiversity” and “white identitarianism.” Phrase-mongering like this is used by political opportunists across the political spectrum to screen every kind of contemptible motivation. When Donald Trump began his first presidential campaign in 2015, Richard Spencer was quick to cast his support for Donald Trump’s anti-immigration platform and exploit the widespread popularity of the Trump campaign to draw attention to his own fringe politics. Although Donald Trump had outwardly disavowed the NPI and the entire Alt-Right political trend, he continued to enjoy support from Richard Spencer and his army of Nazi cartoon frog posters (Pepe the Frog became a mascot of the Alt-Right at around this time, a tradition still in practice today[10]) until he was eventually elected in 2016.
In the year 2017, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, was debating on the removal of two Confederate statues in their landscape. Richard Spencer and his NPI were quick to organize what was ostensibly a protest against the removal of these statues, a rally called Unite the Right. At Unite the Right, the soft, mostly online figures of the Alt-Right rubbed shoulders with hardened neo-Nazis and white supremacists, an experience they must have found extremely uncomfortable. The total number of racist protestors was well in the hundreds. Very quickly, the rally became violent, and the rally had to be disbanded after it developed into a “series of skirmishes.” Donald Trump is quoted as having said there were “a lot of fine people” among the white supremacist hooligans attending Unite the Right.[11] The NPI fell into sharp decline as Richard Spencer and others faced civil lawsuits related to the violent behavior exhibited at the rally. By 2018, NPI had lost its tax-exempt status twice, key leading figures left the organization, and articles stopped being posted on their website, though it is still open to collecting donations. Attempts to deliver legal paperwork to NPI were rendered “non-deliverable” by the organization’s dissolution.
Since the Unite the Rally came to its violent conclusion and the NPI fell into disarray, the white supremacist world in America has not seen any organization like the NPI, National Alliance, or American Nazi Party, or any singular leadership figure, that could be said to represent the entire movement. The American far-right has learned in a very Pavlovian way that for their particular agenda, formal leadership and bureaucratic structures spell nothing but doom and failure.
Why They Should Be Fought
The far-right, white identitarian movement traces its ideological ancestry back to the abominable traditions of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. On a deep philosophical level, at the very center of their worldview, they see life as a violent struggle for the political power of the nation-state. This imperative is asserted as profound metaphysical truth, transcendent from all material considerations, and imposed on all the peoples of the world as though it were divine right. Their belief in racial supremacism, therefore, is not rooted in the racialist pseudoscience they espouse as the absolute core of their belief in its reality, although the racialist pseudoscience is something they rabidly defend as something invaluable to their propaganda. Their belief in the ultimate imperative of the white Aryan race to dominate the other nations through violent struggle is religious in nature. It is therefore impossible to defeat this ideology completely by means of civil discourse. The only criticism these fanatics will ever respond favorably to is the criticism of weapons.
Because they see the people of their nation, the national-folk, as bound up with the state in a way that transcends all class distinctions and is not necessarily grounded in the objective material world, they are under the foolish assumption that they have created a system which separates itself from both capitalism and socialism by means of a metaphysical fusion of the socioeconomic strata of society under the aegis of the fascist state. They are incorrect. As can be seen in history, fascist movements, because they can only appeal to the laboring masses by way of phrase-mongering, fear-mongering, and empty promises of a glorious return to an embellished bygone age, derive their power from the wealth-owning classes of society in times of extreme national duress, when they perceive that their power and their very lives are under dire threat from communist seizure of political power. Fascism does not replace the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the personal dictatorship of the fascist political party. Instead, the two forms of dictatorship stand together, hand in hand, one supported by the other, in utter defiance and stark reaction to the rank and file of the surging red masses.
Because no such dire threat to the capitalist class exists at present, the far-right in America continues to remain a marginalized fringe movement. As a political body, it has a left and right wing. Its left wing is the violent, terroristic one called the “accelerationists”. Examples of this trend include Terrorgram and Atomwaffen, groups whose heritage can be traced back to The Order and White Aryan Resistance. Its right wing is the political opportunist, “entryist” wing that couches its inflammatory rhetoric in soft-sounding and smart-sounding phrases aimed mainly at young mainstream conservatives who are amenable to their populist and faith-based political platforms. If you wish to fight the far-right, the best thing to do is aggravate them; to make them betray themselves openly and reveal their revolting beliefs and their pathetic feelings. Because there is one thing both groups have in common: they rely on deception to survive. When you take away their smokescreens and make them express who they really are, openly, for all the world to see, they crumble like so much origami in the heavy rain.
[1] Cawley, P. M. (2021). Rebranding white supremacy – an analysis of the National Policy Institute (dissertation). Research Exchange. Retrieved 2026, from https://rex.libraries.wsu.edu/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Rebranding-White-Supremacy-An-Analysis-of/99900651794001842/filesAndLinks?index=0.
[2] Anti-Defamation League. (2024, August 16). Accelerationism. ADL. https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/accelerationism
[3] Southern Poverty Law Center. (2025, June 5). Stormfront. Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/stormfront/
[4] Swallow, A. (Ed.). (n.d.). The Project Gutenberg ebook, readings on fascism and national socialism, by various, edited by Alan Swallow. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, by Various. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14058/14058-h/14058-h.htm
[5] PBS. (2024). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9HmV_-EE8g
[6] Antonecchia, M. (n.d.). The John Birch Society: Its History, Platform, and Impact. View of volume VI Spring 2026. https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/colloquium/issue/view/1491/401
[7] Moore, W. (2024). George Lincoln Rockwell: History: Research starters: Ebscohost. EBSCO. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/george-lincoln-rockwell
[8] Randolph, S. (2019). American Nazi Party in the 1960s: History: Research starters: Ebscohost. EBSCO. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/american-nazi-party-1960s
[9] Southern Poverty Law Center. (2026, August 5). William Pierce. Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/william-pierce/
[10] Nicholas J. Fuentes: Five things to know. ADL. (n.d.). https://www.adl.org/resources/article/nicholas-j-fuentes-five-things-know
[11] Southern Poverty Law Center. (2024, December 3). Once a political force, Richard Spencer and National Policy Institute Go Quiet. Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/once-political-force-richard-spencer-and-national-policy-institute-go-quiet/
