15 May Revealed: The rising tide of youth racism
Pictured: Alt-right YouTube personality Godwinson. Used with permission.
We often think of racial prejudice as the territory of the aged and hyper-conservative. But increasingly, white nationalism and extreme racial philosophy is becoming prevalent among the young. James Middleton provides a report with some upsetting language.
Chloe is 20 years old, born and raised in East London where she attends university. She is in many ways a pleasantly typical British Gen Z-er, running a small blog and working part-time at a department store in one of the capital’s largest shopping centres.
She also happens to be of South Asian descent. You or I may not find that particularly interesting, but to an increasingly-growing number of people it is very much so. Chloe is one of thousands worldwide who have fallen victim to the trolling and abuse of the ‘alt-right’, a movement of young white men espousing extreme opinions on issues of race.
“Twitter is the worst”, she tells me. “Every other tweet is met with ‘paki this, paki that’, and sometimes they’re really threatening. I suffer from anxiety and it honestly makes going online so hard”. Such is her concern that she requested we not use her real name for this article.
Although there have always been people with distasteful views, recent political developments in the US and Europe have led some to claim that the number of people espousing racially divisive points of view is on the increase, with the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement coming into particularly sharp relief in the public imagination in recent years.
The alternative right is a phrase believed to have been coined by the paleoconservative philosopher Paul Gottfried in 2008, in an article for Taki’s Magazine. It wouldn’t be until later, when the phrase was shortened and popularised by white nationalist Richard Spencer that a true movement would come to bear its name, however.
Spencer had briefly served as a member of the editorial team at The American Conservative, a widely respected publication for (shockingly) American Conservatives. But he was fired after just nine months for his extreme views, which led to him taking on the role of executive editor at Taki’s Magazine. His tenure overlapped with Gottfried’s article, and he would found the website AlternativeRight shortly after.
The movement might have remained an irrelevant fringe but for the writings of a then-21 year-old student. Markus Willinger had been politically active since the age of 15 with local racist groups in his home village of Scharding, Austria, just a half-hour’s drive from the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. Six years later, he published his first book: Generation Identity: A Declaration of War against the ’68ers.
Generation Identity is a significant text in the evolution of today’s alt-right, though few ever acknowledge it as such. It’s a largely unremarkable screed in terms of content, (though bizarre and unsettling in prose) containing all the things on might expect such a work to contain. It’s crucial innovation, however, can be found in the book’s subtitle: Against the ’68ers.
Intentionally or not, Willinger had hit upon the note that would resonate most sonorously with a new generation of Europeans – that racial extremism wasn’t simply the preserve of the small-minded, knuckle-dragging and mouth-breathing. It could be, he argued, a legitimate expression of youthful revolt. A middle finger to the baby boomer generation.
“You’ve thrown us into this world, uprooted and disoriented, without telling us where to go or where our path lies”, reads the book’s introduction. “You’ve destroyed every means for us to orient ourselves”.
With Willinger’s innovations in mind, Spencer busily set about laying the groundwork for his rising movement, taking over the Presidency of far-right thinktank the National Policy Institute in an effort to lend his cause intellectual weight. This coincided with the rapid and near-total colonisation of the wildly popular anonymous imageboard 4chan by white nationalists, national socialists and all manner of variations thereupon.
The combination of Spencer’s respectable thinktank image and the juvenile, discordant meme culture of 4chan’s community has won the fringe movement a degree of support that would have been unthinkable just five years ago.
Several major personalties in the alt-right sphere are based in the British Isles (despite it being a strongly nationalist grouping with its genesis in Austria and America). Most prominent among these is the Scottish YouTube starlet Colin Robertson, more widely known as ‘Millennial Woes’.
Robertson claims to be in his mid-30s, is jobless and lives in central Scotland. His extremism is remarkable even among the standards of the alt-right, professing to be pro-slavery and advocating for firing squads for ethnic minorities “after the collapse”.
At the other end of the country, however, resides another alt-right figure who derides Millennial Woes as “pathetic” and “an embarrassment to the alt-right”. Operating under the nom de plume ‘Godwinson’, he cuts a sharp contrast to Robertson. Godwinson is trim, educated and speaks with a decidedly upper-class Home Counties lilt.
He also, unlike Robertson, was willing to speak to me for this story. He tells me he advocates for policies that are fundamentally similar to the English liberal tradition that most people would find uncontroversial and appealing. The only difference between Godwinson and a typical member of the public is that he rejects outright the idea that such a free and fair society could exist with ethnic minorities.
“Free speech, free assembly and so on, these are white ideas,” he explained to me. “They belong to the people who have formulated them and defended them throughout history”.
He shares Robertson’s goal of an ‘ethnostate’ – a nation composed of one ethic group – but is more reticent when asked how that might be achieved, refusing to be drawn into detail. He becomes positively effervescent, however, when probed on the failings of white people in British society.
“It’s tragic. These people have nothing to live for, spending decades of their lives on benefits, completely bereft of any sense of divine purpose. They get trapped, living the same day for years at a time, unable to break the cycle of dependency and mundanity”.
He speaks without condescension or disgust – rather, he is disarmingly compassionate. His concern for the so-called ‘underclass’ of Britain is genuine and heartfelt, he is utterly sincere in wanting to do right by them and help them do right by themselves.
But surely this is the eeriest thing of all. It is not hard to imagine a world where Godwinson rejected the worldview crafted for him by Willinger and Spencer, where he instead set about devoting his life to helping people find a sense of self-worth and independence where those things are lacking. And yet he didn’t.
These two aspects of Godwinson’s personality collide most visibly on a deleted-but-archived video entitled “NEETs Rise Up!”, a discomfiting clip where he attempts to rouse disaffected young white men from their listless existences to the cause of extremist racial politics. It is, effectively, a recruitment tool for the alt-right. One of the dozens being publicised the world over each day. Whatever path Godwinson might have otherwise chosen, he is firmly and unerringly committed to this one now.
In order to gain a greater sense of how this recruitment drive has been faring, I spoke to Joe Gellman, a politically active sixth-form student of Jewish descent. I met Joe online, in a Facebook group called the ‘Young Free Speech Society’. Though largely innocuous, there was a small and vocal base of alt-right support.
“I don’t get too much abuse in the group,” he told me. “I think it’s because Facebook has both of our names and photos attached. People aren’t going to call me a kike when I can contact their Mum with two clicks.”
“On Twitter, it’s definitely a different atmosphere. When people pretend to be frogs, suddenly the equation changes. It’s a sort of game. I get it a lot – blood libel stuff, zionist anti-western infiltrator, and so on. You tune it out after a while”.
And what of any potential solutions? “Banning or suppressing these people generally only pisses them off more. It’s easier to just mute or block them on your own. It’s my last resort though. These people are still out there. I try to debate them and show them how wrong they are, but mostly they’re just not interested.”
Chloe agrees, telling me: “You can’t talk to them, I wouldn’t want to anyway. It’s gross. I wouldn’t accept their apology if they offered one”.
