On Monday, Richard Spencer, New Jersey Institute of Technology lecturer Jason Jorjani, and Swedish New Right figure Daniel Friberg launched altright.com, a site aimed at bringing together “the best writers and analysts from Alt Right, in North America, Europe, and around the world.” The site’s launch had previously been discussed by Spencer in an Atlantic piece on his move to Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C:
“What I want for this is to be a one-stop shop,” Spencer said. “So basically if you’re already in the alt-right, this will be a great place to just learn about what’s happening. If you just heard about the alt-right, just because of the URL, hopefully this will be the top hit on Google.”
Quotidian SEO concerns aside, Jorjani and Spencer have more exalted goals for their collaboration. Jorjani, an Iranian American academic, runs Arktos, which bills itself as the main publisher in English of works from the European “New Right.” Arktos has translated works by Alexander Dugin, the right-wing Russian philosopher whose ultra-nationalist views have been influential on the alt-right, and has published Spencer’s former intellectual mentor Paul Gottfried. Jorjani describes Arktos as “the leading press of the alt-right.”
As of now, most of the site’s content is recycled material from Friberg’s Arktos publishing house, Spencer’s other publication, Radix Journal, the alt-right online media network Red Ice, and Occidental Dissent, a white nationalist blog run by altright.com’s news editor Hunter Wallace. A Wallace post originally published at Occidental Dissent disparages the Deploraball scheduled for the night before the inauguration featuring alt-right figures Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich as “alt-light,” a term Spencer has used to describe people he sees as the movement’s hangers-on. “The Alt-Light has also hitched its wagon to ‘free speech,’ ” Spencer told the Daily Beast in December. “The catch is, there’s clearly some free speech they don’t like, particularly regarding race and Jewish activism and influence.”
“I have no interest in pozzed conservatism,” Wallace writes in his post. Pozzed is a word used to insult people infected with HIV/AIDS and is thus a homophobic reference to Yiannopoulos, who is gay, and who Wallace jokes might attack the event’s protesters “with his purse.”
According to the Atlantic, Spencer will be pumping out this kind of content from a presumably pricy townhome in Alexandria he intends to use as “a kind of office-salon hybrid for the alt-right.” His move speaks to both the kind of money the movement seems to have sloshing around and the extent to which the alt-right’s leaders would like to draw themselves closer—literally—to the halls of power. Continuing to gain influence will require adopting the cerebral tone that, apart from Wallace’s post, characterizes altright.com so far.
Still, Spencer’s intellectualism does little to hide the centrality of bigotry to his own worldview and the views of those he publishes. His previous site, Alternative Right, once ran an essay called, “Is Black Genocide Right?” “Instead of asking how we can make reparations for slavery, colonialism, and Apartheid or how we can equalize academic scores and incomes,” Colin Liddell wrote, “we should instead be asking questions like, ‘Does human civilization actually need the Black race?’ ‘Is Black genocide right?’ and, if it is, ‘What would be the best and easiest way to dispose of them?’ ” It remains to be seen whether altright.com will employ similarly candid writers.
