FAQ on the Far Right (Part 1 of 2)

The UnPopulist has released the first of two parts of a resource for informing yourself about the far-right.

Here's a little bit of the story behind it.

In 2017, Richard Spencer was present at the Students for Liberty Conference in Washington DC. (He was invited by some attendees and sat in the lobby holding court until he was escorted out by security. SFL handled the incident well, with a clear video statement denouncing Spencer, identitarianism, and white nationalism that seems, unfortunately, to have been lost to the Internet.)

In the years following, folks became celebrities in the libertarian movement. These celebrities of a sort were, to my mind, too comfortable with flirting with the sort of politics that made Spencer feel welcome—most notably at the time, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin. Then, in March 2019, a white supremacist killed 51 people and injured 89 more in Christchurch mosques. With emotional steel I've lost since, I read the names and looked at the faces of everyone killed. The youngest was three years old. A few weeks later, Unicorn Riot released internal documents from Identity Evropa showing connections to libertarian-adjacent organizations, including a message board discussion of recruiting at the Students for Liberty Conference. I wrote about this at the time (republished for posterity, but with the archived post). I included an appeal to learn about the far right. I included a video explainer by Contrapoints as a starting point.Only a few weeks later, Buzzfeed reporter Rosie Gray published a profile of the former alt-right figure Katie McHugh, in which she revealed she had been radicalized through a libertarian movement connection. The IHS, the organization through which McHugh found her alt-right connections, responded well. So did many other organizations! If the IHS response had been replicated across the libertarian movement and on the political right, we could be in a very different place today.Though I was reassured by the IHS, my sense of urgency grew. I began appealing to anyone who would listen to look more carefully at the toeholds and connections the far right saw in my circles and said were useful. I hoped to help them see why enthusiasm for figures like Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin was dangerous. Even among those who were sympathetic, I encountered a similar apprehension: they did not like the sources I shared to find information from the far right. (In their defence, these sources often included offhand swipes at the very people who most urgently needed to be informed.)Then the pandemic happened. And I had kids! Things were busy. I kept reading, but I wrote little. However, a piece by my late friend Steve was often on my mind. Last year, with Steve still in mind, I was getting uppity about the apparent libertarian fondness for the "heterodox" writer Richard Hanania and Hanania’s attempts to whitewash far-right thinkers and package them up for libertarians, another exposé was published—this time on Hanania. I wrote at Liberal Currents about why we seemed to be in the same place again. I made another appeal to those who see themselves in the center and on the right to be more aware of far-right figures, ideas, goals, and tactics.

We were stuck in a harmful equilibrium. Libertarians, the centre, and the centre-right did not do more to cover the far right ➡️ the coverage of the far right was not appealing to the centre-right ➡️ and the centre-right did not learn enough to provide coverage of the far right.When I expressed my frustration to him and asked whether there might be a better source to which I could point people, my co-author (who has been raising the alarm about dangerous connections to the far right for as long as I can remember—and since they were far less numerous) encouraged me to start writing.

So we did. This piece is Part 1 of the result.

In Part 1, we tackle what the far right looks like and where it came from. In Part 2, we provide what I think may be the most important piece: understanding how the far right works and how to recognize that work.

But we can't get there without starting here. There's just too much ground to cover. And, as says in his intro, "it can be hard to convey the full magnitude of this threat [from the far right] in a standard essay because its format requires a clear narrative arc that often leaves out disparate strands that don’t neatly fit in the story."

Hence, an FAQ. I hope that this FAQ dramatically reduces the cost of chipping away at the toeholds that the far right cultivates with people who are committed to liberalism. Then we can much more meaningfully go on the offensive.

Thanks to for giving this resource the best home I could hope for.