'MY YEAR INSIDE THE INTERNATIONAL ALT-RIGHT'

For the past year, Patrik Hermansson, a young, gay, anti-racist activist from Sweden has been undercover inside the alt-right for HOPE not hate. He risked all to go undercover in some of the most notorious far-right networks in the US and the UK, culminating in the violent clashes in Charlottesville.

This is his story.

INTRODUCTION

...as soon as I left the park a counter-protestor jumped in front of me and sprayed me full in the face with mace. Thankfully I was wearing sunglasses so my eyes were spared, but the rest of my face and arms began to burn. Later the sweat would drip the mace into my eyes and I lost my vision for about 15 minutes.

After returning to my hotel room to clean up, I headed out once more to the streets, thinking the day’s events were over. There was still a march going through the town so I headed over to take a look. That’s when I saw it: a car ploughing at high speed into a crowd of people. I saw someone’s shoes fly through the air. The panicked gathering began to disperse and I started to run, still unsure what exactly had happened.

When the emergency services arrived, I saw the paramedics pumping the chest of a woman before loading her into the back of an ambulance. Earlier that day I had been on the demonstration, just yards from the murderer, now I was stood in shock as his victims were driven away to a cacophony of bellowing sirens.

This sleepy university town had just entered the halls of infamy, thanks to the extremists from the alt-right: the name Charlottesville was soon on the world’s lips...

It was an evening in May 2017 and I found myself sitting at the head of a table for a three-course dinner at the Mandeville Hotel in central London. The occasion was the first annual dinner organised in honour of the notorious, now deceased, British far-right ‘intellectual’ and alt-right favourite, Jonathan Bowden.

Flying into London for the event were some of the most important alt-right figures from Europe and North America. Their arrival times were a closely guarded secret, but I had been trusted to meet one of them off the plane at Heathrow airport and accompany them to their secret accommodation in London. This figure was none other than Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes), the UK’s most prominent alt-right vlogger, who had been hiding around Europe ever since his real identity was exposed in January 2017.

The dinner itself was the most important far-right gathering to have taken place in some time.

The Croatian writer Tomislav Sunić, an important figure in the European New Right and author of the influential book Against Democracy and Equality, sat next to me discussing the prospect of mass-scale expulsion of non-white British citizens. He asserted that it was possible to “fly everybody home” and that a plane could leave Heathrow every three minutes!
At any normal dinner the prospect of forcibly removing all non-whites would be greeted with shock, but repatriation was a relatively uncontroversial topic around this table.

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https://alternativeright.hopenothate.com/my-year-inside-the-international-alt-right