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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBirth of a White Supremacist: Mike Enoch's transformation from leftist contrarian to nationalist
The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, Hate him or love himMike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to. Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (talks like a fag) and Cantwell (a dickhead turtle), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as animals and savages, and expresses skepticism about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speakvoluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotionon his own podcast, The Daily Shoah. (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the over-all tone of the show.) The Daily Shoah is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about post-libertarian politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to fashy memes, songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcastsmeandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogersare not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.
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It was obvious to him that the country was profoundly off track, and that both major political parties were morally and intellectually bankrupt. The only question was which utopian system should replace the current one. He read books by Noam Chomsky and articles on antiwar.com, which published critiques of American foreign policy from the far left and the far right. He dabbled in leftist anarchism, but discovered glaring flaws in the ideology; after that, he became a Trotskyist. One Saturday, he later wrote, he found himself at a meeting in a run down YMCA in Brooklyn with a group of middle-aged Jewish public school teachers. They were discussing what stance to take on Islamic terrorism. An overwhelming sense of loathing washed over me like an awesome wave, he wrote. The people I was around suddenly seemed twisted and horrible. A revelatory religious experience is the closest thing I can compare this experience to.
He began reading books by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises, the grandfather of libertarianism. For a few years, he was an enthusiastic and doctrinaire libertarian. He started a blog called the Emptiness, where he wrote posts such as Socialism Is Selfish and Taxation Is Theft. Through online debate forums, he met a few like-minded friendsa painting contractor from upstate New York, an E.M.T. from Virginia, a devout Christian from Tennessee. They called themselves post-libertarians, though they werent sure what would come next. In a private Facebook group, they debated the merits of various micro-ideologiespaleoconservatism, neo-reaction, radical traditionalismand made jokes that were too self-referential or too offensive to share with the wider public. Each time Mike E. adopted a new world view, he was able to convince himself that his conversion was rational, even inevitable.
Within a few years, he started to wonder whether libertarianism was too tepid. After all, its premises pointed toward a starker conclusion: if the state was nothing but a hindrance to freedom, why not abolish the state altogether, leaving only the unfettered market? From there, he went even further. What if you couldnt account for peoples behavior without considering their cultural background, and even their genetic makeup? Slapped in the face by the reality of human bio-diversity, he later wrote, I had to come to grips with the fact that libertarianism isnt going to work for everyone, and the people that it isnt going to work for are going to ruin it for everyone else. Human biodiversity: the idea that people are different, that they differ in predictable ways, and that some peoplenot just individuals but groups of peoplemight be inherently superior to others.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/birth-of-a-white-supremacist
lapfog_1
(29,205 posts)to being a fascist.
and articulate is not how I describe someone who can only come up with "talks like a fag and a dickhead turtle... which sound more like a 12-year-old than an articulate grown up.
OKNancy
(41,832 posts)Very interesting. It's a different world that I really know nothing about.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)by personality or ideology. And by that I mean nothing like me and my liberal friends or other liberals we know. None of us can understand or agree with the radical and extreme types to our left, who are unmistakably different in important ways and who all despise and reject us to various degrees. See 2016. They and we all need words to differentiate ourselves from each other so that political writing can make sense. And so the terms cannot be used as weapons against us. Btw, the wordis not "progressive." That refers to a philosophy of governance that all of us but those on the very farthest extremes share, not political personality.
His story does strongly illustrate the short journey from extremist left to extremist right because the personality characteristics of both groups are so similar. The age journey is also very typical. Instead of starting out assuming they lean liberal as some young conservatives do before finding themselves with maturity, people like this start out in the farther, anti-Democratic left, become increasingly extreme and end up on the right. (Very few start far right and end up permanently far left.)
This is why so many on the far right, from Hitler and Mussollini to Steve Bannon and Steven Miller, and this guy, have far-left ideologies in their backgrounds. If liberalism appears at all, it's only as an unquestioned assumption when very young that's soon rejected.
Then there is genetic disposition,what we now know is a prewired disposition of personality toward liberal and conservative and moderation and extremism. Then come the powerful influences of environment. We know nothing about Enoch's mother, but his political perversion didn't appear to come from his father's specific genetic disposition or Enoch's later home environment:
ProfessorGAC
(65,057 posts)One does not become a racist, nationalist after being an ACTUAL liberal. Absent a severe blow to the head or something, or course.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)and those that define liberals are almost the antithesis of those that define radicals/extremists. A brain transplant would be required.
The ability, and even desire, to compromise and cooperate with people of differing opinions to achieve joint solutions is a strong indicator of liberal (and often moderate conservative), personality. Effectively never for radical/extremist personalities, which include an increasingly rigid, tunnel-visioned righteousness that does not allow compromise, or respect.
Studies also reveal, as this article illustrates, that people can more radical, very radical and even progressively extreme politically through environmental influences -- such as by immersing in increasingly extremist social media. We saw a number of people leave DU for more extreme forums in 2016, and those other forums themselves tended to also become more extreme over time. An increasingly steep spiral down the rabbit hole.