SoylentNews

aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

As covered by The Guardian [theguardian.com]:

The alt-right appears to be falling apart. The Traditionalist Workers party disintegrated this week after a lurid interpersonal drama among its leadership. Richard Spencer says his alt-right rallies aren’t “fun” any more, and is rethinking his college tour in the aftermath of his fizzer of an event in East Lansing, Michigan, two weeks ago.

It’s a good time to offer an observation: on the terms it set itself, antifascist organizing in the United States has worked.

Exhibit A:

Consider the failure of Spencer’s long-planned address at Michigan State University. Though it was spring break, students and organized antifascist groups showed up to protest, and Spencer gave his pitch for a white ethnostate to an almost empty auditorium. He issued 150 tickets, but only managed to get 20 people along. Spencer himself blamed the protesters for the event’s failure, just as he is blaming them for his movement’s declining ability to muster any numbers in public.

Exhibit B:

And that non-event was not an outlier. The same weekend, a planned alt-right conference in Detroit fell apart after venues pulled out under public pressure and one of the organizers, lawyer Kyle Bristow, announced he was leaving the movement. Various “March 4 Trump” events around the country, featuring alt-right contingents, were also small, and met with significant counterprotests.

Methodology:

The far right’s online organizing has also been targeted. Antifascist websites like Unicorn Riot [www.unicornriot.ninja] have obtained logs from servers used to organize events like Charlottesville. As well as using them in their own reporting, they have made them available [propublica.org] to mainstream news organizations. (ProPublica’s recent reporting on secretive neo-nazi group AtomWaffen was based on similar leaked chat logs.)

These materials, as well as media reporting, have been used to identify and expose [masslive.com] far-right activists to their families, teachers and employers, in the communities they live in.

For many on the alt-right, this has led to serious legal consequences. Rightwing Charlottesville participants are awaiting trial on charges ranging from murder to felony perjury. Cases like that of Oregon’s Andrew Oswalt, who was in student government until exposed as a far-right activist, and was charged with a felony hate crime [oregonlive.com], show that this kind of work is going on away from highly publicized events.

What to say, when one doxxes oneself? Uff da!

There’s also the fact that during the Trump era, a lot of far-right political beliefs have been partially mainstreamed – the resurgence of public antisemitism [adl.org] is just one indicator of that.

But it seems that the white supremacist alt-right will not survive the Trump era as a coherent movement. If so, antifascist activists can take a large measure of credit.

Original Submission