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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Too important to let the Eds deep-six. A Fine Article at Buzzfeed about the story of Katie McHugh [buzzfeednews.com] A cautionary tale for all our alt-right wannabes here on SoylentNews.

If you remember Katie McHugh, it’s probably because of the tweets.

A short selection: “British settlers built the USA. ‘Slaves’ built the country much as cows ‘built’ McDonald’s. Amateur…”

“The only way to strike a balance between vigilance, discrimination, (& terror) is to end Muslim immigration.”

"Funny how Europeans assimilated, unlike Third Worlders demanding welfare while raping, killing Americans."

There are many more examples, but this is the big one, the one that ultimately triggered her firing from her job as a writer and editor at Breitbart News in 2017: “There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn't live there."

That was then, this is now.

If you look at her Twitter feed now, you’ll see that it’s changed. It’s locked, and her bio is blank. Where is McHugh? I can’t tell you, but I’ve seen her lately. The first time we met was late last summer, on the stoop of a house where she was then living in Washington, DC. She looked gaunt and anxious. When I shook her hand, it felt tiny and frail. We sat facing each other across a patio table on a hot, sticky day. She smoked.

I didn’t know what to make of her. This was someone whom I’d known to be a bigot, someone who freely threw around the “cuck” slur and who represented the kind of ideology I have devoted much of my career so far to explaining and exposing. It was a little over a year after Charlottesville. The bad things from the internet had started to come to life, with terrible, violent, and real consequences. It was bizarre to see in person someone who had existed for me only as an online symbol of the very worst parts of contemporary politics.

She was saying she wanted to leave it all behind: her years as a far-right media figure and tweeter, and someone who close observers of right-wing media knew was one of Breitbart’s most obvious connections to the white supremacist core of the alt-right. McHugh had dated Kevin DeAnna, the founder of Youth for Western Civilization, a now-defunct right-wing campus youth group that billed itself as promoting “the survival of Western Civilization and pride in Western heritage,” but was entwined with the white nationalist movement; Jared Taylor, the self-described “white advocate” founder of American Renaissance, once fundraised for the group. Her disparaging tweets about people of color and Muslims made her stand out even at Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, which had launched Milo Yiannopoulos’s career, had featured a “black crime” tag for stories, and had been described by Bannon himself as a “platform for the alt-right.”

She's been there, done that, and now regrets? Can anyone come back from the Dank side, once they have tasted the cookies?

The alt-right was, at the time, all about smoothing over its public image, becoming approachable, more mainstream. “They didn’t have swastikas covering their foreheads,” as McHugh put it. The very term “alt-right” represented this effort to rebrand white nationalism. Everything in public was euphemism. The names of the main organizations were bland: National Policy Institute, American Renaissance. People could blend in, and they did. They were “polished, sophisticated,” she said. “There’s a very high culture aspect to it.” The class markers were important to someone like McHugh, who had come from the sticks. And the emphasis on genetics and IQ was appealing as well. “They see it almost as a moral value,” she said. “They think that people with [a] high IQ confers them with some kind of super ability and makes them leaders, natural leaders.”

This is where aristarchus would link to a Webb and Mitchell skit about Nazi officers, finding out they have Totenkopf, or "death's heads" on their caps. [youtube.com] Enjoy. "These Communists are all cowards!"

But back to Katie.

McHugh thinks of her time in the alt-right like St. Augustine’s famous story about stealing pears in his Confessions — driven by seeking what others hated, alone in the world, but together. Augustine wrote: “A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night … and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them.”
Augustine confesses to God that he had been “gratuitously evil, having no temptation to ill, but the ill itself”: “It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. Foul soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction: not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself!”

This titillating group shame is what McHugh thinks motivated her and the rest of the alt-right. And it allowed them to keep going even in the face of overwhelming social opprobrium.

Kind of like TMB, doncha think? Well, I hope that fixed the problems with my original submission of this fascinating article about someone who has escaped the alt-right. If this one is also possessed of unspecified problems that our eds do not seem able to share with me, I can submit another, quoting different parts of the interview. Really, it is that good. Promise. They cite St. Augustine!

Original Submission