Carolyn Gallaher on the Alt-right, White Identity Politics, and America’s Militia Movements

In your article “Mainstreaming White Supremacy: A Twitter Analysis of the American ‘Alt-Right,’” you discuss White identity politics. Some conservatives reject the notion of identity politics, but the so-called Alt-right embraces it. Can you explain this break? How is this indicative of a larger shift in thinking about race among older and newer generations of the right?

I think it helps to start by thinking about the way identity politics, as it was called, emerged in the 1980s. It was primarily organized around marginalized groups: it could be feminism, Black power, the civil rights movement, early gay rights, and later LGBTQI rights. These groups were saying they were oppressed in some form or fashion because they did not match the White, male, heterosexual norm. So conservatives often reacted very aggressively against it, saying identity politics is undermining the notion of a “we,” it’s undermining an American identity writ large, and it masks, they would say, other more important determinative variables, such as someone’s motivation, or willingness to work hard or seize opportunities when they come your way.

So for a long time, people on the right would decry identity politics. But by the time I wrote this article, people on the Alt-right were openly embracing identity politics, but in their own way. They were embracing White identity politics. The important thing to say here is not just that they were finally acknowledging or saying the quiet part out loud, but that they were actually saying, “Yes, okay, we’re going to accept the terrain that identity politics is important, which is that people are in different racialized or gendered categories.  We’re going to accept that terrain and we’re going to play on that terrain and we’re going to start claiming similar things that you’re claiming, that we need more rights, that we need more protection.”

So it was big shift and they basically went from thinking identity politics was bad to saying, “Okay, well, if everything’s going to be about identity politics, we’re going to play by those rules.” What’s so relevant about this, of course, is that White men, heteronormative men, and cis men are still the dominant players. And so it’s a little rich, to put it politely, to claim oppression when you are coming at it from a dominant category.

Is there a difference in recruiting ability or successful organizing with this shift to the identity politics frame? If we’re looking at specifically right-wing radical or extremist groups, what changes once they’ve adopted this identity politics frame?

Think for instance about what is called affinity groups on campuses. Affinity groups allow faculty or students of color or other ethnic or racial backgrounds to come together and have a safe space, not in the sense of safety from actual violence, but just a place to come together. Now you see White supremacists or Alt-right groups making the argument, “Well if you’re going to have a Black student affinity group, you need a White student affinity group. The response to that is, well, White people are the dominant group on most campuses, so what is it that you need space to do? White identity politics has become a weaponization of identity politics.

There are now members of Congress who are openly embracing White supremacist ideas and notions, and they appear to be suffering very little pushback for doing that…It’s no longer a taboo in the same way it was.

White supremacists have always played White identity politics, but now people feel freer to say things that would be deemed White supremacist and not suffer the same social repercussions that you would’ve in the 1980s. A good example of this is David Duke, a Klan member and a White supremacist. When he ran for Congress, he was no longer calling himself White supremacist. It was seen as a taboo. It’s still a taboo for a lot of people, but there are now members of Congress who are openly embracing White supremacist ideas and notions, and they appear to be suffering very little pushback for doing that. Look at how many Republicans in Congress have referred to the Great Replacement Theory…It’s no longer a taboo in the same way it was.

In your discussion of the key terms of identity used in Alt-right discourse, you write that three groups, White, Jewish, and Black, accounted for the majority of tweets that talk about identity.  Given that these tweets were analyzed at the leader level, what can be extrapolated for how the followers of a movement view the issue of identity? Are these leaders reflecting what they think the base already believes or directing discourse online in these directions?

I can’t measure what the base believes by looking at leaders’ tweets. But I can say something about how leaders can shape what we talk about, and thus what their followers may think is important. At the time I was doing this research, Donald Trump was talking a lot about the border, and therefore about Central American migrants, and Mexican migrants, and he was actually really focused on Latinx people. When I was coding the tweets, I was expecting there would be a big category of tweets focused on Latinx people, while in fact there were very few of them. They were focused primarily, as you said, on Jewish and Black people, and also on Europe. When they talked about immigration, they were talking primarily about immigration in Europe, not in the United States, even though the great majority of the people I was following for this research were located in the United States.

That led me to question, what is it about Europe and immigration to Europe that has captured the Alt-right’s imagination in a way that immigration inside the United States did not. My assessment is that they see Europe as “the White homeland,” and so that’s why they focus on European immigration… It’s like the original place of Whiteness for them, and so they were defending that. I think if you’re the Alt-right and you’re into metapolitics—the idea that you change the framework for how we talk about things before you do the actual politics—you have to define what you mean by Whiteness. The category of Whiteness is all over the map. Literally. You ask people within the Alt-right movement, can Jewish people be White? Some say yes, and some say no. What about Latinx people? Some say yes, and some say no. This focus on Europe is a form of metapolitics for them, establishing who is White by tying it to Europe.

Can you discuss the importance of anonymous internet culture, how those with social dominance orientations found common cause with right-wing sympathizers, and the importance of Gamergate? In the latter case, internet misogyny and harassment had been going on before Gamergate, but why is this moment so important in the history of far-right internet subcultures, and how did it become mainstream?

Gamergate was just a scaled-up version of what had been happening well before. It rolled out on Twitter for everyone to see. I think the attacks on female gamers were very much in line with social dominance orientation (SDO). It was just, “How dare you criticize gaming culture? How dare you call us on our bullshit?” There were very few ramifications for the people that were engaged in these attacks. Twitter could have come in and stopped it, but they didn’t. At any point in history, you have social taboos that are in place, and people figure out very quickly what taboos are because, if they cross them, they will know, and there will be fierce blowback. What Gamergate said to me was that Twitter was a place where it was no longer taboo to behave this way.

Can you describe the role of women in far-right movements? You mentioned Lana Lokteff in your piece as being one of the most influential female actors within the far-right sphere, but what does participation for women look like at the lower level, and what do they see in the movement? What opportunities do they see in the movement?

I think that it depends on what part of the far right you’re talking about. If you look at militias for example, while they’re dominated by men, women are still able to be in them. I’m thinking about the Oath Keepers. Take for example, Jessica Watkins. She was one of the Oath Keepers who was arrested and tried on a seditious conspiracy charge. But if you look at the Proud Boys, it’s different. A group of women tried to start a Women’s Proud Boys chapter, and they were told, “No, you can’t do that. You need to be back in the home, taking care of the kids.” It really depends on what part of the far right you belong to.

Globally, I think women in the far right have hit the same ceiling as women outside of the far right…Where women are finding the spaces to operate on the far right is within the really narrow confines of the so-called trad wife role.

Globally, I think women in the far right have hit the same ceiling as women outside of the far right. They have often been attacked within the far right for getting too big for their britches or getting too far out there. Where women are finding the spaces to operate on the far right is within the really narrow confines of the so-called trad wife role. So now you can find all these White supremacists having Instagram accounts or Twitter accounts that show you how to harvest catnip. Like, “I’m going to be a traditional wife and I’m going to grow my own food,”—all this celebration of a very narrow way of being a “proper woman.” But again, these women, they’re all over social media, and they are therefore setting the framework of what I think is a very regressive approach to femininity and womanhood.

One of the most important issues you bring up in the piece is the mainstreaming of far-right internet culture. Can you describe the process by which something on the fringe moves into wider consciousness, moves into the center?

There are a lot of other scholars who have done this probably better than I have. When I was researching this article in 2016-2017, the first step in mainstreaming the far right was to find someone who’s young and attractive, or someone who’s not necessarily young but is well known, and have them say something on White supremacy as well as more innocuous things, and throw in a dash of young people in good Instagram-level photos. And then get people to retweet them, to say, “Oh, hey, so I ran across this on Instagram or whatever, or TikTok, and it’s really cool,” and so you repeat it.

It means you need to get your people from so-called “central casting” out, get them to say a combination of racist and non-racist things, and—because they’re young and attractive—they get a lot of followers who will retweet or share, and then all of a sudden it’s like, “Well, she can’t be all bad, she was showing me how to harvest catnip.” It’s too out there to be taboo. What makes something taboo is that there are huge social consequences for breaking a taboo. With the internet, whether it’s a Reddit forum, or TikTok, or at the time of my research, Twitter, taboos can be broken with almost no consequences.

To conclude on this article of yours that we’ve been talking about, how should scholars and journalists respond to ideas or concepts that are perhaps not yet in the mainstream, but moving in that direction? Where does one find the balance in reporting on conspiracy theories or far-right talking points without bringing them to a wider audience?

You can’t get away from, to some degree, talking about the misinformation, but there are a lot of things you can do not to amplify it. For instance, I will comment on far-right ideas, but I won’t fully explain what their idea is, because I’m not going to give a thesis on social media about what the Great Replacement Theory is, for instance. The way the media covered Trump contributed to his success—it was a strategic mistake. He says nonsensical stuff or things that are factually untrue. Instead, the media could just report, “He spouted many lies.” If he’s lied, don’t tell me what the actual lie was, just say he lied about this or that topic.

In a 2016 article exploring the militia occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon you assert that to understand the reason for the occupation, one must first understand its anti-government ethos. Can you describe how this anti-government sensibility overlaps with the identities you mention as subsidiary to the ideological charge of the Bundy militia?

There’s no single militia movement. What militias in the American West are worried about are not necessarily what militias on the East Coast or in the center of the country are worried about. In the particular case of the Bundys, I would say a couple of things. One, they are, like many groups in the militia movement since the mid-eighties to early nineties, anti-government and believe the federal government is dangerous to ordinary citizens. They understand that danger in a couple of ways. One, they think that the US government has been co-opted, or in some cases, secretly taken over by international actors that are working with people inside the US government to carry out nefarious plans. In the nineties, it was called the New World Order. You still hear that term but Trump updated it with his notion of the Deep State, but it is a very similar kind of logic. It’s important to recognize that both of these terms are also code words for Jews/Israel. Not everyone who uses them knows this, but both line up clearly with long-standing anti-semitic tropes about Jews.

In the American West, this framework mixes with land politics. For background, the majority of the land in the Intermountain West is owned by the federal government. Part of the reason for this is that when the government “opened up” the frontier and gave White people the right to take/settle it, some land wasn’t viable, so no one claimed it. What was left over, the federal government retained ownership of. That land is often dry scrub lands. Farmers can’t use it, but ranchers can. So, the government, through the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rents its lands to ranchers.

So at a base level, the Bundy family, because they have cattle in Nevada, have a landlord-tenant relationship with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). They need more land to graze their cattle on than they own. They can graze their cattle on BLM lands, but they have to pay grazing fees. Cliven Bundy doesn’t want to do that. He doesn’t think he should have to pay money to the BLM. But he also thinks that the federal government has no right to own land. And so what his politics and what his son’s politics and goals were when they took over the Malheur Refuge was this: we are going to take this land away from the federal government because it doesn’t deserve it. It should be settled by individuals, private owners.

This sense of grievance is rich when you consider the fact that the Bundys’ ancestors got their land because the government took it from indigenous people and gave it to them. This is updated settler colonialism in a nutshell. It’s a naked land grab justified with flimsy justification. In this case, the movement’s anti-government rhetoric provides a veneer of legitimacy. It resonates with anti-government sentiment, which has by now become commonplace. And, because of this it obscures the personal, race and, class-based interests that underpin the Bundys’ actions.   

So Malheur is really interesting because when the Bundys took that land over, none of the local ranchers supported them. They tried to convince ranchers to join them in taking over the land and the ranchers did not want to do that. They did not have the support of local militias in Harney County. When reporters came, they were asking “Well, okay, who do you want to give this land back to?” And the Bundys would always say things like, “We, the people,” or “local ranchers.” But if you dig into what the Bundys feel and think, they are aligned with groups that want to privatize all federal lands, funded by gas and oil interests, among others.

I will give you one more anecdote. At one point, a reporter asked, “Well, the Paiute Burns Tribe, they actually were the original people that owned this land. So since you’ve seized it from the federal government, are you going to give it back to them?” And that’s where the Bundys say the quiet part out loud. Ryan Bundy replied, “Well, they had the land, but they lost it, and the current culture is more important than the old cultures. We have stuff to learn from them but that’s the old culture.” It was a slip, but a telling one. 

Are there parallels among militia movements elsewhere in the country? Or is this primarily a phenomenon in the American West, this specific kind of relationship to the federal state?

The relationship with ranchers is specific, but I think the idea of the federal government being an alien entity is common to militia movements across the US. The core idea is that the US federal government is no longer working for Americans because it has been taken over by international actors, which as I said earlier, is often code for Jewish people. This line of reasoning is bolstered by big political-economic shifts that have happened in the last 40 years, e.g., the farm crisis, during which a million family farmers lost their farms. At that time a lot of people were asking, “Why is the federal government not preventing this from happening? It must be because the Americans aren’t running it anymore.” The same happened with the 2008 housing crisis: the banks seized the houses of hard-working Americans, it must be because the federal government has been overtaken by globalists. You can have a leftist critique of how the federal government handled both crises, but the militias’ critiques are from the right and are very undemocratic.

On the neoliberal core of the occupation, you write: “By depicting the occupation as a harbinger of liberation rather than a forerunner to privatization the occupiers all but ensure their promise to ranchers will go unfulfilled.” Whether rhetorically or practically, how do militia movements contend with the reality that their stated liberatory purpose is often at odds with the material effects of their desired end results? So thinking specifically about them being, not in the pocket per se, but aligned with big oil.

I would say they don’t contend with the reality that their stated purposes are at odds with reality. It was visible with the Bundys: most of the local ranchers did not have bad relations with the BLM in that part of Oregon, or with Malheur in particular, and no one was trying to use it for grazing lands. So the Bundy’s declarations were just performative. Redistributing the land would actually be very complicated. How are you going to choose between rancher A and rancher B, if you’re going to give it to ranchers? And then what about people who aren’t from ranching families but would love to ranch, but don’t have enough money to buy the land? They didn’t think about that. Honestly, we’re lucky that the militia movement is not nearly as strategic as it could be.

We’re lucky that the militia movement is not nearly as strategic as it could be…Look at January 6: the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys go to Washington, and they made it into the building, and then it was kind of like, “Well, what do we do now?”

If you look at other far-right movements in other countries, they’re often a lot more strategic, especially the armed groups. But not so much in the US. Look at January 6: the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys go to Washington, and they made it into the building, and then it was kind of like, “Well, what do we do now?” Some people say it means that it wasn’t really a seditious conspiracy. My answer to that is there’s nothing in the statutes that says insurrectionists have to be smart! A coup attempt is a coup attempt, whether it is a smart coup or a failed one. I actually think that Trump was expecting them to do something more than they did, and they were expecting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act so they could do more. It was not well organized, thankfully.

Lastly, you’ve done research on militia movements throughout the world, with special attention paid to Northern Ireland. What parallels exist between movements around the world, and how can policymakers learn from foreign experiences to protect lives, property, and democratic institutions? Are there common themes that run through these types of political organizing that exist regardless of context?

In the US we use the term militia to describe groups like the Bundys, but in fact we shouldn’t because it suggests that these groups are the latest iteration of our revolutionary-era militias.  They are not, but this term gives them legitimacy they do not deserve.  U.S. militias are non-state armed groups, and that makes them comparable to groups like the FARC in Colombia, the IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force in Northern Ireland, or the Al Mahdi Army in Iraq. They are not sanctioned by the state and present a threat to the government and civilians.

Also, we shouldn’t use the term militia because most state constitutions prevent anyone but the governor or federal officials from calling up a militia. So militias cannot self-muster. When groups that call themselves militias are mustering, they’re not the militia that’s talked about in the Constitution. We should think of them as non-state armed groups. And that allows us to compare non-state armed groups across the world.

There are a lot of ways to compare non-state armed groups, so I’m just going to point to a big comparative point. Is a non-state armed group fighting the government, or is it fighting the government’s enemies? The way we talk about this in many other conflicts is, is it a guerilla movement, or a paramilitary? Colombia is a very good example of this. The FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) was an anti-government guerilla group. The AUC (United Self-Defense of Colombia, or Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) was a pro-state paramilitary. They’re both non-state armed groups. Even though the AUC worked with the state, the state did not control it. Same in Northern Ireland. The IRA (Irish Republican Army) was a guerilla movement fighting to get the Brits out of Northern Ireland. The UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) and the Ulster Defense Association were fighting the IRA at the quasi-behest of the government.

Under Trump, militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters started behaving like a paramilitary, acting on behalf of the government rather than against it.

If we look at the militia movement in the US, we should be calling these groups guerilla or insurgent for most of their history. But under Trump, militias, in particular a couple of militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, started behaving like a paramilitary, acting on behalf of the government rather than against it. The Oath Keepers started providing “security” at Trump rallies and for people in his orbit, like Roger Stone and Ali Alexander. On January 6th, they were fighting on behalf of the president against Congress. That would make them look like, at the very least, a praetorian guard, like the unofficial armed wing of a president. This is important because if the militia movement follows suit and Trump is reelected, you’re looking at an NSAG that could really wreak havoc on lots of marginalized communities.

It doesn’t mean that so-called militias aren’t a threat as an anti-government group—Oklahoma City proves that. But being able to really focus on and define and narrow down who they’re fighting, rather than, “They’re our guys, they’re just a little wacky,” which is often how we treat them. We don’t treat them like they’re illegal, even though they are. Nobody does anything about it when they show up at protests with assault rifles. Kyle Rittenhouse shows up and gets away with murder. We should be thinking about them as non-state armed groups so we can explain the type of threat they pose, and to whom. And it also reminds us they are illegal. We are giving them more credit and more passes than they deserve.

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Carolyn Gallaher is a professor in the Peace, Human Rights, and Cultural Relations Dept. in the School of International Service at American University.  She studies organized violence by non-state actors, examining the politics, internal dynamics, and patterns of violence by militias, paramilitaries, private military contractors, and drug cartels, among others She is the author of two books, On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement and After the Peace: Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-accord Northern Ireland. She regularly writes for Political Research Associates.