Alt-ered Histories: Building a Far-Right Movement in the Digital Age

This paper uses digital archival excavation to situate the recent-history of the far-right, Swedish-based publisher, Arktos. For the last decade, the publisher has “rescued” the writings of fascist thinkers, and published alt-histories, written primarily by young, white-nationalist academics, that decry European “degeneration” whilst scapegoating Jews and Muslim immigrants. Today, Arktos’ staff helps run American Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer’s online magazine, AltRight.com. Spencer, who has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” run the American "National Policy Institute" think tank. The paper also studies Arkos’s sister think tank, Motpol (or "Antithesis" in Swedish). The neo-fascist network’s project includes the study and critique of the Frankfurt School, a recasting of so-called “traditionalist” history, and has culminated with the rise of a fascistic trans-European youth movement, “Generation Identitaire”—whose members translate and actively produce digital content meant to make these alt-histories both aesthetically pleasing and visible to young European audiences. This paper is intended to give a “draft” of the history of this movement, explaining the ways it imagines itself as connected to an imagined “non-racist” form of fascism, to point historians to potential “pressure points” to which we might need to attend in our contemporary moment as the alt-right proposes an alt-history.