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10 most influential American fascist leaders

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What does American fascism really look like? Brief political and personal biographies to follow.

1. Joseph R. McCarthy. By exaggerating his exploits as a Marine in the war against Japan and making up lies about war profiteering, he won a primary victory against liberal Republican Bob LaFollette in 1946 and was duly elected to the U.S. Senate as a Wisconsin Republican. The influential Communist Party-controlled United Electrical workers Union supported McCarthy in order to punish LaFollette for his anti-communism, prompting McCarthy to remark, “Well, a Communist has the same right to vote as anyone else, hasn’t he?” In his early months in the Senate, McCarthy sketched out an unremarkable role as a moderate pro-business Republican, becoming known mostly for his work on behalf of Pepsi-Cola, which in return made a personal loan to him. He also controversially pushed to stop prosecution of accused Nazi war criminals. After 1950, however, McCarthy began making wild accusations about Communist influence over the State Department, soon coupled with an antigay witch hunt (although his personal lawyer, Roy Cohn, later Donald Trump’s lawyer, was himself gay). Like the other witch hunters (such as President Truman and Senator/future Vice President Hubert Humphrey on the Democratic side of the aisle), he took aim not only at communists and pseudo-communists but also at organized labor and anyone left of center, app of which he lumped together as enemies. The witch hunt initially was aimed largely at the rival Democratic Party and supported by allied Republicans, particularly rising conservative star Everett Dirksen and House maverick and future president (and leading anticommunist witch-hunter) Richard Nixon. However, the shared anticommunist and antigay presumptions of the Democratic Party left them largely unable to stop him. McCarthy also found allies in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Bureau of Narcotics Chief Harry Anslinger (who not only covered up McCarthy’s morphine addiction but supplied him with morphine), the Catholic Church hierarchy, and the powerful (and Catholic) Democratic Kennedy family, including fascist sympathizer Joseph Sr. as well as his more liberal sons John (future president) and Robert (future attorney general). McCarthy distinguished himself with his popularity, his dishonesty, and his personal crudeness (personally assaulting a liberal journalist, for example). He played on popular opposition to the war on Korea and concerns about rising prices, which he demagogically promised to fix, to gain support. He was outspoken in defense of Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco and aggressively persecuted people who’d opposed his takeover. After the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which McCarthy’s accusations played a key role, McCarthy set out to challenge Eisenhower for control of the country. Eisenhower initially responded by seeking to out-witch hunt McCarthy by smearing his allies as communists, which only made McCarthy more powerful. But with the victory of the Koreans, the ruling class turned against fascism and Hot War, and McCarthy’s efforts to seize control of the Army by taking his witch hunt into the officer corps was frustrated by the military brass and Senate. McCarthy was censured by the Senate and died of complications of his alcoholism soon afterward.

2. Charles Coughlin. A Catholic priest who used radio to broadcast his propaganda. Originally a close political ally of Louisiana Democratic populist Huey Long, Coughlin began his foray into politics supporting Long’s calls for a minimum and maximum wage and denouncing the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan and the Soviet Union. He joined Long in supporting Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1932 and spoke out strongly in favor of the New Deal during his early broadcasts. In the early 1930s he and his National Union for Social Justice called for “free silver” (inflationary monetary policy), increased taxes on the rich, welfare programs, nationalization of some industry and the Federal Reserve (although he strongly advocated capitalism), and protection of unions to win support from the poor. He denounced the New Deal as beholden to the bankers beginning in 1934, and increasingly began criticizing alleged Jewish influence on the Roosevelt administration. He began denouncing Jews with increased virulence and openly praised Hitler; in this he was largely supported by the Catholic Church hierarchy, receiving full support from most American Catholic leaders and only mild criticism from the pope. He was also supported by Democratic politician and fascist sympathizer Joseph Kennedy, Sr. He denounced internationalism and communism, and criticized the Roosevelt administration’s alleged sympathy for the Spanish Loyalists against Franco, whom he praised profusely. In 1936, Coughlin supported the candidacy of Republican Congressman William Lemke for president, allying himself with other radicals including Gerald L.K. Smith in the Union Party, originally intended as a vehicle for the recently assassinated Long. After the election, he came out more decidedly than ever in favor of Hitler and Mussolini, winning the support of fascist sympathizer (poet) Ezra Pound, British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, and pro-Hitler industrialist Henry Ford, who financed his dissemination of the anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the formation in 1938 of the Christian Front, a militia that assaulted Jews and anti-Coughlin journalists. Coughlin and the Christian Front prompted a boycott of Jewish businesses. In 1939, with the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts, the Christian Front helped organize a pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. However, due to the backlash from the rally, Coughlin went on to denounce the German-American Bund. In 1940, citing Roosevelt’s alleged pro-Jewish and pro-communist positions, Coughlin endorsed liberal war hawk Republican Wendell Willkie for president, but continued to oppose U.S. intervention against the Axis, including after Pearl Harbor. In 1942, under pressure from the Roosevelt administration, newly appointed liberal Catholic Bishop Edward Mooney ordered Coughlin to cease his political agitation on pain of being defrocked, and he lived out the rest of his life as an unoffending parish priest.
 

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3. Frank Hague. Hague worked his way up through the local Democratic Party machine (via a detour through the machine’s reform-slate opposition) to become constable, the local Democratic Party boss, and from 1917 the mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey. His appetite for graft became legendary, but he gained support for his crackdowns on illegal gambling and prostitution in Jersey City (despite his early alliance with the mob-backed Atlantic City Republican machine) and his early conciliatory approach to organized labor. He increasingly became a key political player due to his ability to get out the Democratic vote, both through favors and through outright fraud. In 1932, he supported his personal friend Al Smith’s bid for the Democratic nomination (as he had supported his presidential campaign in 1928), but after Franklin Roosevelt won the nomination he became a firm Roosevelt supporter and a key political ally. The AFL unions were key to his political patronage, helping prompt his aggressive stance against the more radical CIO. He encouraged thuggish factional attacks by AFL unions against the CIO, and also banned pro-CIO pickets and demonstrations. When the Supreme Court ruled he could not arrest CIO supporters without charges, he just went ahead and did it anyway ... with Roosevelt’s explicit support. He also arbitrarily arrested Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas and had him dumped outside of town. Hague’s unconstitutional and corrupt activities were protected by his ally and former personal attorney Thomas Brogan, Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court (appointed by Hague ally Gov. A. Harry Moore, a Democrat). Hague was also closet allied with the wealthy Vanderbilt family. When reform-minded Republican (once a Hague ally and Atlantic City machine boss) Walter Edge became governor for the second time in 1943, he initiated reforms that limited Hague’s ability to cheat in elections, use sympathetic courts to support his illegal activity, and dispense patronage to supporters, leading to his resignation in 1947 and the defeat of his nephew and handpicked successor, Frank Hague Eggers, by his former ally-cum-reform Democrat John Kenny (who turned into another corrupt though liberal politician) in 1949.

4. Pat Buchanan. Buchanan began his entry into politics with the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, organized by William F. Buckley, and went on to support the 1964 campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater. In 1968 he was hired as political strategist by Richard Nixon and went on to serve as a speechwriter and advisor for both Nixon and Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew. Buchanan coined the term “Silent Majority” and encouraged Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” while also staking out positions as a nationalist, anti-Semite, protectionist, and opponent of prosecuting Nazi war criminals. He defended Nixon vociferously during the Watergate scandal and firmly supported the wars on Indochina. Gerald Ford nearly named him ambassador to (apartheid) South Africa but withdrew the nomination due to public outcry. Buchanan continued to support Republican candidates and also began a career as a radio and television personality, earning a name as an aggressive critic of gay rights and abortion rights, before being named White House communications director by Ronald Reagan. He played a leading role in organizing Reagan’s visit to Butburg cemetery, where he honored SS veterans, and pushed back at criticism of the visit by attacking the “Jewish media,” for which he was criticized not only by the left but also by the mainstream right including William F. Buckley and George Will. Buchanan defended Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s call for the killing of Salman Rushdie, exhorted people to vandalize the pro-communist Pathfinder Mural in New York (supporters obliged by spray-painting a swastika on it), and called for the lynching or horsewhipping of the members of the falsely accused Central Park Five. Buchanan went on to become a leading critic of Israel and of the Persian Gulf War, which he blamed on Jewish influence, and a supporter of a return to the gold standard. Buchanan also publicly praised fellow fascist and Catholic politicians McCarthy and Franco, as well as anticommunist rightist Douglas MacArthur, in glowing terms. Running against incumbent George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination on these themes, support for school prayer, and anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-immigrant sentiment, he got enough support among Republicans that they felt obliged to give him a prime-time speaking slot at the convention, where his vitriolic “culture war” speech is thought to have done serious damage to Bush’s campaign. In 1996, Buchanan ran again, calling for house to house searches to root out “illegal immigrants,” life sentences for drug dealers, and the death penalty for gays and for women seeking abortions, and won the New Hampshire primary. After he was denounced for his anti-Semitism and continued support for Nazi war criminals, and specifically denounced as a fascist by influential conservative Republican Charles Krauthammer, mainstream Republicans allied behind Bob Dole to defeat him. But the threat that Buchanan might not endorse him is credited with Dole’s decision not to choose a pro-choice running mate. In 2000, Buchanan led an ultimately successful bid to take over the Reform Party (originally a vehicle for billionaire Bonapartist candidate H. Ross Perot); the anti-fascist wing of the party attempted to stop him by coalescing behind Transcendental
Meditation crank John Hagelin and Buchanan went to court to be certified as the Reform Party candidate and get the associated federal matching funds. His running mate was Ezola Foster, the first Black woman member of the rightist John Birch Society. Buchanan got thousands of votes in reliably Democratic, largely Jewish Palm Beach County, Florida, which he acknowledged were probably intended for his opponent, Democrat Al Gore, and cast for him by mistake due to the county’s confusing (and illegal under state law) “butterfly ballot”—these were enough votes to tip the election in Gore’s favor had they gone to him instead. Buchanan went on to endorse Republican George W. Bush in 2004 (although he criticized the Iraq War), liberal (but anti-Israel) independent Ralph Nader in 2008, and Republicans Mitt Romney and Donald Trump in 2012 and 2016; Buchanan singled out Trump for adopting many of his campaign themes.
 

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5. Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche began his political career with the communist Socialist Workers Party, specifically with its Healyite (ultraleftist) “Revolutionary Tendency” which criticized Cuba and the Black Power Movement for insufficient revolutionary “purity” and opposed the rapprochement between the SWP and the “Pabloite” International Secretariat of the Fourth International, which had split with the SWP over Michel Pablo’s perspective of long-term adaptation to Stalinist regimes but which grew increasingly convergent due to a common response to the Cuban revolution. Expelled with the other supporters of the Revolutionary Tendency, LaRouche joined the American Committee for the Fourth International, which sought to rejoin the SWP and win it back to the perspective of the (ultraleft anti-Pabloite) International Committee, before leaving to join the Spartacist League, another ultraleftist group whose members had been expelled from the SWP but who did not seek to get back in. LaRouche then left the SL and began making demands for a 5th Communist International. Meanwhile he promoted the philosophical bugbears that he continued to support throughout his life, making the basic claim that history was understood as an intellectual struggle between the heroic, spiritual, noble followers of Plato (including Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and Marx) and the debased, materialistic, venal followers of Aristotle (including Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Newton, Kant, and Marcuse). LaRouche became involved in anti-Vietnam War organizing and recruited a circle of followers, eventually named the National Caucus of Labor Committees. He led his followers into Students for a Democratic Society, a multi-tendency leftist group, within which he violently contested with the Weather Underground, a Maoist faction, for control, occasionally leaning on support from the Progressive Labor Party, a more conservative Maoist faction backed by Beijing, until the PLP turned against him over his position on the AFT strike against allowing Black teachers in Brooklyn schools (LaRouche supported the strike) and he was expelled from SDS. Denouncing most of the left as agents of the CIA and the Fords and Rockefellers and as “cultural Marxists” associated with the Frankfurt School, beginning in 1972 LaRouche supporters began organizing physical attacks on the United Auto Workers. After the Communist Party responded with physical attacks on the LaRouchites, in 1973 LaRouche launched “Operation Mop-Up” to destroy the Communist Party by physical force. After the Socialist Workers Party cadres came to the Communist Party’s defense, LaRouche made the SWP targets as well. He later went on to call for attacks on the PLP as well. The FBI considered a plan to work with the Communist Party to have LaRouche assassinated, but abandoned it when they noticed LaRouche turning to the right and cultivating alliances with the Ku Klux Klan and the far-right, anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. LaRouche made apocalyptic warnings about global famine and warned of ever more elaborate conspiracies involving an alliance of the CIA, USSR, banks, Rockefellers, Israel, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Libyans (under Gadhafi), and “globalists,” all of which he eventually declared were arms of an international drug-dealing cartel led by the Queen of England. He was sympathetic to the government of Iran (under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi) and South Africa’s apartheid regime, and through his extensive intelligence network fed information to them on their enemies. He organized the U.S. Labor Party and ran for president in 1976, denouncing the alleged conspiracy and calling for a return to the gold standard, a debt moratorium, nationalization of banks, government investment in the aerospace industry, a “Star Wars” ABM program, and the death penalty for drug dealers. In the late 1970s he deepened his cooperation with the Ku Klux Klan and cultivated relationships with the CIA, FBI, Ford Foundation, and American Nazi Party. In 1979 he joined the Democratic Party and attempted to win its nomination in each subsequent election until his death. His politics in later years called for increased military spending, nuclear power, a national bank, the death penalty for drug dealers, a tunnel under the Bering Strait, an ABM system, and, beginning in the early 1980s, mandatory testing for HIV and putting the HIV-positive in concentration camps. He opposed environmentalism, abortion rights, and gay rights. He smeared opponents, including Democratic candidate (and former Vice President) Walter Mondale, as Soviet agents (in Mondale’s case), drug pushers, and/or gays. He was known for the use of death threats and violence against his opponents, including violent attacks (as well as antigay smears) during a dispute over zoning affecting his headquarters. Besides Mondale, he denounced (and organized physical attacks on supporters of) Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and John Kerry, as well as Barack Obama (his organization famously produced the grotesque Obama-Joker posters and initiated many of the Obamacare-as-Nazi policy conspiracies), but was friendly toward the political campaigns of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Howard Dean, and opposed the Clinton impeachment. He denounced Reagan’s role in the Iran-Contra scandal and actually helped break some of that story, but was hired on by Reagan’s CIA and DEA as a consultant. He accused the Bush family of being leading drug dealers and orchestrating 9/11. He later became friendly toward Yeltsin’s Russia. He also denounced rock music (saying it should be outlawed) and the music of Wagner, while insisting that everyone should listen to Verdi and Beethoven. He was a pioneer of global warming denial. In 1988 he was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the IRS after taking out tens of millions on credit cards through his followers and not paying it back. He spent five years in prison, at one time sharing a cell with televangelist-fraudster Jim Bakker. He died in 2019.
 

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6. William Dudley Pelley. Pelley was a Hollywood screenwriter and fiction writer who served with the White Army during the Russian Civil War. As his Hollywood career began to fail, he denounced “Jewish Communism” and Jewish domination of Hollywood. He went on to get involved in “spiritualism,” studying Theosophy, seances, Rosicrucianism, and pyramid conspiracies. He claimed out of body experiences and the ability to levitate and walk through walls. He became a supporter of the “British-Israelism” conjecture that the British were descended from the Biblical Lost Tribe of Ephraim, a belief that had a great influence in future years on the development of Christian Identity and the Aryan Nations Movement. However, he continued to see himself as a Methodist and his initial forays into politics involved denouncing Jews and Catholics and calling for a “Christian Economics” involving a return to a medieval guild system. In 1933, inspired by Hitler, he founded the Silver Legion of America (aka Silver Shirts or Christian Patriots), a uniformed legion that backed Hitler (despite his Catholicism), denounced and attacked Jews, Catholics, and racial equality, and joined the American Legion and Ku Klux Klan to beat members of unions, particularly the IBT and UAW. After Nazi Germany’s alliance with Japan, the Silver Shirts became strong supporters of Japan as well. However, they denounced Mussolini’s Italy as papist. In 1936, Pelley founded the Christian Party and ran for president as its candidate. In 1940, his headquarters was raided on securities fraud charges and several of his followers were arrested for illegal weapons possession. In 1942, Pelley was convicted of sedition and sentenced to prison. He was paroled in 1950 on the provision that he stop being involved in politics. He spent the rest of his life promoting his newfound interest in UFOs. He was a strong influence, directly or indirectly, on UFO believers and on the “I AM”
religious movements of the later 20th century.

7. David Duke. Duke, often accused of being an FBI agent, began his political career with the Citizens’ Councils organized to oppose racial desegregation and later named the Council of Conservative Citizens. Duke began giving pro-Hitler speeches and denounced desegregation and leftists. He was influenced by William Luther Pierce of the new-Nazi National Alliance. He joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 and formed the White Youth Alliance, a youth affiliate of the National Socialist White People’s Party, in 1968. He served with the CIA in Laos in 1971-1972. In 1972 he endorsed George Wallace in the Democratic primary, and allegedly kept money ostensibly raised for the Wallace campaign for himself. He was also charged with inciting a riot and (in a separate incident) making Molotov cocktails, but the charges were always dropped. In 1974, he founded Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of the most successful successors to the original KKK, which had fallen apart, and the first to admit women and Catholics as members. He supported Wallace again in 1976 and Ernest “Fritz” Hollings in 1984. As a Democrat, he ran for Louisiana Senate, U.S. Senate, and (in 1980) U.S. president. He attempted to steer the KKK away from direct violence and into political agitation against affirmative action and welfare and for the death penalty and three strikes laws; in 1980, California’s White Aryan Resistance split from the KKK due to the KKK’s decreased emphasis on violence. In 1980 he left the KKK and started the National Association for the Advancement of White People, and began promoting Holocaust denial. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, but after losing to Michael Dukakis ran as the candidate of the Populist Party, a single-issue anti-Jewish party founded by Liberty Lobby leader Willis Carto. After losing that election, he became a Republican and was successfully elected as a Republican to the state House of Representatives, serving a 3-year term from 1989 to 1992. He pushed for drug testing of welfare recipients as a major component of his campaign and also proposed sterilization of welfare recipients. He also made property tax relief a component of his campaign, successfully tying his opponent to higher taxes. He began talking less about Jewish conspiracies and white supremacy in explicit terms and more about opposition to affirmative action and busing, saying that he had become a born-again Christian and rejected his hateful past. However, he sold anti-Semitic literature including Hitler’s Mein Kampf from his legislative office. With the endorsement of the Christian Coalition, he was the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 1990, winning a large share of the vote in the blanket primary although he lost to the Democratic incumbent. He ran as the Republican candidate for governor in 1991; during the campaign he compared affirmative action to the Holocaust. He lost due to large Black turnout and denunciation by George H.W. Bush and other National Republican leaders, but received a majority of the white vote. The Christian Coalition backed him in the blanket primary, later claiming it was unaware of his record, but withdrew their support for the runoff. Duke sought the Republican presidential nominee in 1992 and ran as a Republican in 1996 for U.S. Senate and in 1999 for U.S. House. In 1996 and 2000, Duke endorsed the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan, joining the Reform Party in 2000. Also in 2000, he founded the European-American Rights Organization which promoted unity among white nationalists, opposition to affirmative action and busing, welfare reform, and censorship of media that made whites look bad. In 2004, Duke brokered a cooperation agreement among EURO, Liberty Lobby, the neo-Nazi National Vanguard, Council of Conservative Citizens, and the British National Party, helping unite a fractured far right and give it a common direction of nonviolent racist agitation focused on “the Jewish question.” Duke’s close ally was the Democratic candidate for U.S. House that year, while Duke endorsed the re-election of George W. Bush. Duke sought the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2016. In 2008, Duke endorsed independent Ralph Nader, and following the election he became involved with the Tea Party. In 2012, Duke supported Ron Paul in the Republican primary before endorsing Libertarian Gary Johnson. In 2016, he endorsed Trump, saying a vote against Trump would be “treason to your heritage.” Duke was a featured speaker at the 2017 Unite the Right rally. In 2020, he supported Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic primary before pivoting to support Trump’s re-election. However, he refused to endorse Mike Pence for Vice-President, saying that Tucker Carlson would be a better choice of running mate for Trump.
 

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8. Gerald L.K. Smith. A minister of the Disciples of Christ who made his name denouncing utility companies and supporting unions on the radio. Smith became a national organizer for Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth society, advocating a minimum and maximum wealth and income. Smith joined with the followers of Francis Townsend (a reformer advocating social security) and Charles Coughlin to form the Union Party as a vehicle for Long, and following Long’s assassination settled on Lemke, who however denounced Smith. Bankrolled by William Randolph Hearst, Smith took the Society in a more anti-tax, White supremacist direction than under Long. He supported Willkie for president in 1940. In 1942, with financial support from Henry Ford, he founded the Christian Nationalist Crusade, which promoted segregation, anti-Semitism, and isolationism. He published and publicized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s The International Jew. He then ran as the candidate of the America First party in 1944, having unsuccessfully supported Charles Lindbergh for the Republican nomination. During the campaign, he joined Pelley’s Silver Shirts and helped organize attacks on the UAW and other CIO unions. Smith agitated against punishment of Nazi war criminals and was a pioneer of Holocaust denial. In 1948 he ran as the Christian Nationalist candidate for president. His 1948 campaign helped coalesce far-right groups from diverse backgrounds ... the Ku Klux Klan, We the Mothers (a women’s fascist club), the Church of Jesus Christ Christian (the precursor of Christian Identity and Aryan Nations), the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America (another Christian Identity group) ... into a common political current. Smith sought to appeal to supporters of Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic Party, but was denounced by Thurmond. Smith was run out of first Michigan and later California by organized labor, retiring to Arkansas where his legacy includes the Christ of the Ozarks statue and an annual passion play. In later years he was denounced by Robert Welch of the John Birch Society and by Barry Goldwater. The Christian Nationalist Party nominates Douglas MacArthur for president in 1952 and Smith again in 1956.

9. George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell was a commercial artist who served with distinction in the Navy against Germany, Japan, and Korea. He became an outspoken supporter of McCarthy and an outspoken critic of homosexuality, and supported MacArthur’s 1952 presidential campaign, through which he was introduced to Gerald L.K. Smith and Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Via Smith’s influence he read Mein Kampf and became a convinced Hitler supporter. He began denouncing integration but kept his anti-Jewish and pro-Hitler views quiet for strategic reasons. He joined the rightist, segregationist John Birch Society and attempted to nudge them in an anti-Semitic direction, but became disillusioned when many members didn’t agree with his perspective. In 1958, using money given to him by William F. Buckley, he founded the National Committee to Free America from Jewish Domination. He protested the U.S. invasion of Lebanon as Jewish-influenced and coordinated with the segregationist National States Right’s Party and the White-supremacist Knights of the White Camelia to organize synagogue bombings. In 1959 he founded the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, which he renamed the American Nazi Party later that year. In 1962, he co-founded the World Union of National Socialists uniting neo-Nazi movements from around the world. He became an active promoter of racial separatism, referring positively to fellow racial separatist Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam as “the Black Hitler” and donating money at an NOI meeting where Muhammad and Malcolm X spoke. Rockwell, who styled himself an agnostic but spoke positively of Christianity’s effect on culture, also cultivated alliances with Wesley Swift’s Christian Identity Movement and coordinated pro-segregation terror campaigns with the Ku Klux Klan. Rockwell was a major intellectual influence on David Duke. In 1967 the ANP was renamed the National Socialist White People’s Party in an effort to broaden its appeal by de-emphasizing its Hitlerite, anti-Semitic roots. During an unprincipled struggle over the considerable revenues from American Nazi Party literature and racist country music, Rockwell was assassinated by an expelled member of the party in 1967. The party fractured due to continued disputes of this nature; Rockwell’s designated successor became Matt Koehl, who blocked further efforts to dissociate the party from Hitlerism and cultivated alliances with occultists. Rockwell’s close associate William Luther Pierce took most of the Party membership with him into the militant National Alliance which effected a successful merger with the National Youth Alliance organized to support the 1968 presidential campaign of American Independent Party candidate George Wallace. National Socialist Movement, National Socialist Party of America, and National Vanguard, other leading neo-Nazi movements, resulted from splits from these parties, and thus traced their lineage back to Rockwell as well. Their legacy has been one of anti-immigrant terror, anti-Black terror, anti-communist terror, and even attempted assassinations of leading mainstream politicians (Ronald Reagan and James Brady, by NSPA cadre John Hinckley).
 

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10. Richard Spencer. Spencer became involved in politics through Duke University’s Duke Conservative Union, through which he came under the intellectual influence of anti-immigrant rightist leader Stephen Miller (later chief policy advisor to Donald Trump). A supporter of John Kerry in 2004, he backed Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign and became involved with the Robert Taft Club, a conservative and isolationist Republican group. He soon became assistant editor for The American Conservative magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan to unite fascist and conservative critics of the Iraq War. Spencer was introduced to the work of George Lincoln Rockwell and through his influence became a neo-Nazi. He later was profoundly influenced by Julius Evola, a neoreactionary leader who criticized fascism from the right, and by Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin. Fired from The American Conservative (under increasingly mainstream conservative leadership) for his neo-Nazi leanings, he went to work for Taki’s Magazine, a “libertarian” magazine founded by a hardline wing of The American Conservative staff ousted for its explicit support of Greece’s fascist organization Golden Dawn. In 2010 Spencer started the website AlternativeRight-dot-com, which promoted his view that the far right should break with mainstream conservatism and his support for a white ethnostate in Europe. Spencer called for the ethnic cleansing of Blacks, Jews, and Turks. He denounced Christianity and championed atheism, denounced gays and women political leaders, and spoke in favor of the right to abortion. He came to the attention of William Regnery II, a wealthy white nationalist with intellectual roots in the Goldwater campaign, and via Regnery became head of Washington Summit Publishers and the National Policy Institute, respectively a publishing house and think tank founded by Regnery. He influenced both in the direction of anti-Semitism. In 2012 he again supported the Paul campaign for president. He cultivated ties to Youth for Western Civilization, a conservative group chaired by Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo; Property and Freedom Society, a conservative/white-nationalist group influenced by the views of F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard; American Renaissance, Jared Taylor’s White supremacist group; Identity Evropa, a neo-Nazi, White supremacist group associated with white-supremacist Kevin MacDonald; Mike Enoch’s neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate The Right Stuff; and the racist, anti-Semitic HL Mencken Group. He organized the website AltRight-dot-com to facilitate united action by fascists and other anti-Semites (ultraconservatives, neo-reactionaries, paleolibertarians, etc.), and played a big role in organizing alt-right support for Donald Trump. He also encouraged far right support for Putin, and stakes out a very pro-Russia position on foreign policy (including calls for the U.S. to withdraw from NATO). He held a victory celebration after Trump’s election in which he quoted Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews. He has also praised rightist Republican Steve King. Mainstream conservatives who have supported Spencer include journalist Ann Coulter, while he has been condemned by Hungary’s ultrarightist leader Viktor Orban as a globalist, by Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay, Jewish, anti-gay, anti-Jewish ultrarightist and former ally, as an extremist, and by conservative Republican Interior Secretary Ryan Zimmerman (and virtually all Democrats) as a bigot. He organized physical attacks on International Students for Liberty, a libertarian group, in 2017. He was a featured speaker at the 2017 Unite the Right rally, organized through the auspices of the Proud Boys’ and Daily Caller’s Jason Kessler and dovetailing with Spencer’s agenda of uniting the radical right, which included, besides Spencer’s NPI and Kessler, The Right Stuff, David Duke, the Fraternal Order of alt-Knights (a more explicitly fascist wing of the Proud Boys), Identity Evropa, the fascist, Strasser-influenced Traditionalist Workers Party, the neo-Confederate, pro-fascist League of the South, the neo-Confederate Identity Dixie, the Mussolini-inspired fascists Vanguard America, the National Socialist Movement, which split from Koehl’s NSWPP over Koehl’s preoccupation with esotericism, Loyal White Knights of the KKK, an explicitly Christian (but not Protestant-triumphalist or fascist) Klan group, Confederate White Knights of the KKK (a neo-Confederate Klan group without a fascist orientation and the organizers of the first pro-Confederate Statue protests in Charlottesville), Rise Above Movement, a hyper-masculinist fighting group, the American Guard, a conservative nationalist militia, the Detroit Right Wings, a militant antilabor group, True Cascadia, a white separatist group, Alt-Right Montreal, a Spencer-inspired ultraright group, Hammer Brothers, a fascist group with roots in the Rock Against Communism Movement inspired by Britain’s National Front, Anti-Communist Action, an extremely violent fascist group inspired by Russian ultrarightrist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, GamerGate’s neo-Nazi personality Baked Alaska, Augustus Invictus, a leader of the white-supremacist wing of the Libertarian Party, the Daily Stormer, which forged ties among fascists, GamerGate, and “men’s rights activists,” Red Ice, a racist, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory radio show, Rebel Media, a right-wing Canadian broadcast focused mostly on antipathy toward Muslims but also emphasizing white supremacy and anti-Semitism, Right Side Broadcasting Network, a pro-Trump, anti-Muslim conservative media outlet enjoyed by Trump, Business Insider, a mainstream pro-business media outlet, and Radical Agenda, a white-supremacist group with roots in the Libertarian Party. Following the rally, Spencer praised Trump’s comments on the rally. Spencer supporters were convicted of attempted murder in the wake of a 2018 speech in which they fired guns at counter-protesters. Spencer denounced Trump following the assassination of Iranian general Qasim Soleimani, and endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president in 2020, stating that the return of “competence” to the White House would give the alt-right time to regroup.
 
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