The freezing temperatures have affected power plants, offices, hospitals and homes, at least 30 people so far. Major metropolitan cities such as Houston, San Antonio, Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin are literally frozen. Personally, it was indeed unusual to message colleagues in Europe and Britain to cancel meetings, reporting that three inches of snow had caused power outages in a state known for its energy production. Having spent most of my adult life in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, never would I have imagined my home state of Texas crumbling before my eyes from such a minuscule amount of snow.

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On the ground, people, including myself, have collected and melted snow to flush toilets. Some are resorting to more desperate measures. Those who do have water are being told by local officials to boil before usage. Almost everyone fears their pipes bursting and flooding their homes with freezing water, as has happened to many friends and colleagues. Like others, I have scavenged for wood to burn in our seldom-used fireplace. Fueling stations and grocery shelves have been much like during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and people are sheltering in place for the second time in a year.

While some pundits have tried to frame this as a “once in a century event,” such claims begin to ring hollow after they become so frequently used. Scientists like Judah Cohen argue this is just the from the on-going climate crisis.

The Latest Disaster

While snow is indeed rare in central and south Texas, in the northern, rural panhandle, snow is quite normal. Those small northern cities that are closer to Colorado than Mexico have been operating on one of the two national power grids and thus have largely been unaffected by the crisis. In the rest of energy-rich Texas, public utilities have been privatized over the decades, as state Republicans opted for the rest of Texas to operate its own power grid to avoid federal regulation.

Former Texas governor and US secretary of energy, Rick Perry, on Wednesday that “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” One friend of mine, who coincidently works in the oil and gas industry, had to escape his cold, waterless house at midnight with his wife, toddler, and 13-day-old baby. He would certainly disagree with that callous statement.

On Sunday night, as temperatures dropped to a 30-year record low of -18˚C (0˚F), demand for energy rose, the power grid collapsed because of a lack of weather preparedness, causing widespread outages. These outages caused local water systems to freeze not just because of the cold weather, but due to a lack of electricity to pump the water, leaving the state without supply. The state then mandated rolling outages to regulate energy — with no clear idea of which communities are being prioritized, how energy is being triaged and when this will end.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has gone on Fox News to blame renewable energy sources — and to attack the proposed Green New Deal favored by progressives — for a crisis caused primarily by the failure of the state to follow national standards to prepare equipment for dangerous weather events. Falsely, Abbott has : “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a state-wide basis … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”

This was by right-wing representatives like Dan Crenshaw. In truth, the crisis was mostly caused by a mandating equipment be prepared for extreme weather as federal guidelines suggest. It was further exacerbated by the fact that Republican lawmakers, in power for the past two decades, refused to participate in the national grid, which could have eased the strain on the state’s system — all to pad the profit margins of private energy companies.

Of course, much colder places in the northern United States and Canada rely on renewable solar and wind energy that has been equipped for cold weather. After blowback showing that most of the failures originated with fossil fuel, gas and nuclear power plants that were not equipped for the weather, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which is led by Republicans he appointed. Meanwhile, right-wing Texas state Senator Ted Cruz left his constituents to as he headed toward Cancun, in Mexico, Houston police resources to help him get to the airport.

Tim Boyd, mayor of Colorado City, has resigned after on Facebook that “No one owes you [or] your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout.” Boyd’s argument relies on the prominent Texas myth of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. This individualist myth assumed that white settler colonialists did precisely that and survived the wilderness alone at the edge of the American frontier, so you should too. In fact, these settlers often relied upon not just each other but also generations of communal knowledge shared with them by Native Americans.

Ensuring Survival

Ensuring survival during disasters requires a collective approach. This is one of the reasons we humans live in societies — we can do more together than alone. This is something that the current COVID-19 crisis should have taught us. The solution is simple, yet enormous: we must modernize all our systems —health, education and infrastructure. We need to make all utility companies — gas, electric, water, internet, cable, and phones — public. We must not prioritize customers but, rather, people.

Texas is having a rude awakening because of decades of conservative policies that have prioritized private companies and rejected federal regulations that would have made the current crisis more manageable, if not altogether avoidable. Texas, the epitome of right-wing experimentation, has become a failed experiment overnight. Resolving this issue will be complicated because of continued climate change denial and the rejection of facts by right-wing politicians and their cult.

In Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, “Don Quixote,” the fictional errant knight attacks what he perceives to be giants, despite being warned by his squire, Sancho Panza, that they are simply windmills. After Quixote’s failed attack on the windmills, Cervantes writes that “the knight was unable to move, so great was the shock with which he and [his horse] had hit the ground.” With their own attack on wind turbines, Texas Republicans have begun charging at windmills, blaming a small renewable energy sector instead of the destructive policies that created this deadly disaster.

Hopefully, like Don Quixote, who eventually recognizes his madness, the Republican Party will acknowledge its own delusions. Imagining these windmills as socialist giants coming for individual rights will leave us “very much battered indeed,” as Cervantes describes his delusional character who, too, tilted at windmills.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Hardly new concepts, anarchism and antifascism are often mistakenly associated with chaos and violence due to negative propaganda and a general misunderstanding of the concepts. Whilst anarchism, antifascism and antifa are all broadly struggles against oppression, each has its own history, although often overlapping, that can help us to situate a political ideology whose time might have come after nearly a century in exile.

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Anarchists believe hierarchies create oppression, and so they want to decentralize power through consensus-based democracy, requiring much more than a simple majority vote. Today, anarchists are also antifascist — something learned in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. They broadly believe in radical equality and mutual aid through local community, and value personal autonomy.

Antifascism has come to signify the struggle against racism, patriarchy, class oppression, colonialism, nationalism, queerphobia and ableism — what antifascists consider the backbone of fascism. Although Susan Sontag advises against using illness as a metaphor, in the midst of a global pandemic, this one feels apt: Antifascists might be better understood as democratic society’s antibodies in defense against virulent fascism.

The Anarchist Ideal

In his “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” German philosopher Karl Popper distinguishes two main types of government, one in which change can happen without bloodshed, through social institutions that “provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled” and those in which rulers can only be changed through revolution. The options thus are democracy (liberty) or dictatorship (tyranny). For the anarchist, society should be based upon both consensus and consent — and always moving toward a more open society.

During the Enlightenment, a radical idea proposing people could govern themselves reemerged: democracy. In its early modern iteration, this idea of self-governance applied only to middle-class white men. Some women, like Olympe de Gouge and Mary Wollstonecraft, made strong arguments for the rights of women and the abolition of slavery. Seeing the aftermath of the American, French and Haitian revolutions, monarchs across Europe panicked, arguing that leaderless anarchy would only result in chaos. At its heart, the concept of democracy promoted a decentralization of power from the few to the many — the anarchist ideal.

Modern anarchism came into focus with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s provocative 1840 book “What is Property?” that came to propose an expansion of the ancient shared right of “the commons.” In 19^th-century Paris, Proudhon met with the likes of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin. From the onset, anarchists and communists, despite both being on the left, had little patience for one another. Proudhon rejected Marx’s authoritarian tendencies, and Marx considered Proudhon a bourgeois idealist. They both agreed on the dangers of imperialism and capitalism.

Peter Marshall that Proudhon imagined a world in which workers would “control their own means of production” and “form small as well as large associations” for industry and manufacturing. For Proudhon, the worker would thus be “no longer a serf of the State, swamped by the ocean of the community” and instead would be a “free man, truly his own master, who acts on his own initiative” while still being beholden to his community.

Proudhon saw the patriarchal family as the origin of authoritarianism and deplored the dominance of governments in everyday life. Proudhon imagined federations of autonomous regions to which a person would consent to belong and contribute. In his system, the larger political units had the fewest powers, and smallest units (the individual) would have the most power. People would also consent to become members of mutual aid associations based around an idea of having shared “commons” and would trade amongst each other — communal living.

The first grand experiment of this occurred with the declaration of the briefly-lived Paris Commune of 1871, in a moment when the French government retreated from Paris in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Anarchism eventually found even more success in both Russia and Spain. By the 1930s, millions of people in Spain lived in anarchist collectives.

Who Are the Real Terrorists?

Anarchism came to Americans’ attention with the Haymarket affair of 1886 — a protest both against the murder of workers by police and for an eight-hour work day — when anarchists lobbed bombs at officers in an act of desperation as the police attempted to clear the protest.

Just over a hundred years ago, anarchist Emma Goldman about the two principal objections to anarchism she encountered regularly, still familiar today. Anarchism was “impractical, though a beautiful ideal” and that it stood “for violence and destruction.” Goldman defined anarchism as the “philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”

Those two premises both explain the claims of impracticality but also why anarchists have at times been willing to commit destruction or violence. Anarchists commit violence under the assumption that existing governments are violent and unjust themselves and must be changed through revolution, not unlike what was seen in the French and American revolutions. Goldman rejected order “derived through submission and maintained by terror.” As historian John Merriman describes, for Goldman, “it was not anarchist theory that created terrorists but rather the shocking inequalities they saw around them.”

Like socialists and communists, anarchists recognized the revolutionary power of organizing labor and acting as a collective — what they called “anarcho-syndicalism,” or trade unions that operated through direct democracy. For Goldman, social order had to be “based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth” so that to “guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes and inclinations.” In this way, anarchism represents the highest ideals of the Enlightenment.

During the twilight of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s, as Hitler rose to power, the Communist Party created the Antifaschistische Aktion, antifa for short, to combat fascism, which was then understood as being a late imperialist form of capitalism. During the Spanish Civil War, Spanish anarchists, communists, socialists and republicans rose up against the threat of fascism in Spain.

Goldman, by then exiled from the US since 1919, because of her incendiary threat, through the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 (expanded in 1918), organized fundraising efforts against fascism from abroad. As the Nazi threat rose, even the United States — the country from which Hitler’s regime drew inspiration in the creation of its own segregation and miscegenation laws — saw the threat of fascism and collectively decided that the only way to fight it was through the violence of war, ultimately taking an antifascist stance.

In the postwar era, as scholars and activists came to better understand fascism, it became clear that fascism’s strict hierarchies and categories were indeed the antithesis of anarchism in particular. Combatting this articulation of fascism came to define the communal, squatting and autonomous housing movements that arose in Europe and the United States in which anarchist groups took the concept of communal living to also include intentional living and mutual cooperation in their everyday lives. Some anarchist-Catholic groups, inspired by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, even found traction. When Spain finally transitioned to democracy in the 1970s, it opted to have autonomous communities rather than provinces or states — a legacy of anarchism.

Anarchism and Antifascism Today

First entering the public imagination during the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, Washington, “” have largely been misunderstood by the media as organized hordes of anarchists roving the street and causing wanton destruction. Rather than an organized body, a black bloc is better understood as an ad hoc gathering of anarchist-leaning people to anonymize themselves by wearing black clothing and masks covering all but their eyes to march in protest.

In “Who’s Afraid of the Black Blocs?”, Francis Dupruis-Déri that the tactic of smashing property shows “the ‘public’ that neither private property nor the state, as represented by the police, is sacred,” and indicates “that some are prepared to put themselves in harm’s way to express their anger against capitalism or the state, or their solidarity with those most disadvantaged by the system.” Communist party members, conservative politicians, many anarchist-pacifists, orderly protestors and everyone in between have rejected this tactic. Too often such participants have been called “outside provocateurs” in an attempt to exclude them.

In the 21^st century, anarchist tactics of using the occupation of public spaces and strategies to decenter organizing structures reappeared in the Spanish 15^th of May Movement in 2011. Inspired in part by the Arab Spring, as unemployment spiked and services were cut, the movement asked for “real democracy now” and was a rebuke of capitalism and the austerity measures imposed because of the economic crisis caused by rampant speculation in the housing market. Borrowing from the anarchist toolbox, the organizers occupied public plazas and streets across Spain during that summer, organized affinity groups and made consensus-based decisions on actions they wanted to take, including the occupation of abandoned buildings so that to place the homeless.

From the onset, affinity groups interested in immigrant rights, feminism, queer issues and racism arose as well. This model was then adapted in September of that year in the Occupy Wall Street protests in the US. Some of these tactics and strategies were later found in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2013, which also drew inspiration from anti-apartheid, Black Power and pan-African movements, amongst others.

Antifa

In anarchist theory, harm caused by capitalism and racism is the result of systemic violence, often obscured. In recent years, anarchists have come to stand against settler colonialism, have advocated for the abolition of the current carceral system and have allied themselves with indigenous people against the US government, as seen in the Dakota pipeline protests. They believe in self-defense and collective defense. In a coming out of Seattle, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a seemingly anarchist-inspired “occupied” area around an abandoned police station, intends to return land to indigenous people from whom it was “” and to establish community-based policing.

Since the rise of white nationalist movements, such as Richard Spencer’s alt-right, and the populism of Donald Trump, antifa’s banner has been lifted to militantly fight what its standard-bearers consider fascism. Pulling the antifascist flag out of the drawer, the antifa movement combined black bloc tactics with antifascist practice and decentered anarchist organizing in order to physically protect innocents at protests under threat from right-wing radicals whilst simultaneously using their own bodies and freedom of speech to disrupt the hate speech of radical-right provocateurs like Spencer and groups like the and the .

Some of these right-wing groups are accelerationists eager to spark a race war, willing to infiltrate antiracist protests themselves to fan the flames. Accelerationism has a long history in communist circles, but less so in anarchism. Used by Vladimir Lenin during the 1917 Russian Revolution, accelerationism was an attempt to bring forward a communist utopia whilst skipping the “bourgeois revolution” Marx believed necessary for a workers’ revolution to take place. More recently, the concept of accelerationism has been associated with the far right and white waiting for a rapture to .

The convicted Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011, the Australian man charged with killing 51 Muslims at a mosque in 2018 in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the American charged with the murder of 22 people, and the attempted murder of 23 more, in El Paso, Texas, last year all extolled a belief in their manifestos that their acts would accelerate the arrival of an inevitable race war that would leave the white race supreme.

Given that the world is still in the grip of a pandemic and even peaceful protestors are wearing masks, it is still unclear who has caused the damage and who has looted — and for what reason. Prominent far-right figures like and his “Groypers” livestreamed from protests and news reports with their chants, and others, like the Boogaloo Bois, who do believe in accelerationism, have been in Las Vegas and . Although property destruction has often been a black bloc tactic, the FBI has stated there is of antifa’s involvement during the first week of the protests. Some looters could have been opportunists.

During the current protests around the killing of George Floyd, no clear evidence has indicated that looting or physical violence was started by either anarchists or antifascists. And even if there were violence, one must ask if these were actions against the police or self-protection? Is damage indeed violence against racist statues and property, or is it an attempt at dissent against an already oppressive racist, sexist, classist, nationalistic, queerphobic and ableist political and economic system that has been exacerbated by a global pandemic that has left the most vulnerable jobless and at risk? If the latter, then perhaps we need both the idealism of anarchists and the fortitude of antifascists more than ever.

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Recently, many debates have arisen with the arrival of the scathing phrase lobbed in  and : “OK, boomer.” While many have criticized the phrase for having a , and others have lauded it for its , it is helpful to understand what we mean by a generation, and the history and politics behind the concept in order to understand the “Ok, boomer” phenomenon.

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In circulation since the European Middle Ages, a generation once was only used to indicate the divide between grandparents, parents and children. Each birth marked a new regeneration — a generation was not marked by strict years or thought of as cohorts outside of familial categorizations. Today, it is another mechanism by which politics operates.

Generations and Nationalism

On the face of it, trying to find correlations between experiences and identity is not necessarily a bad thing. In many ways, constructions of generations are always based on stereotypes. Naturally, problems arise when deciding what those defining factors are, and when and where a cohort begins. Too often, these definitions of generations lead to dangerous generalizations when stretched too far.

Today, generations often mark difference in ethics, politics and expectations for the future. The bounds of a generation are not created just by familial regeneration, but are also by those who came before and are placed upon a cohort of people based on happenstances that are decided as being fundamentally different life circumstances — often centered around technology and politics. It is a process of “othering.”

One of the earliest documented “generations” arose in Spain — the Generation of 1898. It was thought of as a generation of writers primarily, but reflective of Spanish society at large. In particular, this generation of Spaniards was confronted by the loss of empire with the Spanish-American War of that year. As Spain’s boundaries shifted, new ideas of what it meant to be a Spaniard arose.

Some turned to critiquing the nation, and others desired it to return to its roots, creating what they called the problem of the “two Spains.” Many of those tendencies lent themselves toward nationalism, critiquing what were seen as fundamental flaws of Spain and a desire to return to lo castizo — a belief in a sort of mythical pure Spanishness, not unlike the German concept of Heimat, or homeland. Out of this came the belief that Spain needed to be regenerated — to be made great again.

This nationalistic understanding of those two Spains collided into a civil war between fascists, the military, Catholics and the landed elites versus republicans, workers, socialists, anarchists and communists. However ironically, the fascist dictatorship that emerged fell to the wayside once a new generation emerged that had no memory of the war, living amongst adults who didn’t want to speak of it.

As I write in , “For the young, ‘amnesia’ was a product of a disjuncture in experiences that occurred between the generations that lived through the civil war and those who grew up afterwards… This cultural amnesia functioned to give young Spaniards a reason to look away from a ‘backwards’, forgotten past, and towards a future that was lived in the moment.”

Nationalistic generationalism presumes that a nation must be regenerated — most famously seen in far-right movements like the Hitler Youth. In this modernist understanding of a generation, national boundaries — and who could be considered a citizen — was a defining characteristic of a generation. A generation became a stand-in for the future of the nation.

However, after the Second World War, generations came to mark commonalities in lived experiences and desire for social change more broadly, not solely for nationalistic purposes. A generation could, in fact, cut across race, gender, class and national identity. It could become a shared ethic. Yet still, the nationalistic generationalism of the early 20^th century certainly still exists, as seen for example in the identitarian youth movement, .

No Consensus for the Future

In the United States, boomers earned their moniker for being part of the baby boom that occurred after World War II — a manifestation across much of the West. They were defined by both generationalism of old and the political aftermath of the war. Over time, multiple definitions of a boomer emerged: one that was created by demographers in the postwar era, those constructed by boomers themselves, and the stereotypes made by later generations. In the US, the image of a boomer is often white, middle-class and nostalgic for their childhood.

Those whom millennials and Gen Zers are calling boomers today thought to believe the world was once more innocent, despite growing up in the midst of the Korean and Vietnam wars, women’s liberation and the Black Freedom Movement. For their critics, boomers either ignored those realities or are hypocrites who have since reneged on their politics. The politics behind today’s generationalism is a debate about what the future of the nation should be and who should be a part of the nation. These boomers are looking around at the world they live in now, and wanting to go back to the segregated black-and-white world of “Leave It to Beaver.”

Stereotypes aside, there are plenty of people across generations whom have fallen for this imagined, idealistic dream of the 1950s — “when things were better,” when “men where men” and “people knew their place in the world.” They want Brexit and to “Make America Great Again.” They fall into the nationalistic and fascist versions of the generationalism of old. Fundamentally, this is a debate between some people believing that a nation is defined by race and others believing that nationality identity can be pluralistic.

Millennials were defined by politics and the rise of the internet. They grew up with the internet but also have a memory of an analogue world. They experienced an interruption of the idealism of the 1990s by a war on terror and the militarization of the police force. Millennials lived through an economic crisis and many have serious doubts about capitalism and racist, patriarchal and queerphobic institutions that boomers seem to want to protect, couching their values in some sort of traditionalism.

For the globally-minded Gen Z, the world is burning, and something needs to be done. This is true for very different reasons for climate activist Greta Thunberg and any number of far-right internet trolls. When a millennial or zoomer says “OK, boomer,” it is not so much a rejection of the elders but of close-minded, centrist and backward-looking people who refuse to acknowledge the realities of today: that identity politics matter, that climate change is real and that democracy is under siege.

Some find it hard to accept the realities of a pluralistic world. They accuse the younger generations of naivety and of not being realistic. The younger generations don’t understand their parochialism.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In 1939, a Book of the Month Club (a US-based literary subscription service) edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published “for the political understanding of the American people.” As indicated in the pamphlet insert, the edition was sponsored for publication by a committee composed of the likes of Pearl Buck, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Eugene O’Neill and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, to name just a few. More importantly, the edition proudly proclaimed on its infamous red, black and white cover that all profits would go to refugee children.

In addition to doing right by the children, this effort to give profits to them most obviously attempted to ease the conscience of the consumer. Moreover, the committee also argued that publishing the book was a “demonstration, by quiet deed, of the truest spirit of democracy, to combat this new form of evil among men by first dragging it forth to the full light where it can be coolly appraised.” Indeed, just a few years later, philosopher Karl Popper, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, argued that tolerating intolerance could only ultimately end with intolerance. His “paradox of tolerance” asked if it even were possible to engage with fascism without running the risk of succumbing to, or permitting, its intolerant ideology.

While the publication of the book surely did some good by providing funds for refugee children, the edition highlights two predicaments journalists and scholars who covered the radical right confronted. Firstly, did those scholars and journalists offset potential negative side effects when they dragged evil ideas into the light? Secondly, even if confrontation with fascist ideologies was benign, were the contemporary scholar of the 1930s to purchase Mein Kampf directly from Germany, thus financially supporting the regime, would it be ethical?

Financing Extreme Ideologies

In her most recent book, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany, that “Since the early 2000s, far right youth have gravitated away from the singular, hard-edged skinhead style in favor of sophisticated, fashionable, and highly profitable brands that deploy coded far right extremist symbols.” In her work, Miller-Idriss describes particularities of products the radical right purchases and sells to both identify each other and to finance extremist ideologies. Although the internet age has given scholars easier access to the propaganda and writings of the radical right, there is still material that is not available for free. Thus, one must ask: Is it ever ethical for a scholar to purchase something from a radical right group for the purposes of studying it? This is a question I certainly have confronted.

In recent years, I have followed and the European-American radical-right publisher, Arktos Media, which has a large global outreach, selling books by contemporary right-wing thinkers such as Alexander Dugin and esoteric writers such as Julius Evola. Daniel Friberg, a Swedish nationalist and Arktos’s CEO, has even collaborated with American alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer in creating the website altright.com and has given Spencer and other alt-right leaders a platform in a 2018 edited volume, A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders. I began this research while serving as a lecturer of history and literature at Harvard University.

My research, like Arktos, bridged two mediums: digital and analogue. However, for the purposes of research, I quickly found myself negotiating the careful balancing act of both trying to do my work whilst not incidentally supporting Arktos’s mission in the process of trying to acquire the radical-right literature it peddled to their readers. Published Arktos titles include: The Saga of the Aryan Race; New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe; Fascism Viewed from the Right; The Colonization of Europe; and Understanding Islam, which features on its cover a skeleton dressed in a burka.

When I initially began my research into Arktos in 2016, I found few libraries actually carried Arktos’s work. Most often, they sold their books directly to individuals via Arktos’s website or Amazon. The libraries that did carry those books were often local libraries in small towns — a notable curiosity in itself. Instinctually, rather than shell out money that would support the radical-right publisher, I ordered the books through Interlibrary Loan, as Harvard did not have any of Arktos’s works in its massive collection. However, little had I realized at the time that a simple act of borrowing those books could signal to libraries that there was indeed demand for this kind of literature.

I requested as many of the Arktos books as I could find on WorldCat via Interlibrary Loan. However, when the librarians at Harvard noticed that a faculty member was interested in that publisher, they purchased several Arktos books for their collection. The last thing I wanted was for one of the wealthiest libraries in the world to start to purchase this material, yet suddenly there they were on the shelves of Widener Library.

Unintended Support

Just as problematically, what was I to do about the books that were not available through Interlibrary Loan? Was I to buy them myself? I did need those books to complete my research — but at the cost of financing Arktos? In a capitalist society such as the United States, where money is deemed freedom of speech by its Supreme Court, is spending money to purchase those books not actual financial support for the radical right?

Eventually, in order to complete my research, I settled on purchasing select titles sold second-hand by individuals on Amazon. In this way I could at least tell myself that I was not contributing directly to Arktos’s bank account and potentially was taking a book off the market. Yet still, my purchase inevitably also taught Amazon that there was interest in those books. In fact, when we get technical, even searching for the personages and topics of the radical right can ultimately teach Google’s algorithms to highlight websites and YouTube channels that probably should not see the light of day, at least according to those who prescribe to Popper’s theory of the paradox of tolerance.

More recently, the website altright.com, with which Arktos is no longer directly associated, announced preparations for the release of a new platform called AltRight Plus. Its website describes AltRight Plus as offering exclusive podcasts, videos and long-form articles. Although the platform vacillates between dormant and active, it asks for a minimum $9 monthly donation for access. Under no rationale could I ever justify paying for such a subscription, even if that content is directly of interest to me as both as a digital historian and as a scholar of the radical right. But is such a subscription really that different from other forms of unintended support, such as Google searches and borrowing from libraries?

Of course, this dilemma exists elsewhere in the virtual world as well, and ultimately in more insidious ways. After all, alt-lite provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and his ilk do indeed profit from having eyes on their videos — whether for research purposes or not. Can we ethically watch these videos at all if we believe that in some way Yiannopoulos is profiting from them? These questions expand very quickly into just how our consumerism acts as a vehicle for our politics in a capitalist society — a larger question that leaves us all implicated and for which there is no easy answer or solution. On balance, we can only hope our work does more good than bad.

*[The  is a partner institution of 51�Թ�. Updated: February 11, 2019.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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