Thread by @pastpunditry

A really remarkable piece of reporting by @Rosie Gray about Katie McHugh, a young woman who left the white supremacist alt-right movement. A few thoughts on what her story reveals. /1

buzzfeednews.com/article/rosieg…

@Rosie First: I wondered to what extent the heavy influence of men's rights activism in the alt-right would have on her experience. Women aren't unheard of in the alt-right — I've written about them before — but theirs is a more isolating experience. /2

vox.com/the-big-idea/2…

That comes through in Gray's piece, particularly the discussion of McHugh's relationship with her partner, Kevin DeAnna, who moved in a number of white supremacist circles. Gray describes McHugh's relationship with DeAnna as "her entrée into the alt-right. /3

Through McHugh, we can see the social relationships that tie various parts of the alt-right together in a way that, as @kathleen_belew shows in her work on the white power movement, can only be seen by studying the movement's women. /4

Nor is it just her romantic relationship: she babysits the children of VDARE's Peter Brimelow, offers to host a dinner for Holocaust denier David Irving, and so on. As such, her story provides insights into how the alt-right operates as a social movement. /5

Second: Her path to radicalization, weaving through the Institute for Humane Studies at GMU to the Daily Caller to Breitbart (including working as producer for Steve Bannon's radio show), shows the porousness of the boundaries between the mainstream right and the alt-right. /6

"Mainstream" is a tricky descriptor here, precisely because of that porousness. A site like Breitbart, for instance, sits on the boundary between the mainstream right and the alt-right, acting (esp between 2014-2017) as a pass-through to the alt-right. /7

It's tricky, too, because sites we might consider mainstream, like National Review, hosted people who were decidedly not at various times. But that overlap is the point: for quite some time, there has not been a bright line between these movements. /8

McHugh isn't some bad apple who somehow slipped through the ranks of mainstream conservatism on her path toward becoming a white supremacist. Her work in conservative media was *part* of her radicalization. /9

Which is of course not to say that everyone in the conservative movement is on a path toward radicalization. Rather, it is to say that the movement has not done a great job of rejecting the ideas central to the alt-right. /10

In fact, in the past few years, they've done a particularly bad job of it, because of their loyalty to the current president. /11

But the research I'm doing for my book on the right in the 1990s shows this porousnesss problem has been around for a while, and long before the coinage of the term "alt-right," the right had problems with white supremacy, antisemitism, etc., that it failed to address. /12

Anyway, Rosie Gray's piece is extremely good and you should read it! 13/13

Er, @RosieGray, that is.