Thread by @studentactivism

This is a fascinating piece, but it at times seems to be at war with itself—writing against its own grain and the evidence it presents. buzzfeednews.com/article/rosieg…

This isn't a story of white nationalists and antisemites infiltrating DC movement conservatism. It's a story about the white nationalist and antisemitic wing of that movement.

Here's Ben Shapiro in March 2016 quoting "Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News, whom I consider a friend," saying that "Jews run the banks" and "Jews run the media":

dailywire.com/news/4396/resp…

Shapiro's response to this quote? "Milo seems to be making two points here. The first: not all stereotypes are rooted in falsehood (true). The second: trolling people with viciously nasty language is a positive good because it rips away taboos surrounding language (false)."

Milo straight up says "Jews run the banks" and "Jews run the media," and Ben Shapiro calls him "a friend" who's just pushing back against political correctness.

Later that year, of course, Milo would go too far, and Shapiro would repudiate him. But in the spring of 2016 his open antisemitism was just the kind of thing that people in the conservative movement accepted from their friends.

Look at the moment in the McHugh piece when a low-level Breitbart editor freaks out that she's surrounded on Twitter by fawning neo-Nazis and KKK members. Steve Bannon tells him to shut up. buzzfeednews.com/article/rosieg…

McHugh isn't the outsider here. She's not the one on the fringes of Breitbart. It's the other guy, the guy who Steve Bannon blows off. The guy who thinks it's weird that she's cultivating support from literal Nazis with racist tweets. HE'S the outlier.

And Chuck Johnson? The Holocaust denier who McHugh landed with after getting fired from Breitbart for being too racist? He's still getting meetings with Republican members of congress. nbcnews.com/politics/congr…

This stuff isn't a secret. It's not hidden. I found the Shapiro piece above when I was searching for the source of Milo's "Jews run the media" quote. Ben Shapiro CHOSE to highlight that quote in a column. He picked it to comment on. Favorably!

There are (ever-shifting, as McHugh's Breitbart tenure shows) lines that aren't supposed to be crossed in public utterances, but even those lines are blurry, and the lines have nothing to do with what people say and do when they're not broadcasting to the internet.

Another example: John Elliott, the former head of @TheIHS at @GeorgeMasonU, now with @feeonline? He's the guy who introduced McHugh to notorious Holocaust denier David Irving and his DC circle.

And when BuzzFeed contacted Elliott to ask about his connection to the most famous Holocaust denier in the world, Elliott said he socialized with him because he was "interesting and controversial," and apparently didn't even bother to repudiate his views.

How short are these jumps? John Elliott, socially friendly with Holocaust denier David Irving, ran @TheIHS. I have right in front of me a @TheIHS water bottle which I was given as swag at a mainstream "campus free speech" event.

Like, literally.

I tweeted a few months ago that every GOP politician is at most three handshakes away from a Nazi. I wasn't joking. It wasn't hyperbole.

Hell, given this water bottle, I figure I'm no more than four away myself. At most.

Which is why cozying up to someone like McHugh, a very minor figure in the contemporary right, produces such a torrent of material. There's no divide between the different camps. There are no walls between them.

When mold gets on hard cheese, you can cut it away and eat the rest. When mold gets on jam, you have to throw the jar away, because the spores propagate through the whole thing.

The mold is on the jam.

(One quick correction: Because of an ambiguity in phrasing, I came away from the Buzzfeed piece with the impression that John Elliott was the past director of @TheIHS. In fact, he was in charge of their journalism program, not the entire institute.)

Just want to talk a little more about John Elliott and the IHS here, because the discussions that are swirling around that aspect of the story connect up in interesting ways to my larger point.

Several folks I know onhere who have connections to the IHS have objected to the way that it's portrayed in the article, saying that it's not, as McHugh claims, part of any "libertarian–alt-right pipeline."

But she doesn't actually claim that of the IHS as an institution. She claims it of Elliott himself, her mentor there and at the Daily Caller—and the guy who introduced her to Holocaust denier David Irving.

In an early email to McHugh, Elliott says he singled out her application because she cited Joe Sobran as an influence. He calls Sobran "a friend" and an influence on his own thought.

Who was Sobran? A longtime contributor to the National Review, fired from that publication for antisemitism in 1993. By the early 2000s, he was an active participant in organized Holocaust denial.

In 2002 Sobran gave a speech at the annual conference of the Institute for Historical Review (not to be confused with the IHS), a prominent Holocaust denial organization. His speech was called "For Fear of the Jews."

Here's a passage from that speech: "Why on earth is it 'anti-Jewish' to conclude from the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination?"

And another: "Those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities."

So Elliott saw that McHugh had praised Sobran, and brought her into IHS—and then the Daily Caller—at least in part because of it. And then, a while later, he introduced her to David Irving, the dean of Holocaust denial.

Does this mean that IHS is an antisemitic or alt-right organization? No. But it's a prominent spot of mold, and clear evidence of propagation.