On June 2, 2018, James Allsup, a then-22-year-old Alt Right activist, was elected Precinct Committee Officer for the Whitman County Republican Party, covering the area south of Spokane, Washington. The media reacted with alarm, with headlines announcing that a White nationalist, famous for wielding a tiki torch in Charlottesville, had seized the GOP office.

Allsup had been an Alt Right celebrity for a couple of years, marching at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 with the White nationalist organization Identity Evropa,1 appearing on numerous Alt Right podcasts. He branded himself as an “American nationalist,” following the kind of civic nationalism that paleoconservatives are known for, and which distinguishes itself from explicitly racist White nationalism. But he used the term as code for his larger convictions around “racialism”—the White nationalist belief that race determines individuals’ capabilities—explaining on a 2017 podcast that, “Along with American nationalism comes the implication that we want to return America to the demographics of its founding.”2 He also spoke frequently about “race realism”: the pseudoscientific idea that people of color have lower innate intelligence and are more prone to antisocial behavior than are White people.3 Yet, somehow, he was able to stroll into an influential position in his local GOP basically unopposed. (There are about 60 positions within the county precinct, generally ensuring that an activist can take the reins of one of unless they are actively opposed.)

Despite the shock that greeted his election, Allsup had made no secret of his intentions. In 2017 he’d explained to the hosts of the Exodus Americanicus podcast, platformed on the vulgar White nationalist podcast network The Right Stuff,4 that since few people focus on their local party, his nationalist politics had gone largely unnoticed. “It’s hard to get pushback when no one shows up to the meetings,” he said. Once he was elected though, he almost immediately sought to increase his notoriety, calling on other young White nationalists to follow his lead.

“You can have a position of leadership in your county party, which doesn’t sound like much, but of course that then translates into positions of power in your state party, and then you become part of the national political stock,” Allsup said in an Alt Right YouTube livestream show, America First, in September. “They’ll give you positions of power and authority. All you have to do is show up.”5

Allsup was the most successful member of a plan that was shared across Identity Evropa discussion forums to infiltrate the GOP and use it for their own revolutionary ends. In chat records from Discord, a gaming chat platform popular among the Alt Right, which were leaked by the media collective Unicorn Riot this March, more than 800 members on the Identity Evropa Discord server openly discussed strategies to infiltrate the Republican Party, despite their fundamental disagreement with its platform.

“The GOP is essentially the White man’s party at this point (it gets Whiter every election cycle), so it makes far more sense for us to subvert it than to create our own party,” argued Identity Evropa leader Patrick Casey, writing under the pseudonym “Steven Bennett,” and discussing his plans to get involved in his own county’s party infrastructure.6

What they were talking about was a strategy often described as “entryism,” whereby people outside the political mainstream enter existing political and social institutions with the intention of using them for their own purposes. And it wasn’t new to the Far Right, which, realizing they’re unlikely to realize their vision through voting or appeals to the public, has instead targeted the Republican Party as a vessel for mainstreaming White nationalist ideas.

What is Entryism?

Entryism is not just a strategy on the Right. It was pioneered by Communist figures like Leon Trotsky as a means of infiltrating Socialist parties to draw them toward Communist leadership.7 But across the political spectrum, the model works, with more radical groups entering a more mainstream social or political organization and then using points of commonality to pull it towards their agenda.

In recent years, the most adept attempts at entryism have come from those trying to embed in the Republican Party a far-right ideology that calls for a rebirth of a nation’s mythic past in order to create a populist movement founded on ultranationalism, inequality, and strong, centralized authority.8 Such an ideology is best described as fascism.

They’ve done this primarily by mainstreaming ideas, talking points, and conceptual models—like bringing White nationalist ideas into broader public debates about immigration—explains David Neiwert, author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. “They’re trying to get people to change how they think of the world, because they believe that is how you revivify fascist ideals.” And their efforts to use Republican infrastructure as their vehicle makes sense, he continued. “They recognize [the GOP] is a more congenial space for them, and the Republican Party in particular has absorbed the Fox News environment, and Fox News has been part of the epistemological bubble of fake news and conspiracy theories.”9

By “entering” right-wing groups, fascists can overcome their marginalized position with the general public, radicalize the parties they join, and nudge acceptable, mainstream discourse further to the Right, thereby influencing public policy.10 In other words, shifting the “Overton Window”—the range of political ideas that are considered acceptable in mainstream society—by seeding once-fringe ideas within well-established conservative institutions.

As a means to those ends, fascists will then work on common issues with the conservatives where they can find agreement, such as immigration restrictions. While the proposals that they push within the party are more moderate than their ultimate goal—essentially, enforced racial apartheid—they see this as a stepping stone to reframing the national discussion around race and immigration and gaining access to a larger base of White conservatives.11

James Allsup’s rise exemplified this strategy: building on the small-town populism of his regional party, and focusing heavily on hot button conservative issues like immigration and “political correctness” at state colleges, both of which gained him a small following. He also benefited from an effective outreach strategy to the local party he set his sights on. But he couldn’t have walked in unless no one was at the gate.

Seeding White Nationalism

Allsup was far from the first White nationalist who tried to advance the cause by seeking low-level office within the Republican Party infrastructure. In 2008, 19-year-old Derek Black, son of notorious White Power militant and Stormfront founder Don Black, won an executive seat on the Republican Committee of Palm Beach County, Florida. It was one of 111 seats on the county committee, making Black’s election a small victory in practical terms, but seeming proof-of-concept for a strategy to co-opt the notoriously turbulent Florida Republican Party.12 Black had long theorized that Republican voters could be swayed to White nationalist positions if those positions were coded in more familiar language: using “dog whistle” terms to appeal to White resentment.13

And so Black campaigned door to door, gaining support by highlighting the changing demographics of Palm Beach County to aging White conservatives, and focusing on issues like immigration, affirmative action, and non-White crime. He followed the model of earlier “entryist” figures, like his godfather, former KKK leader and Louisiana State Legislator David Duke, in rarely discussing race overtly, but rather asking prospective voters how they felt about public signs in Spanish or “political correctness.” Rather than pitching explicit White nationalism, he encouraged their implicit racial bias, and ended up winning 167 of 287 votes—58 percent of the vote, but enough to win.14

When the Republican committee learned that Black was an explicit White nationalist, who moderated Stormfront and co-hosted a show on racialism with his father for a small AM radio station, they voted to officially ban him from taking his elected seat. The party cited a technicality—a GOP loyalty oath that Black had failed to sign—resulting in a confrontation at the first committee meeting, where Black attempted to take his elected slot but was shouted down by committee members then asked to leave by security officers.15 While he never was able to take his seat, he used it as a point of credibility in the White nationalist movement and used the “dog whistle” strategy his campaign deployed as a model for training other young activists from Stormfront. (In 2016, Black very publicly renounced the White nationalist movement.16)

Four years after Black’s bid, in 2012, Steve Smith successfully ran for a seat on his local Republican Party county committee in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Smith was the founder of Keystone United (previously the Keystone State Skinheads), one of the most notorious White supremacist skinhead gangs in the country, as well as a member of Aryan Nations, leader of the Philadelphia chapter of David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People, and a state chairperson for the American Freedom Party.17 More recently, he founded a new organization called the European American Action Coalition, which according to The Citizen’s Voice “fights for the interests of Whites.”18

When Smith won, he took one of just two seats in his district, assuming substantial control over a party no one was paying attention to and had little active participation. Local Republicans were appalled. Then-Committee Chair Terry Casey issued an angry statement denouncing Smith’s election, saying, “We unequivocally denounce Mr. Smith and his abhorrent views and would like to make it clear that in no way do his personal views reflect the views of the Republican Party.” But in 2016, Smith was reelected, taking a full 69 of the total 73 votes for his seat.19 This math would spell a landslide in any election, even though he was the only candidate running. While Committee Chair Bill Urbanski showed some mild dismay at the election, he noted that there was no way to undo it since, he said, this is “how it goes.” (In the same election, another Keystone United member, Ryan Wojtowicz, also got elected to the same position in a different district.20)

Smith’s path into the regional GOP was in turn mirrored by that of Leo Stratton, elected in 2016 to Precinct Committee Person for the Multnomah County Republican Party, outside Portland, Oregon. Stratton was notorious in his area for working with the Proud Boys, a “Western Chauvinist” street gang created by Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, as well as Patriot Prayer, a Hard Right organization known for allying with White nationalists to hold provocative and inciting events in liberal cities.21 Stratton often wrote for the website Red Elephants, a California “conservative” outlet that has consistently moved to the Right, including publishing neofascist and racialist voices. (Stratton, a truck driver by profession, died in a September 2018 crash.22)

Matriculating Hate

College campuses have been a key focus of White nationalists for decades, both as institutions that have a strong hand in shaping national attitudes, and also a place where they can influence college students at a time of life when their own identities and beliefs are in flux.

In 2015, James Allsup was elected president of the Washington State University College Republicans. While often dismissed as a campus social club, the College Republicans maintain strong ties with the national GOP and its chapters are considered a recruiting and training ground for young conservative activists looking to get into politics. Allsup went deeper than most in joining the Washington College Republican Federation, which helps build the GOP’s campus presence by establishing more chapters. Before this, Allsup also ran a campus chapter of Students for Rand, supporting the presidential bid of Rand Paul, and he served as the Washington state director for Rand’s student campaign. In 2015-2016, when Donald Trump’s presidential campaign began, the College Republicans were pulled far to the Right, with chapters at schools like the University of California, Berkeley, becoming centers of White nationalist organizing.23 But after the tragedy in Charlottesville in 2017, and resulting condemnation online, White nationalists, including Allsup, were made unwelcome by the organization’s leadership later that year.24

Allsup was part of a well-oiled entryist machine by this point, as the Alt Right had long approached campus conservative institutions as a vehicle to influence broader politics and culture. In fact, much of the backstory of the founding of the Alt Right involves conservative campus networking. Richard Spencer, who coined the term “Alternative Right” in 2008, had helped lead the way.25

“People in college are at this point in their lives where they are actually open to alternative perspectives, for better and for worse,” Spencer would later explain to Mother Jones. “I think you do need to get them while they are young.”26

In 2006, while a student at Duke University, Spencer gained notoriety on campus as an outspoken defender of those implicated in the school’s lacrosse scandal, when members of the team were accused of sexually assaulting a Black sex worker.27 The same year, he helped establish the Robert A. Taft Club with far-right activists Marcus Epstein and Kevin DeAnna, known for their vehement opposition to immigration and affirmative action. The Taft Club hosted Ron Paul during his 2008 presidential campaign and brought far-right figures, such as American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor and paleoconservative academic Paul Gottfried, into the college scene, helping the Far Right disseminate intellectual racism to a younger audience more adept at the modern iterations of the culture wars involving social media and memes.28

DeAnna also helped establish another college group in 2006 called Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), which would play an important role in the growth and development of the Alt Right even as YWC appeared at mainstream Republican events like CPAC. Indeed, members of its nine chapters were able to move between the Far Right and the College Republicans with relative ease.29

In 2013, YWC member Matthew Heimbach co-founded the Traditionalist Youth Network, which would become more deeply and openly racist, helping move the Alt Right towards more explicit fascism.30 The American Freedom Party, a White nationalist political party that attempted to appeal to Tea Party activists and conservatives despondent about free trade, created a youth wing called the National Youth Front. That group in turn spread to some nine chapters and was ultimately rebranded by group leader Nathan Damigo as “Identity Evropa”31—one of the largest and most notorious Alt Right organizations in the country.32

Along with the Traditionalist Youth Network, Identity Evropa and American Vanguard began recruiting on campuses throughout the U.S., particularly in liberal bastions of the West Coast. Most notably, on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, Identity Evropa joined Richard Spencer to host what he described as a “safe space” for Alt Rightists, amid the 2016 election season.33 Members of the Berkeley College Republicans supported such Alt Right activism, disseminated Alt Right memes, and consorted with Alt Right leaders like Brittany Pettibone.34

The Alt Right also spread to groups in the Pacific Northwest. Leading members of the University of Washington College Republicans maintained support for Alt Right figures and ideology.35 As the Trump Campaign heated up, the Portland State University group, Students for Trump, openly flaunted White nationalist memes, doxxed left-wing campus activists, and attracted far-right protesters from the Patriot movement to their demonstrations.36 James Allsup, then still president of the Washington State University College Republicans, maintained friendships with Far Right campus leaders from Berkeley, University of Washington, and Portland State.

“The fact is that if you are a college guy, or a college girl, and you are on a college campus, if you have three or four fashy goy* friends, you can take over your school’s College Republicans group and move it to essentially being an Alt Right club,” [KJ3]said Allsup on a 2017 episode of the White nationalist podcast Fash the Nation. “You can easily do that and that it gives you access to so many more resources. It gives you political credibility. It gives you all of these things that come along with the name of being a Republican.”37

White Nationalists in the Big Tent

The Trump wave brought White nationalists directly into lower-level GOP campaign work as well. When Indiana State Representative Mike Braun ran for Senate in 2018, his campaign hired Caleb C. Shumaker, a former chairperson for the National Youth Front,38 as a contract employee gathering ballot petition signatures.39 Shumaker was fired when his affiliation became known, and the Braun campaign released a statement condemning “Mr. Shumaker’s disgusting beliefs.” But Shumaker didn’t disappear, instead going on to form the Indiana First PAC to support candidates like Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.40

A similar scandal happened when Trump transition team member Kris Kobach, best known for crafting draconian laws concerning voter ID or targeting undocumented residents, ran for Kansas’ governorship.41 In August 2018, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported that Kobach’s campaign had hired three part-time, temporary staffers who were associated with Identity Evropa. (The Kobach campaign has refused to take the claims seriously and has done nothing in response.42)

Even one of Trump’s 2016 primary delegates was a White nationalist: William Johnson, the California founder of the American Freedom Party, who once proposed a theoretical but deeply racist constitutional amendment, which would deport all non-White people in the U.S. Johnson and his AFP have been mainstays in the White nationalist movement since the party’s founding in 2009,† running racialist candidates for office and collaborating with a range of other White supremacist groups;43 before its official founding, some members attempted—unsuccessfully—to infiltrate the 2008 Ron Paul presidential campaign and the Paul-inspired Tea Party movement.44 With Trump, though, they seemed to finally get their chance.

Future Conservative

In the midst of the media firestorm caused by James Allsup’s election, GOP officials in Washington tried to undo the damage. Art Swannack, County Commissioner for Whitman County, announced that the party was looking at bylaws to see if there was anything that could unseat Allsup.

Not all Spokane-area conservatives were bothered, though. Northwest Grassroots, a local ultra-conservative group, supported Allsup, hosting him at an event a month after his election. There, Allsup was introduced by Spokane County Republican Party Chair Cecily Wright, and at least two other local Republican leaders, Spokane Valley Mayor Rod Higgins and Spokane County Treasurer Rob Chase, attended. In his speech, Allsup complained that he’d been “label lynched” by those calling him a White supremacist, and delivered one of his most markedly Alt Right speeches, asking of traditional conservatives “what have they conserved?,” and declaring that identitarians need to seize control of the Republican Party.45

By the time he was elected, Allsup said, “I had already worked with the GOP in Whitman County, Washington, for years. I knew the people involved. And in the 2016 election, I was the only person who volunteered to run their “victory center” office. I organized events in town that brought statewide gubernatorial and senatorial candidates…I was, by all accounts, one of the local party’s most effective and high-energy young operatives.”46

While Wright resigned after video of her introducing Allup surfaced on Youtube, neither Chase nor Higgins resigned or expressed contrition, with Chase stating that he saw nothing abnormal about Allsup’s presentation.47

Allsup, for his part, leaned into his White nationalist sympathies. In July, he spoke on Identity Evropa’s podcast about blitzing the Spokane area with White nationalist posters and doing a “No Sanctuary/Build the Wall” banner drop over the interstate, and admitted to speaking at the Northwest Forum, a White nationalist conference in Seattle.48

“I am ‘doxed,’” bragged Allsup. “I am someone who is a known quantity, and I’m still able to network and engage with people and people want to engage with me.” He continued: