The crunchy to alt-right pipeline. Those living on the fringe of the left and the right share more in common than you might think. And there you have your KKK picture right there with an old woman pickling something. Over the past few weeks, scores of users have become alarmed about the uncomfortable coziness between the natural food and body community and white power and militant right online spaces.
00:01:42.800These are now dangerous, just as free speech is a major problem for these people.
00:01:49.380Anybody who wants to live a natural lifestyle, anybody who wants to be outside of the hamster wheel of this modern health scape, is now a big problem.
00:02:01.420Back to the land living and alternative medicine are hallmarks of crunch.
00:02:05.600Much of this subculture is benign, a declaration of anti-modernism or slow living.
00:02:11.720But this largely white cultural space shares some preoccupations with right-wing organizations, which have used it for recruitment.
00:02:20.300In the 1970s and 80s, women in the emergent white power movement, which gathered Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, skinheads, Christian identity members, tack resistors, and other militant right activists, deployed what we would now call crunchy issues as part of a wider articulation of cultural identity.
00:02:45.280These bits of crunchiness include organic farming, a microbiotic diet, or macrobiotic diet, neo-paganism, anti-fluoridation, and traditional midwifery.
00:03:05.840And they have the white supremacists with them.
00:03:08.880All of these are often thought of as leftists or hippie issues.
00:03:13.480But they appeared regularly in the robust outpouring of women's publications in the white power movement.
00:03:21.820The surprise at the crunchy to alt-right pipeline or at the closeness between the radical right and the radical left reveals a problem with common ideas about left, right, and center in American politics.
00:03:35.600The Archive of the White Power Movement, a vivid repository of letters, newspapers, personal correspondences, images, FBI files, news reports, and court records collected across decades suggests that the reality is much more complex.
00:03:56.940The Archive of the White Power Movement?
00:03:59.380Left and right not only grew close to each other in the 70s and 80s, but they sometimes shared much more with each other than with the political center.
00:04:15.220And this is this, you know, I'm not going to argue, oh, the right and left doesn't exist and stuff.
00:04:18.520And of course they do, but it also, it's constantly the fear that you actually would have people transcend the circus and the right-left political spectrum to actually begin cooperate.
00:04:31.660And it's virtually impossible to, you know, for right-wingers, I think, to work together with leftists overall, at least in these new factions of the left.
00:04:41.780But maybe a traditional left, yeah, you could potentially do that, right?
00:04:44.600But the point is that they're terrified.
00:04:48.640I think they will start to demonize any so-called fringe that doesn't matter where it positions itself on this kind of political spectrum.
00:04:57.800As long as it's not, like, approved, sanctioned, mainstream ideology and views, it will be demonized at some point.
00:05:06.680But they fear that there actually will be just normal, regular people coming together and actually fighting the establishment, fighting the elite, pushing back against, you know, those who actually do hold the power in doing this to us.
00:05:18.820And I'm not saying, like, there'll be this, oh, there'll be some kumbaya movement with Antifa's one day.
00:05:24.500Obviously that's not realistic, it's never going to happen anyway.
00:05:26.760But the center thing, you know, democracy and official stuff and blah, blah, blah, that's the most important thing.
00:05:33.660In the 1980s, for instance, white supremacist compounds and hippie communes could exist in the same rural communities.
00:05:41.600Consider, and here's interesting, consider Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, the home of the white separatist compound Aryan nations.
00:05:50.320Coeur d'Alene also attract other survivalists and people who want a distance from the state as well as environmentally inclined leftists attracted to the scenic lakes and mountains.
00:06:20.320Scholars have spent ample time on other alliances between neighbors in this period, such as the way the white power movement radicalized its rural neighbors affected by the farm crisis of the 1970s.
00:06:31.780Yeah, as soon as they, you know, screw up and do a bunch of bad stuff, people become skeptical and they move, you know, to other solutions.
00:06:41.260They look at other people and they say, well, they make a good point, these guys over here.
00:06:56.400Beginning in the 70s, the alternative lifestyle publication Mother Earth News ran articles on organic gardening and other issues championed by the left.
00:07:06.380Though the publication itself was not an organ of the white power movement, TM, and indeed often espoused leftist positions, in at least one high-profile case, white power activists use its classifieds section to find one another.
00:07:23.940Should be against the law for people with the wrong opinions to use the classified sections of papers.
00:07:30.840Robert Matthews, the leader of the white power terrorist group The Order, met his first wife through the magazine's personal advertisements.
00:07:40.200Matthews would lead The Order on a spree of racist and anti-Semitic assassinations, robberies, and infrastructure attacks that in many ways lay the foundation for the violent strategies used by white powder and militant right activists today.
00:07:56.340His wife, Debbie Matthews, had a movement career of her own that lasted long after her husband's death at the hands of pursuing federal agents and traded on his martyrdom.
00:08:09.160Yeah, did they kill him or something, I assume?
00:08:12.260Unless it was a gay op and it was actually organic, 100%, it wasn't like a feds or something.
00:08:17.060Usually what happens is they just kill them, right?
00:08:22.600The Matthews family lived in Metalline Falls, Washington, and commuted to nearby Hayden Lake, Idaho.
00:08:29.240In addition to the Aryan Nations compound, Hayden Lake and nearby Coeur d'Alene hosted teepee-dwelling hippie communities, alternative lifestyle followers, northwestern outdoorsmen, fundamentalist Mormons, and survivalist unaffiliated or loosely affiliated with white supremacy.
00:08:48.020Do you see, again, do you see what's happening here?
00:08:50.740Where basically, if there's any kind of cross-ideological, whatever political factions pollination that's occurring,
00:09:02.660or just have normal people that might be interested in different things that just talk to each other and just agree on common sense issues,
00:09:09.360you're going to notice that more and more and more of that is going to be a massive problem for these fanatics, such as this author in The Atlantic.
00:09:20.340Issues common to these groups accorded with ideas of purity and interest in survivalism and a deep distrust of the government.
00:09:29.320Yeah, why in the world would someone be distrustful of the authorities?
00:09:33.320To be sure, the meaning of each of these issues would have been different to activists of different political persuasions.
00:09:41.200Homeschooling, for instance, could be used in the white power movement, TM, and as a part of an intentional community or cult on the left.
00:09:49.960Midwifery might be powered by anti-feminism and strict gender divides on the right, or by women's liberation and ideas of empowerment on the left.
00:09:58.960Another part of the Venn diagram is anti-fluoridation.
00:10:02.700Anti-fluoridation, the movement to oppose the government's addition of fluoride to drinking water to reduce dental decay.
00:10:16.000The argument that a couple of kids are having too much soda pop, so we have to poison the entire water supply with this totally safe and not harmful chemical in order to save everybody's teeth.
00:10:30.540This cause was taken up from an individual rights perspective by libertarians who argued that public infrastructure needs should not outweigh public's ability to make decisions about their own dental health.
00:10:41.480Yeah, that's very radical right there.
00:10:44.400It was also treated by members of the right-wing John Birch Society as a communist conspiracy to undermine American public health.
00:10:52.360This alliance between anti-communist and libertarians is well documented in the history of American conservatism, and one can easily imagine how these two concerns could also be translated to social conservatives and survivalist evangelicals.
00:11:08.180Alexandra Mina Stern's 2005 book, Eugenic Nation, documents the intersection between eugenics, hereditarianism, and other forms of white supremacist pseudoscience on the one hand, and environmentalism in general, and the Sierra Club particularly on the other.
00:11:25.220But such work has largely focused on the early 20th century, and it leaves out a main thread that connected the left and the right in the 1980s and 90s, the idea of a looming apocalypse.
00:11:37.640White power TM activists worried that fluoride would make people docile, such that revolution against the state and race war would be harder to accomplish.
00:11:48.200Is this, is this, I want to read that, the archive, the white supremacy archive, what did she call it again?
00:11:53.840Is that really true, or is that just them making it up?
00:11:56.740The crunchy to ultra-right pipeline brings up another problem, one that is very real and dangerous.
00:12:02.320The attempts of the white power movement and the militant right to find recruits.
00:12:07.900That's right, they should not be able to communicate to other people, or share their ideas in any kind of capacity.
00:12:13.340Yet another factor shaping what's going on here is opportunism.
00:12:16.780Oh, why, because the people in charge are largely failing, so people come in and say,
00:12:23.200hey, these guys are completely insane, and they can't do anything right, maybe it's time for something different.
00:12:31.520White power, trademark TM, is built around the movement's ability to understand where our mainstream culture is vulnerable,
00:12:39.020and to use those vulnerabilities for its own purpose.
00:12:41.580Yeah, maybe you shouldn't, call me crazy, but maybe you shouldn't try to diddle the kids.