Information Is Power

Free speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences, says David Neiwert, the scourge of the US alt-right who is visiting for WORD Christchurch.  

- Diana Wichtel

The apology. It happens often these days when you’ve got an American on the line or, in this case, Skyping from the Pacific Northwest. “There’s a whole chunk of America, actually the majority of American voters, who are deeply apologetic to the rest of the world about what our electoral system has foisted upon you,” apologises award-winning journalist and author David Neiwert. “It’s so embarrassing, I just can’t tell you.” President Trump. “To watch the way he treated our allies in Brussels and in the UK … Thank god for Londoners. But most of all I’m frightened for the sake of democracy. This is clearly an attack on democratic institutions.”

Neiwert has a deep and mortified familiarity with American democracy’s situation. His new book, Alt-America: The rise of the radical right in the Age of Trump, puts the President’s election down to not just rust-belt economics but to the far right movement that has been on the rise since the late 90s.

Neiwert’s alt-America: “… an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia”.

What had seemed to many like a ragtag roll call of near-extinct deplorables – white nationalists, supremacists, conspiracy theorists, xenophobes, Klansmen – coalesced in 2008, aided by the Internet and by resentment over the election of Barack Obama, the first black president. “They’ve created this epistemological bubble for themselves, this alternative universe that they can live within,” says Neiwert. “They call it getting red-pilled, after the Matrix films. They’ve taken the red pill that’s awakened them to the reality of how the world really operated.”