you have to respect your mom (and other matters)
I, along with my colleague Creede Newton, have a new article out today about the co-founder of a prominent white nationalist website who faces over a dozen charges related to allegedly stealing $35,000 from his mother in 2019.
Hannah Gais and Creede Newton
Michael Polignano, the man who's accused of stealing from his mother, co-founded Counter-Currents in 2010 along with a man named Greg Johnson. If you haven't heard of Counter-Currents, you probably have heard of some of their contributors: Jason Kessler, who secured the permit for and helped organize the deadly 2017 "Unite the Right" rally, is one. Richard Hanania, a crime-obsessed far-right commentator who holds a lot of dumb views like a strange animosity toward books and the belief that he's smarter than Shakespeare, used to write there under the pseudonym "Richard Hoste." The site's motto, "Books Against Time," is a reference to Savitri Devi, a Nazi collaborator who believed Adolf Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.
In an Application for a Statement of Charges, a detective wrote that Polignano's mother, Ellen, first reported that her son was stealing money from her in October 2019. The detective added, "Ellen advised that Michael had come to live with her temporarily approximately a year ago to help take care of her. She stated that Michael did not leave when she no longer needed daily care."
The whole story is bleak. There's the Polignano allegedly-defrauding-his-mom angle. Then there's the length of time he's been in the movement — according to his own account, he's been in the white power movement since the early 2000s. And based on a conversation he had with another white nationalist in 2017, it sounds like it took a toll on him:
Polignano said in the messages that he met Johnson in the early 2000s. They subsequently became close friends, Polignano said.
But their relationship soured. “Long story short, after putting all my financial eggs onboard Counter-Currents, Greg and I fought more and more with each other,” Polignano told Friberg.
Polignano also characterized his 2013 break with Johnson as “a betrayal of the first-order.” He told Friberg that “Greg thought it wisest to lock me up in a mental hospital” after Polignano had what he characterized as “a mental breakdown.”
Rather than leaving the movement for good, Polignano publicly returned to Counter-Currents as a webzine editor in 2017 for a few years.
Elon Musk has lost it
The world's wealthiest man affirmed his support for a racist conspiracy theory, the "great replacement," that has ties to multiple acts of mass murder.
Here's a summary from Media Matters' Matt Gertz:
“You have said the actual truth” was Musk’s Wednesday night response to a paid X Premium user who, in explaining why “Hitler was right,” accused Jewish communities in the U.S. of “dialectical hatred against whites” and blamed them for “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities.” Musk went on to clarify that he was not talking about all Jews, just the Anti-Defamation League (which has criticized Musk for white nationalist content on his platform) and unnamed others he claimed were “unjustly” focusing on “the majority of the West” rather than “the minority groups who are their primary threat.”
Tucker Carlson sounds like Stormfront again
Musk's dalliance with white supremacist conspiracy theories somewhat overshadowed another prominent right-wing figure indulging in his own white extinction fantasies. During a Wednesday installment Tucker Carlson's show on Twitter (I'm not calling it "X," fuck you), the ex-Fox News host accused major American universities of "calling for white genocide."
From Rolling Stone:
“I get why [Ivy League] donors are mad,” Carlson said. “I support donors giving money to things they agree with […] If you don’t like it don’t pay for it, good for you, — however, then I thought ‘well wait a second’ if the biggest donors at, say, Harvard have decided well ‘we’re going to shut it down now,’ well where were you the last 10 years when they were calling for white genocide?”
“You were paying for it, actually,” he added shortly after about the pro-Israel lobby. “You were paying for it … You were calling my children immoral for their skin color, you paid for that.”
This isn't the first time that Carlson has brought up these ideas on air. He's used the phrase "great replacement" before.
To me, there's a subtle distinction here. Despite the "great replacement's" ties to violence, versions of it — some of which are more explicitly antisemitic than others — have been laundered by figures on the mainstream right.
But even though they're two sides of the same coin, "white genocide" as a phrase isn't something you'd likely hear outside of hardcore white supremacist spaces. David Lane, a member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group The Order, popularized it through a text he wrote while in prison, "White Genocide Manifesto." It's Stormfront tier. Not the thing you'd expect to hear from a personality some the right are hoping will be Trump's VP.
Well, under normal circumstances.