This is the introductory piece for a new, special series for Frontiers of American Reaction. Five upcoming articles will build out the themes introduced here.
Donald Trump’s nomination of Claremont Institute fellow, documented antisemite, and white nationalist Jeremy Carl for Assistant Secretary of State for the United Nations and International Organizations felt intentionally ironic, another appalling but not surprising moment for a country exhausted by this president. In his February 11th confirmation hearing, Carl would not satisfactorily answer Senator Chris Murphy’s request for a definition of “white identity” and struggled to provide examples of his own complaints about “the erasure of white culture in America.” Carl claimed that whites experience more discrimination than any other group in America, and self-identified as a “civic nationalist”—as opposed to the white nationalist his publications and tweets reveal. His real concern, ineffectually proffered, was that mass immigration has weakened the nation and “Balkanized” what he loosely described as “the majority common American culture that we had for some time.” But Carl’s 2024 book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart articulates his grievance more precisely: “White Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded and in which, until recently, they were the overwhelming majority of the population.” The New York Times reporting also cited Carl on the Democratic Party’s alleged “all-out assault on the rights of white people” and his encouragement for whites to organize in self-defense.
Most readers will be aware that perceived threats of “white erasure” by immigrants, Jews, and people of color—all connected to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that has been more-or-less mainstreamed in the United States in the last few years—are increasingly amplified by American officials and right-wing media despite their indefensible premises. Indeed, Carl’s inability to provide credible details about his worldview is part of its strength: an idea too shapeless to carefully analyze may be driven out of one space only to metastasize on another platform or find expression in another medium. Though Carl’s nomination was eventually withdrawn, it was only one example of a rising tide of explicit right-wing extremism within the Trump administration. It is worth tracking and cataloging the many kinds of white nationalist utterances that today are merging into a persistent buzz supporting and normalizing extreme state action.
In this series for Frontiers of American Reaction, I will examine an array of right-wing cultural products that can help us understand the environments out of which a figure such as Carl could emerge as a somewhat normalized, or at least unsurprising, candidate in the public sphere and within which some of the Trump administration’s actions have strong support.
The Project and Conceptual Frame
This work is part of a broader project examining the transnational Anglo-American far right’s use of cultural texts—as distinguished from administrative or expressly political texts—to build new national narratives that reify modern white nationalism. In recent years, only a few texts of importance to the American far right and white nationalists have broken into the larger public consciousness when they have been cited in shooters’ manifestos or elevated by the likes of Stephen Miller. Examples include The Camp of the Saints, The Great Replacement, and The Turner Diaries.
But the “text life” of the far right runs far wider and deeper than the few examples that have made the news after a violent incident or political scandal. And it is important to have an eye open for what it might look like for this textual body to continue to grow—in the literary mode through poems and novels, as well as in traditional academic modes such as scholarly-looking monographs, essay collections, and even book reviews and conferences. I urge readers to recognize the power of all these other texts—whether they are self-authored or (mis)appropriated from mainstream writers—in the authorship of a set of cultural resources that contribute to the struggle for narrative control of the country.
The “text life” of the far right runs far wider and deeper than the few examples that have made the news after a violent incident or political scandal.
Looking beyond the most visible and destructive elements of the far-right attack on a pluralist society, my research examines some seemingly less urgent locations of white nationalist saturation (as compared, for example, to Camp of the Saints). Poems, novels, literature fandoms, pseudo-academic book reviews and conferences, free online education platforms, retooled K-12 curricula and standardized tests—along with bumper stickers, hats, yard signs, and t-shirts—all constitute a deep pool of textual propaganda supporting a fundamentally consistent, if fractious, worldview. At present, these texts and their subtexts are still shocking to many and at least discomfiting to some, but the goal of their authors appears to be attaining some level of toleration by the greater public. During this world-building phase, the accretion of lore and cultural features, such as art, texturizes and adds civilizational verisimilitude to a morally barren white supremacy agenda.
Poems, novels, literature fandoms, pseudo-academic book reviews and conferences, free online education platforms, retooled K-12 curricula and standardized tests—along with bumper stickers, hats, yard signs, and t-shirts—all constitute a deep pool of textual propaganda supporting a fundamentally consistent, if fractious, worldview.
Thus, one of the conceptual frameworks of my current work is acculturation, or how engagement with these literary and paraliterary texts helps to shape the social and political mores of a segment of the population, and to prime the public for certain kinds of political realities. Some far-right voices, such as male supremacist and conspiracist Mike Cernovich, have theorized the proposed cultural-political takeover through the “Overton window,“ which is the range of political ideas currently acceptable to the public: a range that can be moved further along towards the extremes of the spectrum through normalization and exposure to extreme views. This happens through political campaigns and legislation proposals, but also in less overtly powerful cultural spaces like niche websites and locally-owned gas stations, where white supremacy is the backdrop. A high school student doing homework online stumbles across racist sonnets and memes, while a child in a convenience store stands eye-level with a rack of bumper stickers threatening immigrants with gun violence. The potency of racism in such environments can be even greater because it is not likely to be challenged.
It is incumbent upon everyone, from practitioners to scholars to consumers, to defend the arts against bad actors who would exploit cultural pathways in ways that prime the public for fascism and white nationalism.
Critical pedagogy scholar Henry Giroux frames the fight between today’s fascism and the resistance in terms no less dire than “the struggle over culture itself,” tasking those involved in education and cultural fields with much of the work of confronting and reclaiming. Following that vision, I argue that it is incumbent upon everyone, from practitioners to scholars to consumers, to defend the arts against bad actors who would exploit cultural pathways in ways that prime the public for fascism and white nationalism. One essential line of defense against the philosophically hollow cultural productions of the far right is a better and deeper appreciation for the resources contained within genuine cultural production, and a greater sensitivity toward art of genuine value and depth.
Another line of defense, though, is a basic familiarity with the material being produced on the right today: not only what it looks like, but what traditions it affects a serious connection to, how it is deployed, and by whom. Thus, in addition to an interest in acculturation, a second important framework for this project is essentially ethnographic. Following anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description,” I attempt to explain what the far right intends to “do” when they “do” cultural texts. In the suite of essays to come, as I present case studies of literary and paraliterary materials produced, co-opted, or engaged by American and British white nationalists, I consider the external political and reputational impacts they anticipate through their work, but I am more interested in describing the interiority revealed by these cultural texts: the self-facing goals achieved for them/by them as they flesh out the cultural components of the re-whitened nations they aspire to build and then inherit.
My first story will uncover some examples of what I describe as far-right grievance poetry; here, I consider the larger role of this art form in culture building by examining a recent series of Great Replacement-themed sonnets published on the “race-realist” website American Renaissance.
Another story discusses a class of white nationalist fantasy and sci-fi novels that enact a cultural desire to turn back the clock on pluralism and immigration; my case study centers on a new time-travel novel called Britain on the Brink, in which the protagonist’s hatred of immigrants and DEI culture is answered by a sudden opportunity to intervene in the 1960s UK civil rights movement. Its heavy-handed presentation of daily life for the working white British man is an instructive insight into the perceived suffering that leads a man like Jeremy Carl to similarly imbalanced claims about American discrimination.
The author of that book also participates in a third kind of cultural text I will explore: the deep well of white nationalist “book reviews” to be found online. As I will show, the often quite lengthy reviews of books from all academic disciplines, and of books written from within their own ranks, lead uncannily but unsurprisingly to the same limited set of meanings. These pseudointellectual reviews function in the white nationalist project not only to deliver talking points but also to garner cultural authority by mimicking one of the traditional academy’s most recognizable genres.
My story about the Anglocentric interest in replacing Homer with Tolkien as a new founding literary text for white civilization similarly takes up the far right’s concern with tradition—and how to funnel Western history into channels that best suit their agenda. In this installation, I will show some connections and disputes between the American far-right culture creators I am mostly focused on and a similar tradition among European white identitarians.
Finally, closing out this FAR series is my commentary on a scurrilous catalog of short texts, the hit-and-run white nationalism read from bumper stickers, hats, t-shirts, fence signs, and coffee cups observed in two essentially American cultural commons: gas stations and gun shows.
In surveying some of the textual artifacts shaping right-wing culture in spaces that often go unseen, this series aims to build up a new kind of literacy and counter-engagement. While I find this work of importance in educating the public, my interest in cataloging and understanding far-right cultural texts comes from some very personal experiences. When I was about eleven years old, my mother married a man who filled our home with objects of interest to the collection of far-right, anti-government folks who frequented the East Coast gun show circuit. Most noticeable were the large circulating inventory of weapons and the dense array of military paraphernalia from every theater of war that he bought and sold on the weekends. The house was a disturbing mess of uniformed mannequins, grenades and bayonets, a restored Gatling Gun pointed straight at the entryway, loose bullets everywhere, a shooting range in the basement, and an embarrassing Black lawn jockey on the porch.
In surveying some of the textual artifacts shaping right-wing culture in spaces that often go unseen, this series aims to build up a new kind of literacy and counter-engagement.
Much less jarring, but more engaging, were the piles of right-wing media and pornography that accompanied all this militaria. My stepfather was always immersed in books, magazines, trade periodicals, and films; for a short time, he co-owned a shop selling comics, cards, and magazines. Print media in the house ranged from heroic glossy hardcovers on American war history and weapons to a seedy collection of subscriptions evenly split between porn mags and gun classifieds. And there was Soldier of Fortune: part fantasy, part insurrectionist manual. I looked through quite a lot of it. Pirated VHS tapes included vigilante victories like Rambo and the anti-communist resistance classic Red Dawn. For gun show sales, a rack of bumper stickers included all the expected commentary about worthless women, judges wiping their asses with the law, and violent defense of gun rights. I would often hear how the government would someday come to take our house, though I think that was more an excuse to stockpile guns than a true fear. Coupled with all the anti-government rhetoric was my stepfather’s steady stream of racism and anti-immigrant commentary; he also regularly spoke ill of the French, Germans, and Jews. In the preface to the book I’m developing, I write about this experience in more depth.
I eventually left the gun house and was able to look back with some humor. Decades later, I read Kathleen Belew’s 2018 book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America with great interest as she discussed the network of shared texts that connected white supremacist extremist groups forming after the Vietnam War and described many of the same attitudes and some of the same texts I observed as a child. Belew describes a wide cultural movement toward paramilitarism and masculinization; she contextualizes the white power movement that picked up speed in the 1980s “as an especially extreme and violent manifestation of larger social forces that wed masculinity with militancy, in the form of paintball, war movies, gun shows, and magazines such as Soldier of Fortune that were aimed at armchair and weekend warriors.” I spent most of the 80s living in one man’s deeply curated vision of all this.
My stepfather was not an uneducated man; he was a prep-school and college graduate with some progress toward a graduate degree in biology. Yet he found something appealing and fundamentally true about the false white supremacy narrative. Though never involved with a cell, Klavern, or organized group, he wasn’t separated from their shared fears of demographic change in America, or from their hatred for people perceived as a threat to white cultural hegemony, or from their propensity to misunderstand the American history he purported to know—and read—so much about. His heavy reading in publications like Soldier of Fortune legitimized and encouraged this dangerous vision of the world. My later, more academic interests entail the public influence of literature specifically, but this very personal history has sustained my interest in the question of how a loose coalition on the right delivers its message to segments of the public that are amenable to the particular kinds of texts I will explore in the stories to come.
Laura Jeffries is Professor of English at Florida State College at Jacksonville, where she teaches British literature, literary responses to imperialism, and writing about contexts of American race and ethnicity. Publications include articles situating Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” in its original American magazine provenance, along with its afterlife in white supremacist meme culture; the intersections of British religious and political history; and language use among young women posting on YouTube. She writes Narrative Nation on Substack and is developing a book titled “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative. Contact: laurakjeffries@gmail.com.
Image made using “Jesus Preachers Womens March IMG 1878 (32359571132),” by Elvert Barnes licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic; “John Rambo,” by Yoni S.Hamenahem licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
