It was pioneered by Communist figures like Leon Trotsky as a means of infiltrating Socialist parties to draw them toward Communist leadership. What is Entryism?Įntryism is not just a strategy on the Right. 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 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. “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. 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. All you have to do is show up.” 5Īllsup 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. “They’ll give you positions of power and authority. “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. Once he was elected though, he almost immediately sought to increase his notoriety, calling on other young White nationalists to follow his lead. “It’s hard to get pushback when no one shows up to the meetings,” he said. 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. (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.)ĭespite the shock that greeted his election, Allsup had made no secret of his intentions. 3 Yet, somehow, he was able to stroll into an influential position in his local GOP basically unopposed.
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. 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. 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.Īllsup 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. 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.