Nafeez Ahmed
Appearances
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
I think so. I think it was in 2010. I actually said that I think the far-right as a network is going to essentially explode, and not in the sense of exploding and disappearing, but exploding and essentially at risk of taking over the Western political establishment.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Yeah, it's pretty like, oh shit, why did I get that right?
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So it's kind of a play on words. Obviously, we've got the Third Reich, which was the Nazi rule over parts of Europe.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
um during obviously the 1930s and the idea of the alt-right the reason i've come up with that term is to is to kind of convey what's going on with the more familiar term you might be hearing about alt-right which is the idea there's this oh the alternative right and that's the term that was actually coined by people in the movement so richard spencer neo-nazi first came up with this idea we are the alternative right um and steve bannon took it up and said yes that's the alt-right
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And, you know, they kind of have tried to rally around a set of ideas around the problems with liberalism, the problems even with kind of mainstream conservatism, and to say we need dramatic change, which essentially is tearing down a lot of the checks and balances of democracy. They want more authoritarian government. They don't like immigration.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
They don't like the idea of multi-ethnic societies.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
That's right. You've got these two grand theories, I think, which encapsulate some of these ideas. Again, and these both were rooted in actually quite neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic ideologies and were actually originated by Nazis. Cultural Marxism was the idea that basically left-wing Jews...
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
or infiltrating our societies to pursue this kind of flamboyant, super liberal thing and undermine Western institutions in this way. They were going to fight culture wars. It was an idea that Nazis were promoting and it came from them and they promoted it and it was taken up by... quite mainstream right-wingers in the United States.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And they thought this is actually quite an interesting way of seeing things. And the great replacement theory, of course, is the idea that there's a horde and a conspiracy from outside the West to kind of bring and kind of export...
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
millions of immigrants, predominantly Muslim immigrants from all over the world, but primarily Africa, the Middle East, and import them into the West and replace white people. I think what's ironic is that the people who are promoting this idea they're the ones that actually want to take down fundamentals of democracy based on justifying or based on this thing that's happening.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So we need to tear down democracies as we know it.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Yeah, I think what I've come to realize in writing the book, and I've been tracking these groups for the last 10 to 15 years, and even having tracked it, didn't quite begin to see how they're working, how they're working as a network, how they work together. And this is not, I want to be clear, this is not like a homogenous network. It's not like everyone's a Nazi.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
But what's really fascinating is how there are core groups of people who are Nazis and And a lot of the people we're talking about are neo-Nazi parties that even collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. And these are parties which are now active in Europe, in European elections, you know, whether it's the FPO in Austria or the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the French National Rally.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
All these parties have got actual historical Nazi roots. And I think what's interesting is to see how the last few decades have They've deliberately attempted to rebrand themselves.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So here's the thing. I mean, after we defeated the Nazis, it wasn't fashionable to be a fascist. It was a tactical shift. And with some of these organizations, they even talked about it. So like the Vlaams Belang party I mentioned in Belgium, I think it was the 1990s where their leader, Philip de Winter, wrote an op-ed in a Belgian newspaper after they'd rebranded.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
I think they were originally called Lambs Block, and they were very well known as a Holocaust-denying organization. And they rebranded, changed their name, changed their party goals. But he wrote an op-ed where he said this whole shift is all about tactics. He actually said it. It's all about tactics. Fundamentally, we are the same party. We've got the same goals.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And that kind of really kind of let the cat out of the bag that a lot of these organizations, it was all about tactics.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So it's difficult to trace it down. I would say you've got this interesting mix of these political parties, which were, as I mentioned before, you've got these parties, which have these historically Nazi roots.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
You've then got slightly newer political parties, which are, you know, they're often called far right, like the Sweden Democrats and other ones, which again, they weren't around during the Nazi era. But when they were founded, they were neo-Nazi sympathizers openly, you know. So you've got groups like that. And then you've got other networks which have organized around them.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Some of them are research groups. Some of them are think tanks. And I think some of the most interesting ones that I found really shocking. So here's a strange intersection. where you've got groups like the Heritage Foundation, who are like a really established, well-known conservative thing, one of the most powerful in America.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
They work really closely, got really close ties with another bunch of right-wing organizations, pretty mainstream here in the UK. You've heard of, people might have heard of the Tufton Street Network. Yes. So you got like the Institute for Economic Affairs, which is one of their biggest ones. They're very closely linked.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Both these organizations are part of this wider right-wing network called the Atlas Network. That network was founded by this guy, Sir Anthony Fisher. What was really weird is that all of these guys, this whole nexus of people, I traced them back and found that many of them were heavily influenced by another murky group called the Pioneer Fund. Now, the Pioneer Fund was a New York foundation.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
It was actually a pro-Nazi foundation with very strong ties to the real Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. Now, obviously, the Pioneer Fund also kind of had to go underground after the defeat of the Nazis, but they continued to operate. And one of the fascinating things they did was work really hard to infiltrate mainstream right-wing organizations. And they did it through this lens of anti-communism.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
There were some problems. There was a Cold War going on. But they worked to exaggerate that to such a point. And they labeled minorities, Black people, Jews, and increasingly, you know, even Muslims as agents of this kind of left-wing colossal conspiracy. And it kind of metamorphosed from there.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So that's a really good question. And I think often this is understood. It's misunderstood because there's an assumption that everyone in this network has to have the same ideas, exactly the same views, and it's not the case. So how does Putin fit into that? The pattern is kind of really simple. It converges on this idea that,
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
that in order for Russia to survive and thrive, they need to essentially dismantle the sinews of Western power, because they see these key structures that have been created after the Second World War, like NATO, as a fundamental threat to Russia. So what do we do? We need to dismantle NATO somehow, but how do we do that? To actually talk about fostering culture wars. One of the most well-known
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
kind of theoreticians, Alexander Dugin. He wrote like a book that was distributed to kind of Russian military general staff. It's widely read, really influential. And he actually talks about this, this big grand plan of dismantling Western institutions using different groups and ideas. And so they wanted to essentially smash liberal ideas They want to undermine democracy.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
They see democracy itself as fundamentally decadent and problematic. And as a problem, we need to destroy it. And within that framework, working with far-right groups makes a lot of sense. And it's not about whether you agree with them or disagree with them. It's just about how they work. Because if you have all these far-right groups who are saying, well, we're really Eurosceptic.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
We don't like the European Union. We want to break it all apart. And we want to be very nationalist.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
and we want to fight all of this and have everyone fighting amongst themselves the more we're tearing each other down that's great for Putin because he's like well you guys are at each other's throats while you guys are fighting it out we're going to move forward we're going to expand into Ukraine we're going to go further than that and there are lots of documents which reveal these long-standing plans to kind of resurrect the Russian empire so to speak
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So Nigel Farage is an interesting kind of character in this whole thing, because from the very beginning, he's played this really interesting game. And it's something that I think has kind of dropped out of the discourse here in the UK. Astonishingly, like our media just doesn't ever remember anything that happened like five minutes ago.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So in the 1990s, when they founded UKIP, he founded it with Alex Sked. And he was like a kind of Eurosceptic academic. And at that time, UKIP was just pretty much a Eurosceptic party. But then, I think it was 97, there was a coup in UKIP. And Farage took over. And then Sked came out and said, the party's just been taken over by right-wing extremists. And then what happened later that year,
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Everything that happened seemed to bear that out. So Nigel Farage, he's now chairing this party. And then there's some scandals where it turns out that some members of the party happen to be basically neo-Nazis who were part of the BNP. It's like, oh, we didn't know that. So one guy, Mark Devin, I think his name was mentioned in the book, He was BNP's head of research.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Again, BNP, well-known neo-Nazi organization. So he was expelled from UKIP. And it turned out that he'd written a couple of months before or something, or a year before, he'd written some horrifying screed about very Protocols of the Angels of Zion type thing about Jews trying to take over the world and blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Now, a couple of months after he was expelled, he reaches out to Nigel Farage for a meeting and And Nigel Farage says, yeah, yeah, cool. Let's go for lunch. Have a meeting. He meets this guy. He also in the room is Tony Lecombe. He's a criminal who was convicted of assaulting a Jewish school teacher and carrying explosives. Also a BNP member. So Dr. Farage just has a little lunch with these guys.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
A couple of months later, Devin writes an article in a far-right journal called Spearhead, where he says, you know, I think the BNP and UKIP should kind of, you know, work a bit more close together. And then magically, by some unfathomable coincidence, all these neo-Nazis suddenly start joining UKIP.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And at this point in time, the membership clause which stops racist people from joining is not there. It's not operational for years. And then all these actual Nazis come into the organization. And I kind of trace this process in the book. And it's astonishing. So you kind of think, what was Nigel Farage thinking and doing at this time?
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And when people asked him about this, he just said, yeah, yeah, he reached out to me. So I had lunch with him.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
I mean, if an anti-Semite and Nazi reaches out to you and says, can we meet for lunch? You don't reply and say, yeah, cool, let's go for it. She was just expelled from the party months ago. And you're like, no, I'll go meet this guy. What's going on? And that, to me, kind of sums up how Nigel Farage has worked this issue throughout his career.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
After that, he went on in the European Parliament to forge ties. He chaired this group, European Parliament, organized by these political groupings of parties, right? And his grouping, all of the members were basically neo-Nazi parties, right? All of them. And no one's talking about this. It's like, what is going on?
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
That's what concerns me, is that I don't really care whether Nadia Faraj is a Nazi, is he not a Nazi. That's not what this is about. This is about people in this network leveraging...
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
and mainstreaming Nazi organizations and acting as a funnel for those ideas and being influenced by those ideas and having their policies and their approaches influenced and then that becoming sanitized and mainstream and the general public doesn't have any idea that that's where it's actually coming from.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
I think definitely the first thing that we need on the one hand is we need to call out these groups as for what they really are. And I think there's not enough understanding of that. That's why I wrote the book, is because I think there isn't really a kind of understanding, wait a minute, where are these groups coming from? How do they work?
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
The other thing that I think needs to happen is when it comes to the change that parties like Labour are talking about, The biggest kind of thing that is missing is transformation, right? We talk about change. I mean, even the language of change has become so stale since like Obama kind of made hope and change, hope and change, hope and change.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Literally every liberal party since then has kept using the same language. But do we feel that there is hope and change? Do ordinary people experience hope and change? I don't think majority of people voting for Trump unnecessarily would identify themselves. I'm a Nazi. I'm a racist. I don't like anyone.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
They definitely was weaponizing racist ideas and racist means to push people to take these, to kind of take those positions. But the reason people, I think the biggest driver was you know, people were living from paycheck to paycheck. You know, they're not seeing an improvement in their lives. They're not seeing, and that's the biggest issue.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Whereas when you look at what happened when Trump came back, it's extraordinary because Trump successfully packaged himself as I'm the guy who's going to tear everything down. This system, this deep state or whatever, administrative state as they call it, that big thing that is here, I'm going to tear it all down. And people liked that language.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
They looked at him and thought, oh, you kind of feel like the outsider guy who can tear everything down. And it made Biden-Harris administration look like, oh, we're just the status quo guys tinkering with the system, which is insane. Because you look at what Trump actually stands for, and he's got the biggest number of billionaires in his party.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
If you look at what the policy agenda they're proposing, it's not going to help working people. It's going to do it worse. But here's the interesting thing that I see, It's not going to work, right? Because Trump already failed. He came in once. We had the pandemic. We had all this stuff. He couldn't deal with it. He mismanaged these crises. We're in this new era. People call it the polycrisis.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
All the things kicking off, climate, energy, food, the economy, it's all getting worse, blah, blah, blah. It obviously shows that the system in itself is not working. We need a massive change. We need real systemic transformation. And I think that's where we're at. We're at this point where
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
people are just fed up and they're going to vote you out if you can't deliver transformation, they can't experience it in our lives. So my hunch is we're going to go through this quite dangerous inflection point where a lot of the stale, pale, whatever kind of ways of doing things, they're going to keep trying to do it in the same old way and it's not going to work.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
But when these guys come in, they exploit that and You know, whether it's Farage, whether it's Trump, they come in, but are they going to offer change? No way. Look at what Musk's proposal, Musk and Trump proposal is insane. They're going to, what, tear $3 trillion of the federal budget they want to eliminate from the government. It's absolutely nuts.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
When I calculated the GDP implications of that, it's something like a quarter of America's GDP would literally be eviscerated. I don't think Americans are going to sit there and be like, yeah, that's fine. People are going to get angry. They're going to get upset at the government. People are desperate for real change. And that's an opportunity.
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Keir Starmer and his government need to be ready to think outside the box and start acting now. And if they don't do that within this next four years, then there is a real risk that they'll face that at the next election. Why do we want to go through this process of swinging between...
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Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
between a tepid liberal approach and an insane extreme far-right approach until we get to the point where we wake up and say, guys, that was insane. Can we get off the rollercoaster now and do something actually sane? We should just do it now. And I think Starmer has that opportunity. He needs to act.