“I was a racist, certainly,” she said. “And I patted myself on the back, saying, ‘Well, I’m not, you know, some kind of Cro-Magnon racist. I just believe that they’re violent and unruly,’” referring to nonwhite people.

The idea that these were not “Cro-Magnon” racists, but instead cultured and intelligent holders of taboo truths, is essential to their appeal to the lonely and disaffected.

/r/TheMotte in a nutshell

ETA:

The alt-right was, at the time, all about smoothing over its public image, becoming approachable, more mainstream. “They didn’t have swastikas covering their foreheads,” as McHugh put it. The very term “alt-right” represented this effort to rebrand white nationalism. Everything in public was euphemism. The names of the main organizations were bland: National Policy Institute, American Renaissance. People could blend in, and they did. They were “polished, sophisticated,” she said. “There’s a very high culture aspect to it.” The class markers were important to someone like McHugh, who had come from the sticks. And the emphasis on genetics and IQ was appealing as well. “They see it almost as a moral value,” she said. “They think that people with [a] high IQ confers them with some kind of super ability and makes them leaders, natural leaders.”

The emphasis on intelligence endows the whole enterprise with a pseudo-intellectual veneer, and it also provides white supremacists with a way to elide accusations of white supremacy. According to their argument, they can’t be white supremacists because they say that Jews and people of East Asian descent have a higher average IQ. This both whitewashes their bigotry and feeds into the alt-right’s victim mentality, especially as it relates to Jews. The work of the anti-Semitic writer Kevin MacDonald is a cornerstone of the alt-right movement. His Culture of Critique series argues that Jews, using their higher intelligence, employed Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” to perpetuate themselves and win out over other groups. MacDonald blames Jews for the very existence of anti-Semitism, arguing that anti-Semitism is a justified response to Jews’ plot to run the world.

Even if McHugh no longer ‘aligns’, she’s still a grifter at her core. They’re simply dormant, waiting for another wave of attention to ride out of their misery. We must resist humoring the rehabilitation of glassy-eyed opportunists. She’ll be back to swim with the sharks soon enough.

this is a really interesting article actually

she wrote some awful stuff, and believed in awful things

but it also sounds like genuinely sees the error of her ways and is trying to show others (through this long and extensive read) that the alt-right really isn’t the solution

she owns up to her mistakes-she’s not saying “yea I wasn’t ACTUALLY racist, I just made some mistakes NBD” which isn’t really easy to do

I couldn’t care less about her redemption narrative, what’s valuable in this piece is how it traces how she was cultivated through various insitutions and patrons, and how it outs all of these people by publishing personal correspondences.