The Nut Factory in Our Midst
You might have seen the Buzzfeed interview and profile of Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart writer who now calls herself a former white nationalist, or maybe some of the voluminous commentary churned up in its wake. Rosie Gray, who covers the alt-right for Buzzfeed, traced McHugh’s history, from her exurban upbringing to Allegheny College through the wingnut welfare media machine and into white supremacist circles. McHugh claims to regret it all now, but something of local interest in Gray’s long article jumped out at me.
At graduation, Gray writes,
McHugh already had a job waiting for her. According to her, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a college conservative group, gave her a $20,000 fellowship to work at the Daily Caller, the then-fledgling conservative news site founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. The Caller added $10,000.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is housed in an old Chateau Country estate on Centerville Road, on the shore of Hoopes Reservoir directly across from Mt. Cuba. Mt. Cuba is the former home of Lammot du Pont Copeland. ISI’s president is, naturally, state GOP poobah Charlie Copeland.
Just a little reminder that wingnuts grow not only in the sandy soil of Sussex County but throughout Delaware.
BTW, Gray’s article is worth reading, too, if only for the glimpses of a subculture that sounds like “Idiocracy” come to life. For example, McHugh began dating one Kevin DeAnna, a prominent figure among the neo-Nazis.
Their differences went deeper — and stranger — than that, and allowed McHugh to see inside a truly bizarre subculture. McHugh was a Catholic, while DeAnna was a member of the Wolves of Vinland, a group based near Lynchburg that was focused around a neopagan theology based on self-improvement and feats of strength, as well as coded white nationalism. The idea was to cast off the bounds of modern Judeo-Christian society and find a way back to pre-Christian northern-European culture. McHugh sometimes accompanied DeAnna on weekend trips down to the Wolves’ headquarters for what they called a “moot” — a ceremony in which the assembled Wolves would smear ash on their bodies around a fire and give what McHugh described as “dramatic speeches” about self-sufficiency and relying on the other group members. They would then sit around the fire and drink beers.
The second time as farce indeed.
There’s a long local legacy of this!
I mentioned a book on the latest podcast (Kowalko) called ‘Democracy in Chains.’ On page 46 we find this little nugget:
“Darden knew precisely what Buchanan meant by ‘collectivist’ solutions to social problems. His father-in-law was Irénée DuPont, the former president of the DuPont company and one of the nation’s wealthiest men. He was also among the most right-wing of the rich. DuPont so hated FDR that he helped found the American Liberty League, in hopes of restoring an ’employers’ paradise’ by nipping the New Deal in the bud. But he and his corporate colleagues had muffed the job. Their arguments were so crude and self-interested that their mobilization redounded to the president’s advantage, enabling him to denounce the millionaires as ‘economic royalists’ bent on keeping others down.”
—-Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean
This is so fucked up. Copeland is a rich-ass cog in a machine that is so flush with money they spend it on white nationalists?
No, they buy up each year’s nut harvest as they graduate. Some of them are bound to be rancid. Don’t worry, there’s another crop every year.