2. Whitey on the Moon

God Emperor

Spencer explores the notion of Faustian science fiction in another podcast with Counter-Currents publisher Greg Johnson and Arktos Media publisher John Morgan, two leading figures in the white nationalist public sphere. The podcast focused on Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), a popular science fiction novel among fascists.34 Set on an arid planet in the far future, the novel depicts the rise of Paul Atreides after his father is killed by a rival aristocratic family. Cast into the wilderness, Paul inspires the desert peoples to revolt against his enemies, and his triumph brings about his ascension to the position of Emperor. Along the way, Paul develops preternatural prescience, leading his followers to revere him as a messiah. By the second book in the series, Paul has achieved his apotheosis as a god ruling over his empire.

The right-wing podcasters embrace Dune because Herbert’s universe combines feudal social forms with high technology. Despite the mixture of traditions, religions, and languages seen in the novel, which draws inspiration from Arab and Islamic cultures, Johnson claims Dune’s world is spiritually if not genetically European. He argues that Dune rejects “Star Trek liberalism” in favor of an “updated feudalism.”35 The vast timescales required for space travel, Johnson asserts, require an all-powerful sovereign to keep interstellar voyagers on mission. Hitting on a theme explored in the previous chapter, Johnson maintains that only an antiliberal and antidemocratic government can suppress the fickle demands of the masses—who cannot see past their immediate desires—and impose instead the rule of “people who think and plan over great, long spans of time.”36 But Johnson worries that white people will never conquer “the final frontier” or realize their “Faustian aspirations” because “all of our resources are going to providing cell phones and vaccinations for Epsilon semi-morons,” the lowest worker classification in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.37 Johnson suggests that space exploration will be an elite endeavor organized by an authoritarian dictatorship and funded thanks to austerity programs—or it will not happen at all.

It is easy to see why Paul appeals to Johnson and the rest of the alt-right. Paul refuses to submit to popular demands: as Emperor, he sacrifices sixty billion people in his plan to remake the galaxy and bring its inhabitants under his absolute command. But Herbert intended the novel to be a critique of the authoritarianism inherent in the superman figure idolized in Astounding Science Fiction under John W. Campbell Jr.’s editorship.38 The reader is seduced into rooting for Paul in his quest to overthrow the oppressive reign of the Harkonnens only to realize along with him that the path to power has transformed him and later his heir into monsters. Our desire for science fiction saviors, Herbert suggests, leads straight to totalitarianism. Once again, the alt-right ignores irony, parody, or immanent critique in science fiction texts. Through a kind of hermeneutics of obtuseness, alt-right critics wrest right-wing meanings from ostensibly antifascist texts.

Despite its creator’s intentions, Dune contributes to a fascist discourse on time. Paul achieves his god-like station through the innate foresight that alt-right intellectuals such as Johnson admire. Paul is the product of a generations-long eugenics breeding program by the Bene Gesserit to produce a superhuman being with precognitive psychic abilities. At the start of the novel, Paul undergoes one of the tests used in this program. A Bene Gesserit compels him to place his hand inside a box that produces a painful but harmless sensation; he is instructed that if he removes his hand, he’ll be killed with a poisoned needle, the Gom Jabbar. This ordeal serves as a fatal marshmallow test, measuring his ability to deny his immediate impulses and focus instead on the future.39 The Bene Gesserit claim the test is used to determine if someone is human: only animals live for the present moment. Paul passes, proving that like his ancestors he possesses the discipline and rational awareness to think ahead.

Paul’s heritage—along with his consumption of the spice melange—allows him to perceive every possible future. As Joshua Pearson has shown, Paul’s ability to navigate the timestreams transforms him into an expert in a risk management that is coded as heroic and masculine.40 His prescience makes him sensitive to new opportunities and adaptive to circumstances.41 Spencer admires this quality in Paul, likening his nimble negotiation of catastrophic risk to surfing the deluge.42 He imagines white people as uniquely suited to handling Black Swan events.

Ultimately, Paul loses himself as he ranges through potential futures, becoming an increasingly alien being estranged from present moment. Although Paul’s sacrifice appears tragic to most audiences, his alt-right readers demand a ruler eager to relinquish everything to obtain power. Spencer and Johnson agree that the novel sets up a Hegelian master–slave dialectic wherein Paul proves his mastery through his willingness to risk not only his own death but the destruction of the spice melange, which provides the basis for the known universe’s entire civilization. “The power to destroy a thing is the power to control a thing,” Spencer intones.43 Here Spencer and Johnson betray the influence of Ricardo Duchesne, the Arktos author who draws upon Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel to argue that the Indo-Europeans of the Bronze Age were propelled to greatness by their desire to “fight to the death for pure prestige.”44 This cultural complex supposedly selected for individuals with a genetic propensity toward risk-taking behavior and easily wounded pride, breeding a haughty warrior race inclined to engage in Faustian conquest.45 Paul’s enemies—who fascists equate with Arabs or Jews—are unwilling to play at such high stakes because they are petty misers and debauched decadents more interested in hoarding gold than defending honor. Drawing heavily upon antisemitic propaganda, the alt-right readers cast Paul’s foes as born slaves. None of these fascists seems to have read far enough in Hegel or Kojève to see that the servant transcends his circumstances through labor, thereby ushering in the future, while the master remains trapped in the transitory pleasures of luxury consumption.46

Johnson and Spencer suggest that Paul’s refusal to play the game, his unwillingness to compete for spice, makes his ascent to power a genuine rupture with the existing order. The Faustian subject overcomes not only calculable risks but also radical uncertainties. Johnson asserts that the ultimate purpose of Paul’s bloodline is to reintroduce contingency and unpredictability into a world increasingly dominated by precognitive systems of control. This falls in line with the dominant reading of the novel, which suggests that Paul is a heroic version of the Mule, the mutant whose surprising novelty disrupts the course planned by the psychohistorians in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.47 Later in the Dune series, Paul’s son God Emperor Leto II undoes his own fascist rule by breeding prophecy-resistant humans and scattering humankind beyond the reach of any other despot who would try to conquer the known universe again. Johnson affirms Leto II’s self-overcoming as a Heideggerian event that resists enframing.48

At first it seems like Leto II should not fit with the alt-right argument. He improves upon his father’s precognition to become “the first truly long-range planner in human history,” capable of mapping out millennia, but he sets about deliberately creating an empire so stiflingly totalitarian that it inspires humanity to reject despotism.49 Johnson, however, does not see this is a liberal parable. Quite the opposite: he believes Leto II works to ward off the “end of history,” the universal triumph of liberal democracy foretold by Francis Fukuyama.50 Johnson argues that Leto II essentially travesties Fukuyama’s vision when he creates a placid society in which an all-women army systematically blocks outlets for white men to exercise their aristocratic self-pride by dominating others, eliminating such competitive pursuits as war, politics, and exploration.51 In this interpretation, Leto II deliberately generates an explosive psychic pressure that bursts his civilization asunder so as to reopen a “frontier” where this white masculine fighting spirit can finally reassert itself: after thousands of years of “being rapped on the knuckles by burly nuns, patriarchy is going to return with a roar.”52 Never mind that the most prominent rebel against Leto II is a woman: the alt-right insists that white masculine self-expression is the source of all unforeseeable historical change.

By examining these creative misreadings of popular science fiction texts, we begin to see the outlines of what Spencer calls the Faustian. Goethe’s Faust wagered his own soul by making a dangerous deal with the devil to acquire knowledge and power before reshaping the world according to his visionary plans. He endured infinite risk to acquire infinite spoils. By the same token, the Faustian in alt-right mythology is a white man whose constitution enjoins him to speculate on the future. Here speculation means both gambling and forecasting: the Faustian subject rises above merely utilitarian concerns by showing his willingness to sacrifice everything that he possesses, including his own life. While bourgeois figures for white mastery might attempt to demonstrate their fitness to rule by prudently governing all those they command, the Faustian proves his aptitude for future greatness by pledging entire populations and planets as collateral. Only one who displays a disregard for the present has access to the future. That is the story they tell themselves, at least.

Reactionary thought has long been enamored with risk-bearing subjects. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatives claimed that elites were consecrated only after they had faced the perils of combat or commerce.53 The reactionary rhetoric of risk persists up through the contemporary period. After the 2007–2008 financial crisis, a wave of right-wing populist leaders including Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán embraced a “govern-by-chaos” strategy in which they defied cautious neoliberals and pessimistic progressives by attempting to leverage “radical uncertainty” as an opportunity for gain, all the while offering their precarious followers “symbolic social insurance” that, whatever speculative risks they faced, they could rely on the strength of the sovereign nation.54 According to the right, power accrues to the ones who hazard the most.

The most extreme discourse on risk, however, arose from the German context. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra preached that the self-overcoming master is one who is willing to bet his life on a dice roll for more power.55 Conservative revolutionary Ernst Jünger warned that bourgeois society was culminating in a universal insurance system designed to equalize risk and compensate for all possible injuries.56 Writing in 1931, he anticipated that this risk regime would give way to an age of insecurity when those who graduated from “the school of danger” in the Great War would hold sway over the meek and indemnified.57 His prediction soon came true: the Nazi regime put the entire nation at risk in a project that Foucault argues was intended to regenerate the race by “exposing the entire population to universal death.”58

White Americans also saw risk as a catalyst for their racialization. Theodore Roosevelt’s narratives about rugged life at the frontiers of American empire convinced many white male readers that voluntary risk-taking would prevent them from becoming overcivilized. As Jason Puskar puts it, “self-imperilment” came to serve “the broader project of rescuing white men from feminizing racial decadence.”59 Often these imagined flirtations with danger involved antagonistic encounters with racial others who enabled the white risk-taker to rediscover himself and regain his powers through manful struggle.60

However, in the alt-right narratives I explore here the Faustian figure is often alone and unmatched. In these cases, risk preserves its educative function because it allows the white subject to wrestle with himself. Racist ideology presents the white man as a disembodied mind or spirit whose ability to rise above the demands of the flesh makes him fundamentally distinct from Black people, who always represent excessive embodiment.61 Just as self-control allows the white subject to exercise mastery over animal appetites, self-sacrifice allows him to show that he values the ideal over the embodied, the potential over the actual.

Obviously, none of this is true. Alt-right partisans are not the shell-shocked victims of trench warfare. They have led lives of pampered safety made possible by stolen wealth and brutal violence. The most consequential risk-bearing subject on the alt-right is Heather Heyer’s murderer, who claims to have felt gravely endangered while driving into a crowd of protesters encased in several tons of steel. Protected by cops, the fascists have very little to fear: they are the ones putting everyone else at risk. Indeed, in some sense white people have always been indemnified. Whatever accidents may befall the insured, racial capitalism guarantees that white supremacy will persist in every possible future.62

White nationalism’s glorification of risk must therefore be understood not as a genuine openness to radical uncertainty but instead as a predictable example of fascism’s aestheticized politics. In fascism, Walter Benjamin tells us, humankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”63 Death and domination continue, but now totalitarian society sees them all as necessary features of its own artistic expression. The white nationalist shooter is the next step in this process, transforming mass death into mediatized spectacle whose aim is not only racial terror but posthumous celebrity. Manosphere misogynist Lyndon McLeod wrote his victims’ deaths into his science fiction novels before he murdered them.64 He recorded a film of himself rehearsing for the killings on an SD card and gave it to his ex-girlfriend, asking her to sell it. Presumably he imagined that the video would increase in value once he had enacted its threat. Whereas the Nazis transformed death into a total artwork, the alt-right circulates it as a speculative commodity that can only be realized if the present relations of brutality continue until tomorrow.

There is therefore nothing genuinely risky about Faustian science fiction. Despite what Johnson claims about the Heideggerian event, the alt-right imagines the future as a continuation of the present. History becomes for them the millennia-long flowering of white identity, one in which all relations of racial domination remain in place, and nothing ever really happens that was not already predestined by blood. Fascists imagine that they’ll always prevail no matter the danger because of their faith in the limitless possibilities contained within whiteness. What appears to be radical uncertainty turns out to be absolute conviction.

To understand this ideology, we must trace Faustianism’s genealogy back through Spencer’s influences. I will explore Spencer’s immediate inspiration in French ethnonationalism before locating the evolution of Faustianism in Oswald Spengler, Francis Parker Yockey, and William Pierce. White nationalists pretend to affirm a radically open future, but Hari Kunzru’s 2019 novel Red Pill was right when it said that the alt-right’s future visions “terrorize us into accepting that this world is inevitable.”65

A White Nationalist Transhumanism

As the podcasters suggest, they see Dune and other science fiction texts through the lens of “archeofuturism,” a concept formulated by Guillaume Faye.66 Faye became a strong influence on the far right in the United States after he appeared at the American Renaissance conference and his work was published by Arktos. He started out as a member of Nouvelle Droite or the French New Right, a movement of ethnonationalist intellectuals who rejected egalitarianism while adopting what they saw as Gramscian strategies.67 The French New Right emerged from Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne or GRECE, a think tank founded in 1968 with the goal of establishing right-wing hegemony through a project of ideological and cultural subversion through metapolitics.68

The French New Right advocated for an “ethnopluralism” in which every race would maintain self-determination by separating into homogeneous states or spheres.69 Faye broke with GRECE in 1986 and, after a detour into journalism and pornographic film, returned to the political scene in the late 1990s as a man of the most extreme right.70 Shedding his ideological camouflage, Faye became an unequivocal proponent of white supremacy, which he believed to be threatened by Muslim immigrants.71 Faye’s racism grew more violent over the course of his political career, eventually taking on an overtly exterminationist tone.

Faye expounds upon the political principles of his later period in Archeofuturism (1998), a book that sprang out of a science fiction story that he came up with as a “gag” on a radio program.72 Drawing upon misinterpretations of postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers, Faye claimed that the narrative’s fanciful neologisms and speculative ideas might reshape politics and, ultimately, civilization itself.73 Science fiction, he suggested, could write future history. Faye uses this mythmaking to promote archeofuturism, an archaic social order recreated in a world revolutionized by technoscientific innovation. This would be a repetition with a difference—here he cites Nietzsche’s eternal return—that would renovate and revive the old values and traditions of the premodern past.74 Rejecting both linear and cyclical temporalities, Faye likened time to a sphere rolling around on a cloth. The same point might touch the fabric multiple times, but it could be in a different place each time. Through this muddled metaphor borrowed from GRECE cofounder Giorgio Locchi, Faye somehow hoped “to reconcile Evola and Marinetti,” the traditionalist and futurist wings of fascism.75 As in so many science fantasy scenarios, Faye imagines horse-drawn carriages sharing the road with self-driving cars, knights and druids dwelling alongside astronauts and geneticists. According to Faye the distant past and the speculative future could coexist even if Muslim immigrants and native-born Europeans could not.

Archeofuturism holds that each culture’s technoscientific development is rooted in its people’s arché or origin: “The future is not the negation of the tradition and historical memory of a folk, but rather their metamorphosis, by which they are ultimately reinforced and regenerated.”76 Alt-right ideologue Michael O’Meara glosses the archeofuture as a Heideggerian and Nietzschean project of realizing potentials already contained within one’s cultural heritage and actively appropriating authentic traditions in order to make them new again: “The past in this sense is future, for it functions as a return backwards, to foundations, where future possibility is ripest.”77 Although archeofuturist thinkers reject linear, determinist conceptions of time as eschatological or mechanistic, their favored temporality also precludes any real radical rupture with what has come before. We’re supposed to believe that airships, rockets, and sexy virtual avatars were already somehow hidden within Europe’s primordial destiny. One can see why all of this might be flattering to Faye’s alt-right audience of white, anime-obsessed readers in the United States.

After laying out his ideas in essay form, Faye’s Archeofuturism offers us a glimpse of a utopian world that emerges after a catastrophic race war destroys liberal modernity. European and Slavic peoples have merged to form a “Eurosiberian Federation” that stands as a dominant global power.78 Faye’s future is extremely inegalitarian. The elites are called Faustians: practicing “techno-science as esoteric alchemy,” they are the 10–20 percent of the population capable of heroically enduring the “increased risks, unpredictability and the opacity of the future.”79 Like their sorcerous antihero namesake, the Faustian elite engages in dangerous experiments, placing their very humanity in peril. They modify their own genes and augment themselves with cyborg technologies. They create “man-animal hybrids or semi-artificial living creatures” who can be employed as soldiers or servants, and “decerebrated human clones, which could be used as organ banks.”80 In one especially grotesque pro-natalist fantasy, Faustians generate brainless reproductive organs pumping out “supersperm,” which scientists then use to inseminate vat-grown uteruses to increase the white birth rate faster than old-fashioned reproduction would allow.81

Faye’s science fiction vision places him at odds with many others on the right, who see trans- or posthumanism as a plot to dissolve the identity categories they hold dear. Putin’s court philosopher Aleksandr Dugin warns of a future filled with “posthuman” cyborgs and chimeras cut off from the temporal ecstasies of the Dasein.82 American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones does not need Heideggerian jargon to spook his viewers with similar predictions about transgenic gorilla and pig humanoids.83 Working in a more metaphorical register, Great Replacement theorist Renaud Camus worries that multiculturalism is stripping Europeans of their distinct identities and boiling them down into interchangeable units he likens to the robot from Metropolis (1927) or the liquefied-human slurry from Soylent Green (1973).84 Others equate transhumanism with gender nonconformity and sexual deviance. Fascist author Kerry Bolton draws a straight line between the Marquis de Sade’s libertine and Donna Haraway’s cyborg, arguing that technological progressives seek to create a machine-made being liberated from the constraints of patriarchy, reproductive labor, gender categories, and nature itself.85

But Faye is not alone in seeing transhumanism as the next step in Faustian self-transcendence. Even David Duke, the Klansman turned political candidate who made a bid for white nationalism’s mainstream acceptance, pontificates about white people cubing their IQ scores, moving “beyond man,” and exploring the cosmos at faster-than-light speeds: “the universe is constructed so that anything is possible.”86 Perhaps this should be unsurprising given transhumanism’s historical connection to eugenics.87 Moreover it shows there is no contradiction between radical genetic manipulation and racial purity in the minds of racists: some seem to think that racial differences will persist no matter how drastically genetic engineering changes humankind.88

If Faye’s argument sounds like the mutational romances we surveyed last chapter, that is because Faustian science proceeds through speculative storytelling. The Faustian elites set about remaking the planet by implementing “vast plans that represent the anticipated representation of a constructed future.”89 All of these innovations are prefigured in science fictional visions before they’re ever realized: “Aviation, rockets, submarines and nuclear power have sprung from rationalised fantasies where the scientific spirit has managed to carry out the plan conceived by the aesthetic.”90 For Faye, fantasy dictates reality, and, indeed, he considers it to be a sign of Europe’s deep decay that it cannot produce a science film to rival Star Wars.91 Faye’s Faustian elites have developed the technology to colonize Mars and build trains that zip around Earth at 20,000 kilometers per hour not because they’re uniquely rational but because they have an unrivaled capacity for imaginative projection.

However, according to Faye most Europeans are incapable of handling the stresses of existential risk and ceaseless change. They are better off shunted into “neo-traditional” agrarian societies where time follows a predictable cycle laid down by nature and custom.92 Whereas the Faustians inhabit a self-revolutionizing temporality in which nothing remains stable for long, the neo-traditionalists live in the countryside much as their ancestors did in premodern times. In many ways this recalls Nietzsche’s argument that only a small group of free spirits have the power to build a new system of cultural orientations for the masses, who have been left “horizonless” by modernity’s relentless pursuit of the truth.93 The hoi polloi enjoy peace of mind even as their eco-friendly lifestyle allows the Faustian elite to consume a disproportionate share of natural resources without endangering the planet. Risk has its rewards.

Faye has less to say about the Muslim immigrants and other people of color who were ethnically cleansed at the founding of the Eurosiberian Federation. When a visitor from the Indian Empire asks what happened to them, the protagonist pauses for a moment before explaining that they were forcibly deported to Madagascar.94 Nazi official Adolf Eichmann considered this island as an evacuation site for Jews before he oversaw their deportation to concentration camps to be murdered. Whether Faye is engaging in irony or prevarication, his Faustian future expels almost all nonwhite populations from history.

Faustian Antecedents

Faye’s archeofuturism resonates with a discourse on Faust that has long pervaded conservative and far-right thought. Faust first became a symbol of Western culture with the publication of The Decline of the West, a two-volume work by German conservative Oswald Spengler that appeared in 1918 and 1922. Spengler saw great cultures as organisms with a regular lifecycle of development and decline.95 Each culture possesses its own destiny, a set of possibilities that it can actualize over the course of its lifespan, and history is nothing more than the fulfillment of these preexisting potentials. During their youth, cultures work out these possibilities through artistic or spiritual expressions, but as they age these potentials become hardened into actualized forms. Then the culture turns outward and enters a civilizational period of materialistic achievement.96 Despite his protests to the contrary, Spengler was considered a pessimist because he believed the West had already entered its autumn years, predicting that there was nothing left for Europeans to do but stoically accept their remaining life tasks.

Spengler critiques Western culture as Faustian in nature, violating every moral and physical boundary in its quest to explore. The Faustian spirit yearns for the infinite, a desire that manifests itself in the symbol of limitless space.97 As such the Faustian disdains the proximal realm of bodily experience and anything that can be comprehended by the senses in the present moment. Instead, this restless spirit flees into the outer reaches of abstraction or over the next horizon. Although he ultimately commands the earth, there is something otherworldly about this Faust: only “the Western world-feeling,” Spengler suggests, could conceive of “a space of infinite star-systems and distances that far transcends all optical possibilities.”98

Spengler’s Man and Technics—a 1931 book reprinted by Arktos—reveals the violence inherent in this Faustian worldview. Spencer traces the Faustian urge back to man’s nature as a “beast of prey.”99 While the plant is immobile and the herbivore is evasive, the carnivore possesses a ballistic consciousness that perceives targets from afar and pursues them to the death through the most direct paths possible.100 Humans outdo the lion’s pounce because they can improve the techniques that they use to dominate their quarry. Whereas the nonhuman animal is trapped within “the immediate here-and-now,” the predatory man is a Promethean figure capable of anticipating future possibilities by developing new technical means to achieve their ends.101

Faustian culture is therefore violent and alienated, approaching the world as a foe to be subdued and transformed. Spengler claims that this will-to-power stands as the basis of technological civilization and also as the root of its crisis.102 While Spengler views the unfolding of the inner logic of technology as a grim necessity that Europeans must see through to the end, the author of the preface to the Arktos edition takes a more affirmative stance to technics, thrilling at the thought that “through technological extension, the human hand is today reaching out even beyond the stars, towards that curtain of radiation which shrouds the mysterious birth of our universe.”103

Spengler often talks about humanity in Man and Technics, rooting this narrative in the evolution of the species, but in his formulation only white people can grasp toward deep space or deep time. Spengler claims that it was a mistake for Europeans spread their technical knowledge to nonwhite races who do not feel the Faustian will to technological mastery as an “inner need.”104 Spengler worries that nonwhite people will use what they have learned from the Europeans to destroy industrial civilization, and once they have succeeded in wiping out Faustian culture (i.e., white culture), technological progress will end with machines and skyscrapers abandoned as ruins.

Although Spengler does not rank Europeans as the only high culture in history—they were preceded by at least seven others ranging from Chinese to Mesoamerican cultures—he does see them as the only one still making history in the twentieth century. When he turns to “primitive” peoples, he describes them as outside of history, undergoing “the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time.”105 In Spengler’s scheme only the Faustians retain a destiny in the current period.

Spengler never fully embraced Nazism, but the Faust legend held a special appeal for many committed Nazis.106 Alfred Rosenberg’s influential antisemitic book The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) reads Goethe’s Faust as saying that the Nordic race possesses a “Luciferan” soul that compels it to settle colonial frontiers and invent machine technology purely out of a “bliss in commanding.”107

Spengler’s Faustian myth became a crucial component of white nationalist thought in the United States thanks in large part to Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium (1948). Yockey’s life reads like a spy thriller. As Matthew Rose suggests, he seemed almost eager to put himself in dangerous situations, which allowed him to test “the purity of his devotion to what he called the Idea, undertaking the lonely sacrifices and voluntary risks he believed its defense required.”108 His extensive ties to authoritarian nationalists across the globe led him to crusade for a fascist international, the European Liberation Front.109

Although he once maintained a brief connection with anti-Communist senator Joseph McCarthy, Yockey became disillusioned with the United States, and he decided after witnessing the Stalinist purge of so-called cosmopolitan Jews in the 1952 Prague Trials that only the Soviet Union could defend Europe from Jewish-controlled America.110 Following a series of mysterious journeys around the world that may have even included Cuba and the Soviet Bloc, Yockey was arrested by the FBI when baggage handlers discovered fake identity papers in his suitcase.111 Long hunted by federal authorities, Yockey killed himself with a potassium cyanide capsule while in custody.112 Before his suicide, though, he was visited by Willis Carto, an influential far-right antisemite who later published Imperium with the Noontide Press and cemented his reputation as not only as a right-wing martyr but also the grand theorist of American racism.

Although Yockey frequently paraphrases and plagiarizes from Spengler, he supplements his work with the ideas of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.113 If Faustian civilization seems to have fallen into a state of decay, this can always be reversed by a man of genius who has the foresight to abandon mechanical notions of causality that assume that the world is governed by stable laws.114 In this state of emergency, the future leader must grasp that life is exceptional and ever-changing, allowing for dramatic and unprecedented developments that cannot be predicted based on any trendline.115 Only such a sovereign figure—an heir to Hitler, “the hero of the Second World War”—can imagine the radically different future that might await Europeans and their descendants.116 Resisting the cycle of civilizational decline and initiating a new epoch, he will be what fellow fascists such as Savitri Devi would consider a man “against time.”117

Yockey’s term for his untimely hero archetype is the “Genius,” and his “Promethean” role is to realize “the Idea of the Future” by imposing it upon the backwards masses who are always falling behind the times.118 Without an Idea handed down from above, humans remain like the “primitive” peoples outside of Western culture, locked in an animalistic and ahistorical state concerned only with “economic-reproductive existence,” i.e., materialistic gain and carnal pleasure.119 White men, on the other hand, prove they’re worthy of making history by sacrificing their merely animal lives: these “men risk all and die for an Idea.”120 Yockey rejects the United States because he believes its men lost the martial virtue that an Idea demands from its adherents. America has been transformed into a “matriarchy,” giving up the adventure of history to live inside “a cocoon-like life within a closed system.”121 The American people embraced their feminine side, pursuing “peace, comfort, security, in short, the values of individual life,” a condition that leaves them barred from the future just like Africans and the Sámi.122 Somehow when Yockey and his followers berate Western man for falling short of Faust they conveniently forget that Goethe’s magician spends much of the poem seeking the Eternal Feminine and finally finds peace basking in the glory of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.

According to Yockey, European civilization is prevented from actualizing its full potential by alien “parasites” from other cultures who can never be part of the West’s spiritual destiny.123 Yockey targets Black people and Chinese immigrants, but he singles out Jews especially. According to Yockey, Jews are representatives of the past, remnants of a fossilized civilization that spent its potential over a thousand years ago.124 This supposedly renders them insensible to anything beyond the dead and calcified reality of actualized forms. As a result of this ontological incapacity, Yockey claims, Jews embrace materialistic philosophies that deny the inner necessity of the Faustian spirit to expand and conquer. Unable to appreciate destiny-thinking, they now strive to pull white people back into the nineteenth century, the century of Marxism and mass democracy. Yockey’s race war is a time war between the Jewish past and the white future.125

Antisemitism remains at a murderous pitch among white nationalists—in 2018 a gunman affiliated with the alt-right killed eleven people in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre—but as the movement has become increasingly Islamophobic it has transposed Yockey’s temporal politics onto Muslims as well. The Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes told podcast host Joe Rogan that Muslim inbreeding with their first cousins had caused them to go “backwards in time,” moving them from the modern to the medieval period, a point that he underscores by making the sound of an audio track running in reverse.126 McInnes—along with Faye and other anti-Muslim racists—rewrites the clash of civilization narratives as a temporal rift.

If whiteness represents futurity, Yockey asserts his claim on the next century by writing in the future perfect tense. In an almost offhanded manner, Imperium informs readers what will have transpired by 2000 or 2050, and the author often takes up the perspective of a man looking backward at 1948 from the twenty-first century, a time when Yockey’s destiny-thinking will have become the dominant ideology.127 This is not simply a utopian conceit: Yockey takes it for granted that the future will play out according to the cycles he has established in Imperium. His confidence in his powers of prediction is only outmatched by Spencer who, along with Edward Dutton, attempted to solve the Fermi Paradox by projecting the rise and fall of all extraterrestrial civilizations based on cyclical patterns laid out by race science.128 The future is not speculative because in some sense it has already happened for fascists like Yockey.

Yockey’s editor, Willis Carto, saw the science fictional potential contained within this philosophy. An immensely influential figure for postwar racists, Carto established the Liberty Lobby, a white nationalist political advocacy group, and went on to become a key organizer for Holocaust denialists and right-wing populists.129 One of Carto’s signal achievements came in 1968 when he helped transform a youth organization for George Wallace’s presidential campaign into the National Youth Alliance, an antisemitic activist group that took Yockey’s Imperium as its philosophical basis.130 Carto succeeded in spreading Yockeyism throughout the far right.

Writing his introduction to Imperium at the height of public enthusiasm for the space race in 1962, Carto argues that “Western man is bound to conquer Space or to die in the attempt.”131 Carto claims that colonial expansion constitutes “suicide” for white westerners because it inevitably leads to race mixing with subjugated populations.132 But now that “the White Man has burst the ties to Earth,” he is “headed for the stars” where he can fulfill his desire to conquer a new “Frontier” without the risk of racial impurity.133 Citing Spengler’s Man and Technics, Carto fantasizes about all the seemingly impossible cosmic feats white men might dare to accomplish, such as rearranging the solar system, pushing back the oceans, prolonging the sun’s lifespan, and “[upgrading] the human species through deliberate biological mechanics.”134 He claims that none of this will happen, though, if white men do not stop humanity’s degeneration. Jews are undermining Western civilization, he insinuates, and soon “only barred doors [will keep] the jungle out of the laboratory and the boudoir.”135 Carto fears that his white astronauts will return to a Black planet.

Carto taps into a long tradition of thinking Western imperialism and space exploration together. As John Rieder has shown, early science fiction emerged out of European anxieties and fantasies about colonial encounters.136 One can find presentiments of Carto’s space dream in stories that draw upon mythical accounts of New World conquest to depict other planets as virgin territories waiting to be tamed and exploited by white astronauts.137 John De Witt Kilgore observes that midcentury science fiction and popular science also borrowed images of the U.S. western frontier from pulp fiction to depict humankind’s exploits in space.138 Like nineteenth-century thinkers who believed that the frontier would resolve internal social conflicts back home, many authors suggested that shared conflicts with space aliens and other interstellar obstacles would heal earthly racial divisions.139 For Carto, though, space is so appealing precisely because it is an empty void, one that allows for territorial expansion without any confrontations with otherness. Space solves racial conflict for Carto by being exclusively white.

The fascist’s plans for interstellar colonization are obviously bound up in the history of European settler colonialism. As Menominee scholar Rowland Keshena Robinson suggests, the alt-right’s “thirst for a new frontier, for recolonization, for territories, for a white homeland” constitutes a “thirst for the fulfilment of the settler dream.”140 Whiteness has always been predicated on the presumed right to invade, colonize, and possess space even if it is already held by Indigenous peoples.141 White nationalist narratives reactivate the moment of colonization as a way of returning to what Alex Trimble Young would call “constituent power,” a sovereign violence that makes as well as breaks laws.142 In the myth of Wild West liberty, the power wielded by heavily armed white frontiersmen represented the pure potential to create a new world, one opposed to the ossified actuality of constituted power prevailing back in the civilized states. These notions are often expressed in right-wing survivalist novels, “where the lawmaking violence of the frontier is unapologetically projected into the future as fantasy.”143 But they also appear in fascist space opera: white nationalist space colonization seeks to recreate this lawlessness on an even larger scale. The solar system becomes an unsettled place that allows for the free and creative exercise of white sovereignty—made possible by genocide.

The Turner Diaries

Fascists still dream of spaceflight. Popular culture has often wondered what would have happened if German rocket scientists such as Wernher von Braun had completed their research under Nazi auspices. id Software’s revived Wolfenstein series, for example, gives players the chance to blast stormtroopers on the Moon and Venus in an alternate universe where the Fourth Reich won World War II. White nationalists, in turn, have responded to these narratives with their own retrofuturist fascist kitsch. We see this in fashwave, a flash-in-the-pan microtrend in online music that combined synthwave and vaporwave stylings with white nationalist themes. One fan described the wordless synthesizer noodlings on “Galactic Lebensraum” by CybernΔzi as “the sound of driving a futuristic, glistening sportscar (top down), through a twinkling neon cityscape, to a space port, to catch a light ship heading to [a whites-only] off-world resort, with your children and the woman you love.”144 The album artwork combines a fascist Sonnenrad symbol and a Tron-looking grid with a pixelated image of Adolf Hitler in a mech suit taken from a boss fight in the 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D. Fashwave seems to have disappeared, but its glitchy neon aesthetic persists in some Nazi memes.

More important figures on the far right also shared Carto’s vision. Carto’s ideological rival, William Luther Pierce, spoke breathlessly of the Faustian spirit. Carto led the reformist faction dedicated to promoting white supremacy through electoral means, while Pierce rose to become the dominant figure of revolutionary white nationalism.145 Amidst bitter conflict with Carto in the 1970s, Pierce captured the National Youth Alliance and founded its successor organization the National Alliance, a vanguard party for an entire generation of white power activists.146 Although Pierce said that he never read Yockey’s Imperium, we can clearly see resonances with his thought.147

In his writings on the Faust legend, Pierce argues that white men inherited the “basic restlessness” of the Faustian impulse, an inner voice that commands them to discover and master all things not out of Jewish acquisitiveness but out of a need to strive “for a new level of existence, for a fuller development of latent powers.”148 Pierce claims that the Faustian soul that animated European explorers and scientists also moved through him, encouraging him to become a science fiction fan and, in the early 1960s, to embark on a career in Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which developed technology for NASA’s space missions. Pierce was always fascinated by cosmic exploration: he maintained a lifelong interest in Nazi rocket scientist Hermann Oberth, and he tried to join the U.S. Air Force with the hopes of becoming an astronaut someday but was rejected due to his excessive height and poor vision.149 Reflecting on his discovery of science fiction at a young age, Pierce suggests that “our climb upward toward the stars” is driven by a Faustian spirit that makes white society “virile and forward-looking and willing to take chances.”150

Although Pierce moved away from science fiction fandom and abandoned his career as a physicist, his best-known work is a serialized science fiction novel, The Turner Diaries (1978), a near-future dystopia that he wrote under the pseudonym “Andrew Macdonald.” The novel’s influence on white nationalism cannot be overstated: a movement Bible, The Turner Diaries inspired more than two hundred murders and forty terrorist attacks, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.151 Pierce frames the novel as a found document, the diaries from 1991 to 1993 of a white nationalist terrorist named Earl Turner, published more than a century in the future in commemoration of a global fascist revolution that ended in the genocide of all nonwhite people.

As Dan Sinykin points out, Pierce’s apocalyptic novel “divorces humans from agency, delivering them to a larger inexorable force.”152 Racial egalitarian society will inevitably collapse due to unstoppable biological tendencies, The Turner Diaries suggest, but action can accelerate the process so that it falls before extinguishing the white race. In the white supremacist risk regime, white people appear as risk-takers whose dangerous enterprises might usher in a better world, but nonwhite people appear as risks whose foreseeable threat must be preempted through violence.153 The novel attempts to resolve this binary through bloodshed: white nationalists such as Turner are willing to forfeit their lives if it means killing nonwhite people. Pierce’s legacy has therefore been stochastic terrorism, with the all-too-predictable suffering and death that follows.

Turner is somewhat of a tech geek, spending much of the novel inventing distributed communication networks for the movement’s terror cells before finally destroying the Jewish conspiracy’s central computer in a suicide attack. It’s fitting, then, that the novel describes his initiation into white nationalism in science fictional terms. Time seems to stop after he is given a binder known as the Book that provides a full explication of the movement’s real beliefs. He looks up to realize that hours have passed while he remained completely absorbed in the manuscript’s message: “It was as if I had just returned to earth—to the room—after a thousand-year voyage through space.”154 The book seems to take him “out of this world” to a vantage point where he can see not only the entire planet’s nations and races but also all of earth’s history, including “the unlimited possibilities which the centuries and the millennia ahead hold for us.”155

What he finds in the Book is remarkably similar to the opening chapter of Yockey’s Imperium, which begins by taking the reader up to “the astral regions” where we “can glance toward this spinning earth-ball.”156 Floating in “exterior darkness where no breath stirs,” the reader observes the continents and “population-streams,” noticing that on the European peninsula “the greatest intensity of movement exists.”157 Yockey switches to a spiritual or, perhaps, four-dimensional perspective that allows his audience to see future potential in the form of a “light stream” that today flows exclusively from Europeans and their descendants.158 From there, Yockey transports the reader through the ages—“out here we have the freedom of time as well as the freedom of space”—speeding through generations to watch civilizations rise and decline before finally returning the reader to earth where they are asked to intervene to stop the impending fall of Western civilization.159

As in Turner’s conversion experience, Yockey suggests that race consciousness allows white men to transcend the limits of space-time and adopt a God’s-eye perspective that will provide the knowledge needed to resolve the present crisis. Turner’s triumph appears not as a great risk but as a foregone conclusion. From the book’s foreword, we already know that he has succeeded and, regardless of his fate, the white nationalists will have obtained power by 2099. The found-manuscript structure of the book confers upon the reader the same omniscience as Turner when he reads the white nationalist’s sacred text. Try as it might to evoke a feeling of suspense, Pierce’s novel leaves nothing to chance.

The Fascist Simulacrum

White nationalist discourses on the future seem to take place in the future perfect, describing what will have happened once the Aryan ethnostate or imperium has ascended to power. This is the tense used to narrate Lacan’s mirror stage, which some critics read as a theory of fascism.160 Whiteness is therefore a speculative fiction: it relies on an anticipatory fantasy that white men have the power to someday achieve the impossible goal of perfect mastery over themselves and others. The Faustian spirit locks itself into an irresolvable contradiction: its powers of open-ended transcendence and unpredictable risk-taking rely on the assured arrival of the endpoint that will retroactively confirm these abilities. The alt-right proclaims the negation of the here-and-now, but then it betrays itself by committing to a future whose sole purpose is to monumentalize their present identities as glorious, necessary, and eternal. They say they want tomorrow to reveal that they have infinite potential to be anything and everything, but they really want a future that merely confirms who they are as fixed and inevitable.

Faustian science fiction therefore turns out to be bad science fiction. Science fiction at its best is a radically historicizing genre that reveals the present as contingent while allowing us to imagine how things might be otherwise.161 White nationalists, however, are profoundly antihistorical. Whereas strong science fiction asks us to confront the possibility of a fundamental break with the existent, Faustian science fiction consoles its fascist fans by positing the essential continuity of blood and time. Speculative whiteness therefore represents the kind of pseudo-rupture that Alain Badiou described in his diagnosis of Nazism’s radical evil as a “simulacrum” of the event.162

Beyond serving as a method for achieving historical consciousness, science fiction has also been understood as an opportunity to think through racial, cultural, and other differences.163 Aliens often appear as metaphors for the other, but extraterrestrials are strangely absent from most alt-right engagements with science fiction. Spencer makes clear that he considers communication with human as well as nonhuman others to be impossible when he quotes a scientist from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972): “I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the earth up to its borders. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We don’t need other worlds: we need a mirror.”164 Spencer tendentiously interprets him as speaking on behalf of white civilization to say, “We can’t know anything beyond our own history and tradition.”165 White people may explore the stars, Spencer argues, but they can never make contact with others because they’ll always “project” their desires onto them.166 Speculative whiteness will always remain self-imprisoned in a racist solipsism that prevents it from imagining anything outside or after itself. Once more, the alt-right promises a bold new future in space but it never achieves escape velocity from white supremacy’s perpetual present.

Notes

1. 1. Richard Spencer, qtd in Josh Harkinson, “Meet the White Nationalist Trying to Ride the Trump Train to Lasting Power,” Mother Jones, October 27, 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/richard-spencer-trump-alt-right-white-nationalist/.

2. 2. Richard Spencer, qtd in George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 65.

3. 3. Richard Spencer, interview with Roman Bernard, “Faustian Identity,” Radix, podcast audio, November 14, 2014, author’s archive.

4. 4. Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin, “Unconscious Cinema—The Terminator,” Radix, podcast audio, August 9, 2017, author’s archive.

5. 5. Spencer, “Faustian Identity.”

6. 6. Jared Holt, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The White Nationalist Who Toiled Inside a Right-Wing Media Powerhouse,” Right Wing Watch, February 3, 2020, https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-white-nationalist-who-toiled-inside-a-right-wing-media-powerhouse/.

7. 7. See Neil M. Maher, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), 11–14, 20–53.

8. 8. See Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan, White Power and American Neoliberal Culture (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2023), 92.

9. 9. Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016); Fred Scharmen, Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space (New York: Verso, 2021), 161, 166–70.

10. 10. Greg Johnson and Paul Kersey [Michael J. Thompson], “Aryan Dreams Deferred,” Counter-Currents Radio, February 23, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20230604115154/https://counter-currents.com/2017/02/space-a-dream-deferred/.

11. 11. Scharmen, Space Forces, 183–84; David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler 19 (March 2012), https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit.

12. 12. Paul Kersey [Michael J. Thompson], “Whitey on the Moon”: Race, Politics, and the Death of the U.S. Space Program, 1958–1972 (n.p.: SBPDL, 2016), 30.

13. 13. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2003), 21–28; andré m. carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 68–88.

14. 14. Richard Spencer, “Star Trek and the Jews,” Taki’s Magazine, May 22, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20230330143849/https://www.takimag.com/article/sniperstower/star_trek_and_the_jews/.

15. 15. Trevor Lynch [Greg Johnson], “Star Trek: Beyond,” Counter-Currents, August 24, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20231205011550/https://counter-currents.com/2016/08/star-trek-beyond/.

16. 16. Hilary Moore and James Tracy, No Fascist USA! John Brown’s Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movement (San Francisco: City Lights, 2020), 141, 189.

17. 17. Chad Andrews, “Technomilitary Fantasy in the 1980s: Military Sf, David Drake, and the Discourse of Instrumentality,” Extrapolation 56, no. 2 (2015): 140–42; David Forbes, The Old Iron Dream (Oakland, Calif.: Inkshares, 2014).

18. 18. Vanessa Romo, “Trump Unveils New Space Force Logo, Inciting ‘Star Trek’ Fan Outrage,” NPR, January 24, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799396583/trump-unveils-new-space-force-logo-inciting-star-trek-fan-outrage.

19. 19. Peter Thiel, qtd in Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2021), 163. National Conservatism, “Peter Thiel: The Star Trek Computer Is Not Enough—National Conservatism Conference,” YouTube, 40:05, July 16, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JRyy2MM-rI&ab_channel=NationalConservatism.

20. 20. Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 1–6, 210–15, 234–40.

21. 21. Bernard, “Faustian Identity.”

22. 22. See Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (London: Arktos, 2013), 34.

23. 23. Bernard, “Faustian Identity.”

24. 24. Roger Griffin, “Revolts against the Modern: The Blend of Literary and Historical Fantasy in the Italian New Right,” Literature & History 11, no. 1 (2002): 103.

25. 25. Jason Horowitz, “Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader,” New York Times, September 21, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/world/europe/giorgia-meloni-lord-of-the-rings.html.

26. 26. Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (New York: Dey Street Books, 2020), 74.

27. 27. Spencer, “Faustian Identity.”

28. 28. Matthew Heimbach, “Elysium Is an Anti-White Open Borders Farce,” Traditionalist Youth Network, August 20, 2013, http://web.archive.org/web/20170816050632/http://www.tradyouth.org/2013/08/elysium-is-an-anti-white-open-borders-propaganda-farce/.

29. 29. Spencer, “Faustian Identity.”

30. 30. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 39–41.

31. 31. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust,’” New German Critique 19, special issue 1: “Germans and Jews” (Winter 1980): 110.

32. 32. Dan Sinykin, American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 57–58.

33. 33. Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 95; Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (New York: Verso, 2020), 42.

34. 34. Jordan S. Carroll, “Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 19, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/race-consciousness-fascism-and-frank-herberts-dune/.

35. 35. Richard Spencer, interview with Greg Johnson and John Morgan, “Archeo-Futurist Messiah,” Radix, podcast audio, August 14, 2014, https://archive.org/details/soundcloud-207417964.

36. 36. Spencer, interview. See Alexandra Minna Stern, The Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 44–45; Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 147.

37. 37. Spencer, “Archeo-Futurist Messiah.”

38. 38. Frank Herbert, “Dune Genesis,” Omni 2, no. 10, July 1980: 72.

39. 39. See Michael E. Staub, “Controlling Ourselves: Emotional Intelligence, the Marshmallow Test, and the Inheritance of Race,” American Studies 55, no. 1 (2016): 69–73.

40. 40. Joshua Pearson, “Frank Herbert’s Dune and the Financialization of Heroic Masculinity,” CR: The New Centennial Review 19, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 155.

41. 41. Pearson, 171–73.

42. 42. Spencer, “Archeo-Futurist Messiah.”

43. 43. Spencer.

44. 44. Alexandre Kojève, qtd in Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 51.

45. 45. Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age (London: Arktos, 2017).

46. 46. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115–19; Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), 23.

47. 47. Timothy O’Reilly, Frank Herbert (New York: Ungar, 1981), 86–87.

48. 48. Spencer, “Archeo-Futurist Messiah.”

49. 49. Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (1976; repr. New York: Ace, 2020), 463.

50. 50. Greg Johnson, “The Golden Path: Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune & God Emperor of Dune,” Counter-Currents, January 12, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20231211121737/https://counter-currents.com/2021/01/the-golden-path/.

51. 51. Johnson, “Golden Path.” See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 181–91.

52. 52. Johnson, “Golden Path.”

53. 53. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 37.

54. 54. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2022), 97–119.

55. 55. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 99.

56. 56. Ernst Jünger, “On Danger,” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 370.

57. 57. Jünger, 371.

58. 58. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Maurio Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 360.

59. 59. Jason Puskar, “‘Hazardous Business’: Nella Larsen’s Passing and Risk Racialization,” English Language Notes 54, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2016): 100.

60. 60. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 44–53.

61. 61. Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017), 39.

62. 62. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 2005), 17; Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 23–29.

63. 63. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 241–42.

64. 64. Marisa Kabas, “His Woman-Hating SciFi Went Viral in the ‘Manosphere’: If She’d Known, Maybe She Would Have Seen Him Coming,” Rolling Stone, June 19, 2022, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/denver-shooting-tattoo-alicia-cardenas-lyndon-mcleod-1360771/.

65. 65. Hari Kunzru, Red Pill (Knew York: Knopf, 2020), 208.

66. 66. Spencer, “Archeo-Futurist Messiah.” See Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, 44.

67. 67. Stéphane François, “Guillaume Faye and Archeofuturism,” in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the Threat to Liberal Democracy, ed. Mark Sedgwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 92–93.

68. 68. Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 6–9, 30.

69. 69. Bar-On, 5–6.

70. 70. François, “Guillaume Faye,” 93.

71. 71. François, 96–98.

72. 72. Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age, trans. Sergio Knipe (1998; repr. London: Arktos, 2010), 57.

73. 73. Faye, 53–58.

74. 74. Faye, 74.

75. 75. Faye, 89.

76. 76. Faye, 75. See Roger Griffin, “Foreward: Another Face? Another Mazeway? Reflections on the Newness and Rightness of the European New Right,” in Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), xiii–xiv.

77. 77. O’Meara, New Culture, New Right, 162.

78. 78. Faye, Archeofuturism, 195.

79. 79. Faye, 168–74.

80. 80. Faye, 85–86.

81. 81. Faye, 246.

82. 82. Aleksandr Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, trans. Sergio Knipe (London: Arktos, 2012), 183.

83. 83. “Alex Jones Warns of Pig/Gorilla/Human Hybrids Who Can Talk,” Media Matters, July 6, 2017, https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-warns-piggorillahuman-hybrids-who-can-talk.

84. 84. Renaud Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! (Plieux, France: Chez l’auter), 137–38.

85. 85. Kerry Bolton, The Perversion of Normality: From the Marquis de Sade to Cyborgs (London: Arktos, 2021), 493–510.

86. 86. David Duke, My Awakening (Covington, La.: Free Speech Press, 1999), 110–11.

87. 87. Alison Bashford, “Julian Huxley’s Transhumanism,” in Crafting Humans: From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond, ed. Marius Turda (Goettingen: V&R unipress GmbH, 2013), 153–67.

88. 88. Carleton S. Coon, “The Future of the Races of Man,” in Apeman, Spaceman, ed. Leon E. Stover and Harry Harrison (1968; repr. New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1970), 150–52.

89. 89. Faye, Archeofuturism, 71.

90. 90. Faye, 71.

91. 91. Faye, 101–2.

92. 92. Faye, 172–73.

93. 93. Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 34–39.

94. 94. Faye, Archeofuturism, 224.

95. 95. Spengler, The Decline of the West, 21.

96. 96. Spengler, 31.

97. 97. Spengler, 68, 75–76, 183–84, 278, 334.

98. 98. Spengler, 172.

99. 99. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson and Michael Putnam (1931; repr. London: Arktos, 2015), 52.

100. 100. Spengler, 53–56.

101. 101. Spengler, 39.

102. 102. Spengler, 111.

103. 103. Spengler, 20.

104. 104. Spengler, 131–32.

105. 105. Spengler, Decline of the West, 167.

106. 106. Inez Hedges, Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 48–51.

107. 107. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age, trans. Vivian Bird (Torrance, Calif.: The Noontide Press, 1982), 157.

108. 108. Matthew Rose, A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021), 64.

109. 109. Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1999), 167–81.

110. 110. Coogan, 238–40, 264–67.

111. 111. Coogan, 20–22.

112. 112. Coogan, 38.

113. 113. Coogan, 74–79.

114. 114. Francis Parker Yockey (Ulrick Varange), Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948; repr. Sausalito, Calif.: The Noontide Press, 1962), 102–3.

115. 115. Yockey, 13–14.

116. 116. Yockey, dedication.

117. 117. Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, 36–38.

118. 118. Yockey, Imperium, 267.

119. 119. Yockey, 43.

120. 120. Yockey, 44.

121. 121. Francis Parker Yockey, The Enemy of Europe (York, S.C.: Liberty Bell Publications, 1981), 68

122. 122. Yockey, 69.

123. 123. Yockey, Imperium, 376–439.

124. 124. Yockey, 383, 395–96.

125. 125. Yockey, 115–17.

126. 126. Joe Rogan, interview with Gavin McInnes, The Joe Rogan Experience, 920, podcast audio, February 22, 2017, https://www.mixcloud.com/TheJoeRoganExperience/920-gavin-mcinnes/.

127. 127. Yockey, Imperium, 27–28.

128. 128. Richard Spencer and Edward Dutton, “Where Are They?” Radix, podcast audio, April 10, 2021, author’s archive. See also Matthew Andrew Sarraf, Michael Anthony Woodly of Menie, and Colin Feltham, Modernity and Cultural Decline: A Biocultural Perspective (Amherst, Mass.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 19.

129. 129. Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 3–16.

130. 130. Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 518–19.

131. 131. Willis Carto, “Introduction,” to Francis Parker Yockey (Ulick Varange), Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948; repr. Sausalito, Calif.: The Noontide Press, 1962), xxxviii–xl.

132. 132. Carto, xl.

133. 133. Carto, xl.

134. 134. Carto, xl–xli.

135. 135. Carto, xli.

136. 136. John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 2–7.

137. 137. Rieder, 30.

138. 138. Kilgore, Astrofuturism, 1–2, 78–79.

139. 139. Kilgore, 84–85, 101.

140. 140. Rowland Keshena Robinson, “Fascism & Antifascism: A Decolonial Perspective,” The Spectral Archive, February 11, 2017, https://onkwehonwerising.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/fascism-anti-fascism-a-decolonial-perspective/; emphasis in original. See also Devin Zane Shaw, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 11–15.

141. 141. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 49–50. See also Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15–17.

142. 142. Alex Trimble Young, “The Settler Unchained: Constituent Power and Settler Violence,” Social Text 33, no. 3 (124) (September 2015): 7–10.

143. 143. Alex Trimble Young, “The Necropolitics of Liberty: Sovereignty, Fantasy, and United States Gun Culture,” Gun Culture 9, no. 1 (Spring 2020), https://csalateral.org/forum/gun-culture/necropolitics-of-liberty-sovereignty-fantasy-us-gun-culture-young/.

144. 144. Michael Hann, “‘Fashwave’: Synth Music Co-opted by the Far Right,” The Guardian, December 14, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/dec/14/fashwave-synth-music-co-opted-by-the-far-right.

145. 145. Zeskind, Blood and Politics, 17–26.

146. 146. Zeskind, 20–26.

147. 147. Martin Durham, “From Imperium to Internet: The National Alliance and the American Extreme Right,” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 3 (2002): 53.

148. 148. William L. Pierce, “The Faustian Spirit,” National Vanguard, April 12, 2015 [1978], https://web.archive.org/web/20220706122001/https://nationalvanguard.org/2015/04/the-faustian-spirit/.

149. 149. Robert S. Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce (Bloomington, Ind.: 1st Books Library, 2001), 34.

150. 150. William L. Pierce, “The Faustian Spirit and Political Correctness,” National Vanguard, December 6, 2015 [July 29, 2000], https://web.archive.org/web/20240317004616/https://nationalvanguard.org/2015/12/the-faustian-spirit-and-political-correctness/.

151. 151. J. M. Berger, “The Turner Legacy: The Storied Origins and Enduring Impact of White Nationalism’s Deadly Bible,” The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism—The Hague (ICCT) Evolutions in Counter-Terrorism, 1 (2016): 22.

152. 152. Sinykin, Neoliberal Apocalypse, 58.

153. 153. Katharyne Mitchell, “Pre-Black Futures,” Antipode 41, no. S1 (2009), 239–61.

154. 154. Macdonald, Turner Diaries, 71.

155. 155. Macdonald, 33.

156. 156. Yockey, Imperium, 3.

157. 157. Yockey, 3.

158. 158. Yockey, 3.

159. 159. Yockey, 4.

160. 160. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 81–83; Hal Foster, “Armor Fou,” October 56 (Spring 1991): 64–97; Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3–41.

161. 161. Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 54–55.

162. 162. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001), 72–77.

163. 163. Isiah Lavender III, Race in American Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 8.

164. 164. Richard Spencer, Colin Lidell, and Andy Nowicki, “Man & Superman,” Vanguard Radio, podcast audio, April 15, 2013, https://archive.org/details/ManSuperman_201905.

165. 165. Spencer, Lidell, and Nowicki.

166. 166. Spencer, Lidell, and Nowicki.