Recently we have noticed multiple announcements for two meetings of a new group here in Grays Harbor WA. It uses the conspicuous name “America First”, a term with a long and brutal legacy steeped in xenophobia, and fascism. This is a troubling development in a county with too many fascist politicians as is. If we are seeing a wave of America First meetings that means that people here are not even satisfied with the fascistic policies being enacted by their beloved political figures, ones they themselves voted in to office not but a few years ago. They are stuck in the electoral trap, but the historical and current links to far right Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists is still upsetting. We cannot stand by idly and let groups like this openly organize in public in our county. Direct action and sabotage is needed to shut down their meetings and publicly shame the participants. We will look at the history of the phrase “America First”, then connect that historical fascist movement with current trends in Neo-Nazi circles, finally we will discuss the future of fascism in this country and the wider world, as a previously nationalist ideology goes global in the 21st century.
History of the phrase
In Donald Trump’s announcement for his candidacy for president he said, “Sadly, the American dream is dead,” a sign that he was turning from the typical jingoist political style in favor of a style that was all his own. The American Dream went from being something to uphold and glorify, to being something that was dead and would only be revived through Donald Trump’s policies of putting America First. This deeply disturbing phrase was used by Trump two times in his inaugural speech. Immediately people began to talk about the isolationist origins of the phrase, publishing think pieces on it, and explaining how it went back to attempts by fascists of the time to keep the US out of the second world war.
This is only part of the truth, in face the phrase “America First” has a much deeper and more disgusting history than event that. Its origins are entwined with other American principles like slavery, white nationalism, nativism, and anti immigration sentiments. While this history has largely been forgotten by the mainstream, hardcore fascists have always reminisced on this period of time and the ideology behind America First, building it up in their minds to the point where, when it broke into the mainstream again, it was primed and ready for the new wave of American fascism. Politicians have long made use of dog whistles to cover their real intentions, and that is exactly what this is, a dog whistle.
The slogan first appeared in 1884, when a California paper ran “America First and Always” as a headline for an article about trade wars with the British. In 1891 the New York Times reported that the Republican Party has always believed in: “America First, the rest of the world afterwards.” The Republicans of the time agreed and adopted it as their campaign slogan in 1894.
In 1914 Warren G Harding successfully ran for senator using the phrase “Prosper America First”. The expression would not become a mainstream catchphrase until April 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson used it to describe the position of the administration towards the first world war: “Our whole duty for the present, at any rate, is summed up in the motto: ‘America First’.” “America first” should not be understood “in a selfish spirit”, he insisted. “The basis of neutrality is sympathy for mankind.”
By 1916 the phrase was so popular that it was being used by both presidential candidates. When the US joined the war in 1917, it became a jingoistic motto, but after the war it returned to the realms of isolationism. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge then used the phrase in his keynote address to the Republican National Convention in 1920. Harding used it to secure the Republican nominee and subsequently the presidency, where he invoked it endlessly until his administration collapsed in a bribery scandal.
By the 1920s “America First” had taken its place among many other coded phrases that appealed to White Nationalists and nativists. Phrases such as “100% American” coded the ideas behind the “one drop rule” that made anyone with one drop of “Negro blood” legally black. This was foundational for the white supremacist laws that ruled whether someone should be free or not. Therefore, the declaration of someone as being 100% American, is much more than a simple turn of phrase in a country where citizenship and basic humanity has been governed through percentages and fractions.
But this phrase, “100% American”, was also used to describe people who were not fully American, such as Senator Knute Nelson, who upon his death in 1923 was hailed as 100% American despite having been born in Norway. This belies the underlying logic of these white nationalist phrases, its not about being American, its about being white. Senator Nelson came from “the true Nordic line”, “from the race which set up strong gods and bred strong men.” according to commentators at the time.
This term “Nordic” is yet another code word in the same way that Nazis used the term “Aryan”. Influential eugenicist texts such as The Passing of the Great Race: or The Racial Basis of European History (1916) by white supremacists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant explained that people of northern Europe were superior to people from southern Europe, or anywhere else. These terms all ultimately refer to anyone who is Caucasian or Anglo-Saxon, namely: White.
In 1919 a Ku Klux Klan leader gave a Fourth of July speech declaring: “I am for America, first, last and all the time, and I don’t want any foreign element telling us what to do.” The Klan quickly adopted the motto America First. In January 1922, the Klan staged a parade in Alexandria, Louisiana, bearing two flaming red crosses and banners with slogans including “America First”, “100% American” and “White Supremacy”. That summer the Klan took out an advertisement in a Texas newspaper: “The Ku Klux Klan is the one and only organization composed absolutely and exclusively of ONE HUNDRED PER CENT AMERICANS who place AMERICA FIRST.” All of these ideologies point to a false history that never existed in which America was originally populated solely by good, strong, Nordic men. This myth animates all sectors of the far right wing, and they all intend to return us to this fake past, through varying levels of violence.
Soon Americans were watching the rise of fascism in Europe, with Mussolini taking power in Italy, and Hitler seizing power in Germany. To explain this phenomenon to Americans papers of the time simply wrote that these fascists were essentially the Ku Klux Klan, but in Europe. In November 1922 a Montana paper noted that, in Italy, fascism meant “Italy for the Italians. The fascisti in this country call it ‘America first’.” There are plenty of the fascisti in the United States, it seems, but they have always gone under the proud banner of “100% Americans”.
By 1927, the Klan was spread entirely across the country. In May, about 1,000 Klansmen gathered to march in the Memorial Day Parade in Queens, New York. Many people rejected their presence and a riot broke out soon enough. Ultimately, the paper released the names of those arrested, among them was a man not identified directly as a Klansman, but who was arrested, arraigned, and released. His name was Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father.
In the autumn of 1940, a group of Americans against the entry of the US into the second world war formed the America First Committee. Famed aviator and racist Charles Lindbergh served as the first spokesperson. They thought that since Germany was unlikely to invade America directly, they should not enter the war and remain neutral in all aspects, even if (or especially if) that meant continuing to do business with the Nazis. By that December, the committee boasted 60,000 members.
In the spring of 1941, after the Lend-Lease Act was passed over objections from the America First Committee, Lindbergh gave an address to a Manhattan rally, talking about the position of America First on the current global political situation. As Trump has done, Lindbergh then laid out the idea that the majority of Americans were on his side, regardless of any evidence to that effect. Polls at the time showed that most respondents agreed that the US should go to war in order to defeat fascism. Later, Lindbergh would publicly reveal his views about Jewish people, whom he faulted for pushing the U.S. toward war and for manipulating the narrative through what he saw as their control of the media. The committee began to loose its more moderate members as it became increasingly seen as Un-American and antisemitic. The America First Committee would soon die, hampered by its public image and its failure to keep the country out of the war, but the sentiments and American breed of fascism would not die so easily.
In 2016, during his run for Louisiana State Senate, notorious racist and antisemite David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, publicly claimed that he was “the first major candidate in modern times to promote the term and policy of America first”. But this is historically inaccurate, for nearly a year earlier, in 2015, Donald Trump first revived the term in a op-ed with The Wall Street Journal. He said then “The American people need an administration that will tell them the truth and a president who will put America first. That’s what I intend to do.”
By the time he began to actually campaign for president, Trump was praising World Tribune writer Jeff Kuhner as a “nationalist who seeks to put America first”, his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski (who later published a book with the title America First) would promote Trump with the phrase, and both Sarah Palin and Chris Christie used it to endorse Trump. He would eventually incorporate the phrase into his daily rhetoric after he was made aware of the historical implications of it by an interview with the New York Times. Trump promised that “‘America First’ would be the major and overriding theme” of his administration, and advocated nationalist, anti-interventionist positions.
Following the election, and his ascendancy to the office of President, Trump made “America First” the official foreign policy doctrine of his administration. His inaugural address, which mentioned the phrase twice was viewed by 65% of Americans as positive, with only 39% seeing it as a poor message, according to a Political Poll. In 2017, the administration proposed a federal budget for 2018 with both “Make America Great Again” and “America First” in its title, with the latter referencing its increases to military, homeland security, and veteran spending, cuts to spending that goes towards foreign countries, and 10-year objective of achieving a balanced budget.
It is not surprising to think that theories of eugenics might have played a role in the upbringing of Donald Trump. In his biography one of the writers, Michael D’Antonio, stated that “The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.” Donald has also espoused a rather dim vision of eugenics in a 2010 interview: “I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.” While we may never know the reason Fred Trump was arrested that day, we can use the surrounding context clues to fill in the gaps.
For example, in October 2017 The New York Times reported that Trump’s close advisor, Stephen Miller used “100% Americanism” for his quotation in his high school yearbook. Trump has repeatedly belittled people from other countries, once wondering why people would want to house refugees from places like Haiti and Africa, which he referred to as “shithole countries”, adding suspiciously that he wanted “more people from places like Norway”. The ultra right wing neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer approved of this remark, and continues to claim that Nordicism per se – and “America first” – is its racial ideal for the US.
Ties to Neo-Nazis
On February 28, 2020, in Washington D.C. Nicholas Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference held its inaugural conference. Speakers included Newsmax’s Michelle Malkin; the former leader of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa, Patrick Casey; former Daily Caller editor Scott Greer, and Fuentes himself. AFPAC was a collaboration between Casey and Fuentes, whose followers began to troll and harass right wing youth organization Turning Point USA’s Culture War Tour in early 2019. Fuentes and his followers, known as Groypers, an online collective of alt-right and white nationalist trolls who attempt to inject far right viewpoints into the mainstream conservative politics, called for a more extreme version the Conservative Political Action Conference. Fuentes then founded the annual America First Political Action Conference and the America First Foundation, whose mission statement reads “Spearheaded by our Founder, Nicholas J. Fuentes, the America First movement is an amalgamation of traditional values, Trumpian populism, and American Nationalism.
So lets take a look at who Nicholas Fuentes really is and why he has chosen to go so hard on the America First phrase. Fuentes was born in 1998, making him 25 years old as of the writing of this article. He began as a mainstream conservative commentator on a local radio and TV station hosted by his high school. in 2017, when he moved into college at Boston University, he started the episodic live stream show America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes. The show often includes bigoted views presented as edgy jokes, and he himself has advocated the use of such measures among white nationalist groups stating “is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views”.
He has asserted that Muslim speech is not covered by the First Amendment and said on his show in 2017 “Who runs the media? Globalists. Time to kill the globalists” and “I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged because this is deliberate.” Globalist is a term used to code the word Jew in white nationalist circles. Following these and other comments, as well as his public attendance of the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, his employer and publisher Right Side Broadcasting Network parted ways with Fuentes in August 2017.
He also co-hosted the Nationalist Review podcast with another white nationalist, James Allsup, until January 2018. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “the two had a public falling out with each host accusing the other of laziness, impropriety and a variety of petty slights.” Perfect superior race behavior as always. In April 2018, Fuentes spoke at the American Renaissance conference, another white supremacist and white nationalist organization which attempt to “demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies.”
For a long time he plied his antisemitic and Holocaust denying views on YouTube, until it was permanently suspended in 2020 for violating YouTube’s hate speech policy. In addition to his rabid Catholic Nationalist viewpoints, he also openly supports authoritarian government and religious theocracy. He subscribes to the anti-immigration and white nationalist idea of white replacement theory, that states that as immigrants come into the country white people are slowly being replaced demographically. He even says he opposes conservatism, stating that “Christian Republican voters get screwed over” because “the GOP is run by Jews, atheists, and homosexuals.” Yeah.
In 2021, Fuentes was among the coalition of far right individuals and groups who participated in the rallies that led up to US Capitol attack on January 6th. The FBI is currently investigating a large transfer of bitcoin on December 8th to a group of far right activist which included Fuentes. Fuentes received approximately $681,750 worth of bitcoin in he transaction. Two days before the attack he said: “What can you and I do to a state legislator—besides kill them? We should not do that. I’m not advising that, but I mean, what else can you do, right?”
On January 6th, prior to the storming of the Capitol, Fuentes spoke to a crowd at Freedom Plaza, stating, “It is us and our ancestors that created everything good that you see in this country. All these people that have taken over our country—we do not need them. … It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world… Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.”
He has since received a subpoena from the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. Ten months after the receipt of this subpoena Nicholas Fuentes was the recipient of an invitation from Donald Trump to his Mar-a-lago residence in Florida. The invitation was for a dinner with Kanye West and Trump, in which West stated that Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes”.
Future of Fascism
With the globalization of our society we have witnessed many changes, from the realms of politics, to what we consume, to where we labor. All aspects of life have been affected by globalization, and this include white supremacy. No longer are white supremacist view relegated to an individual nation, confined to within its expanding but finite borders because of nationalism. Now isolation means simply withdrawing from consensus reality, not isolating one’s nation from the effects of others. Authoritarian countries across the world are increasingly becoming more cohesive and well networked. They work across borders for a shared vision of a global ethno-empire. They have an overarching goal of the eradication of marginalized groups and anyone who isn’t white enough to make the grade. This movement has been term alternatively transnational white supremacy, or more poetically “The Reconquest”, a nod to Reconqusita crusade by Christians to reclaim Spain from Muslim rule in the Middle Ages.
From Warsaw to Charlottesville chants exposed their existential fears of white demographic replacement. As does the infamous 14 words of white supremacy: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Now, Islamophobic Anders Brevick can pull inspiration from Hindu nationalists when he kills 69 young people in Norway which in turn can inspire Dylan Roof to shoot up a black church in America, that can in turn inspire the Christchurch mosque shooter in New Zealand.
This global fascist movement intends to overthrow all democratic institutions and replace them with localized autocracies based on mutually assured oppression of all non-white individuals across the world. They have no problem with borders, they have problems with brown people. They don’t care about immigration, they want ethno-states, with the black and brown states enslaved and exploited by the white ones.
In America this looks like American flags and Christian crosses, children saying the pledge of allegiance everyday at school, and police at every corner. The fascists of the future will use these instruments as their litmus tests to detect the enemy within. They will use the justice system and federal government to subject everyone to the most extreme Christian white nationalist ideologies. They will oppress minorities and declare LGBTQIA2+ people child abusers then declare that child abusers need to be put to death. They will enact their own holocausts. Their plan is called Project 2025, and its being actively pushed by the most powerful coalition of right wing organizations in the history of the country.
Sources:
https://time.com/4273812/america-first-donald-trump-history/
Gorman, Michele (July 22, 2016). “Former KKK leader David Duke announces Senate bid under ‘America first’ slogan”. Newsweek. Retrieved August 15, 2022.
Trump, Donald J. (November 10, 2015). “Ending China’s Currency Manipulation”. The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on May 16, 2020. Retrieved July 9, 2020. The American people need an administration that will tell them the truth and a president who will put America first. That’s what I intend to do.
DelReal, Jose A. (April 27, 2016). “Trump, pivoting to the general election, hones ‘America First’ foreign policy vision”. The Washington Post. Archived from the original on May 1, 2016. Retrieved January 26, 2016.
Haberman, Maggie; Sanger, David E.; Trump, Donald (March 26, 2016). “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 28, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2017.
“America First Foreign Policy”. whitehouse.gov. Retrieved January 26, 2017 – via National Archives.
Owens, Tess (June 7, 2022). “They Love Jesus, Bon Iver, and Incels. Inside America’s New Ultranationalist Youth Movement”. www.vice.com. Retrieved October 15, 2022.
“‘I’m a 12th Century Man’: White Nationalist Nick Fuentes Longs for the Days of Catholic Monarchy, Crusades, and Inquisitions”. Right Wing Watch. March 24, 2022. Retrieved March 26, 2022.
“Nicholas J. Fuentes: Five Things to Know”. Anti-Defamation League. July 8, 2021. Archived from the original on July 20, 2021. Retrieved July 10, 2021.
Barrett, Malachi (January 7, 2021). “Far-right activist who encouraged U.S. Capitol occupation also organized ‘stop the steal’ rally in Michigan”. MLive. Archived from the original on January 8, 2021. Retrieved January 8, 2021.
https://shafr.org/sites/default/files/passport-09-2018-america-first-essays.pdf
I’m in for sabotaging these bastards any way I can