In the next part of this special Byline Times investigation, Nafeez Ahmed delves into a controversial ‘Alt-Right’ event attended by key figures in a conservative lobbying group with Home Office funding to research Islamist militancy
In November 2017, both Douglas Murray and Dr Alan Mendoza of the prominent conservative think tank the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), spoke at the annual Restoration Weekend, organised by the David Horowitz Freedom Centre.
Held the year after Donald Trump’s election, the 2017 Restoration Weekend was a key celebration of the success of ‘Alt-Right’ nationalists. It was hosted by David Horowitz, who had spent years mentoring President Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller, regarded as the driving force behind his administration’s “racist” policies – including the legal architecture of the ‘Muslim ban’.
An email leak revealed that Miller promoted white supremacist conspiracy theories to the Alt-Right publication Breitbart while forging close ties with its then executive chairman, Steve Bannon. In 2013, Bannon attended a Restoration Weekend event along with his Breitbart sponsors Robert and Rebekah Mercer and came up with the idea of installing a new leader into the conservative movement – “an outsider to shake things up”.
Just six months before the 2017 Restoration Weekend, the HJS’s executive director Dr Alan Mendoza invited the host David Horowitz onto his YouTube television show to discuss extremism on college campuses. After raising legitimate concerns about anti-Semitism in universities, Horowitz went on to claim that American Muslim student groups are little more than “terrorist front groups” orchestrated and funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Mendoza nodded as he listened to Horowitz’s claims, even though they have been debunked as Islamophobic conspiracy theory.
Horowitz has been described as “a driving force” of the “anti-black movement”. Just a week before the event attended by the HJS, Horowitz declared that “the country’s only serious race war” is “against whites”.
A Who’s Who of White Nationalism
Many of the attendees joining Murray and Mendoza at the Restoration Weekend read like a Who’s Who of Trumpworld white nationalists: the Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos; the shock-jock reporter Ann Coulter; and international ‘counter-jihad’ icon Robert Spencer whose publication Jihad Watch was cited 162 times in a manifesto by neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik who killed more than 70 people in Norway in 2011.
Also present was the far-right British commentator Katie Hopkins, who told the conference that in the UK “discrimination against whites is institutionalised and systemic”. She was joined by James Damore, the engineer fired from Google after sending out an internal ‘anti-diversity’ memo, claiming wrongly that “biological causes” explain the under-representation of women in tech.
Other speakers included Gavin McInnes, the founder of Proud Boys, a group designated as “extremist” by the FBI in 2018. McInnes has published anti-Semitic material and Holocaust denialism via the Canadian media organisation Rebel News and on his own personal platform. At the Restoration event, he began his talk by describing France as a “weak… country of homos” and then boasted about how the Proud Boys regularly “beat the crap out of” anti-racism protestors using “justifiable violence”.
Another speaker was Trump’s former deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka, previously Breitbart’s national security editor. Forward magazine revealed Gorka to be a member of a Hungarian military order which collaborated with the Nazis by helping to deport thousands of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps in 1944. According to the American Jewish advocacy group, Bend the Arc, Gorka “co-founded a far-right political party in Hungary with known anti-Semites” and “wrote several op-eds for Magyar Demokrata, a paper notable for publishing anti-Semitic articles”.
These speakers had been announced well in advance of the event, but Mendoza and Murray attended anyway.
