Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination

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A critical analysis of the intellectual productions of the alt-right--necessary reading for all who seek to counter its appeal and expansion. The "alt-right" has sadly become a household term. From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, it has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly through America's cultural, political, and digital landscapes. But the alt-right is also mercurial and shape-shifting, encompassing a range of believers and ideas that overlap with white nationalism, white supremacy, and neo-Nazism. It provides a big and porous tent to those who subscribe to varying forms of race and gender-based exclusion. In Proud Boys and the White Ethno-State, historian Alexandra Stern begins with the premise that alt-right literature, most of which exists online, should be taken seriously as a form of intellectual production that has distinct lineages, assumptions, and objectives. Applying the tools of historical analysis, cultural studies, and other interdisciplinary approaches, she explores its conceptual frameworks, language, and narratives. In doing so, she is able to probe the deeper meanings and underlying constructs, concepts, and frameworks that guide the alt-right and animate its overlapping forms of racism, xenophobia, sexism, and other social hostilities. Like George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, Proud Boys and the White Ethno-State is a key tool for combating today's white supremacist ideologies.

Reviews

An important study that extends the knowledge from other recent books that have demonstrated a stubbornly pervasive network of white nationalists.
Kirkus Reviews

An important volume for anyone interested in the future of liberal democracy. Stern has fashioned an invaluable guide with which to unmask a new breed of racism.
Shelf Awareness

Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate is the definitive guide to alt-right ideas today. Stern brilliantly documents how a younger generation of activists are repackaging the Far Right, waging a battle for cultural dominance. The internet is their home, where they mix fascist ideologies and faux scholarship to make their case for white/Christian/male dominance. Stern has analyzed an enormous swath of ethno-nationalist material, sparing the rest of us from having to engage in that odious task. Proud Boys is essential reading in the age of Trump.
Arlene Stein, author of Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity

In this carefully researched book, the historian Alexandra Minna Stern studies a wide array of online web sites, documenting a rise in claims to whiteness as a basis of identity, as a claim to victimhood and as an argument for a white ethnostate. Drawing ideas from films (red-pilling comes from The Matrix) and from the left (the need for safe spaces), the Alt-Right, she argues, is trying to normalize a frightening shift from talk of civic nationalism to talk of race-based nationalism. This is very important work we should all know about.
Arlie Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, finalist for the National Book Award.

Timely, well-researched, and insightful, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate is a brilliant study of the alt-rights beginnings and current attempts to push its message of racial separation, misogyny, white nationalism, and xenophobia into the American mainstream. It should be read in schools and book clubs across the nation.
Leo R. Chavez, author of The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation

Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate lays bare the complex intellectual, theoretical, and political commitments of an ascendant alt-right and its use of culture, history, and identity to build power and win broad public consent. At its heart it is a sober warning about the ways that violence, patriarchy, and white supremacy continue to shape the American political imagination.
Daniel Martinez HoSang, coauthor of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity

Author Bio

Alexandra Minna Stern is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation- Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2d. ed., 2015) and Telling Genes- The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (2012). In addition to dozens of scholarly essays, she regularly contributes to the popular media through opinion pieces, blog posts, and interviews. She leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan whose work on eugenic sterilization in California has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and NPR, and many other media venues. Stern is Professor of American Culture, History, Women's Studies, and Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Michigan.