Full text in English below (automatic translation):
A few days after Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election, journalist Daniel Lombroso was covering a meeting organized by Richard Spencer, the firebrand who coined the alt-right concept. There he witnessed the host address the attendees with "Hail Trump!" and videotaped it. At that moment, he began to follow the day-to-day life of several alt-right prescribers, which he shows in El nuevo supremacismo blanco (The new white supremacism). Movistar + broadcasts in Spain the first documentary produced by the U.S. media outlet The Atlantic.
After more than 3 years of research, Lombroso was not entirely surprised by January's Capitol assault, "although the escalation of violence and absurdity seen there was something impossible to predict," he admits by phone from the United States. What he is trying to highlight with this film is that "white supremacism is an essentially violent movement, which is not only maintained on the level of ideas or politics".
The controversial Spencer moved to live at his mother's house after many American universities cancelled his speaking tour because they considered his speech a public threat and after his controversial intervention during the violent protests in Charlottesville. Another target of this documentary, Mike Cernovich, made a six-step guide to creating a fascist dictatorship and spread hoaxes on Twitter about Hillary Clinton's health status during that same election. Married to an Iranian woman with whom he has had a son, he takes advantage of his fame to sell dietary supplements online. While Lauren Southern, with more than 650,000 followers on YouTube, focuses her efforts on fighting immigrants and defending the white community, although she has also raised a biracial family.
The weaknesses and contradictions of these three media personalities come to light in a narrative that they themselves help construct in first person and that defines a new generation of extremists. "Racism and xenophobia have always been latent, what has changed in this century is how these opinion leaders have fed off the virtual world to incentivize dangerous behavior. Mike would be nothing without Twitter and neither would Lauren without YouTube, but the tech giants don't care," defends Lombroso.
Although the journalist considers that it was "the ego and the desire for fame and money" of the protagonists of the film that allowed him to have such broad access to their lives, he decided that it was important to tell what happens around this type of influential people among young audiences. "As a Jew with two grandmothers who are Holocaust survivors who lost part of their families in World War II, I've learned that you have to shed light on what fascism is doing. But rather than include the reflections of experts, I preferred to let them expose themselves and define themselves on camera as the fraud that they are. They treat hate as a commodity they can market," she says.
Lauren Southern doesn't usually deal with the press, so she had the hardest time accepting the offer to appear in the film. For the director, she is the most complex character of the three: "She is young and intelligent, but very naive at the same time. She tries to control her own image and her own narrative, because she has all the tools at her disposal. Both she and her collaborators understand that the message goes further if you take care of the visual aesthetics; they perfectly understand the style of Leni Riefenstahl [a film director aligned with the Nazi regime]. As far as I know, she is now not very happy with the result of this film and my articles."
Focusing on a particular movement in American politics, the documentary builds from it a broader portrait of society. One that is "quite depressing" and in which "the patterns of reality TV have been transferred to reality," defines Lombroso, who believes that the threat of white supremacism is still latent. "Trump may no longer be in the White House and many of these far-right activists may be in decline, but the stream of ideas they have helped spread is still alive; you can see it on Fox News more clearly than ever," he asserts.
Full text in English below (automatic translation):
A few days after Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election, journalist Daniel Lombroso was covering a meeting organized by Richard Spencer, the firebrand who coined the alt-right concept. There he witnessed the host address the attendees with "Hail Trump!" and videotaped it. At that moment, he began to follow the day-to-day life of several alt-right prescribers, which he shows in El nuevo supremacismo blanco (The new white supremacism). Movistar + broadcasts in Spain the first documentary produced by the U.S. media outlet The Atlantic.
After more than 3 years of research, Lombroso was not entirely surprised by January's Capitol assault, "although the escalation of violence and absurdity seen there was something impossible to predict," he admits by phone from the United States. What he is trying to highlight with this film is that "white supremacism is an essentially violent movement, which is not only maintained on the level of ideas or politics".
The controversial Spencer moved to live at his mother's house after many American universities cancelled his speaking tour because they considered his speech a public threat and after his controversial intervention during the violent protests in Charlottesville. Another target of this documentary, Mike Cernovich, made a six-step guide to creating a fascist dictatorship and spread hoaxes on Twitter about Hillary Clinton's health status during that same election. Married to an Iranian woman with whom he has had a son, he takes advantage of his fame to sell dietary supplements online. While Lauren Southern, with more than 650,000 followers on YouTube, focuses her efforts on fighting immigrants and defending the white community, although she has also raised a biracial family.
The weaknesses and contradictions of these three media personalities come to light in a narrative that they themselves help construct in first person and that defines a new generation of extremists. "Racism and xenophobia have always been latent, what has changed in this century is how these opinion leaders have fed off the virtual world to incentivize dangerous behavior. Mike would be nothing without Twitter and neither would Lauren without YouTube, but the tech giants don't care," defends Lombroso.
Although the journalist considers that it was "the ego and the desire for fame and money" of the protagonists of the film that allowed him to have such broad access to their lives, he decided that it was important to tell what happens around this type of influential people among young audiences. "As a Jew with two grandmothers who are Holocaust survivors who lost part of their families in World War II, I've learned that you have to shed light on what fascism is doing. But rather than include the reflections of experts, I preferred to let them expose themselves and define themselves on camera as the fraud that they are. They treat hate as a commodity they can market," she says.
Lauren Southern doesn't usually deal with the press, so she had the hardest time accepting the offer to appear in the film. For the director, she is the most complex character of the three: "She is young and intelligent, but very naive at the same time. She tries to control her own image and her own narrative, because she has all the tools at her disposal. Both she and her collaborators understand that the message goes further if you take care of the visual aesthetics; they perfectly understand the style of Leni Riefenstahl [a film director aligned with the Nazi regime]. As far as I know, she is now not very happy with the result of this film and my articles."
Focusing on a particular movement in American politics, the documentary builds from it a broader portrait of society. One that is "quite depressing" and in which "the patterns of reality TV have been transferred to reality," defines Lombroso, who believes that the threat of white supremacism is still latent. "Trump may no longer be in the White House and many of these far-right activists may be in decline, but the stream of ideas they have helped spread is still alive; you can see it on Fox News more clearly than ever," he asserts.