Katie McHugh’s story exposes the anti-Christian underbelly of the alt-right movement

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Katie McHugh’s story exposes the anti-Christian underbelly of the alt-right movement
By Jonathon Van Maren
May 13, 2019
The Bridgeheard

Buzzfeed News recently published the fascinating (and still unfolding) story of Katie McHugh, a one-time conservative gadfly who wrote for the Daily Caller and other right-wing publications before becoming so embedded in the alt-right she managed to get canned from Breitbart in 2017. I found it particularly interesting because McHugh went on record and revealed both the extent to which Steve Bannon and an assortment of other characters were willing to use the alt-right Internet trolls to stoke the rage that fired up the masses and kept their agenda steaming forward, and how exactly she drifted from mainstream conservatism into alt-right extremism. I have seen a number of people follow this trajectory in recent years, many of whom worked for The Rebel (and several of whom I knew personally.) McHugh’s revelations are an extremely instructive cautionary tale on how this can happen, especially to someone trying to get noticed in a media landscape that specializes in sensationalism and bomb-throwing.

Because I have tangled with the alt-right quite a few times in my efforts to ensure that conservatives do not confuse alt-righters as ideological allies (and had the privilege of being called out and condemned by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer for my efforts), I have had to spend quite a bit of time explaining to people who are unaware of just how nasty, toxic, and racist the alt-right is that they are not on our side. They are not pro-life, for starters, and far from wanting to embrace the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West, they see the worship of a crucified Jew as a weak embarrassment that must be dispensed with. They speak of “Christendom” as a political reality, and laud the Crusades because it involved Europeans warring with Muslims, but when it comes to religion, their views stretch past Christianity to the misty darkness of Europe’s pagan past. In this way they are precisely like the Nazis, who also disdained Christianity for its perceived weakness well as its origins as a Jewish sect. Instead, leading Nazis such as SS head Heinrich Himmler preferred to toy with occult mysticism and Germanic paganism, which provided far more fertile ground for their battle cries of blood and soil.

Because the alt-right makes use of much of the same traditionalist imagery and lauds the canon of the West in a way that rings familiar to Christians, they may be confused into thinking that the alt-right are ideological fellow-travelers. They are not. I would urge anyone interested in getting a good look at the devolution of a conservative into an alt-righter to read the entire profile on McHugh, but I want to draw specific attention to this passage, about McHugh’s differences with her alt-right boyfriend and the pagan underbelly of the alt-right movement ...

Read the rest at The Bridgehead