Daniel Lombroso’s documentary film on three of the main players in the American alt.right movement aims to give its subjects enough rope to hang themselves, and largely succeeds in showing them for the ridiculous, yet dangerous, figures they are.
Produced by The Atlantic, Lombroso spends time with Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and Lauren Southern as they capitalise on the rise of nationalism and the election of Donald Trump to spew their racist nonsense across America and other western nations.
That this film can be viewed at a time when, for now at least, the rise of these dangerous fascists has been curbed, is a comfort, but there’s little of the schadenfreude the viewer desires, because it’s too soon and too raw.
Cernovich (the end result of whose credo would see even his Iranian-American wife deported) is a grifter, and Spencer is truly vile, but many of those features have just been dangerously radicalised by ideas that should have been confined to the dustbin of history decades ago. That social media has allowed them to pursue fame and fortune through hate is a worse indictment of the modern world than any fear for the future of the ‘white race’.
The film’s subjects are humanised to a degree, which is a consequence of allowing them to hang themselves, but no-one can come out of this documentary thinking these people are justified in their spite, and Lombroso should be applauded for this even-handed assassination.
