Some of you may remember Eli Mosley, Richard Spencer’s right-hand guy, who bravely leaped to Spencer’s defense over the latter’s failure to pay royalties, provide reports, release the rights, or respond to a contractually required demand for arbitration on the part of one of his Radix authors. Now the New York Times has published an expose on him which serves to demonstrate that not all hit pieces are without merit.
As it turns out, Mosley is a military fraud. And I very much doubt his stolen valor is going to enhance the image of the Fake Right among the U.S. military or combat veterans.
After a short time filming behind the scenes with Eli and his associates, a theme emerged. He kept emphasizing a connection between the military and the alt-right. He said many of his compatriots were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who had become disillusioned with the American political system after fighting in unwinnable conflicts. In his telling, members of the alt-right were patriotic Americans who had come to their extreme worldview through honorable life experience, not hatred.
He mentioned that he too had served in Iraq. But when I asked him to elaborate, he waved off the question. “It was boring.”
Boring? I had heard soldiers say they experienced periods of boredom on deployment, but I had never heard anyone sum up time in a war zone that way. I emailed the Army to verify details of his service. While I waited to hear back from them, my colleagues and I combed through alt-right podcasts in which he talked about his life.
The podcasts were laced with the most abhorrent racist vulgarities I had ever heard. Not only did they reveal more about Eli’s war story, but they also gave me insight into how he talked before he became media conscious and sanitized his message. With me, he insisted that the media unfairly applies labels like white supremacist and neo-Nazi to members of the alt-right “to browbeat white people out of identity politics.” But in the podcasts, recorded less than a year ago, he and his friends were unabashedly racist and anti-Semitic. He also spun tales of being embedded with the Iraqi Army, of being on the lookout for Chechen snipers, and of killing “muds,” a racial slur for Arabs.
When I got paperwork back from the Army and the National Guard confirming that he had never deployed, I was not surprised. At the same time, I couldn’t believe he would lie so boldly, first to his fellow members of the alt-right and then to a Times reporter, on camera.
His parents declined to speak with me, but I called some of his former friends and fellow soldiers, who told me Eli had wanted to deploy but his timing was off: He graduated from high school in 2010 and went straight on to a couple of semesters of college; by the end of 2011, the last troops had left Iraq. They also confirmed that Eli’s unit in the Pennsylvania National Guard did not deploy anywhere else during the roughly six years he served, and neither did he.
At this point, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Mike Cernovich was correct all along and Richard Spencer really is controlled opposition. That, or Spencer’s natural ability to surround himself with leftists and frauds while staggering from one obvious and easily avoidable PR disaster to the next without ever losing the media spotlight is the most highly developed since Hillary Clinton’s.
There is nothing – nothing – even remotely genuine about the Fake Right, and at this point, you would almost have to be retarded in order to take them seriously. They are strawmen set up in order to be taken down.
These people are stupid.
