Everything Is Alt-Right
by N. G. Leonetti
part 1
Georgia, all in all, was happy with how the day was unfolding. Tensions were high, and the crowd had just about reached its boiling point. She had seen this so many times before, and it always made for the best b-roll. Liberals say the darndest things when they get fired up. One girl had actually called a black guy wearing a MAGA hat a racial terrorist!
Sam was on a coffee run. Georgia felt the sweltering heat rising off the blacktop in nauseating waves. It was mid-August, the dog days, much warmer than the year before. Climate Change propagandists are probably basking in this, she thought with derision. An iced coffee with almond milk would certainly hit the spot.
So far, she had only been spat at once, which was a little disappointing; it meant that no one recognized her.
It wasn’t all a wash, though. The big skinhead next to her was screaming at a slight yet toned Black kid. Their faces were so close they could have kissed. Drops of saliva flew from their mouths, ricocheting off their cheeks and foreheads. Georgia watched with visible glee, iPhone at the ready, as fists were about to fly.
That’s when she heard the ear-piercing, demonic squeal of tires. All thoughts of the prospective fight vanished from her mind when she whirled around to face the source of the noise.
The girl’s body was shattered before it even hit the blacktop. Georgia watched in horror as the young female went airborne, so high above everyone else, only to come smashing to the ground with a meaty thud. She was wearing a JanSport backpack, powder blue and covered in pins and patches that read things like FEEL THE BERN and FRACKING IS CHEMICAL WARFARE and #RESIST. She had cotton-candy pink hair. She had small hands with lime-painted fingernails. She had skinny legs that bowed. She wore a dirty pair of plaid Chuck Taylors with more pins poking out of them.
She can’t be older than sixteen, Georgia thought as a waft of exhaust hit her square in the face, making her eyes water.
She stared desperately into the broken girl’s face, searching for something, anything, a semblance of life still floating around there. But something wasn’t right. When she saw the girl’s eyes, she also saw the backpack, the crack of her ass peaking through Levi’s, and the heels of her dirty sneakers. Georgia couldn’t comprehend this at first, but then it dawned on her: the girl’s head was twisted completely around. Her wide, beautiful eyes reflected the marshmallow clouds that drifted above her.
She was most certainly dead.
Others were thrown from either side of the black Ford SUV as it plowed its way through the dense crowd, going at least thirty miles an hour. Later, sixteen would end up at the hospital, one guy would lose a leg, another would be left permanently blind after his head bounced off the Ford’s bumper and smashed backward into a steel railing.
But the girl was the only one who died that day. Her name was Donna. She had skipped school to be at the protest. Her junior prom was only a week away. Her punk rock party dress hung in her closet, shielded in plastic. Her mother would faint and crack her head open on the dingy grey floor of the morgue after identifying her.
Georgia felt herself being pulled out of the fray. A strange sensation took hold of her as her feet lifted off the ground. She felt feather-light. The ear-splitting screams didn’t stop until she realized she was the one making them. The hive-buzz of the crowd died off when Sam suddenly appeared, a carrier with two iced coffees hitting the ground. He scooped her up effortlessly and carried her away. He tossed her into the backseat of his Jetta parked illegally a city block over and sped off down a desolate alley.
All the while, about a block up from the murder, the Ford SUV veered out of control and smashed into a brick wall. A mob of people hauled the driver out and put him on the ground within seconds. Georgia had caught a ghostly glimpse of the murderer as she stared back at the wreckage: overweight, piggish, a hat summersaulting through the air and exposing a razor-burned bald head, long unkempt beard and squinty blue eyes, a pug nose covered in blackheads...
Mark. His name was Mark something. She had seen him at meetings, even talked to him a few times.
He was quiet, but he mustered up enough nerve to tell her he watched her YouTube channel all the time. And that she was pretty.
Georgia was pretty, of course. She knew this. She had been called “elf-like” and “petite” with her long blonde hair that ended just before her size-zero waist, round blue eyes, thin and pointed nose, compact set of ruby lips, and surprisingly ample breasts. She loved being called elf-like. She had been obsessed with Lord of the Rings since she was a kid, especially the elves. Her schoolgirl crush was Orlando Bloom.
She didn’t know what had happened to her bullhorn, that trusty tool she always used to amplify her rehearsed oration of hate and vitriol. She put a cork in it when the fighting was about to begin. When the SUV made impact, she lost her grip on the bullhorn, everything around her going slo-mo. The panicked bystanders had kicked it away somewhere.
Thankfully, she had her helmet. Sam had recommended she always wear a helmet to these things.
At the last counter-protest, people threw rocks and one grazed her, just above her brow, slicing a five-inch gash across her forehead. She didn’t realize she was bleeding until her sweat-mingled blood ran down her face and into her mouth. She tasted pennies, touched her forehead, saw red...
The helmet was big and black and dwarfed her head, making her appear even more childlike and innocent.
Mark wore Screwdriver t-shirts and rune necklaces and Doc Martins with red laces. He kept his head shaved; none of that Alt-Right type of faggotry for Mark; he was old-school.
He was almost stomped to death under the feet of the crowd that dragged him from the vehicle. Someone had a firm grip on his necklace, the chain ripping into his throat. He almost blacked out, but the chain snapped.
His friends were there. A lot of them.
A crew of skinheads, all in black with Aryan Brotherhood patches sewn onto sleeves, broke through the fray with skull-cracking efficiency. Beer bottles, billy clubs, brass knuckles, rocks, baseball bats: all weapons easily hidden from the casual onlooker. Legs and arms were broken; bodies were smashed under black boots.
Police in riot gear eventually broke the whole thing up, but Mark was long gone. He was pulled free and carried off into one of the alleys.
Shortly afterwards, the streets were cleared. The crime scene was taped off, the Ford a gory centerpiece of it all, and an APB was put out on Mark and any possible accomplices. There were checkpoints at every route out of the city. A canvassing at a twenty-block radius began immediately and eventually expanded citywide. Anyone who was questioned denied having any knowledge of Mark’s potential whereabouts. There was a firm omertà within their crew.
* * *
Georgia unsnapped her helmet and let it fall from her head. She used it to catch her vomit as Sam turned onto the turnpike.
It had been a little over a year since Georgia launched her YouTube channel, and she rose to fame quickly. It felt almost like a dream. People began recognizing her at rallies and counter-protests and occasionally while she was out to dinner. Her antics were naturally trendy, especially within the growing number of her female fans. Blonde girls in booty shorts were burning copies of the Koran in the middle of Times Square, wielding tiki torches around Confederate statues and monuments in South Carolina, sipping from Hydroflasks on college campuses up and down the east coast, and mock-Sieg Heiling on their TikTok channels.
Her message was clear: it was okay for a woman to be provocative as long as she was submissive to the important men in her life; men were the dominant sex. It was good to be Christian; it was great to be White; political correctness was a festering wound on the First Amendment; and multiculturalism was a plague. And QANON and the Deep State were revelations.
She wasn’t a racist; rather, she referred to herself as a “truthist.” The Alt-Right ate it up.
She was lauded for courage and called a maverick. She was invited to speak at events and on podcast episodes and told she should run for public office. And she made more money at 21 than she ever could have imagined.
Her close friend, Sam, became a sort of protector and bodyguard by default. Sam was smart and handsome, and he could also bench-press three hundred pounds. He had an intimidating disposition without even trying, and he was in love with Georgia.
Initially, Georgia was very attracted to him. His personality was lacking, but that body... They had sex once, and Georgia found it to be unremarkable and devoid of anything remotely pleasurable. She never wanted to do it with him again.
Sam still carried a torch for her, and he seemed idiotically oblivious to her disdain. He said he would do anything for her, including die for her, and she believed him.
* * *
When they got back to her apartment, Georgia made a beeline for the bathroom. She told Sam she was fine and she just needed time alone with her thoughts. Without saying anything, he nodded and left, bummed.
She stared at herself in the mirror. It grew foggy from her ragged breath. Black mascara mingled with tears and sweat ran down her cheeks, thin like spider legs. She ran a bath, stripped out of her sweat-sodden clothes, and got in. She stared at the tendrils of steam as they rose from the bath water. She heard the girl’s body hit the ground like wet meat on a butcher’s block over and over in her head until she couldn’t take it anymore and went under.
When she got out, the water was cold. She felt that hours had passed. She dried off and wrapped her hair up in a towel. She didn’t bother getting dressed. She crawled naked into her bed, cradling her pillow in her arms.
Before she fell asleep, she heard her phone beep. Mark, in his panic, had sent her a text message.
The next morning, Sam came by with bagel sandwiches and two large cups of black coffee.
She had called him earlier, almost as soon as she woke up, telling him it was important that they make a reaction video about what had happened at the protest as soon as possible while it was fresh in their minds.
The living room of her apartment was made into a fully functioning studio. As the money came pouring in, Georgia spared no expense when it came to professionalism. No one would take what she had to say seriously if her surroundings made her look amateur.
The setup was simple, minimalist: she had a black desk, a white board and a green screen, which she used on rare occasions. A globe sat to her right, a copper bust of an American eagle to her left. The scope of her rhetoric ranged from Deep State to the border wall to immigration to Jewish conspiracy, but also occasionally focused on Christian values and the responsibility of White women in America.
Sam was finishing up his bachelor’s in Film and Media Studies and was an absolute whiz when it came to editing. He usually had her content up within a few hours after filming.
Her “Last Word” was the most popular of all her segments, and it would be especially prescient on that particular morning since it was dealing with the prior day’s events. They both needed to be on point. Georgia’s initial idea was to summarize what happened. It was important to make absolutely clear that the guy who plowed through the crowd of “left-wing extremists” wasn’t at all a reflection of the movement as a whole.
She also wanted to be careful about completely condemning Mark’s actions. She would say how she, herself, wasn’t a violent person. She did, however, see the merit in violence when it was used correctly. Words were powerful, but physical action left an indelible mark on any betrayers of freedom that stood in the way.
She felt good, ready as she surveyed the flurry of notes she set down that morning. She took a deep breath. She would have her coffee and bagel sandwich when they finished. She would call her mom and dad. She would maybe even see a movie. She would whitewash the stain that death had left on her mind. Everything would be all right.
However, when Sam hit record and she began to talk, things spun out of control so fast it made her dizzy.
Copyright © 2021 by N. G. Leonetti
