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1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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What is the Alt-Right?
Berlet does not think that American politics has been in such a dangerous place vis-a-vis the far right for almost a century. For him, the parallels between the Trump campaign and the alt-right are “the most important pushback against having a multicultural and pluralistic society since the 1920s Klan”.
‘A sense that white identity is under attack’: making sense of the alt-right
The appointment of Breitbart Media’s executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, as Donald Trump’s campaign CEO has been greeted as a turning point in that presidential bid, and perhaps in conservative politics in America. We have been told that it “marks the official entree of the so-called ‘alt-right’ into the Republicans’ top campaign”, and that Trump’s election strategy “now resembles the alt-right dream of maximizing the white vote”. Hillary Clinton will address Trump’s alleged turn to the alt-right in a speech in Nevada this Thursday.
But what is the alt-right? It is new, difficult to pin down, and hard to understand. But it’s important to try to get a handle on who is involved, what they believe, and what their possible influence might be on the immediate future of rightwing politics.
A movement that lives and breathes – and taunts – online
The alt- (or alternative) right has surged as a (so far) mainly online movement, occupying positions beyond the pale of many conservatives. It has no centralised organisation or official ideology – it has been described as “scattered and ideologically diffuse”.
The alt-right has been involved in fleeting street protests, but its online activities are well-organised and relentless. It recruits by opposing progressive ideas about gender, sexuality, and especially race and immigration. Adherents congregate on message boards like 4chan and 8chan, comment on websites like the Right Stuff and American Renaissance, and lurk on Twitter, where they taunt progressives (or “shitlibs”) and mainstream conservatives (“cuckservatives”).
The association with Breitbart comes from the efforts of Milo Yiannopoulos to appropriate and popularise the term. At the height of his Twitter-driven notoriety, Yiannopoulos wrote a manifesto introducing the tendency to mainstream conservatives. But are Breitbart and Bannon really a part of the movement? Some of its most hardcore activists say no.
Race realism and ethno-nationalism: what the alt-right believes
Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” in 2008, says he intended the term to describe a diverse, heterodox group whose members were “deeply alienated, intellectually, even emotionally and spiritually, from American conservatism”.
They were disillusioned at the end of the Bush presidency by Republican policies on war and immigration. They sought to draw on currents like the European New Right to transform what they saw as a moribund conservative movement. He and others connected with the succession of websites he edited – such as Taki magazine and alternativeright.com – wrote extensively, focusing the alt-right into a more definite ideology, with increasingly hardline ideas about race.
The alt-right has been involved in fleeting street protests, but its online activities are well-organised and relentless
Spencer says that the term is still flexible, but affiliation has some minimum requirements. “Someone who is really alt-right recognises the reality of race, and the fact that race matters, and that race is an essential component of identity.”
Spencer says that the term is still flexible, but affiliation has some minimum requirements. “Someone who is really alt-right recognises the reality of race, and the fact that race matters, and that race is an essential component of identity.”
Shane Burley, a journalist and researcher who has covered the far right extensively, says that Spencer’s orientation “is clearly under the umbrella of what we would call fascism”. Spencer’s so-called “race realism” underpins theories of racial hierarchy, and the idea that it has a basis in biology. Related ideas of “human biodiversity” attempt to buttress the notion that race is destiny, and the primary organising category of society and history. Radix is full of articles that link race with IQ or crime. This revival of previously discredited scientific racism is another recurring feature of alt-right thought.
Burley says that the very fact that these ideas were once so thoroughly discredited opens up a gap for them to be promulgated again. “Right now the arguments against their race and IQ position are less well-known, so they have the ability to plant the seed in the public imagination.
“Almost all of the studies that they cite are marginal, construct-sweeping theories on the basis of very little data, and don’t demonstrate the causal links that they claim for them.”
Other adherents emphasize their desire for racial separatism. Mike Enoch, from the site the Right Stuff, a major hub for the dissemination of alt-right materials, says: “The core principle, in my view, is ethno-nationalism, meaning that nations should be as ethnically and racially homogeneous as possible.”
As for Breitbart, Enoch thinks that it “is the closest thing to sympathetic to our position that is out there in the mainstream, and there may be some people that share our views that work there, but the official editorial line of Breitbart is not alt-right”.
Chip Berlet, a veteran researcher of the far right and the coauthor of Right-Wing Populism in America, says that the idea of ethno-nationalism is derived from the European New Right. It’s the claim that “every ethno-religious nationalist group has the right to its own homeland”.
Chip Berlet, a veteran researcher of the far right and the coauthor of Right-Wing Populism in America, says that the idea of ethno-nationalism is derived from the European New Right. It’s the claim that “every ethno-religious nationalist group has the right to its own homeland”.
This willingness to make open racial appeals is reflected in another fundamental claim on the alt-right that, as Spencer puts it, is the preponderance of “Jewish power and Jewish influence”. This antisemitism dovetails with other kinds of conspiracy thinking – in the last week, alt-right Twitter accounts have been pushing the claim that Hillary Clinton is hiding serious health problems.
Berlet says antisemitism has “always been a dividing line on the US right”, separating the fringes from more mainstream groups, and “rightwing movements in the US have been obsessed with conspiracies since the Salem witch-hunts and the anti-Masonic scares. Nativist movements have always embraced the motif of subversion. It’s normal for them: it makes them into heroes who have exposed a plot.”
‘A sense that white identity is under attack’
Perhaps the most potent element of alt-right activism is the effort to build a sense of a specific white identity, and to claim that this identity is under attack.
Anti-white animus in society at large is palpable,” says Spencer. Demands for diversity in the workplace mean “less white males in particular”. More openly extreme alt-right accounts on Twitter talk about immigration in terms of “white genocide”.
This sense of injured white identity is what defines the alt-right, according to Dan Cassino, a Fairleigh Dickinson University political scientist and the author of a new book on Fox News and American politics. “The founding myth of the alt-right is that the disadvantaged groups in American politics are actually running things through a combination of fraud and intimidation. By doing this, they’re actually oppressing white men.”
The “original sin” of current American politics, according to Cassino, is that neither liberals nor conservatives have a very good answer to the question of what is to be done about “the people who get screwed over” by economic policies.
If these sentiments are growing, it may mean a larger and more receptive audience for the more radical message of the alt-right. Adherents claim that the movement is expanding.
Spencer does not have solid figures, but claims to have seen many new faces at his events, including young people who have been “redpilled” – or racially “awoken” – in the last year. Enoch claims that the Right Stuff’s suite of podcasts gets more than 100,000 listeners a week.
It may be that a growing audience for these ideas is pulling Breitbart in a more hardline direction. Spencer calls Breitbart “alt-right lite”, and says that its fundamental populism has led them to tentatively begin to express ideas similar to his.
Berlet says just because Bannon is not a card-carrying member of the alt-right does not mean that progressives should be relaxed about Trump’s erratic and intermittently fascist-sounding campaign.
Berlet does not think that American politics has been in such a dangerous place vis-a-vis the far right for almost a century. For him, the parallels between the Trump campaign and the alt-right are “the most important pushback against having a multicultural and pluralistic society since the 1920s Klan”.
Last edited by Goose (8/25/2016 7:57 am)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- Rongone
- Sentient Being
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Re: What is the Alt-Right?
Funny . . . I always thought the alternative to 'right' was just plain 'wrong'.
They employ some unique twisting of word meanings and obsfucation of language to disguise their real objectives.
What is the ‘alt-right’? A beginner’s guide
A political movement most Americans have never heard of is suddenly in the spotlight, thanks to Donald Trump — who has hired one of its leading spokesmen to run his campaign — and Hillary Clinton, whose speech planned for Thursday afternoon is expected to denounce it.
It’s the “alt-right,” a loose aggregation of bloggers, radio hosts, think tanks and activists that emerged from the “white nationalist” movement of the 1980s and 1990s. It occupies positions on the far right of American politics, but it is not primarily about the issues that motivate mainstream conservatives, such as taxes or government spending. Instead, it postulates that the culture of white America is under attack, and sees itself as its defender.
Trump has for much of his campaign flirted with “alt-right” themes, mostly through retweets, some of which he later disavowed. When former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke — a major figure in the “alt-right” world — urged his supporters to back Trump, the candidate maintained, implausibly, he didn’t know anything about Duke before grudgingly disavowing the support.
But with the hiring of Breitbart Media chairman Steve Bannon as CEO of his campaign, Trump has embraced someone at the heart of the movement, who boasted of turning Breitbart.com into “the platform of the alt-right.” Duke himself celebrated the hiring with the boast: “We’ve taken over the Republican Party,” although presumably the party’s mainstream leadership would disagree.
There are, of course, many strains of thinking under the “alt-right” umbrella. Some factions are preoccupied with a return to “traditional values,” while others espouse a philosophy called “Human Biodiversity”: the belief that there are significant biological differences between people of different races, which justifies treating them differently. (The other name for this is “scientific racism.”) Anti-Semitism is common, in various forms, ranging from Holocaust denial to full-bore denunciations of Jews as agents of the collapse of white Christian society. Bannon, personally, has not been accused of anti-Semitism, however.
The common thread, however, that connects members of these different factions is a shared desire to protect Western civilization from what many refer to as “white genocide.” This manifests in opposition to things like immigration and multiculturalism, as well as a steadfast aversion to political correctness and to establishment politics of all kinds, including Republican.
Some prominent Alternative Right personalities are: Andrew Anglin, The Daily Stormer; Richard Spencer, The Alternative Right; Jared Taylor, American Renaissance; Matthew Heimbach; David Duke; Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon.
The term “alt-right” was coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank. Spencer founded the influential Alternative Right blog in 2010 to define the movement’s core principles.
The term represented a “shallow rebranding” of white nationalism, according to Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups. “They don’t want to be identified as white nationalists anymore,” she said. “People associate that with white supremacy, which is what it is, so instead they changed it to ‘alt-right.’”
And with that, Beirich said, the movement quickly made its way from the fringe “into right-wing politics.”
“They’re self-mainstreaming,” she said. “But it should be called out for what it is, which is just pure racism.”
Spencer’s own reasons for supporting Trump seem to directly reflect the alt-right’s central “white genocide” fears.
Asked by a reporter at the Republican National Convention about the possibility that some of Trump’s policy proposals, such as banning Muslims from entering the country or abolishing birthright citizenship, might be unconstitutional, Spencer replied, “Who cares? The whole point is that we’ve got to survive.”
“Whether something is constitutionally legal I could give a s*** to be honest. Survival is more important than law,” he continued, adding, “power is what matters.”
Other key “alt-right” figures include Andrew Anglin, who endorsed Trump for president on his neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer almost immediately after Trump announced his candidacy last June, and Jared Taylor, a prominent white nationalist leader who has long promoted eugenics and racial segregation through his American Renaissance magazine and now Amren.com.
Back in January, Taylor lent his voice to thousands of pro-Trump robocalls in Iowa sponsored by the white nationalist American Freedom Party in which he told voters, “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture.”
Yet, ahead of Clinton’s speech on Thursday, Taylor dismissed “the attempt to link Donald Trump to the alt-right [as] a standard lefty campaign technique.”
“Find someone with certain views who supports your opponent and then suggest your opponent shares those views,” Taylor told Yahoo News. “It is illogical and unfair to act as if Mr. Trump is responsible for the opinions of all of his supporters.”
There’s also Matthew Heimbach, who’s been widely regarded as the future of white nationalism since his senior year at Towson University in 2013, when he gained national attention (including from this reporter) for establishing the school’s first white student union. This April, the 25-year-old was caught on video shoving and shouting racial epithets at an African-American protester during a Trump rally in Louisville, Ky.
And James Edwards, host of The Political Cesspool radio program, which, according to the statement of principles on the show’s website, “stands for the Dispossessed Majority” and promotes “a philosophy that is pro-White.”
Edwards caused a firestorm for the Trump campaign back in March when he promoted a 20-minute interview with Donald Trump Jr., which the candidate’s son insisted he would “never have done” had he been aware of Edwards’ white nationalist views.
Yet by July, Edwards had managed to get an all-access media credential for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where he interviewed several GOP members of Congress and a Trump campaign official. According to the progressive, nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters for America, “Edwards pointed to his attendance at the convention as evidence that he and his radio program are going ‘mainstream.’”
Apart from Bannon, none of these figures has any role in the Trump campaign, which has harnessed some of their energy and themes without specifically embracing them. And they do the same.
“They don’t necessarily think Trump is one of them, but he creates a space for them,” said Pete Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way and author of the blog Right Wing Watch. He notes that Duke, Spencer, Anglin and others who have endorsed Trump have qualified their support by saying they don’t agree with everything he says.
“I do not believe he would solve all or even most of the problems we are facing, but he is absolutely the only candidate who is even talking about anything at all that matters,” wrote Anglin shortly after Trump launched his campaign. “Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: it’s time to deport these people. He is also willing to call them out as criminal rapists, murderers and drug dealers.”
- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
Re: What is the Alt-Right?
I think that the Alt-right is just another name for the American Nazi Party.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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