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Is Anyone Worried about the Alt-Right?
Several recent Ricochet comments have referred to the “Alt-Right,” mostly in passing. Since I wasn’t familiar with the term, I decided to find out what it actually was. My investigation has been an unnerving experience and I, for one, am worried for this country. Most people will acknowledge that the beliefs and goals of the Alt-Right are despicable. Their proponents are mostly young, self-described radicals who have found the positions of Donald Trump admirable (which, I know, does not make all Donald Trump supporters Alt-Right).
During the most recent Need to Know podcast, Mona Charen, Jay Nordlinger, and guest David French condemned the Alt-Right without reservation. They cited websites where the comment sections had to be shut down due to the volume of venomous comments made against people who didn’t support Donald Trump. Several sources I reviewed regarding the Alt-Right movement highlighted an article from Breitbart written by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos (pictured), who believe that the movement is mischaracterized. They say:
Previously an obscure subculture, the Alt-Right burst onto the national political scene in 2015. Although initially small in number, the Alt-Right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.
It has already triggered a string of fearful op-eds and hit pieces from both Left and Right: Lefties dismiss it as racist, while the conservative press, always desperate to avoid charges of bigotry from the Left, has thrown these young readers and voters to the wolves as well.
One journalist who criticized the Breitbart article assessment was Cathy Young at The Federalist who writes:
The Alt-Right movement counters the toxic culture of the left with a toxic brew of its own: a mix of old bigotries and new identity and victimhood politics adapted for the straight white male.
She then describes part of a tweet:
Retweeting an image of a man in a Nazi uniform standing in front of a baker’s oven captioned “Pop ’em in the oven!” may be a tasteless “trolly” joke. When the same person retweets comments about Jews “killing millions in the #Holodomor”—the Soviet terror-famine engineered by the Stalin regime—this looks like something more than “lulz.” The trolls of the Alt-Tight are well-versed in anti-Semitic tropes such as Jewish control of the media (which Yiannopoulos, in his Dave Rubin interview , bafflingly waved aside as a mere statement of statistical fact).
White supremacist Richard Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute — a tiny white supremacist think tank — coined the term “Alternative Right” as the name for an online publication that debuted in 2010. The online publication changed hands in 2013 when Spencer shut it down. Today Spencer runs the Radix journal and quoted from an article in Time, written by Alex Altman, which characterizes the Alt-Right movement and its relationship to Trump as follows:
Trump’s ascendancy comes at a moment of reinvention for the Far Right. A new generation of leaders like NPI’s Spencer are trying to recast white nationalism as a 21st century movement steeped in social media. The NPI meeting was dominated by young men under 30, many of whom said they were part of an online network known as the Alt (for Alternative) Right. Originally rooted in antipathy to mainstream conservatism, the Alt Right has morphed over the past year into a virtual pro-Trump army. It’s a loose collection of furies who range from provocative Twitter trolls to white-rights activists, garden-variety anti-Semites, proto-fascists and overt neo-Nazis.
revealed that the quote is actually from a Time article that Spencer posted on Radix, which was written by a guy named Alex Altman.
So I have a few questions:
Do you think Donald Trump should condemn the people who profess these beliefs and vocally support him?
Why aren’t Senators and Representatives who are backing Trump condemning them, and encouraging Trump to condemn them too?
Are Trump supporters concerned that they will be identified with these people, especially if the Alt-Right movement strengthens?
As a country that celebrates free speech, any suggestions for how to create roadblocks for this movement?
Published in General
I hope you understand I didn’t say that, and I agree with you that racism is ignorance and counter productive. Hold on to those principles and ideals, but just try to put the alt right in the proper perspective as just another group of racist idiots like the BLM and La Raza racists. Fear them equally. They all represent the same thing.
In fact, it’s physics.
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Sir Isaac Newton
Thanks, TKC. Trump has already spoken to this fact a couple of times. I do see your point that “Politics is a game of addition”; a couple of people have made that point. And I’ve touched on that in other posts.
I know you didn’t say that. You are kind to make your point above. Perspective is so important. It’s just so easy to blow it all off or become reticent. I wish I could find the right balance!!
Your concern is valid and the movement disturbs me. I believe at this time the best tactic is to starve it from media attention. I hope I am not wrong.
They are taking grievances which are real (the denigration of the white male just for being white and male) and twisting them to evil. That never ends well. I see people who could be tempted at my son’s halfway house, people trying to get past their mistakes and it is so easy for them to go negative and blame any target for their struggles. The program there is to get them to accept that they are where they are because of their own actions. This stuff does not help.
Gainful employment for the majority changes a lot of these attitudes.
I submit the following for your consideration:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/retribalizing-america/
Sounds familiar.
It was a long post, Blitter, but I think you were directing me to the following information submitted by a blogger to Ron Dreher on the American Conservative. It seems to support Mate De’s points. Quite disturbing:
The connection between the Alt-Right and the various masculinity movements deserves some elaboration. As many have mentioned, the demographics of the Alt-Right are young and male, and the role of young male frustration (sexual or otherwise) cannot be overstated.
As Dreher adequately documents, the hegemonic narrative regarding gender is clearly insane. And while the level of insanity has climbed exponentially in the past decade, virtually everyone under-30 (my generation) has been marinated in relentless gender-equivalence propaganda since kindergarden. But, as the male cohort grows older, the distance between the experienced reality of of the dating market and the official dogma becomes unsustainable. The cognitive dissonance is simply too great, and boys are driven to seek answers elsewhere. And those answers come, with varying degrees of accuracy and crudity, from the PUA/Game/MRA/RedPill blogs. Whatever their faults, they all have one redeeming quality – they are manifestly not insane. This comes as a great shock and relief to boys. A shock because they realize the magnitude of the deception they have experienced, and a relief because they realize they are not the crazy ones.
These blogs are essentially applied evolutionary psychology. The systematizing, logical male mind is placed in the dispassionate, clinical service of disassembling every polite fiction about courtship, and replacing it with an amoral imperative. Women are to be understood, then mastered. And once women are mastered, they are irrelevant. Onto the next challenge. Unless you are in this generation, you have no idea the sea-change that is occurring. 35-year-olds are teaching 25-year-olds, who then repackage it for 15-year-olds.
Thank you PHenry for expressing my thoughts so well.
Isn’t that the right wing equivalent of saying that black arsonists and Palestinian terrorists aren’t really responsible for their actions? I blame the alt-right for the bigotry of the alt-right.
Whites and men and especially white males cannot stand being accused of racism and sexism.
For all of you still following, I am ever so grateful for your input, and I’d love your comments on my thoughts at this point. I can see that I am over-reacting to the alt-Right. Not that they aren’t despicable, but that any actions we would take to limit their free speech would violate my own principles. It sickens me when I hear of their behavior, but that is an appropriate reaction–not trying to stop them. In fact, a few of you have said that the less media attention we give them, the better. I think you’re spot on. So my attitude at this point is to be vigilant of these kinds of groups, notice if they are making any consequential headway in actually hurting this country, and appreciate that I live in a country where everyone can speak his or mind. Any thoughts?
Shelby Steele is an articulate and intelligent man. Thanks for sharing this video, Henry.
As I wrote recently, there’s a take on Milo that he’s a naughty boy who sticks-up for the right of others to be naughty as well; to a degree, this is commendable.
However, his “Oh, it’s just a joke! Don’t be so PC!” act gets old and rather disgusting when its applied to well-misinformed anti-semetism and racism.
PC is awful and should be opposed, but some of the alternatives are merely differently-awful.
I think you covered it well. Overnight, this subject has remained on my mind, and I had a couple of thoughts.
First, the ‘alt-right’ is, in my mind, misnamed. The idea of right vs left has become as jumbled and meaningless as liberal vs conservative. The alt right types are in nearly every way more in line with the general philosophy of Democrats than they are Republicans – identity politics. Their problem is that Democrats have excluded one group from their identity politics, the white man. So, that one group has been lumped in with the ‘right’ (conservatives?) by default because those who agree with their general worldview reject them. Conservatives reject them as well, but in an identity politics mindset, since Democrats support all their ‘enemies’ ( anyone not white), in their mind that makes Democrats bigger enemies than Republicans.
Racists are not conservatives, because to be racist you must first reject the basic self evident truth that every person is an individual first, and cannot be in any way adequately defined by simple identity attributes.
Second, it occurs to me that racism is a form of superstition. It is not logical, it is not defensible, it does not offer any real advantage to its adherents, but they believe it does. Much like someone who is obsessed with not letting black cats cross their path or never picking up a penny that is face down. It handicaps them, but they are convinced it advantages them.
Like any label use to describe any “movement” of vaguely-defined and loosely-organized folk, it all depends. There are “neocons” I respect, “paleocons” I respect, “establishmentarians” I respect, “libertarians” I respect, even “liberals” I respect, and yes “alt-right” folk I respect. There are also members of each category I think are blowhard whackadoodles. Lumping folk one dislikes under a single label is a pretty common propaganda tactic.
Depends on how one defines “the media” and “control”. It is a perfectly accurate statement of fact that every single major Hollywood studio CEO is currently of the Jewish faith. That should not be a controversial fact for a person to point out. The question is whether the person argues it’s a “bad thing” or merely “a thing that happens to be true”. It should be obvious that the major Hollywood studios are not the sum total of “the media”, nor that the CEOs maintain dictatorial control over the content of the movies their studios produce. Still, I’m with those who argue that merely pointing out facts that are undeniably accurate cannot in-and-of-itself be considered anti-semetic.
Indeed. I can respect a good troll as long as they’re strategic about it and don’t fall into the trap of thinking trolling is a good in-and-of-itself. The goal of a strategic troll is to provoke one’s opponent into doing something stupid that harms their own cause. Once the troll stops thinking strategically and starts focusing solely on tactics they tend to end up hurting their own side.
Simple rule-of-thumb: An effective trolling operation is allowed to be silly, but it must always be factually correct. Be a troll if you must, but always remain a credible troll. That way, if the opponent falls for it and tries to counter the troll they end up looking doubly-silly, because they’re trying to fight facts that are true and end up looking like they are thin-skinned and that they have something to hide.
As soon as a troll slips up on factuality they lose all credibility. They can no longer use the “ok, point out where I’ve lied” defense.
Satire ≠ Slander.
Susan, I think …
People, the communities we live in, can manage the not fit for civil society outliers. I don’t know how we would do it today but in my grandparents day it was “tarred, feathered and run out of town”; the people just would not tolerate bad behavior beyond a certain level. We need to stop shouting Fire all the time.
I think someone else has already pointed out, politicians should manage these elements similar to how Reagan handled them.
Lots of pov in the world: I think an abortionist is worse than a racist; someone else thinks the opposite — who’s to say who is right/wrong? Maybe we’re all both.
We are the USA — freedom and liberty are how we roll. Always been a messy business, always will be. We create laws when bad becomes “criminal”, as in acted upon. Otherwise, every citizen’s rights — inalienable and constitutional — are equal and the same.
BTW, The Internet is a magnifying glass … it makes everything seem bigger than it is in reality. I think of it as a huge copying machine that never gets turned off, running all day and night, geometrically reproducing and replicating nonsense. It creates distorted shadows of the truth. Much like a hand puppet and a flashlight in a darkened room … a hand puppet is only a hand puppet but with a flashlight, the shadow created looks like a mega-sized menacing monster. Ignore truth distorting shadows.
All politics is identity politics.
This where the mainstream right let’s smugly treating puffery as axiomatic become foolishness.
It’s like hoarding Snapple because it’s made of the best stuff on earth.
If Charles Manson endorsed Donald Trump, Trump would say that Sharon Tate had it coming.
And if her family didn’t like Trump for saying that, then all the more reason to him that she should have been butchered.
I don’t think it matters whether he condemns them or not. We know what kind of person Trump is.
I think what worries me most is that after 8 (and more) years of accusations of being “racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, gun-toting, violent crazy white people” and 8 (and more) years of trying to convince them we’re not . . . there are a significant number of people who will finally snap and say “Okay, that’s who you think I am? That’s who I’ll be!” . . . and there doesn’t seem to be a way to step back from that.
Call someone a monster enough times, eventually he’ll just decide that being a monster is easier than refuting it.
Perhaps this conversation should be linked with Mama Toad’s post about manliness and Kevin Vickers.
How many campus speakers have been shut down by Alt-Right protesters?
How many people have been hauled before “human rights commissions” and bankrupted for refusing to serve same sex wedding celebrations because of conscience by the Alt-Right?
How many Leftist organizations have had their applications for non-profit status improperly, and probably illegally, delayed by the Alt-Right?
How many people have had their children hauled away for specious reasons by Alt-Right Child Protective Services workers?
Has the Alt-Right required public schools to allow biologically male/female students to use the female/male restrooms, locker, and shower facilities?
The list could go on, but you probably get the idea.
I’m a lot more concerned about what the Left is actually doing, than by what the Alt-Right might do someday.
I will admit to one concern. The Left constantly pushes, pushes, pushes, and pushes. At some point someone, probably including any members of the Alt-Right who can sober up and stagger out of their mom’s basement to show up, is going to push back, hard. It’s going to be very ugly. I’m not advocating this, only predicting it.
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Can’t like this enough.
You are glossing over a very real problem. These are not random supporters. They are a strong and vocal part of Trump’s base, as anyone who publicly opposes or criticizes Trump can testify. David Duke and his minions were not out making death threats or closing down comment sections or acting as Reagan’s forward army. If they had, I’m quite sure Reagan would have denounced them. Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to denounce these alt-right thugs, or even ask them to tone it down. When confronted with the vile anti-Semitic taunts and death threats directed by his supporters at journalist Julia Ioffe, Trump’s response was that he would not ask them to stop, and that Ioffe had brought it on herself. This attitude is typical of his actions and statements throughout the campaign. Trump is only to happy to have the support of these vile storm troopers, and has therefore tarred himself with their filth.
Susan, What have these Alt-Right people done that has you so concerned? Concerned enough to create a post?
Susan and all,
I have no idea what alt-right is, but are you sure Milo Y is the right rep for the movement? I just discovered him a week or so a go, and have checked out 3 or 4 of his YouTube videos of his current “Dangerous Faggot” tour of American universities, in which he is singlehandedly dismantling PC and at the same time exploding some of the more pernicious progressive myths.
Here he is at U of Minnesstota with his hero, feminist, author and philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers. It’s a riveting discussion, if you have time for it. He often intentionally says outrageous things, but I truly can’t believe there is any antisemitism in his message. Do you all know something about Milo that I have missed? Anyway, check this out.
I was a regular listener to Derbyshire up until a few weeks ago when I reached my limit with his deranged blatherings about the glory of Trumpism. I can understand and sympathize with those who support Trump out of a need to stand against Hillary, but Derbyshire has demonstrated of late those very characteristics that led National Review to disassociate from him. In his recent podcasts I felt an irrationality in him which generated out of some deeply felt hatreds that made it possible for him to be blinded to Trump’s obvious deficiencies. He became in essence a one issue voter who disregarded any other potential problems with his chosen candidate. His gloating over every successive Trump victory became nauseating. They had become the major portion of his weekly rants. No longer worth my time.