Maybe merge if there is already a thread for this topic, I searched but nothing came up. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...o-a-professor-writing-a-book-about-them/feed/
Posted tis in the presidency thread but here is a cross reference.... http://deadstate.org/white-national...-and-give-nazi-salutes-during-d-c-conference/
When your favorite band is playing the Super Bowl halftime show, they're not "alt" anymore. This isn't the alt-right, it's the right.
The alt right are the equivalent of internet trolls or bullies. Not really interested in genuine conversation. They just try to bait people into an emotional response so they can point and laugh and feel superior. Ultimately what they crave is attention and the reaffirmation of their fellow alt righters. By being detached from reality, facts and emotions they can claim to be 'independent'. But really there is no intellectual substance to the philosophy. It's a movement defined by what they're against and very little of what they're for.
Unmentioned so far is how these guys have their roots in the "pick up artist" thing for adolescents and young white men. Instead of shooting up their school and then killing themselves, they paid some entrepreneurs to teach them them how "alpha males" are supposed to behave, and they started developing attitudes around that, and then generalizing their contempt for women to minorities, etc. It's where the archaic term "cuckold " came to be applied to Republican politicians (cucks) who weren't Trumpish enough. You have your "alpha male" who treats women as trophies and uses them for sex, and you have your cuckolds who get used by women for support while still having sex with the "alpha males." It's ironic because the term is derived from the cuckoo bird laying it's eggs in other birds nest, so these guys idolizing the idiotic, sneaking, ahole cuckoo bird is perfect.
The thing is that they are hipster nazis, they have taken the white nationalist message and repackaged for more modern times. You need to understand it to fight it.
Yeah, this "alt-right" self-branding is bs. This is the founder speaking. They are Nazis. They use the salute, the heil, and they use Nazi terms in the original German. Change the title. At least add Neo-Nazi in parenthesis.
My sense is that they're more pro-white Christian than their "grandfathers," and less anti-black/brown, anti-Jew. I think that explains why they are motivated to vote for Trump but weren't that motivated to vote against Obama. This may seem like a horrible word to use, but I can't think of a better one. They are inclusive, not exclusive. They're about defining the in group rather than attacking the out group.
Pretty sure they've got you fooled there. They are playing you with a "positive" rhetoric. They might not want to attack brown people on the street, but their ultimate goal is expulsion.
Let me try again. Understand I'm going to oversimplify here to get at my core point. I wrote my master's thesis on Spartanburg County SC during Reconstruction. The Klan was very active there. Their mentality was NOT that they were under siege by minorities. Their mentality is that they were under siege from minorities and invaders. Those who used racism to squash Populism in the 1890s did NOT think they were under siege by minorities. They thought they were under siege from the rabble. The Klan of the 1950s and 1960s didn't think Southern blacks were going to overpower them. They thought Southern blacks + "outside agitators" were going to overpower them. The alt-right thinks they're going to be overpowered. In the past, the racist's mentality wasn't that they were outgunned or outmanned by non-whites, the mentality was that alliances that included non-whites was defeating them. The alt-right fears minority status.
Yep. This is why their relationship with Jews is complicated. On the one hand they may not want Jewish culture to be prominent in their community. On the other hand they look up to Israel as an example of a successful ethno nationalist state. The thing that differentiates the alt right from Nazis is that they're not interested in mobilizing for war. The whole basis of 1930's Nazis is to mobilize the entire nation for war in order to start conquering Europe. The alt right impulse is to withdraw inward. They're more interested in cleaning their own back yard. They feel like every nation/ethnic group in the world should be pursuing nationalism and cultural homogeny. In fact I think the alt right would be more than happy to have nationalist governments in Mexico and Canada. For them this means social order.
This is a good point. Israel has been compared by some to an apartheid state. We know these wacko alt righters would like the same thing here. Or at least someplace like Idaho or New Hampshire declared an official Whitelandia. But in the end, finding a coherent message grom these F'ers is like trying to suss out what libertarians stand for. You'll get a different answer depending upon what day it is & which way the wind's blowing.
I'm afraid their ideology will become a lot more coherent over the next 4 years. Up until a year or two ago, nobody really knew what alt right was. Now there's millions of Americans who are predisposed to these ideologies who are now googling this stuff and ending up on those web sites. As the appeal grows, so will its leaders and main influencers. Once these influencers become more established in main stream media/social media, the whole movement could become more coherent. The best we can hope for is that the movement attracts too many big egos, big personalities and fanatics which hopefully leads to infighting and splintering.
Until very recently, "alt-right" was an internet safe space where racists could post racist shit and not get called on it. We'll see how they do in the public sphere.
Weren't they in the public sphere during this election? I don't have faith that we will reject these people with the vehemence that they deserve, especially now that one of their numbers is going to be in the White House. . I'm feeling very pessimistic about my fellow Americans right now and I think things are going to get very, very ugly.
Well, it seems to me more of them are showing their faces and doing things under their real names (and not anonymous or pseudonymous internet handles) OFF the internet, as opposed to, say, ganging up on people via social media. I'm not saying they aren't scary, but a few more of them are out in the open where they might have to accept more responsibility than before. I hope. But I'm aware it's just as likely they will do to public spaces the same thing they have done to the internet.
Funny you should mention that. Steve Bannon is "proud" that he created a platform for the alt-right. pic.twitter.com/6oqHY2hoHu— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) November 22, 2016 So, there's no question that Bannon is part of the alt-right. He says so himself! On Bannon:"If I thought he was a racist or alt-right or any of the things, the terms we could use, I wouldn't even think about hiring him."— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 22, 2016 I'm not sure which is more dangerous, Trump's bigotry (or bigotry enabling, if you think there's a difference), his complete ignorance of what he's doing, or his mental illness. Cuz you'd have to be mentally ill to so assiduously construct your own fake reality and then repeatedly insist everyone else live in it, too. I keep coming back to how the Stern tape was unearthed, and Trump's response was, first, he came out against the war a year after it started, second, secret conversations with Sean Hannity, and finally, "Wrong!"
Alt-right doing what it does best... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/t...ackage-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news WASHINGTON — Days before the presidential election, James Alefantis, owner of a local pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong, noticed an unusual spike in the number of his Instagram followers. Within hours, menacing messages like “we’re on to you” began appearing in his Instagram feed. In the ensuing days, hundreds of death threats — one read “I will kill you personally” — started arriving via texts, Facebook and Twitter. All of them alleged something that made Mr. Alefantis’s jaw drop: that Comet Ping Pong was the home base of a child abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief, John D. Podesta. When Mr. Alefantis discovered that his employees were getting similar abusive messages, he looked online to unravel the accusations. He found dozens of made-up articles about Mrs. Clinton kidnapping, molesting and trafficking children in the restaurant’s back rooms. The articles appeared on Facebook and on websites such as The New Nationalist and The Vigilant Citizen, with one headline blaring: “Pizzagate: How 4Chan Uncovered the Sick World of Washington’s Occult Elite.” Why this particlar restaurant? “From this insane, fabricated conspiracy theory, we’ve come under constant assault,” said Mr. Alefantis, 42, who was once in a relationship with David Brock, a provocative former right-wing journalist who became an outspoken advocate for Mrs. Clinton. There are a few other NYT articles on how fake news works.