the alt-right

There was a Danish news-parody show that once had an interview with a young guy from the populist right, who'd started a group protesting left-wing bias in the media. The first question was 'Can you tell me about your new group, you right-wing asshole?'

― Frederik B, Tuesday, November 22, 2016 11:07 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is the B for Basic?

is there any reason to call these people "alt-right" when "neo-nazi" would suffice?

― k3vin k., Monday, November 21, 2016 5:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've personally flipped that switch already. Fuck whatever media-friendly label they prefer.

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch), Tuesday, November 22, 2016 8:30 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I like to think of them as Trunk Club Fascists

I'm not sure what to make of some of the labelling. Many people including myself were using alt-right to refer to a much wider array of modern right wing bigotry, including non-whites who use some of the same ideas as the white nationalists and repurpose them to suit their own prejudices.

"I was just kidding" is a refrain I'm very familiar with hearing from the people I've known who suffer from personality disorders.

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch), Tuesday, November 22, 2016 2:11 PM (four hours ago)

Er, wtf Old Lunch?

I think the reason why I've used 'alt-right' as a term rather than neo-nazi is similar to what RAG is saying. It was something that encompassed a lot of online spheres, from PUAs to st0rmerz to channers to whoever else was being a fucking dickhead. Now that the entire real world is crumbling, though, I'm with people who want to call them what they are.

afaics, the whole "alt-right" label is just a rebranding of plain old white supremacy and neo-Nazism, for the same reason Comcast is trying to rebrand as Xfinity, because the old brand is hated and reviled. Using this new friendlier brand name just obscures their connection with white supremacy, which benefits the neo-nazis and no one else. The news media should be flayed for playing into the hands of these deplorable people. God, what a world we live in now.

they're mostly just entitled white-terrorist fuckhead dweebs and should be treated like any other terrorism suspects

except with more waterboarding

I'm kidding, they should be treated like Breivik their Viking lord, allowed to study for a degree from the comfort of prison

I don't even know. Put them and Isis in a big pit then check back forty years on, see if they've forged a new society together

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3954508/The-worrying-rise-Britain-s-modern-day-Hitler-youth-Neo-Nazi-referrals-Government-s-deradicalisation-programme-overtaking-Islamist-extremism-cases-parts-UK.html

really though what the western world needs is an overhaul of education systems, mental health access, employment law and much, much besides

in the meantime, wage fucking cultural hell upon these cunts until they don't exist as a movement

We've got our own little tinpot Breivik here in the UK.

That article's headline should read 'SUCCESS! Our xenophobic hate-campaign reaches YOUR CHILDREN!'

Of the Mail, I mean

And I don't care how trenchant that is

... the Mail and all the others.

xps @Aimless, that's a great point, Clear Channel did the same thing - I didn't realize they were iHeartRadio until fairly recently.

Thing is though, don't some people who aren't white nationalists refer to themselves as "alt-right"? Like "I'm not white or racist, I just hate political correctness and women.

When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Donald Trump knows the word 'disavow'

Thing is though, don't some people who aren't white nationalists refer to themselves as "alt-right"? Like "I'm not white or racist, I just hate political correctness and women.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, November 22, 2016 2:16 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nazi-adjacent
Nazi allies

"I was just kidding" is a refrain I'm very familiar with hearing from the people I've known who suffer from personality disorders.

― i need microsoft installed on my desktop, can you help (Old Lunch), Tuesday, November 22, 2016 2:11 PM (four hours ago)

Er, wtf Old Lunch?

― emil.y, Tuesday, November 22, 2016 12:24 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, I was referring to PARTICULAR (and pointedly not ALL) NPD/BPD suffers I've known who didn't take personal responsibility for their actions or mental health and whose behavior reminded me of what j.lu described. That particular defense just hits a little close to home. It certainly wasn't meant as a blanket assessment, though, so I apologize if I caused offense.

ok deep breath.

there's specific recent history to these terms as well as overlap as well as slippery definitions of each.

the term 'alt-right' is not entirely generic; richard spencer ran (runs?) a website about white nationalist concerns called "alternative right" and has done so since the late bush years iirc? the idea that it was about old-right or explicitly white-right ideas that then-dominant bush-era neocon or theocon politics had kicked out

"white nationalist" is probably the best catch-all term but it doesn't encompass everything and everyone. "nationalist" does etymologically contain "natal" ie questions of birth, lineage and belonging which are the key obsessions that mainstream american conservatism keeps out of sight.

the high-toned term "neoreactionary" was bandied about a few years ago (with catchy web-contraction NRx), largely for people coalescing around blogger 'mencius moldbug.' this scene is much nerdier and less 'nazi'

quite a number of years ago john derbyshire suggested the term 'dissident right' to mean roughly all this stuff but it never took off

not sure how it's resonating elsewhere but at least insofar as the_d0nald is concerned at least one thread exists where ppl are either really upset or just certain that it's a long game being played re: trumps announcement not to prosecute Clinton when he comes into office.

i am interested to see how these communities react to some of the more obvious walk-backs trump takes on his variously insane campaign promises

i like the term fascist, but in an american context a lot of these people are old-right/libertarian descended -- ie it's not the totalized state but the totalized anti-state as utopia

I'm sticking with "radical white terrorists"

Hey, as long as they consort with neo-Nazis, I'm comfortable tagging them all with that label.

as long as actual neo-nazis are using this label to try and buff up their image/play down their murderous race fantasies i think it's probably good to use a label that brings out the real nature of their "ideas", and let the non-nazi alt-rightists work it out for themselves

sorry for same post as Old Lunch

xps sadly i don't think Trump will get any significant blowback from his most diehard supporters for broken promises. it'll get blamed on someone else.

yeah i agree with that totally.

xp NV i mean

Yes, NV's is a perfect unpacking of my perspective.

yes. OTMFM. All those "non-nazi" alt-righters are free to create some other space for themselves and distance themselves from literal nazis.

i think successful political nicknames are typically loose, simple, ideologically useless and openly derogatory. something like 'wingnut right' but you'd want a specific new coinage. these sensible or technical labels just legitimize, whereas it's better to be dismissive.

also the rise of the Hitler state was achieved thru a broad coalition of right wing interests. i'm sure there were scumbags who thought anti-semitism was a meaningless sideshow who were backing him right thru into WWII

http://www.whitepages.com/name/Richard-B-Spencer/Whitefish-MT/8fqyxgh

just saying.

lol
thx man

postcard campaign.

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The other side of that is that you're massively inflating the number of Neo-Nazis, which is not an act without side-effects.

yeah how many americans are there that identifies with being alt-right? do we have an estimate?

scott alexander made an estimate (ymmv obv):

The alt-right is mostly an online movement, which makes it hard to measure. The three main alt-right hubs I know of are /r/altright, Stormfront, and 4chan’s politics board.

The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.

Stormfront’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the Stormfront community.

4chan boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of 4Chan’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of 4chan traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on 4Chan.

Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.

so it is still very marginal.

That Steve Bannon performative bit of evil reads so much like Davis Aurini:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kprBSlFRCv0/maxresdefault.jpg

bannon obv successful enough that his grandiose notions about power are not just youtube larping

yeah but his success not fully dependant on being the king of the alt-right or so. might be obvious to people like you who have (rightfully) studied the movement, but reading the news it's hard to really get the scale of the movement.

identifying how racism operates is #1 priority when it comes to finding solutions to fight it, focusing a lot on 4chan seems misguided to me rn (only accusing some media institutions here, no one in the thread).

this twitter is run by, if i've read it correctly and he's not a complete fabulist, old-line republican staffer on the senate foreign relations committee. (i found his blog during the iraq war, written pseudonymously as a rolling horror document of what was happening.)

https://twitter.com/DrLeoStrauss/status/801135190806503424

Well known GOP op/pundit to me- “white genes superior to blacks ala VDARE, Franco USA over dealing with ethnics” Writes w/Bannon @ Breitbart

take it all with a big grain of salt, but he's said shit like this numerous times over the years -- that the staffers and on-the-ground operatives of the conservative movement, even back in the reagan days, had beliefs identical to the alt-right hidden just a scratch below the surface.

i think analyses like scott alexander's (AS USUAL) miss the point totally by adding up numbers online. these ideas are everywhere. that the trump moment, or the internet, or whatever it is we're living through, has shown us a bloc of young men willing to espouse them loudly if semi-anonymously in public should indicate some greater multiple of people who are nodding along.

Any 'alt-right' folks who are uncomfortable with being referred to as neo-Nazis are free and welcome to denounce any white supremacist or antisemitic beliefs they've been wrongly accused of harboring. But I'll just comfortably continue making my assumptions about those who run with that pack and keep shtum.

I suspect most alt-right people don't care what we call them - or if they do care it's because they find it amusing. A big piece of the alt-right is about irreverence for traditional taboos in American civil culture like the Holocaust or slavery. If they felt any kind of disassociation from the term Neo-Nazi it's probably in that they see it as an ironic moniker.

I'm still going with 'Vanilla Isis'.