the alt-right

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'.

It is kinda the same as people calling ISIS Daesh. Does anyone think ISIS gives af if you use one over the other?

There's a strong performative wannabe edgelord aspect to much of it, which makes online estimates really off, since you can't tell who really means it and who's just an asshole 14-yr-old tryna rile up scaredypants media types.

Not that teenage nihilism necessarily leads to this shit, but more like you how much of it is mere teenage nihilism. Hell, two decades ago, some of these assholes would be find just acquiring & trying out the Anarchists Cookbook.

It is kinda the same as people calling ISIS Daesh. Does anyone think ISIS gives af if you use one over the other?

I always took this to be a move to deny the idea of them as actual statehood movement, rather than just a regional non-state army. Names have power, obv.

iirc it's supposedly bc daesh sounds like some other Arab word that means 'crushing underfoot' or something so it's like a pseudo-homophonic critique

https://www.google.com/amp/www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/amp/paris-attacks-what-does-daesh-mean-why-does-isis-hate-n463551?client=safari

Apparently it also means "bigot," and they hate that part

like i'm sure people who believe in chopping off the heads of infidels yezidi adults and selling their kids into slavery are v concerned about being called bigots

I don't know about that, these sorts of wankers tend to be pretty thin skinned.

ok but they don't have diversity and open-mindedness as their purported aspirations

What I've been seeing on american friend's facebook walls is that, post-Bannon apointment, the Trump voter's in people's lives are now very invested in a narrative where the media is smearing the alt-right and, yeah, they're very adamant that the alt-right is NOT neo-nazi/racist. Mind you I mostly doubt that the people putting forth that argument are "from" the alt-right; more likely generic Trump supporters who'd never heard of it and now have swallowed the party line on the term.

Is the attitude that names are names, but Breitbart is supported by the right people (IE Trump clearly trusts its owner) and attacked by the wrong people?

Calling the 'alt-right' neo-Nazis isn't about trying to get their goat but rather stripping the glossy finish off of their media-friendly moniker of choice. Stories about the 'alt-right' grant them an air of legitimacy, like they're just another perspective that's as valid as all the others. Beetbort is just a publication, in the words of our president-elect. Calling them neo-Nazis will hopefully dissuade some people from even dipping a toe in those shit-filled waters.

... how?

like when people get called racist and they go "ooooops what was I thinking sorry!!!!"

like i'm sure people who believe in chopping off the heads of infidels yezidi adults and selling their kids into slavery are v concerned about being called bigots

― Mordy

people who do that kind of stuff have a really, really strong need to justify themselves and get very defensive if you suggest that maybe they aren't good people. you're not talking about a bunch of '82 metallica types going out there saying "Fuck yeah, I'm evil!" ('82 metallica a good example here, actually- changed up the four horsemen of the apocalypse because they didn't want people to think they liked war. Death, plague, and famine, on the other hand...)

people who do that kind of stuff have a really, really strong need to justify themselves and get very defensive if you suggest that maybe they aren't good people.

tbh

xp good people yes but their definition of good ppl isn't our definition and their definition doesn't include tolerance for divergent lifestyles

we would like the use of the word nazi to emphasize how fucked up the person/idea the label is being applied to is, but in reality it is just a license to ignore the person applying the label

... how?

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, November 23, 2016 8:12 AM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You don't honestly think that the general populace are less likely to explore news outlets and political movements if they've been branded with the label 'neo-Nazi' as opposed to 'alt-right'? Granted, I'm more cynical about that assertion than I would've been a year ago but I still think it holds water.

Listened to Richard Spencer's speech and its fantastical projections of "unity" among white people, and was thinking that the great irony is that it was liberalism that allowed the creation of a "white" race that included irish people, germans, slavic people, anglo-saxons, etc., basically completely flying in the face of everything that Nazi ideology was about. Maybe Spencer thinks the horse has left the barn on that one, but his absurd concept of a "white empire" in North America struck me as, above all, childish. Diversity is messy and complicated and there are tensions, but that's just reality. There is no unified ethnostate on the planet. Middle Eastern countries are in the midst of civil wars. Israel is divided between religious and secular, mizrahi and ashkenazi. China and India have dozens of ethnic groups and languages. Diversity and tolerance aren't always easy, it's just that the alternatives are always worse.

You don't honestly think that the general populace are less likely to explore news outlets and political movements if they've been branded with the label 'neo-Nazi' as opposed to 'alt-right'? Granted, I'm more cynical about that assertion than I would've been a year ago but I still think it holds water.il

Well, the populace have already heard that the alt-right is a thing, so no, I don't think that - I think there's a lot of people who will hear EG "Gamergate are neo-Nazis" and when they investigate and find out that Gamergate are not in fact neo-Nazis, they will be told "See, the media is out to tar us all with the same brush". Speaking purely from the point of view of "There are a lot of people out there with some fucked up views, let's not radicalise any more of them than we have to", I don't think alt-right = neo-Nazi is helpful.

The guy who coined the phrase "alt-right" and started a publication with that name is a literal neo-nazi Andrew.

He just gave a speech in which he quoted nazi propaganda in german, called for creation of a white empire in North America, referred to whites as a "conquering people," and had an audience full of people doing nazi salutes. What is your criteria for calling someone a neonazi?

Those meet my criteria - you're aware that the term has drifted a bit since then?

I was reading something recently where someone in a White Power fan group did one of those hokey genetic background things and found that they were significantly genetically "Eastern European" and someone else was like, "LOL UR NOT EVEN WITE" so................ o_O

Divisions are inevitable. If they actually somehow "cleansed" the United States of everyone not "white" by the arbitrary new standard I'm sure that you'd see an increase in tensions between eastern and western european descent, between catholic and protestant, etc.

slate says alt-right still the right term to use:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2016/11/22/is_alt_right_still_all_right.html

'deplorables' might be even better tbh, really brings out the fact they're the enemies of decency

nope nope nope

"deplorables" was one of the biggest disasters of the campaign please never utter it again

Listened to Richard Spencer's speech and its fantastical projections of "unity" among white people, and was thinking that the great irony is that it was liberalism that allowed the creation of a "white" race that included irish people, germans, slavic people, anglo-saxons, etc., basically completely flying in the face of everything that Nazi ideology was about.

Some of those where included with open arms, some less enthusiastically.

"deplorables" was one of the biggest disasters of the campaign

yeah should've gone harder

Why not just call them fascists if alt-right is too mealy-mouthed and neo-nazi makes people roll their eyes?

*goes back to lurking*

bc they're not all authoritarians. some of them are libertarians.

Okay, okay, I'm willing to surrender 'neo-Nazis' if we can all agree to start calling them 'low-T betas' instead.