the alt-right

Buzzfeed reporter on Chris Hayes' show.

I found Dan Lyons' apology that he sent today after I called him out for saying he'd apologized (he hadn't) and wowie zowie oofa doofa pic.twitter.com/cG7rONZQws

— 💀zombië queen💀 (@UnburntWitch) October 7, 2017

no longer sure how to respond to my friend's political beliefs. He says he does not support the alt-right, but he thinks they have a legitimate reason for being an advocacy group. Obviously I disagree with this and think it's laughable, but he's always trying to forge a middleground while clearly sticking to his conservative line beliefs. I don't think the middleground exists. By not denouncing their intentions he's kinda enabling them

maybe re-characterize alt-right as driven by hippie leftist "free thinking" canadians and see if that doesn't inspire some denouncing?

http://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2017/10/07/19373764/patriot-prayer-group-planning-surprise-rally-sunday-during-portland-marathon

Q: Why do current fascists tend to accuse social justice movements of a "cultural marxism" that they draw back to the Frankfurt school? I'm not very educated on those guys, but from everything I've heard of Marcuse, Adorno, etc. it doesn't feel to me like they'd be the biggest standard bearer of current leftist concerns?

because it is more trv kvlt that way

Q: Why do current fascists tend to accuse social justice movements of a "cultural marxism" that they draw back to the Frankfurt school?

First off, it makes them feel educated and intellectual, even if they are only parroting talking points and have no clue what they are talking about the moment they stray from those talking points. Next, this argument impresses many of their listeners, who are almost certain not to know the first thing about the Frankfurt school and will marvel that the speaker knows so much about it. Lastly, it places the 'debate' on unfamiliar ground, so that the person armed with rote talking points adapted to that ground can 'win' more easily against a less-prepared opponent.

To these you can add the advantage that average American instinctively scorns European leftist intellectuals, just on account of widespread prejudice against foreigners, intellectuals and socialists.

iow, it works in their favor, even if it is arrant nonsense.

arendt nonsense

(tips hat to Mordy)

hey im being doxxed by the proud boys

badge of honor

On the appearance of Cultural Marxism in a WH doc from this summer, and how it connects to the John Birch Society and even John Wayne complaining about Marcuse from 1971

Also, like with many/the majority of Bircher conspiracies, the ethnic makeup of the Frankfurt School has something to do with it

the main flaw with the cultural marxism argument afaict is that derrida + foucault have been far more influential on critical theory imo than adorno or benjamin. the primary argument - that politics are downstream from culture and that the academy has exerted influence on the culture - has some relationship to reality. but the obsession w/ the frankfurt school feels like more of a consequence of wanting to link communism to the academy as its primary influence. there's some truth to the idea that major leftist ideologies (post-colonialism particularly) are closely related to communism but unless you're in the weeds on these things and can see how sometimes these connections were tenuous, or relationships of convenience, (or the USSR piggybacking on convenient ideologies), or can see that communism itself is a changing/malleable concept and not monolithic, it's too convenient to just be like - "oh communism did this" and these guys were the communists of the modern academy.

Yeah, I just feel like all the supposed sins the alt right throws at what they call cultural marxism - basically boiling down to identity politics and intersectionality, issues of race, feminism, etc. - have much more obvious antecedents on the left. As I said, I'm not well read on the Frankfurt school, so might be totally wrong, but I haven't known those guys to talk about race and gender much? Like even the existentialists fit much more closely, as far as right-wing talking points go.

But yeah I'm probably overthinking and it's all just down to "marxism" having a sinister ring in the US.

also has something to do w/ The Authoritarian Personality which despite adorno's participation strikes me as a break from the frankfurt school and not a continuation

The last few eps of the Philosophize This! podcast have been about the Frankfurt School

none of them know anything about adorno. "cultural marxism" is the equivalent of "cultural bolshevism" ---- lump all the changes in culture that enrage your target audience together, and insist that they have something to do with a vanguardist conspiracy which is consciously pushing an agenda, now in our Elite Liberal Colleges.

Adorno probably knew more about and had a greater love and desire to preserve Eurocentric Western high culture than anyone in the current alt-right.

he absolutely did

adorno said the revolution should have been the moment of "philosophy's realization" and he lamented that this moment was "missed." his marxism was about fulfilling the highest promises of modernity/the enlightenment while overcoming its violent aspects. the frankfurt school was absolutely not against "the west" as such. if people on the alt right believe that it is because they are morons.

i think if you read around you will find ppl on the alt-right (eg mcdonald) who do lodge specific critiques at adorno's writing tho as i said above ime it's almost exclusively from authoritarian personality w/ maybe some out of context quotes from other works. of course when km discusses frankfurt school he makes the antisemitism implicit in the conspiracy theory explicit and surely the "jewishness" of frankfurt plays a role in its popularity.

Mentioned in the New Republic article, but I think recent alt-right prominence of the Frankfurt School bogeyman comes via the Breivik manifesto. Breivik cites Michael Minnicino's 'New Dark Age: the Frankfurt School and Political Correctness', a '92 essay published in Fidelio and available online. Fidelio is the journal of the Schiller Institute, whose wiki page I am enjoying now.

Good call. (Graun article about why Breivik feared the Frankfurter Schule)

"hey im being doxxed by the proud boys"

where is this happening, chaki? Fuck those guys to hell and back

the use of the term cultural marxism is basically meaningless nonsense, completely uncoupled to what the frankfurt school actually was about. i almost never see it used to denote anything other than social liberalism. it just adds the insinuation that the terrible movements for racial justice, lgbt rights, migrant rights etc. are caused by a cabal of jewish academics

'cultural marxism' = 'culture industry' imo

yeah since there's nothing discernably "marxist" about that phenomenon, it seems like the term is only used to connote that it is (1) left and (2) jewish

I think it's bandied around, yeah, to paint social justice as radical left. There's a very real sense even on the moderate right that social justice movements are a juggernaut aiming at the Harrison Bergeron-ification of the world.

chaki sayin that the DFA 1979 dude is a Proud Boi

quick internetting on a Proud Boi tumblr

http://78.media.tumblr.com/c6aed4a511529529fea10d4306320105/tumblr_inline_oix6h4Bzdh1tfpjwx_500.jpg

in this photo w/Gavin I., i think the dude with his hat pulled half over his face is in DFA 1979

^^^based on my detective work this is from election night

1. the dude is on the gavin show constantly https://www.compoundmedia.com/shows/?search=Jesse+F.+Keeler

2. the proud boys call him one of their own in this article https://www.proudboymag.com/proud-boys-white-pride-new-york-magazine/

wholly unsurprised by this if it's true, given the band's profile

*if* it's true, i said

(as a way of covering my ass)

yeah I feel like there was some ugly thing involving them recently

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/sxsw-music-the-riot-at-death-from-above-1979

that is the worse designed UX I've run across recently so I checked out. was there anything other than a giant slidshow of shitty pictures?

hey while y'all were splitting hairs about the Frankfurt school there were Nazis marching in Charlottesville again:

http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/charlottesville-s-top-prosecutor-declines-to-press-charges-over-saturday/article_3374b594-adc2-11e7-93c1-f38457661523.html

and this latest outrage regarding the parking garage assault:

http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/deandre-harris-attorney-says-assault-charge-based-on-misleading-evidence/article_0915ce1c-ae05-11e7-a775-9fa5f8e50aaf.html

tbf our splitting hairs about the frankfurt school might have a larger impact on the world than the few hundred nazis marching around charlottesville

haha, yes

brb making a video game about the frankfurt school to piss off nazis

lol point taken, it's just my hometown so I take it all personal, plus the Harris assault charge is such BS

I would play that game

take over the minds of college students by stealthily deploying texts in the curriculum

BArK? a karl sent me over from the samantha bee thread where I was posting this:

Hello! First post from a random mutt wandering by. Last week a Samantha Bee show producer spent an hour with me scoping out a story...

Speaking of patchy, that's my byline where I write about furries. Lately there's a bit of a nazi problem in that community, yes that's a word for it lately too...

There's a new book about them out yesterday from Cleis Press. And speaking of the nazi thing here's tags for it (one) (two) if you care.

The news site is a silly hobby thing, but interesting stuff has happened with it. The nazi thing is yet another push into geek groups (along with gaming, sci fi, comics) so we had some infiltrators document them from the inside, which synched with the Charlottesville nazi marching. I documented a couple of them on the scene of violence. We had them do "swatting" against a furry convention with a 5-figure security cost. And there's been more in the news like another convention getting ruined by them, I broke a story about it that Rolling Stone picked up. With all this going on I would be into stepping up the game by learning from peers in indie reporting.

Bark!

There is only one side. #NoMoreNazis #Wolf2 pic.twitter.com/7Ctu265Mus

— Wolfenstein (@wolfenstein) October 15, 2017