My Rebbe says it is assur for a Jew to vote for any candidate who has anything bad to say about Wall Street who might mean it. So looks like we should support Clinton. The Clintons, we can do business with.
These journos could never match brains or wits with the Alt Right, so they always resort to slurs.
Alex Yabon writes: The punditry’s dissection of the origins of the Donald Trump juggernaut has lately been joined by exhaustive analysis of a corollary phenomenon: the rise of the self-described “alt right.” The alt right is a confrontational strain of conservative thought that has recently crept out of the shadowy online precincts where it was born to assert its influence on the 2016 campaign. Right-wing news website Breitbart recently added the latest entry to the burgeoning genre with an essay titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” The article ran more than 5,000 words and was co-authored by the loosely affiliated movement’s most prominent figurehead, a British writer named Milo Yiannopoulos (who, full disclosure, has written for VICE.com before).
For those looking to understand the alt-right phenomenon, an examination of Yiannopoulos and his online persona is a good place to start. He presents a stark alternative to the staid Heritage Foundation set. Openly gay, sporting a shock of blond hair and boasting nearly 200,000 Twitter followers, Yiannopoulos has sworn allegiance to Trump, whom he calls “Daddy.” He has also taken to posing with semi-automatic weapons. Recently, he circulated a photo of himself holding an AK-47 and a Louis Vuitton handbag, while wearing a suit and a camouflage “Make America Great Again” hat.
If the alt right has a coherent credo, it’s to wage war on what it sees as politically correct speech and thought. The movement’s members seem to latch onto certain ideas and images due to the outrage they cause across the political spectrum. This explains how Trump, who embraced the politics of divisiveness long before the internet even existed, has become an alt-right folk hero. It also accounts for the alt right’s embrace of guns and gun imagery.
Yiannopoulos seems to relish the iconography of firearms for the reasons that drive much of his public life: They are fraught symbols with the power to piss off other people. The alt right’s adherents don’t often invoke the “first freedom” talking point, the heritage of sportsmen, or the need for self-defense—the rhetoric used by groups like the National Rifle Association. For Yiannopoulos and much of the rest of the alt right, guns are a locus of symbolic conflict, yet another means of provocation.
The alt right, which coalesced out of several web outlets that launched in the last five years, began to gain mainstream exposure at the end of 2015, when Buzzfeed’s Rosie Gray wrote a feature on the movement—its most expansive treatment in the press thus far—and tied its newfound prominence to Trump’s campaign. The lineage of the alt right itself can be traced back at least a decade further, to the “South Park Conservative” sensibility that emerged during the 2000s: As co-creator Matt Stone said, “I hate conservatives but I really fucking hate liberals.” The show ripped on Bush-era neocons and Bible thumpers just as readily as it ridiculed hypersensitive leftists. But whereas the South Park smartasses were essentially foul-mouthed independents, the alt right marshals a similar rhetorical approach in service of an extreme right wing identity politics.
In 2012, Radix, a slick website that resembles a hip critical journal (albeit one with a white nationalist bent), ran an essay that said the gun control movement is driven by women who want to repress men. “[It] comes down to the psychological roots of feminism and the desperate need of such women to control, manage, and limit male agency,” the author wrote. “Essentially gun control is an attempt to perform a symbolic castration of all men in society, in particular those men that would outwardly manifest strength and a will to power by owning a gun.”
Radix is well-mannered compared to some alt-right outlets, as it has pretensions to bookish seriousness (its online store sells volumes on Heidegger). Other personalities on the alt right talk about guns and gun control in the slang-heavy argot of the internet. On the podcast “Fash the Nation” (fash being an abbreviation for “fascist”), cohost Marcus Halberstam (a name apparently lifted from the novel American Psycho) once said, “obviously, leftoids … their target really is huhwhite America, to see us disarmed.” (“Huhwhite” here translates roughly to “rednecks,” a reappropriated slur.)
During Halberstam’s podcast episode, a guest going by the name Reactionary Tree fantasized about an armed uprising of the “cuckservatives,” an epithet for metaphorically cuckolded or politically impotent conservatives who shy away from asserting racial chauvinism. He posited a scenario where a Scalia-less Supreme Court could overturn rulings like District of Columbia v. Heller, the landmark decision that found that Second Amendment protections extend to individuals. If it was overturned, might that spark a right wing political awakening? “What would happen if they would come for our guns?” Reactionary Tree asked. “Would the cuckservative, middle-state Americans just give up their guns … or will they fight back?” Even as Reactionary Tree heaped contempt on mainstream conservatives for their perceived decades of acquiescence to contemporary political mores, he seemed to approve of their attachment to guns, since it could catalyze a violent reaction.
The short answer is that the Alt-Right are goyim who think like Jews when it comes to their own tribe. Just as Jews ask — is it good for the Jews? The Alt Right asks — is this good for whites/America/my group?
Armin Rosen writes for Tabletmag.com:
An article on Breitbart.com provides one of the election’s most important, if occasionally terrifying, explanations of certain factions of pro-Trumpers.
Among the many bizarre quirks of this presidential election is the fact that the case for Donald Trump is hardly ever made in print by people who actually agree with him. There have been numerous attempts at understanding the grievances and overall logic of Donald Trump’s supporters, but they’ve been the work of journalists who would never consider voting for the man. Take, for example, Tablet columnist James Kirchick’s recent reporting for the National Review on “white identitarian” support for Trump, or Slate’s Reihan Salam, who exhaustively explored the socio-economic unperpinnings of the real estate developer’s populist appeal.
Largely missing from the discussion are cogent, long-form defenses of Trump from the perspective of his supporters. Trump’s most prominent backers have been oddly incapable of arguing the man’s case, like during New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s shambolic appearance on Meet the Press a few days after he endorsed his former presidential primary opponent. In fact, Trump’s rank and file seems to have been largely epitomized in the media by the Louisiana woman who said she’d vote for Trump so long as he refrained from shooting her daughter in the street.
Because few mainstream opinion-makers back Trump, the pro-Trump position has largely been treated as a puzzle for the rest of the media and polite society to unpack on their own. Which is why Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s article, An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right, published earlier this week Breitbart, is one of the election’s most important if occasionally terrifying documents.
Bokhari and Yiannopoulos guide their readers through the various constituencies of the often Trump-supporting “alt-right” movement, those ideological factions whose open embrace of white identity politics, and rejection of both open markets and a muscular U.S. foreign policy, have made them anathema to maintream conservatism. The article introduces readers to “the intellectuals,” thoughtful people who just aren’t all that enthusiastic about liberal democracy, and who are honestly interested in topics like, say, purported biological differences between the races. “Natural conservatives” are earnestly concerned with the preservation of what they believe to be America’s white and masculine majority culture, while “the meme team” consists of web users bent on undermining social taboos, regardless of how vulgar or provocative their means may appear to be. The authors also touch on “The 1488rs,” actual Nazis and white supremacists who, we’re told, do nothing more than tarnish the reputation of the rest of the alt-right. Pay no attention to them, the authors urge.
There are plenty of valid criticisms one could level against Bokhari and Yiannopoulos: The piece soft-pedals the racial rhetoric common on sites like VDARE and Taki’s Magazine. The authors assume that all racism outside of the alt-right’s explicitly neo-Nazi camp, whose existence they readily acknowledge, is all for the sake of anti-establishment provocation. Critics argue that Bokhari and Yiannopoulos avoid reflection on the implications of actual Nazis being attracted to the movement in such disproportionate numbers. The piece also leaves an unnerving mystery in its wake: since the article is an abstract, largely ideology-based discussion of various alt-right tendencies, one gets very little sense of the real-world purchase of the ideas themselves. For instance, the piece repeatedly assures its readers that the alt-right doesn’t harbor any actual racial animus towards anyone. But with sentences like, “The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved,” the burden of proof should be somewhat higher than just the author’s assurances.
Even so, the article, which is written in the elevated language of ideas and legitimate political discourse, is important for decoding the Trumpist phenomenon. And there aren’t exactly a lot of other articles like that out there! Before the Bokhari-Yiannopoulos opus, all you really had to go on as far as compelling Trumpist or quasi-Trumpest elucidations of Trumpism went was The Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson’s apologia in Politico this past January. Trumpism may be an ugly and un-self-conscious worldview. But as Bokhari, Yiannopoulos, and Carlson have invaluably reminded us, it’s a worldview nonetheless, and one that’s on the cusp of getting a major American political party’s reluctant stamp of approval.
And it’s a worldview that is not uninterested in the Jews, at least as they exist in the feverish imaginations of even the more polite (relatively) corners of the alt-right.
This week, Yiannopoulos appeared on Dave Rubin’s web series “The Rubin Report” and explained Trump’s attractiveness. In Yiannopoulos’s view, Trump is appealing in part because he has helped create an environment where even the ultimate taboo could be raucously shattered.
“Most of Generation Trump, the alt-right people, the people who like me, they’re not anti-Semites, they don’t care about Jews,” Yiannopolous, who notes his Jewish ancestry in the Breitbart piece, explained. “They might have some assumptions about Jews. They may have some prejudices about Jews, like the Jews run everything—well we do—like the Jews run the banks—well we do—like the Jews run the media—well, we do! You know they’re right about all that stuff. Now what you do with all that stuff is the issue.”
