Steve Sailer writes: “Do you ever get the feeling the Establishment is suffering a collective nervous breakdown as its projections about “rantings” and “hateful” become every more obvious?”
Comments at Steve Sailer:
* This article or editorial or whatever you want to call it is absolutely priceless, not only for the haughty and condescending rhetoric but for the absolute obliviousness that lies behind it. They simply have no clue to the extent to which they have been taken in.
* I’ve subscribed to The Economist for many years. I found it to be the last bastion of sanity among Establishment media, long after the NYT, Wash. Post, CNN, etc. jumped the shark.
But, its coverage of Trump and Brexit is completely loopy. This is very disappointing.
I’m a firm believer in the benefits of free trade, globalization and liberal immigration policies. But, that doesn’t mean I believe in the insane, absolutist, literally no borders policy now supported by the Global Establishment, including The Economist. If you truly believe in the benefits of an open world, you have to acknowledge there are reasonable limits. Otherwise you risk killing the golden goose.
Free movement of goods and people between western European nations, with similar economies and a cultural background that goes back millennia, isn’t a bad idea (although the serious problems the EU is now experiencing shows even that even this has its problems). To propose unlimited immigration from Middle Eastern and African nations is insanity, and will kill the liberal global order. What else was Brexit about? Does anyone really think the Brits were worried about Polish plumbers?
* I’m at a loss as to how these writers and publications think they’re going to benefit by acting as Digital Cannon Fodder on behalf of Hillary Inc.
At even, or perhaps especially, prestige media there are so many who have volunteered for this duty the payoff must be all of a glass of wine at Happy Hour (only) at this point.
* When Jerry Falwell said that Tinky Winky on the toddlers’ show Teletubbies was there to soften people’s perception of homosexuals with Tinky’s eternally happy disposition and niceness (the triangle antenna and purse were the tells so people would know he’s gay), the public laughed and laughed, then laughed some more, egged on by the media. A grown man with a huge in-person congregation and millions watching on t.v., who leads an influential section of the electorate, takes a silly cartoon character soooo seriously, how beneath his station. What a clown he makes himself, giving the ridiculous so much power by calling his, and the nation’s, attention to it.
A candidate for President calls out a meme figure, a badly drawn frog named Pepe of all things, as the symbol of all bad. The candidate can get no more mileage out of attacking the rival candidate, either personally or based on policy, so let’s go after a cartoon that 10,000 haven seen and up until now maybe 300 thought was an alt-right shill, 250 of that 300 being in the candidate’s organization.
If this candidate is so bothered by a meme frog, how on earth will this person take real, live, people who have malice beforehand when dealing on behalf the U.S.?
The question the rival should ask at any debate, to immolate any and all credibility of this candidate’s qualification for top office as thoroughly as a can of Aqua Net and a BBQ lighter can napalm a hornet’s nest is, “If Madam Secretary treats a temporary internet meme as a credible threat to the nation, what does this say about her ability to discern the true threats and serious concerns we all face? And we make fun of fellow candidate Vermin Supreme for the boot on his head? At least he knows he’s parody. She’s not even dialed in to that.”
The ultimate answer to this progressive tyrant is a belly laugh. Laugh, laugh, then laugh some more. People laugh at Trump and he laughs right along, the schtick that is he. Laugh at her and she melts. Soooo serious. About Pepe the frog. Then laugh twice as hard at anyone defending this, and go after their precious social capital, progressive’s kryptonite. You’re defending Hillary? What will people think of you, what you have to say, why should they care what you say, you’re defending a mad woman who’s looking over her shoulder to scapegoat a cartoon frog. What kind of knuckle dragger are you? And you people sunk Dean over a spontaneous yell? Aw, you mad and serious, like the strange kid everyone shunned in school? Is that what you aim to be like? It’s how we’re looking at you now.
* Harambe jokes are frowned upon at UMass Amherst:
Going further, the email’s two authors said that the “dicks out for Harambe” catchphrase could be serious business: “Phrases/hashtags which encourage the exposition of body parts runs the risk of being reported as a Title IX incident. These are sexual assault incidences that not only get reported to Community Standards, but also to the Dean of Students. Needless to say, it is a very serious incident—especially for a first year student!”
I have to admit that when some alt-righters explained to me that the plan was to make the Great and Good look ridiculous because the people at the pinnacles of power would be unable to resist lecturing us about the dangers of a cartoon frog and gorilla memorial movement, I scoffed. Yet here we are, with the media conducting HUAC hearings on the subject of bad amphibian drawings.
Come see the absurdity inherent in the oppression.
* Bravo, meme warriors. I used to look down upon you. But you’ve trolled the world. You got the Democratic presidential nominee talking about a cartoon frog.
* I usually watch very little television, but I’ve been watching MSNBC and CNN a bit lately to witness the Establishment’s nervous breakdown. It’s been pretty interesting. I still can’t believe that this morning the people at MSNBC were actually suggesting that Hillary’s health is better than Trump’s.
* The Economist is owned in part by the Rothschilds so some poor sap in London got a call to make Hillary’s paranoid delusions semi-believable. When I read these articles, I wonder how they appear to your average truck driver or waitress in this country. I have to imagine it is just as disorienting for your average bond trader and hedge fund manager that reads The Economist. Is this the real life?
* Alt-Righters have secret code words and signals to identify fellow tribesmen. Generally meaningless to normies.
* Is it my imagination, or is Clinton losing a fight with a cartoon frog? #Trump #Clinton https://t.co/TVHbodxesU
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) September 14, 2016
Attacking a cartoon—and getting her media surrogates to join in—is the height of hilarity.
I can only assume that Hillary and her crew are deliberately doing this to distract from her Parkinson’s collapse and the DNC attempts to get her to step down. Otherwise, attacking the frog is doubling down on stupid, and while Hillary might be delusional enough to do it, her team would be blocking it.
I have a strong suspicion it was Hillary’s team that released those Colin Powell emails to distract from her death spiral as well.
I remember in the 1980s I thought The Economist was lively. Now it is dull.
The Economist: FIRST, an apology, or rather a regret: The Economist would prefer not to advertise the rantings of racists and cranks. Unfortunately, and somewhat astonishingly, the Alt-Right—the misleading name for a ragtag but consistently repulsive movement that hitherto has flourished only on the internet—has insinuated itself, unignorably, into American politics. That grim achievement points to the reverse sway now held by the margins, of both ideology and the media, over the mainstream. It also reflects the indiscriminate cynicism of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Much of the Alt-Right’s output will seem indecipherably weird to those unfamiliar with the darker penumbras of popular culture. It has its own iconography and vernacular, derived from message boards, video games and pornography. Its signature insult is “cuckservative”, directed at Republicans supposedly emasculated by liberalism and money. Its favourite avatar is Pepe the frog, a cartoon-strip creature co-opted into offensive scenarios; one Pepe image was reposted this week by Donald Trump junior and Roger Stone, a leading Trumpista, the latest example of the candidate’s supporters, and the man himself, circulating the Alt-Right’s memes and hoax statistics. Its contribution to typography is the triple parentheses, placed around names to identify them as Jewish.
To most Americans, the purposes to which these gimmicks are put will seem as outlandish as the lexicon. One of the Alt-Right’s pastimes is to intimidate adversaries with photoshopped pictures of concentration camps; a popular Alt-Right podcast is called “The Daily Shoah”. To their defenders, such outrages are either justified by their shock value or valiantly transgressive pranks. Jokes about ovens, lampshades and gas chambers: what larks!
Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, an extremist website, dismisses these antics as “youthful rebellion”. (Mr Taylor is also involved with the Council of Conservative Citizens, which Dylann Roof cited as an inspiration for his racist massacre in Charleston last year.) But the substance behind the sulphur can seem difficult to pin down. The term Alt-Right, reputedly coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute, a bogus think-tank, encompasses views from libertarianism to paleoconservatism and onwards to the edges of pseudo-intellectual claptrap and the English language. Many Alt-Righters demonise Jews, but a few do not. Some, such as Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent, another website, think “democracy can become a tool of oppression”, and that monarchy or dictatorship might be better; others, such as Mr Taylor, disagree. Some are techno-futurists; others espouse a kind of agrarian nostalgia. Many mourn the Confederacy. Mr Griffin thinks that, even today, North and South should separate.
Yet from the quack ideologues to the out-and-proud neo-Nazis, some Alt-Right tenets are clear and constant. It repudiates feminism with misogynistic gusto. It embraces isolationism and protectionism. Above all, it champions white nationalism, or a neo-segregationist “race realism”, giving apocalyptic warning of an impending “white genocide”. Which, of course, is really just old-fashioned white supremacism in skimpy camouflage.
That is why the term Alt (short for “alternative”) Right is misleading. Mr Taylor—whom Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a watchdog, describes as the movement’s “intellectual leader”—says it represents an alternative to “egalitarian orthodoxy and to neutered ‘conservatives’.” That characterisation elevates a racist fixation into a coherent platform. And, if the Alt-Right is not a viable political right, nor, in the scope of American history, is it really an alternative. Rather it is the latest iteration in an old, poisonous strain of American thought, albeit with new enemies, such as Muslims, enlisted alongside the old ones. “Fifty years ago these people were burning crosses,” says Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, a venerable anti-racist group. “Today they’re burning up Twitter.”
Probably the best that can be said for the Alt-Right is that its mostly youngish adherents are naive: unaware that 21st-century America is not the worst society the world has ever conjured, and so prime exemplars of the pampered modernity they denounce. Their numbers are hard to gauge, since they mostly operate online and, as with most internet bullies, anonymously: like dissidents in the Soviet Union they must, Mr Taylor insists, for fear of punishment. As with pornographers, though, the web has let them forge like-minded communities and propagate their ideas, as well as harass critics and opponents (particularly those thought to be Jewish). Online, they have achieved sufficient density to warrant wider attention. There, too, they and Mr Trump found each other.
The association precedes Mr Trump’s hiring as his campaign manager of Stephen Bannon, former boss of Breitbart News, a reactionary news website that Mr Bannon reportedly described as “the platform for the Alt-Right”, and which has covered the movement favourably. Already Mr Trump had echoed the Alt-Right’s views on Muslims, immigration, trade and, indeed, Vladimir Putin, whom Alt-Righters ludicrously admire for his supposed pursuit of Russia’s national interest. Pressed about these shared prejudices (and tweets), Mr Trump has denied knowing what the Alt-Right is, even that it exists—unable, as usual, to disavow any support, however cretinous, or to apply a moral filter to his alliances or tactics.
This is not to say he created or leads it, much as Alt-Right activists lionise his strongman style. Mr Taylor says Mr Trump seems to have “nationalistic instincts that have led him to stumble onto an immigration policy that is congruent with Alt-Right ideas”, but that “we are supporting him, not the reverse.” Breitbart, Alt-Righters say, is merely Alt-Lite. The true relationship may be more a correlation than causal: Mr Trump’s rise and the Alt-Right were both cultivated by the kamikaze anti-elitism of the Tea Party, rampant conspiracy theories and demographic shifts that disconcert some white Americans.
Unquestionably, however, Mr Trump has bestowed on this excrescence a scarcely dreamed-of prominence. As Hillary Clinton recently lamented, no previous major-party nominee has given America’s paranoid fringe a “national megaphone”. Many on the Alt-Right loved that speech: “it was great,” says Mr Griffin. “She positioned us as the real opposition.” Because of Mr Trump, the Alt-Right thinks it is on the verge of entering American politics as an equal-terms participant. “He is a bulldozer who is destroying our traditional enemy,” says Mr Griffin. Mr Trump may not be Alt-Right himself, but “he doesn’t have to be to advance our cause.”
