There's a reason the most hateful fringe of the right wing is supporting Donald Trump.https://t.co/AqB3DM2m0N
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 25, 2016
* I have to guess that Trump will disavow the alt-right in the most honest way possible: by declaring that he has no idea who they are and what they stand for (and who would not believe him on that? His famous ignorance here works for him), has no more responsibility for them and their support than he has for David Duke and his, and for Hillary to bring it up is just one more smear against him, because she has no answers on the issue of immigration.
What Trump has been doing, which is quite effective, I think, is aligning himself with the ideas and people of Brexit. Brexit won, showing it has the people’s support, and also showing that it isn’t some radical, crazy idea. The elites went after Brexit with the same hysterical claims they’ve been making against Trump, and predictions of Doom. No Doom has arrived.
Brexit legitimizes his positions.
* The left has a hard time grasping the idea that there exists a bunch of internet Trolls without wealthy donors funding and organizing them. It would be hard to find someone big (rich) enough to point fingers at when taking on the aspect of the Alt-Right that drives the big shoe activists and media the most nuts. Can anyone actually see Hillary holding up some picture of a cartoon frog avatar with a bad pun for a name and calling them a public enemy? I think she will call Breitbart a hate site, give some choice quotes from there ‘bout the blacks, and focus on Trumps campaign manager running it while mean commentary happened. She could end it with a tearful recounting of the Ghostbusters black lady star being bullied and hacked though. Probably call for Trump to disavow his stained shirts on Twitter. I doubt we will see specific HBD nerds, pickup artists, discussion board dads and Trolls denounced beyond that Breitbart guy, so everyone needs to curb their enthusiasm that this is going to launch their hate career into the mainstream.
* Goodness – our sleepy little community is about to be denounced by the Democratic nominee for president. Rather exciting, no?
* That weird seizure Hillary had with her head bobbing back and forth right in front of the cameras and reporters is damning. There’s no way to disguise that as anything other than a seizure.
Anyone’s who’s on the fence about Hillary may be shoved right of by it. The bizarre duck-face expression she had during the balloon drop for her nomination, which looks like another seizure, doesn’t help. She also seems to have a nodding syndrome popping up which goes on too long to be socially appropriate.
That fact that this woman has chosen to run for the presidency knowing her own health condition, and considering the decrepit way Bill looks these days, makes them come across like two greedy, crazed, power-hungry zombies ready to rip apart and devour the gullible American public. Considering what a war-monger Hillary is, everyone outside the country better duck and run for cover, too.
* Currently on Drudge he is featuring a photo of Hillary climbing into the back of a black SUV. You will note she is using a step stool to enter the vehicle. Who needs a step up to enter a normal SUV? I could see if you put on big tires or jacked the suspension. But this is a street-type SUV. It just seems odd seeing someone using a step to get into it.
* The Five on Fox is on now and they are saying this was Hillary’s best speech and that she is correct about the alt right’s racism/bigotry. They haven’t named names on just who on the so called alt this is comprised by. But especially, Dana Perino, says she has taken shots from these groups herself, and that this will be a winning issue for Clinton. Nausea inducing stuff.
This network has officially jumped the shark.
* I don’t know who came up with #AltRightMeans but a full-time media operative could not have coordinated that better, and it’s been bouncing from first to second trend on Twitter all day. The first person I saw using it was Brett Stevens (amerika.org).
* Most media pieces on the alt-right get it bafflingly wrong, some conflating it with Moldbug’s monarchism, others seeing it purely as an outgrowth of GamerGate. Apparently none of these people actually spend any time reading Sailer, MPC, or Twitter and so it becomes the job of random Internet morons like me who do to write the True History of Alt-Rightism, which goes something like this:
Once upon a time many American conservative intellectuals who wrote at magazines like National Review were nationalists who believed in an America First foreign policy, low levels of immigration, and pre-Judaeo Christianity. Examples include Russell Kirk, Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, John O’Sullivan, Lawrence Auster, and (least notably) Steve Sailer. Those unpalatable members of the conservative movement were exiled from the reach of respectable opinion c. 1996 with accusations of anti-Semitism. Sailer, Brimelow, and Auster migrated to the World Wide Web where they promoted an unconstrained version of Buchananism that allowed for more discussions of topics like racial differences in intelligence and crime rates, but their audiences were small. In 2003 the germ of what would become the alt-right consisted of just three websites. All the same, through the first decade of the 21st century they picked up young converts from a strange collection of sources:
1. Readers of Pick Up Artist blogs who were similarly blunt in talking about sex differences.
2. Demographics nerds who liked using the General Social Survey to pick apart ethnic differences
3. Health and bodybuilding enthusiasts who see Americans as fat, undisciplined, and decadent.
4. A large group of men who were conservative and unreligious, but who found libertarianism unpatriotic and unmanly.
By 2012 there were at least 20 Sailerclone blogs, the best of which has the stupid name “The Audacious Epigone”. These blog scribblers were not proper Alt-Right because they resented accusations of racism from the left, did not oppose interracial marriage, and generally gave the impression that they were only hobbyists whose harmless stamp collecting posed no threat to the country’s ruling ideology.
The alt-right only came into a recognizable form when this mutated version of Buchanism was adopted en masse c. 2014 by an enormous number of young men who were part of an old Internet tradition of racist trolling and general ruckus raising. If you’re an old coot who doesn’t follow this sort of thing think of the “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” Mountan Dew meme as an archtypical example: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hitler-did-nothing-wrong
This demographic, which consists of a large fraction of all men who watch video games and porn, was partly radicalized by the events of a gay little scandal called GamerGate, which absolutely no over the age of 40 understands. The lady creator of a low-budget non video game-game beloved by video game writers and hated by actual gamers called Depression Quest was revealed to have cheated on her boyfriend with five different men, one of whom was a writer at the Gawker affiliate Kotaku. When Internet degenerates ran to Reddit and 4chan to make fun of her they discovered that the moderators on these websites, famous as bastions of totally unrestrained free and filthy speech, had shut down all discussions of Quinn. To many gamers this reeked of a real conspiracy because Quinn was friends with a surprisingly large number of big figures at those sites. I got to this story late, and in the first week or two the media clampdown was so complete that the only place on the Internet where you could learn what had actually happened was the mega-vulgar Wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica.
The media launched a coordinated campaign that potrayed gamers as sexist lunatics (some of them WERE crazy) who were trying to keep all women out of video games, which disillusioned and infuriated them. They launched a war against gaming journalists on Twitter and elsewhere that served as a forerunner to the cuckbaiting that later got Hillary’s attention. They quickly moved away from Quinn and began making arguments against political correctness in general that cribbed heavily from Steve Sailer and in 2014 teamed up with old school white nationalists to push back against the bullshit Mike Brown media narrative when useless sinecured conservatives refused to.
Alt Rightism has moved past its polite Sailerite origins and adapted itself to the world of vulgar verbal combat found on places like Twitter. It is now a conventional white nationalist movement, the first to achieve widespread success in a century.
* Somehow my 14 y.o. daughter and her Catholic school friends have adopted Pepe the Frog as a mascot. They lean liberal, because they are 14 y.o. girls in a blue town, red county, blue state that hasn’t elected a Republican to national office for twice as long as they have been alive.
And they’re kind of pissed off that the schools have been running, and will run, Holocaust education on them every year since fourth grade, public or private. Like they’d go tattoo some Jews if the schools didn’t scold them every year. Holocaust, racism, and dystopia, oo-rah.
Pretty, young, liberal girls think Pepe is cute, funny, and rebellious.
Cranky Catholic conservative mother thinks he’s ugly and revolting.
My money is on the girls.
* Pepe the Frog wasn’t created by the alt-right. It was used by normal people and liberals before it was adopted by the alt-right. It’s 10 years old.
* One of the left’s major goals is completely silencing its (already marginalized) critics, which means increased censorship of the internet. This speech might not be designed to drum up votes for Hilary, but instead be part of their long term efforts in this direction.
* This speech means that the Alt Right’s trolling of establishment journos on Twitter has gotten to them badly. Richard Spencer has 14k followers. Trump has more than 11 million, Hillary more than 8 million. More than 100 million people will vote in this election. Why did Hillary even acknowledge the Alt Right’s existence? Probably because lots of her speechwriters, advisers, consultants and friendly journos have been trolled by the Alt Right, and it got to them. They’re angry. And people tend to talk about the things that anger them.
What could be the consequences of this anger? More censorship on big Internet platforms. Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. could “voluntarily” start putting more effort into policing speech on their sites.
* I think we are not that far from cable BNN and explicitly white programming. There is a huge market that is sitting there untapped. Once we have that, all bets are off. Even Fox is going to whither and die in that scenario, or adapt.
* Trump after being asked by Anderson Cooper about Alt-Right: “Nobody even knows what it is…there is no Alt-Right.”
Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway: “We’ve never even discussed [the alt-right] internally. It certainly isn’t part of our strategy meetings. It’s nothing that Mr. Trump says out on the stump.”
* We need to understand the MSM is part of the political class and has been for quite a while. They are also the “kingmakers” in politics as Phyllis Schfley and Pat Caddell has noted – due to their control of the media they can make or break anyone they so choose – usually anyone who reeks of nationalism and America First.
It doesn’t matter whether the print or TV news media – ideologically they are on the same page as Soros or the Koch Brothers – anti-American and pro-globalization.
The few media types that show any sort of independence are often shown the door after transgressing just like Dr. Drew, whose show was just cancelled after he made critical remarks about Hillary’s health care.
Lou Dobbs found that out as well when he was fired from CNN shortly after Obama took office.
* Trolls can have a major impact on politics but they are not as important as they think they are. Sweden has had a long history of “alt-right” internet blogs and publications stemming from the late 90s. However, most of these publications had a narrow readership of people already onboard with the message. From the late 1990s until about 2006 the most important outlets were Swedish Democratic Courier (SD-K) and National Today. The first owned by the populist Swedish Democrats and the second owned by a local far-right party.
In the general election of 2006 the Swedish Democrats received 2.93 percent (163,000 votes). The Swedish Democrats had been rapidly growing in every election at every level since they were founded in 1988. After the election they had come so far that there was no doubt they would pass the 4 percentage threshold to parliament. With 281 municipal seats (of 13,092) and 16 county seats (of 1656 seats) they had cemented their place as the largest (by far) party outside parliament. They had an enormous presence locally and nationally. Media (of all stripes) constantly published hostile articles about them which caused their support and membership to grow even stronger.
On the internet a grassroots movement who supported them began to take form. These people were not members of the Swedish Democrats, politicians, paid staff or official spokespeople for them. Many did not even share their ideas. Rather, they were mostly young provocateurs in college or angry under-unemployed graduates with too much spare time who loathed mainstream media and the political correct establishment.
From 2008 these trolls had been able to turn this independent internet Forum (in terms of membership, readership and visitors) into not only the largest internet forum in Sweden but into one of the largest for internet forums in Europe. Flashback had not only turned into a megaphone not only for the Swedish Democrats and their populism. It had presented far-right ideas which would make the Neo-Nazi blush. Most of the later positions were just provocations and irony – however it caused massive distress among the establishment as they couldn’t police anonymous writers on the internet. Soon it spilled over on the largest newspapers comment sections and in internet polls. As soon a journalist wrote an article which the trolls didn’t like they would bomb Flashback and the commentary field of that newspaper with criticism.
In 2008 a retired ethnic Swedish man living with his Turkish wife in Izmir founded Political Incorrect. He had no intention to play footsy with the Swedish Democrats. Rather, put out material he liked. Mostly about crime related to immigration but also to debunk articles written by journalists if they were related to immigration. It became a huge success and became the largest blog in Sweden. No opinion blog could even come close to the number of visitors. In 2009 most major media outlets (today non Swedish media allows commentary on their articles) shut down their commentary fields making the Political Incorrect website even more popular. In 2009 a young Swedish man who was working as a computer consultant in Czech Republic launched “Free Times”. It was less focused on crime and more focused on spreading news about domestic and international politics from a paleo-conservative/libertarian perspective. At first it was perceived as mainstream but within a year the Swedish media branded them as “fascists” after a misplaced article.
Their income fell from 200,000 dollars a year into nothing when they lost their advertising. The Political Incorrect was defunct in 2011 when he founder died. When the Swedish Democrats entered the parliament in 2010 the Political Incorrect blog and Free Times had more visitors to their webpage than Gothenburg Post and the South Swedish – the largest regional newspapers in the Sweden. They were only beaten by national newspapers; Daily News and the Swedish Daily paper and national tabloids; “The Evening paper” and The Express.
From 2011 onward there was a surge in Alternative Media with Alt-right newspapers, blogs and podcasts coming out. The mainstream media couldn’t stop it and closing down their own commentary sections didn’t help either. The Swedish Democrats became significantly more “political correct” around 2012 in hope of growing past 5.7 percent and their base. Their leaders decided that if you had written something “racist” you would be fired or lose your seat. The media saw a great opportunity and began to confront Swedish democratic politicians to force them to resign.
However, the Swedish Democrats continued to grow in support. In 2013 the second largest tabloid decided to hunt the trolls by hacking Disqus (getting millions of E-mails which hundreds of thousands they were able to track by running them with official registries, their own customers and previously hacked web-pages an). They put regular people with no societal position on their front-page to discourage people.
It also became a TV-show were regular people (unemployed, college students, retirees, teachers, social workers, nurses, medical doctors, civil servants and others) were confronted for their political views they had expressed online. The Swedish Democrats received 12.9 percent in the 2014 election and became the third largest party.
People in general (even on the left) didn’t like that regular people were confronted in their homes and at their workplaces. In 2014 the largest tabloid bought an old hack of the Flashback forum. Although they refrained from publishing names (politicians and their staffers not included) they did confront the trolls and if they worked for a living, their supervisors. Since then, mainstream media continue to confront regular people who have written online about politics.
If you have not written anything in public you may have done it in an E-mail and so they use different methods to get it. Sometimes it is done legal methods and sometimes with illegal methods. The latest have been about nurses, psychologists and medical doctors who had written critical of the immigration policy. Most of the stuff they had written was five to ten year old stuff.
For example, a young doctor had written on Flashback when he was in high school and so they confronted him and his supervisor and demanded that he would be fired. This was also the case of most of the nurses and doctors. They weren’t even working in the medical professions when they had written it. A retired chief medical doctor was confronted outside his home because he had written about IQ and race in a comment at Un-pixled a few years back. He didn’t apologize and told them to bugger off. The tabloid also said that if they did an interview they would not have to see their name and picture in the paper.
These actions of the Swedish Media have been very effective. The Free Times have abolished their commentary field and people have refrained from writing outrages comments on the internet. There has also been a sharp drop in the popularity for Free Times and Un-pixled although they are still a major force but is now competing with the two largest regional newspapers rather than with the national newspapers and tabloids as they did three years ago. Flashback has for some weird reason become enormously popular the last year. The blunt racism and trolling has largely disappeared and been replaced with a more modest tone. The last years have also more people become more outspoken. They don’t hide behind anonymous accounts in the same extent anymore.
Politically, the Swedish Democrats are still thriving. They would receive something around 20-25 percent in the coming election and become the largest or second largest party. Their membership is also constantly growing. They have the third largest membership base although still far from the Moderate Party and the Social Democrats. A growing number of the dying media outlets (in particular Gothenburg Post and Swedish Daily Paper) seem slowly come in support for an alliance between the Moderate Party and the Swedish Democrats.
In Norway, the populist Progress Party is in government coalition together with the Conservative Party. In Finland the True Finns are also in government and their leader is Minister of Foreign affairs. In Denmark, the Danish Peoples Party is the key supporter of the bourgeois alliance. Their former leader recently became the speaker of the house. With the recruitments from mainstream parties (and even newspapers) it seems like the Swedish Democrats is about to become mainstream after the 2018 election.
The internet “trolling” is sort of over in the Sweden. The Swedish Democrats does not need trolls and the trolls don’t need the Swedish Democrats. Last year the Swedish Democrats kicked out their Youth League with 5000 members after a feud with their leadership. Free Times decided to take the side of the Youth League and subsequently cut their ties with the Swedish Democrats. Un-pixled and the rest of the “populist” outlets are slowly radicalizing and are not willing to speak for Swedish Democrats behalf as they did before. Politically, there seem to be a growing group who wants to see an alternative to the Swedish Democrats. You are seeing something similar in Denmark were the Danish Peoples Party are seen as to play to much politics and less of the populism which made them into the strongest political force in Denmark.
I think the same thing would happen populists would take over the GOP. At first there would be a lot of support from the trolls but then it would be fading away as time goes by. Internet trolling is one thing and serves it purpose to breakthrough but politics is something very different. Donald Trump plays politics (this is why he back down on a lot of his positions) and the Alt-right is ideologically driven. They have nothing really in common.
The trolls who supported the Swedish Democrats from 2005-2015 were a mix of libertarians, conservatives, nationalists, contra-jihadists, non-conformists and betrayed establishment voters. A lot of the “alt-right trolls” may not be onboard with the Alt-right defined by Richard Spencer or for that matter Donald Trump. I think Milo Yiannopoulos are more right than Spencer when he says that the young trolls are more of anti-establishment than driven by a certain vision for the future. They are certainly not onboard with this disturbing stuff about intermarriages and race. The trolls supported Ron Paul. He was anti-establishment and therefore they supported him.
What we all can note is that Hillary did what the Swedish elites did. She went after the alt-right media. When Hillary wins (and I think it is pretty clear that she will because Trump is backtracking on his positions and play a horrible political game) she will along the MSM go after the trolls. They will see their picture and name in the paper and they will apologize. What will happen is that more people will be more outspoken about their views. The future of politics will therefore be much more divided and decentralized than today and people will not be as afraid as before. Trolling as what we saw in the Swedish Democratic campaigns of 2006, 2010 and 2014 or in the Trump campaign will be gone. Trolling is just an insurgent method – nothing more.
