David Weigel writes for the Washington Post:
‘The Camp of the Saints’
A 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail, published as “Le Camp des Saints,” which envisions an immigrant invasion of France, and which many on the alt-right view as prophetic. In a 2005 essay for the American Conservative, after riots in France, commentator (and future Michelle Bachmann collaborator) Jim Pinkerton cited Raspail’s novel at length to ask why Europe had not realized it was committing “national suicide.”
As Raspail describes the scene aboard the immigrant convoy, “Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers … a welter of dung and debauch.”
But France is persuaded that these people are a “million Christs,” whose arrival will “signal the dawn of a just, new day.” In other words, Raspail writes, what the French are lacking is a proper sense of national-racial consciousness, “the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest.” Instead, he concludes, after having been beaten down by decades of multicultural propaganda, “the white race” has become “nothing more than a million sheep.”
Raspail’s vision has been cited frequently at Breitbart News, especially when a major Western leader criticizes anti-immigrant sentiment. “Now, as in the novel, prominent political officials are urging on ever larger waves,” wrote Breitbart’s Julia Hahn in 2015. “Secular and religious leaders hold hands to pressure blue collar citizens to drop their resistance; media elites and celebrities zealously cheer the opportunity that the migrants provide to atone for the alleged sins of the West — for the chance to rebalance the wealth and power of the world by allowing poor migrants from failed states to rush in to claim its treasures.”
‘Cuckservative’
A portmanteau, from “cuckold” and “conservative,” used to troll people who call themselves conservative but support immigration reform and multiculturalism. The implication: A white American who allows mass immigration into his country is no different than a man allowing other men to sleep with his wife.
‘It’s the Current Year!’
A logical fallacy, popularized on 4chan and Reddit, in which an idea can be dismissed because “it’s 2016” (i.e., the world and history have moved on, and there is nothing left to discuss). It’s frequently identified with HBO’s John Oliver, whose commentaries (circulated widely on progressive news sites) often label ideas as ridiculous because, well, it’s 2016.
Jared Taylor
The founder of American Renaissance, a magazine, then conference, then website about white identity. Ever game to talk to media — though critical of the term “alt-right” — he’s used the publication and conference to encourage white nationalists to expand on their ideas.
Pepe the Frog
A cartoon that originated on MySpace but was adopted by Trump supporters and alt-right trolls, as reporter Olivia Nuzzi explained at length this year.
Peter Brimelow
The founder of VDare, a clearinghouse of news and opinion about immigration, which he founded after his immigration book “Alien Nation” became a taboo bestseller.
‘The Political Cesspool’
A white nationalist podcast and radio show that began in 2004 and grew its following during Barack Obama’s presidency, and became notorious after Donald Trump Jr. appeared to promote his father’s presidential campaign.
Richard Spencer
The president of the Virginia-based National Policy Institute and founder of the defunct website Alternative Right, which was “dedicated to heretical perspectives on society and culture — popular, high, and otherwise — particularly those informed by radical, traditionalist, and nationalist outlooks.” One of the most media-savvy thinkers in the movement, Spencer was an early supporter of what Trump’s campaign represented; before that, he helped find and promote young alt-right thinkers. In addition to shaping what “alt-right” meant, Spencer coined the term “identitarian” to distinguish white people who wanted to defend their culture but rejected the label of “racism.”
Sam Francis
An influential conservative thinker cast out of the movement’s mainstream — and fired from his Washington Times column — for speaking at the 1994 American Renaissance conference. Subsequently, he became a sort of martyr for nationalist writers and thinkers. Throughout his career, he argued that cultural liberalism was not as popular or inevitable as its promoters claimed.
“Whites need to form their racial consciousness in conformity not only with what we now know about the scientific reality of race but also with the moral and political traditions of Western Man-White Man,” Francis wrote in 2005. “The purpose of white racial consciousness and identity is not simply to serve as a balance against the aggression and domination of other races but also to preserve, protect, and help revitalize the legacy of the civilization that our own ancestors created and handed down to us, for its own sake, because it is ours, and because, by the standard of the values and ideals we as a race and a civilization have articulated, it is better.”
Walt Bismarck
A musician and video editor who grew a following (under the sobriquet “Uncuck the Right”) with pop song parodies rewritten around alt-right themes. “The alt-right does not comprise obese low church Protestant Baby Boomers with 103 IQs,” he explained to Fusion in 2015. “We’re a bunch of eccentric hipsters and neckbeards who understand how the Left works, and how to create legitimately subversive and effective propaganda.”
