Luke Ford

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs writes:

Of course it’s Milo Yiannopoulos (with his crony Allum Bokhari) who finally takes Breitbart “News” all the way over the line into overt white supremacism, with a lengthy, utterly disgusting article singing the praises of the “alt-right” movement — the latest term neo-Nazis, Gamergate trolls and white nationalists use to describe themselves: An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right.

We’ve written about the so-called “alt-right” movement many times; the term was coined by infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer sometime around 2010, and has since been wholeheartedly adopted by the kinds of people who pollute sites like Twitter and Facebook with harassment, antisemitism and racist hate speech.

Yiannopoulos’ ugly apologia for racism doesn’t even try to hide that it’s a movement of knuckle-draggers and neo-Nazis; in fact, he openly exults in the fact, praising people like Pat Buchanan, Richard Spencer and Steve Sailer and websites such as VDARE and American Renaissance as “intellectual” — and shrugging off their virulent racism by saying it’s nothing but a leftist smear and doesn’t really exist. And he doesn’t shy away from the outright neo-Nazis who make up the core constituency of this movement, calling them the “1488rs” — a reference that combines two of the ugliest racist memes, the “14 words” of neo-Nazi terrorist David Lane and the number 88, a numerical reference to “Heil Hitler.”

In our many posts on the Breitbart “News” business model of encouraging hate speech and racism among their commenters, we’ve often compared the comment sections to the worst sewers of the Internet, places like Stormfront.

Now Breitbart “News” itself will forever be associated with racism and white supremacism. This is the dead end of right wing media, folks; the final Rubicon has been crossed.

I won’t even get into the comment thread for this one. It’s exactly what you’d expect.

Comments:

* John Podhoretz: Of all the things to carry Andrew’s name, a piece respectful of Nazi scum is the worst. SHONDEH, Larry Solov. SHONDEH.

* RosieGray: Breitbart fully embracing the white nationalist alt-right movement.

* If you’re mystified by Trump and the current election, here’s what you need to know.

* The fun part will be watching the hysteria unfold on Cuck Twitter.

* @woodruffbets: Breitbart describes white supremacist sites as “an eclectic mix of renegades”

* Milo is an opportunistic jew trying to cash in on altright while declawing it ( also breitbart is click bait)

* Breitbart’s alt-right story was a groupie blowing a drummer in a dirty bathroom stall: gross, degrading for everyone involved, unsurprising.

* Sad to see Breitbart post an article defending the Alt-Right. You’d be hard pressed to find a single #altright-er who isn’t a huge racist.

* Was the exodus of Jews from #Breitbart a purge or rats leaving a sinking ship they’d chewed holes in?

From the Roosh forum:

* Gays always make everything into them being fabulous, as we see in real-time with Milo

* This is the first article that I’ve ever encountered, in a semi-mainstream publication or better, that attempted to couch the interests of the alt-right in anything but a foundation of economic insecurity.

Which, if one thinks about this framing strategy as well as the overall economic focus of the establishment Republicans, is just a continuation of the economic frame that communists insist upon. Like the communists, the establishment holds that politics is defined and driven by economics. Merely taking the opposite economic position makes them reinforcers of the communist worldview in their acceptance of the overall framework of the culture denying political model and the discussion. I digress.

Anyway, this is the most incisive and honest article that I’ve ever read on the politics of at least 1/3rd of the Western population. I’ll be curious as to whether the establishment media ignores or addresses it, given their primary strategy of ignoring the truths laid forth in the article and disingenuously reframing motivations as a means of platform denial.

Every time I thought that the authors were going to cop out, they reeled it back in. In addition, these two journalists were impressively objective, in spite of personal stakes, in a manner that I have not witnessed perhaps ever in my adult life. It can now be said that at least two journalists understand modern politics and understand what the difference is between propaganda and journalism. They are choosing the West and the prospect of peace over any other agenda to include that of any possible interest in a particular political group that they might identify with. Good for them and for Breitbart.

* Yep, even though he’s gay, I like Milo a lot. He’s doing some great work for the manosphere. But after the Rubin interview I was under the impression he didn’t understand the seriousness of the matter and what Alt-Righters really think. This article however, is a pretty accurate depiction of what the situation looks like. I’d have some things to add about the 1488ers, but it doesn’t matter all that much. I’d guess his co-author contributed some good insight that clarified a few things for Milo. One thing they still get wrong though… their denial of a certain historic event isn’t just memes to rustle some jimmies.

From Breitbart:

A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the “alternative right.” Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.

The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong.

Previously an obscure subculture, the alt-right burst onto the national political scene in 2015. Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.

It has already triggered a string of fearful op-eds and hit pieces from both Left and Right: Lefties dismiss it as racist, while the conservative press, always desperate to avoid charges of bigotry from the Left, has thrown these young readers and voters to the wolves as well.

National Review attacked them as bitter members of the white working-class who worship “father-Führer” Donald Trump. Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast attacked Rush Limbaugh for sympathising with the “white supremacist alt-right.” BuzzFeed begrudgingly acknowledged that the movement has a “great feel for how the internet works,” while simultaneously accusing them of targeting “blacks, Jews, women, Latinos and Muslims.”

The amount of column inches generated by the alt-right is a testament to their cultural punch. But so far, no one has really been able to explain the movement’s appeal and reach without desperate caveats and virtue-signalling to readers.

My sense is that the Alt-Right is neither. It is largely white people who think like Jews when it comes to their own people. They are goyim discovering that they have group interests which often clash with the interests of other groups. All told, they prefer their own kind. Just as Jews ask, is it good for the Jews, Alt-Right gentiles ask if things are good for their group.

The Alt-Right is the equivalent of Tibetans who prefer that Tibet remain Tibetan rather than be overrun by Chinese. They are the equivalent of the Japanese who prefer that Japan remain Japanese rather than a mixture of races.

Ben Shapiro writes: One of the great mouthpieces of the alt right is Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News, whom I consider a friend and with whom I occasionally engage in spirited bouts of insult-fighting.

Milo appeared on Dave Rubin’s podcast today to explain why people like me shouldn’t be bothered by the apparent bigotry of those on the alt right. Here was his explanation:

“Generation Trump, the alt right people, the people who like me, they’re not anti-Semites. They don’t care about Jews. I mean, they may have some assumptions about things, how the Jews run everything; well, we do. How the Jews run the banks; well, we do. How the Jews run the media; well, we do. They’re right about all that stuff…It’s a fact, this is not in debate. It’s a statistical fact….Jews are vastly disproportionately represented in all of these professions. It’s just a fact. It’s not anti-Semitic to point out statistics….The anti-Semitism on the internet, which is really important, I want people to understand this because nobody seems to, when Jonah Goldberg of National Review is bombarded with these memes, and anti-Semitic “take a hike, kike” stuff, it’s not because there’s a spontaneous outpouring of anti-Semitism from 22-year-olds in this country. What it is is it’s a mischievous, dissident, trolly generation who do it because it gets a reaction. Right? That’s been the case for young people for generations….They can get to people in positions of power, and people in positions of power and keep biting, they keep taking the bait….It’s a direct response to the language policing, it’s a direct response to being told they can’t say things.”

So Milo seems to be making two points here. The first: not all stereotypes are rooted in falsehood (true). The second: trolling people with viciously nasty language is a positive good because it rips away taboos surrounding language (false). Then Milo wraps all of this in the mantle of political incorrectness.

As someone who despises political correctness with the fiery hatred of a thousand suns, I find this problematic. Here’s why: I believe there’s a difference between political incorrectness and bigotry, or political incorrectness and vulgarity. I have this problem with Trump, and I have this same problem with the alt right that simplistically embraces Trump because they mesh being a jackass with being politically incorrect. They’re not the same thing. It is politically incorrect to point out that black Americans commit a wildly disproportionate share of crime, or that Jews comprise an outsized percentage of successful media moguls, doctors, and lawyers. It is also politically incorrect to point out that cultural stereotypes are sometimes rooted in reality — Milo’s right about that. It is racist, however, to tweet the word “n*****” at a black person, and it is anti-Semitic to tweet a meme of a stereotypical hook-nosed Jew controlling the world or greedily collecting shekels. There is a difference between the two.

And it actually does the cause of political incorrectness a grave disservice to merge the two. It makes it easy to dismiss solid information and data by writing it all off as the work of bigots. The alt right isn’t tearing down taboos regarding language, if that’s really what they think they’re doing. All they’re doing is re-enshrining in the American mind a basic falsehood about the right itself: that we are bigots who use selective data-picking to back our political viewpoints. The self-aggrandizing belief that trolling Microsoft Artificial Intelligence bots on Twitter into tweeting about the wonders of Hitler somehow strikes a blow for free speech is sheer fantasy. It’s teenage puerility. It’s damn dumb.

There’s another problem, too: the alt right gives cover to actual anti-Semites and racists. I’m glad to grant Milo’s premise that there’s hardly any racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism in America. I believe that. But when I can’t tell the difference between a David Duke tweet and a tweet from Milo’s biggest fans, that’s not my fault – that’s the fault of the person tweeting like David Duke. When I can’t tell the difference between a trolling tweet and a death threat, perhaps the author ought to be clearer in his verbiage.