From Breitbart: Anything associated as closely with racism and bigotry as the alternative right will inevitably attract real racists and bigots. Calmer members of the alternative right refer darkly to these people as the “1488ers,” and for all their talk of there being “no enemies to the right,” it’s clear from the many conversations we’ve had with alt-righters that many would rather the 1488ers didn’t exist.
These are the people that the alt-right’s opponents wish constituted the entire movement. They’re less concerned with the welfare of their own tribe than their fantasies of destroying others. 1488ers would likely denounce this article as the product of a degenerate homosexual and an ethnic mongrel.
Why “1488”? It’s a reference to two well-known Neo Nazi slogans, the first being the so-called 14 Words: “We Must Secure The Existence Of Our People And A Future For White Children.” The second part of the number, 88, is a reference to the 8th letter of the alphabet – H. Thus, “88” becomes “HH” which becomes “Heil Hitler.”
Not very edifying stuff. But if you want to use the 1488ers to tarnish the entire alt-right, you need to do the same with Islamist killers and Islam and third-wave feminist wackos with the entire history and purpose of feminism. Which you might well be fine with — but let’s be consistent.
Alt-right vlogger Paul “RamZPaul” Ramsey describes them as “LARPers” or Live-Action Role Players: a disparaging comparison to nerdy nostalgists who dress up as medieval warriors. Paul even goes as far as to suggest some in this “toxic mix of kooks and ex-cons” may be there solely to discredit the more reasonable white identitarians.
Every ideology has them. Humourless ideologues who have no lives beyond their political crusade, and live for the destruction of the great. They can be found on Stormfront and other sites, not just joking about the race war, but eagerly planning it. They are known as “Stormfags” by the rest of the internet.
Based on our research we believe this stands in stark contrast with the rest of the alt-right, who focus more on building communities and lifestyles based around their values than plotting violent revolution.
1488ers are the equivalent of the Black Lives Matter supporters who call for the deaths of policemen, or feminists who unironically want to #KillAllMen. Of course, the difference is that while the media pretend the latter are either non-existent, or a tiny extremist minority, they consider 1488ers to constitute the whole of the alt-right.
Those looking for Nazis under the bed can rest assured that they do exist. On the other hand, there’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.
What little remains of old-school white supremacy and the KKK in America constitutes a tiny, irrelevant contingent with no purchase on public life and no support even from what the media would call the “far-Right.” (Admittedly, these days that includes anyone who votes Republican.)
THE ESTABLISHMENT’S FRANKENSTEIN
Not all alt-righters will agree with our taxonomy of the movement. Hacker and white nationalist Andrew Auernheimer, better known as weev, responded in typically jaw-dropping fashion to our enquiries: “The tireless attempts of you Jews to smear us decent Nazis is shameful.”
Delving into the depths of the alternative right, it quickly becomes apparent that the movement is best defined by what it stands against rather than what it stands for. There are a myriad of disagreements between its supporters over what they should build, but virtual unity over what they should destroy.
For decades – since the 1960s, in fact – the media and political establishment have held a consensus over what’s acceptable and unacceptable to discuss in polite society. The politics of identity, when it comes from women, LGBT people, blacks and other non-white, non-straight, non-male demographics is seen as acceptable — even when it descends into outright hatred.
Any discussion of white identity, or white interests, is seen as a heretical offence. It’s a fact observed as early as 2008 by Yarvin:
Ethnic pride is one thing. Hostility is another. But – as progressives often observe – they tend to travel together. It strikes me as quite incontrovertible that if an alien anthropologist were to visit Earth and collate expressions of hostility toward human subpopulations in Western culture today, the overwhelming majority would be anti-European. Anti-Europeanism is widely taught in schools and universities today. Its converse most certainly is not.
So here is my challenge for progressives, multiculturalists, “dynamists,” and the like: if your antiracism is what it claims to be, if it is no more than Voltaire 3.0, why do non-European ethnocentrism and anti-European hostility not seem to bother you in the slightest? Do they maybe even strike you as, um, slightly cool?
The current consensus offers, at best, mild condemnation of identity politics on the Left, and zero tolerance for identity politics on the right. Even for us – a gay man of Jewish descent and a mixed-ethnic half-Pakistani – the dangers of writing on this topic loom large. Though we do not identify with the alt-right, even writing an article about them is akin to prancing through a minefield.
The pressure to self-censor must be almost overwhelming for straight white men — and, for most of them, it appears to be, which explains why so much of the alt-right operates anonymously.
While movements like third-wave feminism and Black Lives Matter often draw criticism from conservatives and libertarians, advocacy on behalf of those causes is not a career-ending offence. Quite the reverse. It’s possible to build successful and lucrative careers off the back of those movements. Just look at Al Sharpton, Anita Sarkeesian and Deray Mckesson.
