Luke Ford

New Yorker:

Is your special guy Mr. Right—or actually Mr. Alt-Right? Luckily, there are a few surefire warning signs.

Mr. Right: Brings you the paper in bed on Sunday mornings.
Mr. Alt-Right: Believes that your Sunday-morning paper is brought to you by a cabal of scheming Jewish élites.

Mr. Right: Doesn’t mind staying in on a Saturday night and watching TV together.
Mr. Alt-Right: Was banned from Twitter for harassing Leslie Jones.

Mr. Right: Asks how your day went and is genuinely interested in the answer.
Mr. Alt-Right: Listens to Infowars and has some genuine questions about Pizzagate.

Mr. Right: Accepts you just the way you are.
Mr. Alt-Right: Accepted Tila Tequila’s friend request.

Mr. Right: Makes you feel like the most special woman in the world.
Mr. Alt-Right: Refers to you as “snowflake.”

Mr. Right: Impresses you with his ambition and drive.
Mr. Alt-Right: Has a hard drive full of Pepe the Frog memes.

Mr. Right: Isn’t afraid to talk about your future together.
Mr. Alt-Right: Isn’t afraid to use the term “white genocide.”

Mr. Right: Is kind to your friends and makes a real effort to connect with your family.
Mr. Alt-Right: Just retweeted your dad and called him a cuck.

From the Irish Times:

Currently the subject of a major Twitter storm, Nick Pell’s article for The Irish Times’ website “The Alt-right: everything you need to know” omitted the main thing you need to know about the alt right – that its central concern is race.
Richard Spencer, a movement leader named in the article, who popularised the term Alt-right, couldn’t be clearer or more explicit about his goal, which is to create a white racial consciousness in America. Some of the more ambitious aims discussed exhaustively in Alt-right circles include the creation of a white ethno-state in America and later a pan-national white European consciousness, uniting North America, Russia and Europe in a bloc or Empire.
Spencer is in the strict dictionary definition of the term, a racist. He claims “race is something between a breed and an actual species” and believes non-white Americans should leave in a “peaceful ethnic cleansing”. He believes the Alt-right will infiltrate mainstream American culture and politics, starting with deporting undocumented immigrants under Trump. Spencer’s Alt-right takes influence from the French New Right who were often called “Gramscians of the Right” applying the theories of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, arguing that political goals would best be achieved through changing the culture and media from which formal politics would follow. And so far, it seems to be working.
The strictest definition of the Alt-right includes other overtly racial thinkers like Jared Taylor who calls himself a “race realist”, Steve Sailer who writes about “human biodiversity” – a pretty transparent euphemism – and Nick Land who explores the idea of the “Dark Enlightenment”. All of these are to varying degrees preoccupied with racial IQ, the Bell Curve, Western civilisational decline due to increased racial impurity, cultural decadence, cultural Marxism and Islamification…

While Alt-right leaders like Spencer are deadly serious and irony-free, it would be absurd to suggest that there has suddenly been a mass explosion of popular and sincerely-held white separatism in the US – a fevered liberal fantasy now mockingly associated with the expression “literally Hitler”. There are many in the Pepe-meme-sharing, Alt-right online world who probably aren’t that political but like the transgression and subcultural subversiveness.
No matter how familiar you are with the Alt-right, and I’ve watched them closely for many years, “explaining” the Alt-right’ to a general audience will always make you sound like an overwhelmed grandparent trying to figure out how to work the internet, in part because of their slippery use of irony. Stylistically the Alt-right is like the music subcultures of past decades, with its hip elitism that rolls its eyes at normies who don’t understand its conventions and argot – even though they are of course designed to be opaque to outsiders so as to resist easy interpretation.

Andre Reszitnyk writes for Truth-Out:

Trump is the organic expression of a sinister faction of right-wing thinkers that have up until now been restricted to the dark corners of the internet: the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, extreme religious traditionalists, anti-Semites, anarcho-capitalists and hardcore libertarians that together make up what white nationalist Richard Spencer describes as the “alt-right.” This host of regressive political communities also includes the so-called Men’s Rights Movement, the group responsible for instigating the Gamergate cyber attacks upon women in the video game industry. Jared Taylor, the head of the white nationalist New Century Foundation and one of the chief “intellectuals” of the self-described alt-right, has said that the president-elect, “instinctively, clumsily stumbled upon some of the policies that we’ve been promoting for a long time.” These are the people for whom Trump was not a protest candidate but instead a champion, the first high-profile figure to openly espouse their extreme cause. This movement embodies a violent identity politics for straight white men that rejects the very principle that all people on Earth deserve equal protection and dignity.

The white supremacists and other right-wing activists who describe themselves as the alt-right are united less by coherent shared policy positions and more by a number of strong feelings — mostly angry, hateful feelings directed toward the media, government institutions, universities and the so-called culture of political correctness. Members of this group describe the efforts of left-leaning academics, politicians, media outlets and celebrities to call out racism, sexism and homophobia when they see it as tyrannical developments that have stripped white men of their “rightful” power. Claiming that feminist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic political movements represent a turn away from universalism, and that efforts to criticize offensive speech amount to censorship, this group rejects both mainstream Democrat and Republican parties. Some members of the alt-right have hijacked the language of feminism in order to describe their movement as an intersectionalism of the right, which blends a wide spectrum of prejudices. The self-described alt-right gives a home to all who reject the idea that the government should provide for its citizens and that all people are equal. Trump’s vocal supporters — KKK leader David Duke, anti-Semitic media chairman Steve Bannon, anti-feminist and Islamophobic journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, and an army of anonymous internet trolls posting racist Trump memes on 4chan and 8chan — comprise a veritable “who’s who” of the alt-right.

In order to identify the hub around which the varied spokes of this movement turn, it is necessary to examine one of the more intellectually “rigorous” factions of the movement: neoreaction. The principle voices of neoreaction are Curtis Yarvin, who goes by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, along with former University of Warwick professor and Deleuzian philosopher Nick Land. The central theme of neoreactionary doctrine, which is predominantly expressed via long, torturously written blog posts, is hardline opposition to what they call “the Cathedral,” the imagined alliance of institutional politics, academia, mass media and culture. The three major subsections of Breitbart News — the alt-right’s chief internet gateway — “Big Hollywood,” “Big Government” and “Big Journalism,” clearly echo these neoreactionary pillars.

What neoreactionaries find so abhorrent about “the Cathedral” is its promotion of things that we generally take for granted as the preconditions for political activism: namely, a belief in natural equality, human rights, social justice, egalitarianism and democracy. Land urges his followers to “stagger back in imagination before 2008 … remain in reverse until the Great Society/Civil Rights era … that is before backing out of the calamitous 20th century.” He calls for the creation of a “Dark Enlightenment,” which embraces the technologies and scientific achievements of the past 200 years, but rejects the progressive, universalist mode of politics that emerged after the French Revolution.

The neoreactionary movement is not just trying to slow down or partially reverse the advances made over the past decades by women, people of color and the LGBT community. Rather, it seeks to install a society in which equality as such is regarded as evil. While the left battled those who were unwilling to include everyone in the universal human community, a cabal of misanthropes was rejecting the very notion of a global humanity. Many of us underestimated the strength of the fringe, which sought to divide the world back into tribes.