{"id":105863,"date":"2016-09-07T19:08:55","date_gmt":"2016-09-08T03:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=105863"},"modified":"2016-09-07T19:08:55","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T03:08:55","slug":"the-specter-of-the-alt-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=105863","title":{"rendered":"The Specter of the \u2018Alt-Right\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It began, as many instances of sliming do, with curiosity, following Hillary Clinton\u2019s August 25 speech<\/a> denouncing Donald Trump\u2019s ties to the so-called alt-right movement. Living as I do in a bubble, I had never heard the term alt-right<\/i> before. In fact, my acquaintance with alt<\/i> as a prefix was more or less limited to the Alt key on my keyboard, which I never understood in the first place and which has now been replaced by the Option key on my Mac. (I use it for diacritics, though I\u2019m sure it\u2019s useful in other ways.) I had at least understood alt<\/i> as an abbreviation of alternate<\/i> or alternative<\/i>, which made sense in terms of keyboard functioning and also worked for alt-rock, which was a movement seeking independence from mainstream rock ’n’ roll in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

But alt-right, Clinton made clear, presents not so much an alternative as an extreme. When I found Slate\u2019s explanation<\/a> of the movement, I could not believe the sources to which they sent me were truly propounding the views attributed to them. I was wrong.<\/p>\n

First, Taki\u2019s Magazine<\/a>, to which the Slate article sent me to find the origin of the term alternative right<\/i> (it was used in a headline<\/a> over the text of the philosopher Paul Gottfried\u2019s address to the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008), seems to expound nativist, misogynist, racist ideology to a fare-thee-well, including headlines like \u201cFeminist Witch Hunts Are Rape\u201d and \u201cL.A.\u2019s Dirty Little Brown Secret\u201d (a doozy that gives a thumbs-up to ethnic cleansing). I got even more curious when I spotted a strange, froglike creature next to the headline \u201cGetting the Alt-Right Wrong.\u201d Since the article itself didn\u2019t explain the green cartoon guy, I had to read further<\/a> to learn that he was Pepe, originally a mascot on the trolling website 4chan and since co-opted by extreme conservatives as an avatar of their movement. (At the point in Clinton’s speech where she first used the term alt-right<\/em>, someone shouted out<\/a> “Pepe!”) That the green Donald Trump image I’ve now picked to accompany this post looks completely creepy to me but is celebrated by some of his ardent supporters should have told me that researching this topic further was not going to make me feel any better.<\/p>\n

But I couldn\u2019t help myself. I traveled through the vortex into the even more extreme Radix Journal<\/a>, where “Hannibal Bateman” (a merging, I assume, of Hannibal Lecter<\/a> and Patrick Bateman<\/a>), sitting on a leather couch backgrounded by a gray stone wall that brings man cave<\/i> to mind, refers<\/a> to the \u201cemphasis on freedom\u201d in Western democracies as \u201ca negative ideal.\u201d Bateman \u2014 er, Richard Spencer, who seems to use Bateman as an alter ego \u2014 appears again in an even more alarming video explaining the innocuously titled National Policy Institute<\/a>. Touting \u201cthe heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States,\u201d this video reminded me of the chilling \u201cTomorrow Belongs to Me\u201d scene<\/a> in Cabaret<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: It began, as many instances of sliming do, with curiosity, following Hillary Clinton\u2019s August 25 speech denouncing Donald Trump\u2019s ties to the so-called alt-right movement. Living as I do in a bubble, I had … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t