{"id":83495,"date":"2015-12-28T15:28:07","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T23:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83495"},"modified":"2023-09-07T04:02:43","modified_gmt":"2023-09-07T12:02:43","slug":"how-2015-fueled-the-rise-of-the-freewheeling-white-nationalist-alt-right-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83495","title":{"rendered":"How 2015 Fueled The Rise Of The Freewheeling, White Nationalist Alt Right Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Buzzfeed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 Old-guard racists like David Duke aren\u2019t the only white nationalists to have been encouraged by Donald Trump\u2019s candidacy this year: His bid has also provided a tremendous boost to a newer movement calling itself the \u201calt right.\u201d
\nUp until now, the alt right labored mostly in obscurity, its internal fights and debates hidden from anyone who wasn\u2019t directly looking for them. But all that\u2019s starting to change, and it\u2019s only getting stronger.
\n\u201cThis is really a phenomenon that\u2019s been happening over the last year,\u201d said Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute. \u201c2015 has been huge.\u201d
\nThe movement probably doesn\u2019t look like anything you\u2019ve seen before. The alt right is loosely connected, and mostly online. The white nationalists of the alt right share more in common with European far-right movements than American ones. This is a movement that draws upon relatively obscure political theories like neoreaction or the \u201cDark Enlightenment,\u201d which reject the premises on which modernity is built, like democracy and egalitarianism. But it\u2019s not all so high-minded as that. Take a glance at the #altright hashtag on Twitter or at The Right Stuff, an online hub of the movement, and you\u2019ll find a penchant for aggressive rhetoric and outright racial and anti-Semitic slurs, often delivered in the arch, ironic tones common to modern internet discourse. Trump is a hero on the alt right and the subject of many adoring memes and tweets.
\nIn short, it\u2019s white supremacy perfectly tailored for our times: 4chan-esque racist rhetoric combined with a tinge of Silicon Valley\u2013flavored philosophizing, all riding on the coattails of the Trump boom.
\nSpencer himself can claim credit for coining the term \u201calt right\u201d; in 2010, he founded AlternativeRight.com, which is now RadixJournal. But he says the term has gotten a second life in the past year due to a confluence of external factors. \u201cI think it has a lot to do with Trump,\u201d he said. \u201cI think the refugee crisis is also an inspiration. I just think things have gotten so real.\u201d
\nJared Taylor, the American Renaissance founder who along with Spencer is considered one of the chiefs of the intellectual wing of white nationalism, also acknowledged Trump\u2019s influence, but said, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to do only with Trump,\u201d citing Black Lives Matter and \u201cthe current rowdiness on college campuses\u201d as other inspirations.
\n\u201cI think it goes by a lot of different names,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cI consider it a dissident right as well.\u201d
\nSpencer believes the alt right is \u201cdeeply connected\u201d with his work. \u201cI would say that what I\u2019m doing is we\u2019re really trying to build a philosophy, an ideology around identity, European identity,\u201d he said, \u201cand I would say that the alt right is a kind of the take-no-prisoners Twitter troopers of that.\u201d
\nThe alt right\u2019s targets don\u2019t include just liberals, blacks, Jews, women, Latinos, and Muslims, who are all classified a priori as objects of suspicion. (Though this has not gone unnoticed: \u201cIt\u2019s definitely something we\u2019re aware of and tracking,\u201d said Marilyn Mayo, director of the Anti-Defamation League\u2019s Center on Extremism. \u201cThere are more white supremacists who are defining themselves as part of the alt right.\u201d)
\nThe alt right\u2019s real objective, if one can be identified, is to challenge and dismantle mainstream conservatism.
\nIt\u2019s in part responsible for the spread of the \u201ccuckservative\u201d slur that gained currency over the summer and likely originated in forums on sites like My Posting Career and The Right Stuff, and has come to define a far-right contempt for conservatives they view as weak or sellouts \u2014 often those who oppose Trump.
\nSo far, they haven\u2019t garnered much attention from mainstream conservative figures, though they\u2019ve begun to intersect a bit with national political commentary.
\n\u201cYou are on fire tonight, Alt Right!\u201d conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted in August at an account called @_AltRight_ whose current avatar is a photo of Front National scion Marion Mar\u00e9chal-Le Pen. Coulter\u2019s rant about Jews over the summer was met with approval by Spencer. Her public persona has become more and more tied to a kind of white identity politics; Coulter\u2019s book Adios America! may have had some influence on Donald Trump\u2019s hard right turn on immigration, and her Twitter feed has lately seemed of a piece with alt right ideas about America being a white nation (\u201cAll trying to imitate Trump on immigration, but it\u2019s not just security!!! Its CULTURE!!!! See Miami, Houston, Nashville etc etc\u201d) and secretive Jewish influence (\u201cI love how the media assumes all Americans know Yiddish.\u201d)<\/p>\n

…The alt right\u2019s current moment in the sun has actually been a long time coming. The movement is undergirded by some of the ideas espoused by Dark Enlightenment or neoreactionary thinkers like the English philosopher Nick Land and the the American computer programmer Curtis Yarvin (aka \u201cMencius Moldbug\u201d). Land and Yarvin have for years espoused a rejection of democracy and a return to traditional authoritarian structures. But the Dark Enlightenment thinkers are the definition of inaccessible; both Land and Yarvin\u2019s writings are eye-glazingly verbose. A representative Land sentence, from his manifesto on the Dark Enlightenment: \u201cThe war on political incorrectness creates data-empowered, web-coordinated, paranoid and poly-conspiratorial werewolves, superbly positioned to take advantage of liberal democracy\u2019s impending rendezvous with ruinous reality, and to then play their part in the unleashing of unpleasantnesses that are scarcely imaginable (except by disturbing historical analogy).\u201d
\nThe alt right\u2019s genius is in dispensing with the self-marginalizing pseudo-intellectual stuff and getting straight to the point, and not in the creaky hit-you-over-the-head fashion of, say, Stormfront, but the slangy and freewheeling argot of the internet in 2015. The Right Stuff has a page devoted to the lexicon of the alt right, a collection of terms that pop up frequently on Twitter once you know what to look for. \u201cFash,\u201d for example, for fascist. \u201cMerchant\u201d for Jews. \u201cDindu nuffins\u201d for \u201can obviously guilty black man.\u201d Where neoreactionary thinkers refer to \u201cthe Cathedral\u201d as shorthand for the politically correct elite establishment, The Right Stuff is more pointed in calling it \u201cthe Synagogue.\u201d Rare Pepes, the frog meme native to 4chan, are common. The Right Stuff forums are rife with memes targeting, for example, Jeb Bush as a weakling (a recent Bush-related thread is titled \u201cSuicide Watch Headquarters\u201d) and portraying Trump as a hero (see \u201cMemes of Der Trumpenfuhrer\u201d). The culture clearly draws on 4chan \u2014 the \/pol\/ board is another hub.<\/p>\n

…One of the central figures on the alt right internet is Paul Ramsey, a 52-year-old in Oklahoma who makes YouTube videos as RamzPaul. He agreed to an interview with BuzzFeed News on one condition: that he would record it.
\nI agreed to his terms, and interviewed him over the phone about the alt right movement and his role in it. Right after we got off the phone, Ramsey started tweeting about me and the interview. Immediately, a stream of anti-Semitic tweets came my way, without a word of this story having yet been written or published: \u201cOy vey! Look at that nose! I can\u2019t imagine this ending well,\u201d read one. \u201cShe looks like she echos,\u201d read another, using a slang term on the alt right for being Jewish (see: The Right Stuff\u2019s glossary). \u201cShe @RosieGray interviewed me once my .1% Jewish DNA results were published. We MOTs stick together,\u201d Ramsey himself tweeted. Ramsey tweeted about my being \u201cnice\u201d and exhorted his followers to be nice to me in turn, but he also tweeted about how he planned to post the recording online so his followers could assess it \u2014 a not-so-subtle invitation to troll me.
\nRamsey characterized the alt right as being neither mainstream conservatism nor neo-Nazism. As an example of the differences between the alt-right and neo-Nazis, he stated that the 14\/88 crowd (14 for the \u201c14 words\u201d white supremacist slogan and 88 as shorthand for \u201cHeil Hitler\u201d) don\u2019t like Trump because his daughter is Jewish (Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism), whereas the alt right doesn\u2019t care about this and generally support Trump for his policies. Ramsey objects to the word \u201csupremacist,\u201d saying he\u2019s a nationalist and doesn\u2019t hate other people or think he\u2019s better than them. He repeatedly invoked the example of Israel as a template of the kind of nationalism he seeks for the United States. In keeping with the alt right\u2019s affinity for European identity movements, Ramsey often visits Europe and said he has recently been in Romania and Hungary, though he said he isn\u2019t affiliated with any specific groups there.
\nI pressed him on the ideological specifics of the alt right. For example, does he believe that the Holocaust happened?
\n\u201cI believe it should be able to be discussed, let me put it that way,\u201d Ramsey said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s because \u2014 and it depends what you mean by the Holocaust. Do you mean that 6 million figure? You know that 6 million figure has been used many times before World War II, did you know that?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Buzzfeed: WASHINGTON \u2014 Old-guard racists like David Duke aren\u2019t the only white nationalists to have been encouraged by Donald Trump\u2019s candidacy this year: His bid has also provided a tremendous boost to a newer movement calling itself the \u201calt … 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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720,605],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-anti-semitism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83495"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151279,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83495\/revisions\/151279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}