Back in college, at Cornell in the mid-eighties, I once enjoyed the distinct displeasure of being stuck in a discussion section with Ann Coulter. Not someone who looked or sounded or acted like Ann Coulter, but the actual Ann Coulter.
If you’ve ever seen her on TV, and I suppose most of you have, the experience was, well, pretty much exactly like that. At the time, Coulter had built herself a reputation on campus as a right-wing provocateur, and she took more or less the same approach in class; I remember her going on and on and on in one class session about Martin Luther King’s alleged crypto-Communism.
I had pretty much forgotten all about her when, towards the end of the next decade, I flipped to a cable news channel and bam, there she was. And she’s been there, on TV and in American political life, ever since.
I found myself thinking back on this experience as I watched Hillary Clinton’s speech this week attacking Trump for his ties with the alt-right. Suddenly a bunch of the fringe characters I’ve been obsessively following on this little blog for years have pushed themselves (with a major assist from Donald Trump) into the center of our political discourse.
There was Hillary, essentially doing what I’ve been doing here for six years now, reading out some of Milo Yiannopoulos’ worst headlines on Breitbart and mordently mocking their sheer awfulness.
On the one hand, I’m glad to see Hillary taking on these guys, and doing so with so much energy and skill.
On the other hand, it’s deeply troubling that she had to make the speech in the first place, that Pepe-posting Nazi shitlords have managed to garner so much attention so quickly, transforming what had been a weird internet sideshow into something approaching an actual threat to the Republic.
While some alt-righters purport to be indignant about Hillary’s alleged “lies,” most are clearly thrilled to be getting the attention. “After this week, there is little doubt that we Alt-Right shitlords are making history,” the neo-Nazi Infostormer blog happily proclaimed.
The evil bitch Hillary Clinton and current Democrat nominee for President of the United States dedicated an entire 30 minute plus speech to attacking our movement. Something like this would have been entirely unfathomable just a few years ago.
He’s got that right.
While we have accomplished much in a very short time, there is still much to do. In the very near future, we will be taking back control of our nations and restoring them to greatness. … I believe that this is something that is going to happen much sooner than anyone thinks. Jewish Marxism is a dying political philosophy and we are here to put the final nails in its coffin.
Hail Victory!
Over on a site called The Atlantic Centurion, alt-right blogger Lawrence Murray offered a similar assessment.
One of the most powerful people in the world spoke for a half hour about an internet movement of White nationalist blogs and Twitter trolls. The Archbishop of the Catlady Ascendancy herself addressed the White heresy known as the Alt-Right. In the flesh. Are we winning the meme war or what?
Commenters across the political spectrum have made much of Hillary’s fairly obvious attempt, in her speech, to lure longtime Republicans who feel uncomfortable with Trump’s racism into voting for her.
On the alt-right Radix Journal, Hannibal Bateman (presumably not his real name) suggested that Hillary was trying to appoint herself the new leader of America’s conservatives — sorry, cuckservatives.
Hillary and her allies are making a play for a one party state. Her wing of the managerial elite hope to absorb what elements it can from the GOP and cast the rest to what it calls, “the outer fringes.” …
Like the Borg, Hillary wants to assimilate the cuckservatives. …
She’s making a direct plea for Conservatism Inc. to merge with her rather than risk a hostile takeover by the Alt-Right.
As Bateman’s sees it, this is good for bitcoin the alt-right. If conservatives — sorry, cuckservatives — desert the Republican party to join up with Hillary, the alt-right will become the standard-bearer for pissed-off white folks, at least in Bateman’s rather fanciful view.
Americans, especially White Americans, are angry. Rightly so: while the “right” got its tax cuts and tax-free foundations White America has been slowly dispossessed and demoralized. …
Conservatism is dead. Its new standard bearer is Hillary Clinton.
As for us, we will offer Whites, not just in America, but the world over, a real alternative.
Morgoth, of Morgoth’s Review, had a similar take. Declaring himself “surprised” at Hillary’s attempt to win over the “cuckservative Right of American politics,” Morgoth compared the situation, somewhat awkwardly, to Europe’s refugee crisis.
The post-Trump Republican party has its own refugee crisis, and Hilary is doing a Merkel by offering them a place at her sagging bosom, alongside the inter-sectional Trannies, Black Lives Matter and ISIS.
Wait, ISIS is a wing of the Democratic party?
Morgoth even managed to work in a reference to a classic Arnold Schwarzenegger film.
Strictly speaking, [the cuckservatives] aren’t just ‘Cucks’ they’ve been cucked over twice! they were cucked when they sat in silence as ‘minorities’ became majorities, then they were cucked again when Trump, Nationalism and the Alt-Right overran their party. All that’s left for them now, and Hillary and her handlers know it, is to join the ranks of a party explicitly and openly anti-White, they’ll be absorbed into the main putrid mass of the Politically Correct Left to live out a life as a minor appendage, like Quato from Total Recall.
Dude, get your references right! Quato may have been a parasitic twin growing out of his brother’s torso, but he was also the leader of the whole damn resistance!
The biggest complaint of the hardcore alt-righters at the moment? That Hillary and the media are talking a lot more about Breitbart (and its poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos) than they are about, say, The Daily Stormer. This focus has an obvious logic to it, given that Trump just hired Breitbart’s former top banana as his campaign CEO.
But the hardcore alt-righters don’t quite see it this way. In their view, it’s all about the Jews. In a post that came out just before Hillary’s speech, Infostormer complained that the “Jew Media [is] Falsely Declaring That Homosexual Jew Milo Yiannapolous Is Leading Alt-Right Nazism.”
This, Infostormer believes, is an obvious attempt by sneaky Jews to shut down discussion of Jewish sneakiness, or something,
The Alt-Right has become such a major political force that it was impossible for them to continue ignoring us. Our victories have become far too numerous to count.
Their new strategy is to try and redefine the Alt-Right as a movement led by the homosexual Jew Milo Yiannapolous.
And Infostormer is having none of it.
The goal of promoting this Jew faggot as the face of the Alt-Right is to limit the scope of debate. Specifically, they want to ensure that the Jewish question is not brought up. … Milo being both a degenerate faggot and a kike will certainly never bring up the Jewish question.
The Jews want the general public to believe that the Alt-Right is some kind of goofy White nationalist movement that has no real issue with Jews or homosexuals. …
In reality … the Alt-Right is … an uncompromising White nationalist movement which is both anti-Jew and anti-homosexual. None of us believe that a homosexual Jew like Milo should be leading such a movement.
So apparently they don’t like gays or Jews? Who knew?
The real question here is whether or not the alt-right will live up to the fantasies of its proponents — replacing the so-called cuckservatives as the standard-bearers of the right in America and possibly even assuming a major role in a Trump presidency (shudder). Are they going to become a permanent part of the mainstream political landscape, like Ann Coulter?
Or is the sudden rise of the alt-right a more fleeting phenomena — something akin to an extinction burst, driven by the anger of reactionary whites, mostly male, who can’t deal with the realities of an increasingly diverse America in which white people will ultimately become a minority.
I think, and I certainly hope, it’ll be the latter. We should plan to do everything we can to hasten their departure from the national political stage.
@kupo
None of what’s depicted is wrong (it’s all deeply, morally wrong, but not factually wrong), but your friends had questions, mainly cos the movie has no intention of giving you too many answers. Anything the movie tells you about Wall Street is in service to the story, instead of as information for its own sake. Check this:
Jordan (played by Leo), in the middle of an explanation into IPOs, realizes the only important thing the audience needs to know is that they were doing illegal shit. Scorcese is far more interested in showing you 2 guys OD on quaaludes or Margot Robbie in the nude than the inside scoop on finance law. And I love it 😛
Even though my white cishet fee fees are by no means the most important here, I’ve got to say it annoys me that Emmerich thinks I’d rather watch a movie about a straight passing white cis man than see something more historically accurate and diverse. Were racist, homophobic and transphobic cishet people really going to be the type of cishet people who would go see Stonewall anyway? Not everyone needs to be pandered to and talked down to.
Okay, I’ll stop with the #notcishetpeople now.
On an even more shallow note, I like both The Conjuring movies in the sense that they’re mostly very well executed horror movies. But I wish they didn’t push the based on true events angle so hard. I view Ed and Lorraine as self deluded at best and con artists at worst so it’s hard to get behind them as protagonists. Plus, I already know they weren’t killed by demons at any of their “investigations” so I can’t get properly scared for them.
Alan,
I think Foundation would work well as a series, maybe on Netflix, Amazon or premium cable. It would need to be treated a little more stand alonish like Black Mirror or American Horror Story since the series is more interconnected vignettes set in the same universe than a single epic story. I think audiences would like it. It would never work as a blockbuster type of movie though. Too many problems are solved with psychohistory instead of battles!
Alan: the key problem with Foundation is the characters are cardboard. The story is either interesting because of the world, or interesting because of the action, but never interesting because of the deep character development — there is none at all.
WWTH: There are battles; Foundation breaks the Empire by engaging in guerrilla tactics (in space). Hollywood would make the movie be about those, and would infer a few more.
@foundation trilogy: i admit i only got to the Mule’s part of the story before i had to give it back to the library (must remember to take it out again) but i loved the depiction of ladies in this book. It’s a scifi book where they can math so well that they can predict the outcomes of civilisations, and yet Asimov couldn’t see past the gender norms of his own time. There is a lady character in the mule story, but she’s there as a wife.
I can’t wait to see what we’re writing in our Scifi stories that is going to look as bad in seventy(?) years.
@Rhuu
Long as we stay honest about it and admit to making mistakes, the only one who’s gonna look bad in seventy years is Vox Day, and he already looks bad as of now.
Aaaaaanyway that’s my approach to writing, for what it’s worth.
(unless all the dystopian scifi eventually becomes reality, and then we’ll look bad for not promoting police states and dictatorships)
@ WWTH, Numberbois & Rhuu
You’re bang on about Foundation suiting a TV anthology rather than a movie. Ironically I think it’s a series that would benefit from a smaller budget. One of my fave things about the stories is that a lot of the time it’s just people in rooms having conversations. A blockbuster movie would end up being all about big space battles, and they’re almost peripheral in the books.
Numberbois, I’d have to respectfully disagree about the characters. I think there are some great ones. Even the megalomaniac tyrant is wonderfully sympathetic and Arcadia (sorry, Arkady) Darrell is one of my favourite characters in sci-fi. The books are obviously products of their times. Bayta is highly accomplished but still acts like a 50s housewife. And Preem Palver sounds like he wondered in off the set of Fiddler on the Roof (he’s still a great character though, oy vey). But there can’t be many 1940s books, of any genre, that have a 14 year old girl outsmarting the cleverest men on her home planet and going on to save the day.
Having recently watch the seminal Angels in America, I’m tempted by the idea that the best way to do Foundation would be with ensemble casting. Each character may only be in the story for a single episode, but having the same actor play a different character in each episode would give it the sense of continuity that its rapid era-advancement would otherwise lose.
(As a semi-digression, I’ve always imagined Hari Seldon as being a person of colour. I can’t remember if Asimov describes him that way or if that’s just my headcanon. Either way, that’s a casting decision that I would support entirely.)
@ EJ
The only time that Asimov ever makes a point about anyone’s skin colour is in Currents of Space (where it’s sort of integral to the plot), so the characters could look anyway you want really.
As a personality, Seldon was written as an avatar of Asimov himself.
(I could see Morgan Freeman as the older Seldon; he’s got that tounge in cheek smart guy thing down pat)
I recently heard that Leonardo Di Caprio was going to be playing Lenin in a movie. I can see him being up for that. I don’t know who the script is going to be written by, but we can pretty much expect more revisionism. OTOH, I don’t know if even twenty years ago Hollywood would touch a movie like that with a barge pole.
I did film studies as an undergraduate, before I switched to music. Some of the movies back then I studied as part of my course were Soviet Formalist, so I did Serge Eisenstein’s ‘October’ and some other ones, ‘Mother’ and ‘Battleship Potempkin’. It was a long time ago now, I’m going to see if I still have my essays somewhere in storage because I can’t remember what conclusions I came to back when I didn’t have a clue what I was actually writing about.
I enjoyed ‘Wolf of Wall Street’, ‘Catch Me If You Can’ and ‘I Love You Phillip Morris’. I like movies about con artists. I watched ‘War Dogs’ a couple of nights ago, that’s the same kind of movie. I’m not sure if its anti Semitic tho, as both the guys who con the US government are stereotypical Jews, ie running after money. There was a movie I watched ages ago about a Biblical archeologist, I can’t remember the name of the movie, but the writer/director is the same person who made Napoleon Dynamite. He uses this trope to very bad taste, and the Jewish character is particularly nasty, I wondered at the time how they got away with writing that. Maybe the same can be said of WOWW as Jordan Belfort was Jewish as well, although that is based on Jordan’s own ‘autobiography’.
With reference to Hillary Clinton, I don’t think it’s a “high bar of purity” to object to Clinton voting for the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq, palling with such scum as Henry Kissinger and Hosni Mubarak, supporting the right-wing coup in Honduras, the slaughter of civilians in drone strikes, the disastrous bombing in Libya that produced a failed state… None of which means she isn’t totally preferable to Trumpelthinskin.
Before deploying sarcasm, it’s advisable to have some idea what you’re talking about. Late medieval and early modern Christian doctrine justified enslaving certain classes of people classed as “enemies of Christ” – basically non-Christians and some types of criminal. Around the Mediterranean, Christians enslaved Muslims, and vice versa.The first participants in the trans-Atlantic slave trade* were the Portuguese and Spanish – and it was simple to extend the justification of this practice to other non-Christians – both black Africans and Native Americans. Some of the Popes attempted to place limits on enslavement, generally in favour of non-white Christians, but none ever condemned slavery as such. The justifications stigmatising black people as inherently inferior came later.
*There was trade in slaves in Africa before this, as someone else noted – but it was on a much smaller scale. European trade in slaves changed west Africa fundamentally, enabling the growth of states such as Dahomey which relied on it completely. However, it’s not clear whether the transport of tens of millions of slaves to the Americas affected population levels in Africa.
Is it just me or does everything this Nick G person post drip with condescension?
It’s been irking me for awhile but I never said anything because they don’t usually engage much and usually comment when the thread has died down.
My head casting was always Adrian Brody as The Mule, but I think he’s gotten too old for the role.
Bella Ramsay, who stole the show as Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones last season would be a great Arkady.
@ WWTH
I had to Google him but wow yes!!!
He’s exactly like I pictured the Mule (even in my youth).
Would it matter that he’s a bit old? Not sure how long ago this pic was taken but that’s pretty much how I envisage the Mule to look; and even within the stories he’s meant to be subject to premature ageing.
http://celebritywc.com/images/adrien-brody-5.jpg
@axe
The Big Short, if you’ve seen it, takes a bit different approach. They actually stop the action to explain the mathematics of what’s going on. It’s a bit more educational than WOWW for that very reason.
I dunno, Mark. I liked that comment better when it was given by Winston Churchill in 1920, writing about a
Or Alexander Stephens, in the Cornerstone Speech, explaining that the Confederacy’s
and that it was the anti-slavery faction that were doomed to fail because “They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”
Or, in the words of a great American philanthropist, “I’ve heard it before… and it wasn’t funny the first time.” (B. Wayne, 1988)
@Mary
Haven’t, mean to, so I heard
And they do what I now realize was a wonderful meta-commentary on Margot Robbie’s nude scene in TWoWS (in addition to its other wonderfulnesses): put her in a bubble bath to explain subprime mortgages (with no exciting body parts showing) and have her end that explanation with “Got it? Good. [sips champagne] Now fuck off.” The celebrity cameo scenes — Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez — contain layers of such thought-inducing alienation as to have Bertolt Brecht’s shade clapping his spectral hands until they bleed ectoplasm.
Mark Plus:
I think this
“society’s losers, misfits, kooks, weaklings, defectives, scolds, utopians and degenerates have conflicting grievances that they can’t reconcile”
is an astute description of the Alt Right and why they won’t hang together as a movement. For as long as I can remember, there have snarky, articulate right-wing cranks who want to revive segregation, the gold standard, phrenology or some other discredited crap. They just have the internet now. Politics in the 2020s will be just as dull ad it is now. Thanks for the chuckles though.
On Milo
Milo considers the alt-right to be a bunch of rebellious anti-pc youth in need of a leader, and the real racists to be the “nerds” obsessed with race and IQ. He couldn’t be more wrong.
While there is a subculture of “nerds” obsessed with race and IQ, they are no where near as racist as the alt-right. The alt-right is composed of hardcore racists and anti-Semites, these are not your garden variety bigots or reactionaries.
Fortunately, there isn’t much of a market for what the alt-right is selling. The alt-right’s bigotry is so ugly and nasty as to be unacceptable in our day and age, even for the most hardcore Trump supporter.
I live in Texas, and their just isn’t a market for the hardcore anti-Hispanic prejudice. Mexicans aren’t new comers, they have lived here since before Texas became part of the U.S. The average Texas white man has Hispanic friends and co-workers.
I would go so far as to say, it’s harder to be gay in Texas than it is to be Hispanic.
What’s bizarre about this, is that someone as cynical and opportunistic as Milo would hitch his name to a sinking ship. White millennials who have grown up around Hispanics are not going to suddenly embrace Ann Coulter style anti-Mexican paranoia.
The fact that Milo believes that there exists a “generation Trump,” shows how clueless he really is.
Milo is a 21st century version of Oscar Wilde. We are in a major social/technological shift. For instance, the internet is about 20 years old, this could be compared to electrification in 1900, it was just begging to make an impact, this would be a key underlining driver of feminism. Just like the Victorian era values that were becoming more and more obsolete the old progressive left (which is now conservative) is fading.
The movie The Big Short makes some nuanced points. Brad Pitt did a great job on this movie. There is no master plan or conspiracy. While Michael Burry was fearing a witch hunt that could through him in jail and Wall Street was throwing there goats out the windows, Michael Burry’s clients, some who were suing him, made a fat 400% + profit.
@ joe
I think you may be conflating the Internet and the WWW. Either that or my dissertation was amazingly prescient.
Interestingly the word internet predates the use of computers; it was used as a term for general inter connectivity as early as the 19th century.