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.
@alan
I don’t really care when St George’s day is…
Wasn’t he the patron saint of Barcelona?
His mythology is closely connected to that area.
They’re not a movement. A movement requires motion, or the desire to implement motion. They are anti-motion.
He’s not wrong! The Republican party has depended upon the votes of white working-class racists as their base for decades, but has delivered a lot of nothing to them economically. The working class as a whole has been screwed over, but while black Americans can point at racism and a return to Jim Crow as the price of disengaging politically, white Americans have much weaker political motivations. All they are shown is tax cut after tax cut aimed at the wealthy, providing little to nothing to themselves, and social issues like abortion which lose their power as people slip farther into an economic hole; people only prioritize abortion when their more basic needs like shelter and food security have been met. Ironically, the Republican party has delivered better motives to blacks than to whites.
Clinton purposefully did not slam the Republican party in aggregate in her speech, as she will need to work with them once she is elected. Again, his perception here is not far off.
Well, two out of three is almost a passing grade.
@Mels
I’ve heard that Anne Coulter doesn’t believe what she spews either and I feel like people like that are kind of scary because the only way that they could lead the movements they lead and not believe it is to have no conscious or no empathy
@Sir Prize
I’m going to have to disagree with the others who are praising your view of the future but mostly because I’m sick to fucking DEATH of people implying a woman who risked her career in service of progressive causes is somehow a centrist who would be better off with a majority of Republicans that with the Left that SHE SUPPORTS. I agree that the parties need to move around and we could stand to lose the worst parts of the fringe to utter irrelevancy, I just wouldn’t mind if the worst parts of the political left did the same, so the rest of us didn’t have to constantly meet some high bar of purity just to get anything done.
@Alan
Sorry to pedant at you, but that’s the definition of Englishness. Britishness is far more complicated. 🙂
I’ve succeeded for most of my life in blissful ignorance of St George’s Day, but it has been forced into my consciousness recently, by the EDL (the English Defence League, for those unaware of the noxious organisation) choosing that day for a few years to march through Brighton – presumably as the symbolic capital of SJWs.
Luckily Brighton tends to respond largely in the vein of the other EDL (English Disco Lovers), with mockery and dismissal, rather than violence. Very much in the spirit of this very blog, but with more 70s-specific fashion items.
@ weatherwax
Heh, good point.
In my circles someone usually points out it’s the same day as Shakespeare’s birthday; but no-one knows when that is either.
I have fond memories of Brighton. Whenever I finished in Hove(actually) Crown Court I’d walk along the seafront, have a hotdog at that stand, then some very vinegary chips on the pier, then go see the Dalek, before getting the train back to London. Bliss.
@Loquora
Sorry about that. You’re absolutely right. I wasn’t trying to imply that she’s like Republicans. I was agreeing with Prize, cos I think Republicans (the one’s who are smart enough to see the writing on the wall or young enough to not have the same culture war hangups) will wanna be like her. I’m more on Clinton’s side than Sander’s, and I’d happily trade ‘busters’ and brocialists for ‘centrist’ Republicans (eg Susan Collins) every time. Clinton has shown she’s willing to bring em on board. Part of the reason I like her actually 🙂
Clinton’s plenty ‘left’, but it’s the kinda ‘left’ that grows it’s coalition. The purity people you mentioned close ranks and create vast divisions where none exist or are really small. If the real progressives(tm) don’t want what she (and other mainstream Dems) are trying to do, I’m not bothered by them leaving to form their own party. I might even vote for em if they ever get their shit together. Especially if it means having a new, 2 party system without the GOP
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, the 45th President of the United State, is going to be Donald J. Trump. Hillary is fighting with sticks and Trump is using a flame thrower. Its going to be a massacre, Trumps going to win by a land slide. Trump is a true grand master of weapons grade bullshitting. Hillary on the other hand couldn’t bullshit her way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. Even Michael Moore, no supporter of Trump, knows Trump’s going to win. And really whose kung-fu do you want when negotiating with ruthless bastards like Li Keqiang or Putin?
Start working on the Uncyclopedia and RationalWiki pages for president Trump.
@axecalibur
I don’t know if the purity people would be able to get their shit together. One of the best criticisms I’ve heard of the far left is that it’s easy to be ideologically pure when you’ve never been elected or had to make tough choices to get things done and every person I know who is a purity person are the type of people who prefers complaining about other people than actually make things better
The best definition of an extremist that I’ve heard is someone who spends more time attacking the moderates on their own side than their putative opponents.
On a different matter, I’ve always thought that the surest test of being British was asking someone to pronounce the following word:
EXTERMINATE
@ EJ
EX-TERM-IN-AAAATTTTTTEEEEE!!!!!!
ETA: Nick Briggs says that whenever he has to do multiple voices he always does a slightly nervous one. Like he’s not sure he really belongs and he’s worried the others will find out. I love that.
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy:
All this is proof that Milo doesn’t believe a word he says himself. No logical person could believe that ‘they’re just horsing around to piss off the PC brigade’.
I would not want to debate Milo though: motormouths like him always manage to make their opponents look ‘stupid’ in the eyes of their own moronic following, at least.
I’m really hoping for a troll/meme attack on Milo by ‘the real alt-right’. It couldn’t happen to a ‘nicer fellow‘ [COUGH!], now could it?
@loquora
Hillary is a centrist. Exactly the same as Obama, the Liberals and our ‘Red Tory’ Blairite crowd. Supporting progressive causes alone does not make oneself a leftist. Bernie as a socialist was much further left than she as a fiscal conservative will ever be. It was dissapointing that Bernie ended up endorsing her instead of using the platform he had to create a genuine Marxist Socialist Worker’s Party, something which the USA so sorely needs. There have been enough movements from anarchism, the Occupy movement, Anonymous etc, who rightly identify the problems of the ‘1%’ and are anti capitalism, but being anti communist as well means they have no solution to the crisis of capitalism (which is basically overproduction stalling economic growth) as they have rejected the only other proven economic system. If there is indeed a ‘Third way’, that would be great, but reforming capitalism still leaves us with capitalism.
I know Axe will have a go at me for saying this, but the truth is the USA political system only has two right wings, and no left wing option.
I gotta stop you there, because income inequality is not the biggest problem with this country, unless one is white and probably also male, middle-class, and otherwise quite privileged. It’s not even the most pressing economic problem. Income inequality is not what keeps the people in West Louisville poor; that would be racism. Income inequality is not the reason why women make $1 million less over their working lives than men; that would be misogyny.
There is a reason why African Americans voted for Clinton over Sanders in overwhelming majorities. Maybe you should ask yourself why “racism is bad” resonated with them more strongly than “Wall Street is overpaid.”
Clinton cares about income inequality but she cares about other axes of oppression more. That doesn’t make her centrist or conservative, and I’m honestly tired of hearing the argument that she is something other than leftist because she doesn’t prioritize the pet peeve of the white middle class over the oppressions of everyone else the way Sanders did.
@pom
Which is exactly why the right wing has taken to using racism and sexism to prove its point, there is nothing like the old ‘divide and conquer’ tactic to set the proletariat against each other instead of looking at the ruling classes. It’s diversion tactics which keep our eyes away from the true enemy. If people of all races and gender identities can show solidarity to each other, half the war is won. If you think that racism and misogyny are more important than the class struggle, you are really missing the point. You can’t just treat the symptoms, you need to find the cause of the disease.
There is an article I found on Marxism and racism which might explain this a little better.
https://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism
Plus there is a movie out which illustrates the way the class struggle can unite people of different races to a common cause, The Free State of Jones, about a Confederate deserter, Newt Knight, who forms a resistance force against the confederates of black slaves and farm women. It’s meant to be based on a true story.
The whole point of focusing on class struggle is to unite the proletariat and have them look out for one another. It’s not about dismissing racism as a side issue; it’s about white people helping black people with the racism problem they face. You’ve got Marxism entirely backwards if you think that black people need to just suck it up so that white people can get what they need. The story Marx was telling was to white people, telling them to stop oppressing black people and unite with them.
Racism and misogyny are not symptoms of class war. They are problems in and of themselves. Not everything boils down to class. Marx was actually not correct about that.
@pom
Yes, you are right, and I am not criticising the work Hillary has done for victims of racism and misogyny, but I’m sure you will admit yourself that the capitalist system is a racist and misogynist system, one happy to use immigrants as cheap labour, and women as either unpaid housewives or pay them less than men for the same job. The reason most Trumpites hate ‘brown people’, be they black, Mexican, or other is job insecurity. They see people coming into the country to steal their jobs by happily accepting a lower wage. The same goes for women up to a point. They don’t want to lose their jobs to women, so they actively bully them out of the workforce, just like we see in the fire service, the military, STEM and other male dominated professions. After WW2, they even needed a targeted propaganda campaign to get women back into the home and out of the jobs they had filled when men were drafted, that’s where all the ‘perfect 50’s housewife’ stuff comes from! It’s job insecurity engineered by the ruling classes to prevent workers complaining and forming unions, they live in fear of losing their few crumbs from the top table to women and minorities. Look at all these priviledged, mostly male, usually white CEOs, they really don’t care whether the labour power is male, female, black, white or Asian, all they are seeing is a homogenous rabble of braying to do their work for them and increase their wealth, ad infinitum, till they drop down dead in a ditch.
@Virgin Mary
It’s true that our current system of capitalism relies on unpaid and underpaid labor, but misogyny and racism came well before that and so are different issues that need to be addressed separately. Fixing class issues while ignoring racism and sexism really only helps white dudes. If engineers are paid a closer wage to that of CEOs but companies are still less likely to recommend an interview based on a black-sounding name, the class gap may have improved but the race gap has not.
Okay, Imma stop you right there, because movies based on a true story are bull fucking shit all the way through. Don’t watch that garbage. Watch actual documentaries, hell, watch Drunk History, to get info from. Movies are made to be entertaining first and factual second.
Hate to tell you this, but, fun fact, misogyny and racism existed before modern class structures. People thought black people were animals and shit before they decided to enslave them to work on plantations to bolster their own coffers. Women were thought of the weak-willed and wicked sex thousands of years ago and it had nothing to do with emasculating men because they brought home more mammoth than them.
Racism, sexism, classism, hell even homophobia, ableism, sizism, fatism, religious intolerance, colorism, whatever -ism existed before modern classes and they’ll exist even after the class system falls. They aren’t built into classism, classism is built around them.
There’s no one thing that you can take from the world to make everything else fall, and even if it was, it wouldn’t be classism. Life isn’t goddamn Jenga.
EDIT: What kupo said because it’s nicer when I don’t wanna be.
There’s no evidence of that. There are plenty of wealthy, college-educated, employed white people who are racist. Racism isn’t confined to poor, unemployed whites. Poor unemployed whites are very likely to extend their racism as an explanation for their economic situation, but their economic situation is not the origin of their racism.
Now, because the Republican party is racist, it has been telling a story for decades about how poor, unemployed blacks are riding high on the welfare hog. The intended moral of this story is, “Your tax money is going to black people, and as a racist, you don’t want that, do you? So vote for the GOP to reduce your taxes!” The unintended (but not undesired) moral is, “Black people are in a better economic position than you are.” This has a nice synergy with the story that affirmative action leads to unqualified black people taking jobs from qualified whites; the overarching theme is that blacks are undeserving poor who are cheating their way through life.
This is a theme that comes straight down from slavery, and you can read it in the literature of the time. It’s not an economic argument; it’s a racist one.
I’m not going to buy that “we are okay sharing our employment pool with other men but not with women” is rooted in something other than misogyny.
Marx was wrong about this. He wasn’t wrong about everything – class conflict exists and is important, and he was one of the first people to realize that governments exist to support economies and not the other way around. But whenever someone comes at you with a single weird trick that explains literally everything that is wrong with the world, you need to question that really hard. There is no single answer, and there is especially no single simple answer that can be summed up in five words (in English; one if you’re German).
Racism is not a conspiracy engineered by the 1% to keep everyone else down. It would be nice if it were that simple, because that would have a simple solution and reality isn’t that kind.
@Mech Shop
Something tells me you won’t be on this website on November 9 saying, I told you so!
Something = uncanny psychic power
Something = insider information
Something = I’m going to fix the election
Something = common sense
You decide.
PS: None of the preceding means that I’m not really, really scared of the possibility of a President Trump.
I wouldn’t bet on him winning — but we can’t afford to be complacent!
Pretend I’m giving you a bored look while drinking soda and then I burp in your face and flip you off.
That’s my response. I don’t have a gif for it. Pretend I found a Rick gif of what I did.
@Mish
If you’re reading, pls send halp. My brain says ‘maybe let this one go’, but my keyboard fingers are too busy taking off their earrings to listen…
@Mary
You know me so well. Here goes
Others have dissected your ‘Marxism is a Masterball’ nonsense, so I’ll stick to with repeating (until either you get it or 1 of us leaves this blog) that your universalist worldview and devotion to a strict political binary are stupid
When the term was coined, ‘gauche’ or ‘left’ meant antimonarchist. By that standard 99.99% of my country is ‘left wing’. Except no, that definition is played out. It only applies within a certain temporal and spatial frame of reference, ie post enlightenment France. Nobody disputes this change in terminology, but some people (not just you by a long shot) refuse to extend that to the here and now. Also, you’re essentially saying that a racist, sexist, everyphobic, traditionalist, authoritarian is more ‘left wing’ than, well me for example, if he’s a communist. And people wonder why I use the scare quotes
And what’s the problem? How does labeling Hillary Clinton ‘center left’ or even just ‘left’ hurt anything? It’s the metric system argument all over again but somehow more meaningless. I’m not British. Y’all can name things whatever you like over there. Other than ‘something something Marx’ and ‘Gore fuckin Vidal said so’, why is your paradigm more worthy to describe us than mine? Cos it seems to begin and end with familiarity bias (Scildfreja or someone else with the knowledge can tell me if I’m using that wrong)
Oh, and if you don’t mind, no pressure, define your terms. You’ve been arbitrating what counts a ‘left wing’ for a while now, and I’d like to know, in as much detail as you’re comfortable with, what the diagnostic criteria for either side of the spectrum are. Thx in advance
PS. Sanders was never gonna start a socialist party. He’s glommed onto the Dems his entire career, and he’s 74. That ship as sailed, come back, been decommissioned, modernized, reactivated, and retired again. 1 person, let alone that guy, was never gonna be able to just make open socialism a thing here