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.
Handsome Jack: “People thought black people were animals and shit before they decided to enslave them to work on plantations”
I think that may not actually be true. According to a series of documentaries I saw years back, when Europeans started trading with West Africa there was not much difference in either cultural or economic development, and the slave trade began with African merchants using slaves as payment, there being a slave economy in Africa already. Racist notions about blacks then evolved to justify/rationalize the practice of treating them like animals. I have assumed that the ensuing haemorrhage of manpower from Africa to America was the most significant event in the path to the disparity in wealth we see between the two continents today. If this version of events is wrong I am happy to be corrected by someone more knowledgable – my historical education is pretty patchy.
This is for you, Axe.
Initiating slow clap meme:
It worked! I owed you one dude, for standing up for me a while back.
MY DEBTS HAVE BEEN PAID!!! *scuttles out of the room like an even more awkward Zoidberg*
@Pabu
*Looks thru emails* Ayy! I remember! No prollem, breh, and don’t be a stranger 🙂
@Richardbillericay:
You’re right, AFAIK. It isn’t as though people before that didn’t have bigotry – nobody was as bigoted as medieval folks – but real racism, complete with power structures, was a thing that postdated the introduction of the Atlantic slave trade. My hypothesis is that we teach ourselves to hate those we exploit, not the other way around, as a self-defence mechanism to avoid having to feel bad about that exploitation.
One can see similar things within South African history and British Indian history. I know nothing about Australian history but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened there too.
Right, so, they decided to pick mostly black people as slaves as a coincidence. It totally didn’t have anything to do with white people thinking black people were lesser in anyway. I bet they just didn’t enslave more white people because there wasn’t enough of them in America or something. Sounds very plausible.
@ Alan
Shakespeare’s [i]death[/i] day if I’m not mistaken. Every year we are hammered with that fact and also that is also the day of Cervantes’ death.
What they don’t usually mention is that while Miguel and William died on the same [i]date[/i] they did not die on the same [i]day[/i], since at the time England had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar officially while Spain had, so Apr 23 in England was not the same day as Apr 23 in Spain.
(re patron saint – actually St. George is the patron saint of Catalonia, together with Our Lady of Montserrat. The patron saints of the city of Barcelona are Our Lady of the Mercy, St. Eulalia, St. Madrona and St. Severus)
Grrr. I again tried to use in a forum the formatting tags of another. Okay, asume all that [i][/i] nonsense makes words into italics.
HAH HAH there’s so much wrong with this sentence – the master of quitting through bankruptcy when the going gets tough being a master negotiator; Trump being able to “negotiate” with anyone who isn’t weaker than he is; Trump being capable of playing hardball with people he admires; “kung-fu” being the appropriate response to the international political order; Trump knowing any “kung-fu” in the first place, or knowing anything at all – that I can’t respond with anything other than laughter.
One of many reasons why re-defining racism as institutional power, and excluding non-institutional racial bigotry from that definition, is problematic in a practical way, and why I don’t support that re-definition as a positive step toward understanding and dealing with it. The only up-side is being able to say “black people can’t be racist!” which does not outweigh the many down sides, like this one, where the language of racism is stripped away from a situation where it would otherwise apply.
PoM
Agreed
That’s an upside? I mean, I assume someone must think it is, or social justice types wouldn’t have run with it. Don’t really get it myself…
@ Axe –
Ize sorry I missed you 🙁
I was teaching all day and only saw these comments on the train on the way home this evening. Not sure if anything I said would have stopped those keyboard fingers, though…
@EJ (TOO)
It’s a pretty compelling hypothesis on the whole. I think you’d be able to see it in Aust. history, although like other histories it’s very complicated. For instance, the British categorisation of Australia as terra nullius has of course powerfully shaped our history – but did this stem from racism, or a desire to claim territory, or a combination of the two?
The Stolen Generations certainly rested on a belief that Aboriginal Australians needed to be “bred out”, but which came first, the exploitation or the beliefs that justified it?
And of course, some people (past, present, and no doubt future) simply exploit others and don’ t feel any need to justify it. But you weren’t talking about that, I don’t think.
Apologies for the rather lengthy post – lots of food for thought from your comment, and Richard Billericay’s.
@ Spaniard in the works
Ah, didn’t know that cheers.
The shift to the Gregorian calendar is an interesting topic. There’s a modern trend to assume the “Give us back our 11 days!” protests at the time was just ignorant peasants thinking time had physically vanished.
They did of course understand exactly what had happened. What they were complaining about was that because rents were paid on the traditional Quarter Days, landlords didn’t adjust for the new calendar so their tenants had paid rent for 11 days they didn’t actually get.
@Mish
Gotta put these bad boys on a leash or summat… 😛
And how would one go about sussing out the 2? Bigotry makes oppression and exploitation easier, while that same oppression makes bigotry easier. I tend not to think it matters which causes which. Attack it all, just in case. Worst possible thing for an advocate/activist to do is to neglect an aspect of fuckery as unimportant, assuming that what you feel like focusing on will fix that other stuff too. Cos, if it doesn’t, that’s on you…
The precursors of racism are neurological. Our brains have a slightly harder time identifying people who look very different from our kin as “human,” on the order of milliseconds. This may seem like a tiny amount of time but it’s certainly enough time for other neurological hardware to do things which it normally wouldn’t have time to when empathizing with people. No evidence on this, but I suspect that combating racism is all about forcing the conclusions of those other processes to shut down through conscious effort, and explicitly closing the ‘human-identification loop’ if it doesn’t close on its own. (all of that is a horrible metaphor for brain activity but i think it gets the point across)
Were medieval humans racist, and used racist beliefs to justify their behaviour? I have no idea. That empathizing-hardware in the head is both built genetically and trained through behaviour, and it’s that training component that’s in question. Given the relative uniformity of faces and phenotypes that people were exposed to when growing up then, it’s likely that the people who lived back then were less likely to include outsiders as part of the empathy in-group. That’s all just bafflegab on my part though, don’t take it as much. History is a much better thing to pay attention to for that.
@Axecalibur, I’ll take Familiarity Bias for $500. That works fine for me!
Marxism and the “There is no left wing in North America” argument is getting sort of tiring. Marx is lovely and worth reading and knowing, but he wasn’t right about everything, and no lens can explain every problem. An important trait of complex problems is that multiple lenses are needed to see the various depths clearly.
@ scildfreja
Elizabethan London was more ethnically diverse than modern London.
That’s a result of a number of factors, principally a relatively small population so the influx of migrants through trade and commerce had a bigger impact. That included a lot of people from Asia and Africa.
Funnily enough the reason we know this is that there’s a lot of contemporary writing about ‘foreigners coming over here, nicking our jobs and putting up house prices’.
Plus la change
@Alan, point taken! But when I say “growing up” it’s less “the kids you play with in the schoolyard” and more “the faces looking down at you in the bassinet”. We still don’t know a lot about the phenomenon or how it forms, mind you.
There’s a “face-recognition” spot in the brain; we know it’s there because we can put you into a PET scanner and show you pictures, and that one spot lights up any time you see a face.
When you’re looking at faces that are similar to your kin (same ‘race’), it lights up within x milliseconds. When you’re looking at faces that are dissimilar to your kin (different ‘race’), it lights up in x+t milliseconds, where t>0.
That span of t is the brain going through extra pattern-recognition to make the connection. It takes longer, since there are fewer identifiable patterns. That’s all fine and normal, and that time t gets longer the less like-a-face the image is. The same face-recognition spot can fire when looking at electrical sockets, clouds, patterns of raindrops, and burn patterns in toast, with different values for t. It’s just that in those cases, t is much greater than 0.
Just conjecture at this point, but the thinking is that the extra time t is enough time for other brain regions to do things, like goal-setting and action planning. It’s easy to imagine how that could result in some very terrible behaviour.
I’m a firm believer that it takes conscious effort to fight racism and sexism, and that requirement never really goes away. It is by an act of will that we overcome the failings of our biology in what ways we can.
@Scildfreja
Peachy!
So much preach. There’s the whole ‘got a hammer, everything’s a nail’ thing, but that’s more than just a quirky saying. The point of that phrase is to remind you to put the hammer back in the box sometimes
I don’t see it. Trump supporters have a lot of enthusiasm, but that doesn’t translate into votes.
Look at it this way: Just about every person who votes for Trump in 2016 will have voted for Romney in 2012. A lot of those people weren’t enthusiastic about Romney, but they voted for him anyway, because it was the only path to “getting that [N-word] out of the White House”. They’re a lot more enthusiastic about voting for Trump, but they still only get one vote each.
Meanwhile, a lot of Center-Right Republicans who voted for Romney in 2012 are going to vote for Clinton in 2016. They’re not enthusiastic about it at all, but its the only path to preventing Trump from crashing the economy and turning the country into a nightmarish dystopia where the living would envy the dead.
On the Democratic side – there’s very little policy difference between Obama in 2012 and Clinton in 2016. Clinton is less popular and this is costing her some votes, but we’re not seeing evidence of the sort of widespread defection that Trump is getting.
Taking all that together, it’s almost certain that we’re going to see a Democratic victory in 2016 that’s wider than the 4% margin from 2012. The polls are currently showing a margin of 7-8%.
The whole “familiarity bias” thing (which I’m not sure if its’ 100% the best term to use for it, but it’s got enough legs to cover the phenomenon) is an important one. It’s the reason why MRA’s blame wimmins for everything. They feel that men are always under attack because they see evidence for women getting “a better deal” everywhere, and they interpret what’s actually just slightly-better-than-miserable treatment to be favouritism because the men-are-always-under-attack heuristic is highly available… because they see it everywhere. It’s very circular and self-reinforcing, and it’s very hard to break out of. That’s exactly what our recent MISHMISHEH troll was doing.
(I am in no way saying that anyone here is victim of this – I only do that to trolls who ask for it! I am talking about this just because it’s something that we often point at misogynists about in disbelief, but it’s something that we’re all vulnerable to, and combating it is important!)
@Mech Shop,
Lol! Missed your comment. Thanks for the comedy. Over here in the real world, Trump is currently polling at around 20% odds of winning.
To put that into perspective, I looked at the history of polling to election results. The biggest upset in recent history was a spread of 5.7% between the poll numbers and the election results. That is, the candidate polled at 49% and won at 43.3% (That was Bill Clinton’s first term).
For Trump to win, he’d need to have a spread of about 30%. For those who don’t like math, that’s six times the largest spread in recent history. The polls would have to be so astronomically wrong that we would have to start questioning our understanding of basic mathematics. For someone as unliked as Trump (And he’s currently the most-hated politician ever in favorability polls) that 30% is an impossible cliff face to climb.
It ain’t gonna happen.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/9442/election-polls-accuracy-record-presidential-elections.aspx
There are two main problems I have with the argument that there is no left in the US.
First, it’s very dismissive of those of us who have done work for progressive causes. Our system makes going outside the two party system impractical if not completely futile. We’re doing the best we can and it’s insulting to shit all over us for that.
Secondly, this argument doesn’t actually accomplish anything. Even if it is true that the Democratic party isn’t truly liberal, so what? It’s what we have to work with. Accomplishing political goals is about more than just ideology. You have to be practical.
@ scildfreja
I totally get where you’re coming from. I’ve had dealings with some related work in a different field. All to do with OODA loops and Hick’s Law.
As to your main point, that cropped up at a criminology seminar about the perils of identification evidence. We also looked at the “All (not me) people look alike” cliché/phenomenon.
(Weirdly we got discussing about whether wearing a pair of pants as a hat would make ID difficult and then later someone robbed a building society doing just that!)
@Virgin Mary
You know who else spend all day beating their chests about ideological purity instead of, y’know, actually doing anything useful? MRAs. There’s not that much difference between your annoying-ass hobby-horse derails and their “Smearing poop on comment sections is our activism!”
@everybody
Look, I’m sorry. I’m going to apologise for maybe some comments which were ill judged in context. As you know, I’m English. I come from a very, very white part of the country, where there are very few people of other races. I saw racism aimed at the few kids at school who were ‘different’ but I also saw this happen to disabled kids, ginger haired kids, and kids with glasses and braces. I know what bullying is, and it is exactly what Scildfreja says, ‘familiarity bias’. Is bullying overweight or skinny kids racism? No. Racism is a different kettle of fish all together. It’s usually based on unfounded cultural myths and pseudo science, like the fundamentalists and evo psych people like to use, like saying that they are closer relatied to apes, or their culture is barbaric yada yada. It’s making excuses for the way you treat people, making them out to be sub human makes you feel less bad. It’s not like you’d treat your own kin that way, is it? Same thing happens when the media try to demonise the working class, saying all people on benefit have loads of illegitimate kids, use drugs, drink, have tattoos etc. Its a convenient form of dehumanisation, which means people will vote to remove their benefits and condemn them to the poverty trap. They use the words ‘chavs’ and ‘white trash’ Same thing is happening with black people, although the history of the slave trade and the ‘biblical’ justification of it still colours a lot of mainstream beliefs. Even back on the plantation there were white ‘free men’ who were treated not much better than the slaves were. They were not victims of racism, but were still victims of an oppressive and coercive ruling class. That class we still have. It’s the class which imposes zero hour contracts and benefit sanctions. It’s the class which denies healthcare insurance for the sick, whilst they live on their hedge funds, slum rent and over seas tax dodging billions. It isn’t going to go away any time soon. Racism is a terrible thing. You know this as well as I do. The UK desperately needs a Black Lives Matter, and we need to identify the dangers of nationalism which people are walking blindfolded into, thinking they are safeguarding their “national heritage” the UKIP, BNP, EDL and Britain First. It isn’t a joke. Sorry if you think I downplayed that part. 🙁 didn’t mean to.