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.
You know, I come from a very white part of California. I knew maybe 3 black kids and 2 Asian kids. Maybe a Middle Eastern dude? I think maybe 10% of the school population of Latinx and/or Hispanic. Overwhelmingly white ass part of California, a red county, faded Bush/Cheney and Romney/Ryan stickers on a bunch of bumpers.
That doesn’t give me an excuse to think classism is the only variable to oppression, especially when I’ve been told, time and time again, that it’s not, especially when I have experienced shit that doesn’t have to do with the fact that I’m poor.
So, I don’t care what excuses you’re making, I don’t care if you don’t understand, what you think is really oppressing people is just a thread in the tapestry of oppression. Which is a terrible metaphor I know but that isn’t the point.
Listen to people that have different experiences from you, because your experience is only a tiny part of the experience humans have.
@handsome jack
Ok, Handsome Jack.
We are all here to learn. I’m sorry I was a bit arrogant.
I see your point, and I agree with what you are saying.
Citation fucking needed. I would definitely like to see evidence that white workers were routinely whipped, tortured, raped and otherwise sexually exploited, chased down and returned if they tried to escape, occasionally outright murdered, and forced to work for zero wages.
Yes, show me a citation for that, or stop talking about slavery.
It was Southern propaganda that white workers in the North had it worse than black slaves. Almost 200 years later you, a Marxist, are spreading the propaganda written by white slaveholders – propaganda written by that “oppressive ruling class” that you think is the root of all evil – without any irony. Sit on that for a few minutes.
@Virgin Mary
I’m happy to hear that. I know it might take a bit to understand, but do you best to take in consideration everyone’s view point. Maybe do a little research about things exclusively about racism, sexism, whatever, take time to read stuff about intersectionality, and then you’ll have even better tools on how to dismantle the shit system. The shitstem.
…IDK what I’m saying anymore. I’m just trying to defuse a situation with humor at this point.
Shitstem.
For real.
Anyway, one step at a time, bud.
@PoM
Yeah, I was actually going to address that but, like…I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the energy.
Just, like, take into consideration other people’s views, that’s it. Just do that.
First stop is Black Boy by Richard Wright.
@The Handsomest Jack, you say it best as always. Intersectionality is quite a puzzle, but it really digs into the core of how to understand the world.
When I was looking more into the atheist community, I was always irked by one of the arguments often leveled at believers – that the things in the bible contradicted their real-world behaviour. The idea that the believers followed mutually contradictory beliefs, while the non-believers had a single unified perception of the world that was free of those contradictions.
That claim always sat poorly with me because science is jam-packed with mutually contradicting models of the world. Each one describes a slice of reality very well, and is terrible at describing anything else. These atheists were (and are) claiming that their perception was universally applicable and entirely infallible. That’s comically wrong.
Intersectionality, in my mind, is one of the best signs of a mature, realistic philosophy. It acknowledges that any one perspective has limits, and that reality can only be triangulated by way of examination from multiple perspectives. Gender relations is one. Race relations is another. Class relations is a third. Only by taking in all of these conflicting descriptions and examining how they intersect can we hope to approach real truth. Doing so while not declaring one perspective to be the highest is also very important. The key with integrating conflicting models is knowing when and how each is used, and not in hierarchical stratification.
Got a bit more wordy than I had wanted in that, but that’s what I’m thinking on it, anyways! Class struggle is an important part, but it’s far from the only useful interpretation. They’re all useful.
@Mary
Wooow… That is the most atrocious apology…
1)there’s no “maybe” about this. You did, definitely, say some stupid, inconsiderate things. That happened. “Maybe” means you’re saying… What? That PoM, Jack, and them invented this? That they’re overreacting? What does “maybe” mean? What’s with the casting doubt? Cos that’s some low key gaslight shit
2)so it’s their fault for judging what you said? Not that you said it, but that they got the “context” wrong? You felt the need to apologize, but it totally wasn’t your failing. Basically, you’re pulling an ‘I’m sorry you took this the wrong way’
Like, the others can get into whatever else if they want. I’m just so tired of these weak ass apologies from people. As if pantomiming contrition is the same as actually being sorry. Maybe you are actually sorry but aren’t good a showing it. I can buy that. But that means you need to learn how
Now I kinda feel bad for picking on Mary. I’m not wrong, and she did say that shit. But, like… *gale force sigh*
@Handsome Jack,
@axe
Ok. Sorry.
@pom
I did not say that white workers in the North had it worse than black slaves in the south. Nothing of the sort. What, do you think that I believe the Disney horse shit that black slaves were all singing and dancing in the fields? Also, I didn’t say that I believed any movie was a document of real life, documentaries too are subject to distortions and fictions. I do think that black women were treated appallingly, especially the ones used for sex by white men. How do you think they treated the children from these relationships? If you are from the USA you have probably been better educated on this in reality than I have. We were taught very little about black history and civil rights. Most of what I know has been from documentaries and movies. I am very happy to be corrected if I get things wrong.
@Virgin Mary
I was the one who said not to use movies as sources of information, specifically movies based on a true story. Documentaries are a-okay. Regular movies based on a true story are not, because as I said before, they’re made to be entertaining first and truthful second. They exaggerated and add shit to make things more dramatic than what they really were, or even to vilify certain people which do not deserve vilifications or make people sympathetic which really weren’t.
Movies based on a true story are gross, from Rudy to Gandhi. Read actual biographies and autobiographies. They may not be 100% accurate but way more than some third-party making things not as they were for the Oscars.
EDIT: ALSO they’re often made with a certain agenda. At least get different sources and stuff. Getting three different viewpoints that all conflict is better than one that you think is right.
I suspect the message of the Alt Right upsets a lot of people because it invokes what terror management theorists in psychology call “mortality salience,” namely, reminders of vulnerability, failure and death. Look up terror management theory and see the experimental support it has – you will see human behavior in a new light once you absorb the theory’s implications.
Specifically, people have finally started to wake up from the make-believe world of the Radical Enlightenment in the 18th Century. This sweeping social experiment – based on pseudoscience about equality, democracy, feminism, human fungibility, the mind as a blank slate, cosmopolitanism, borderlessness, mass immigration, miscegenation and trying to erase the biological distinctions between men and women – has come crashing down around us because it conflicts with man’s nature. “Social progress” can never happen because human nature doesn’t change; and “social justice” remains forever beyond reach because society’s losers, misfits, kooks, weaklings, defectives, scolds, utopians and degenerates have conflicting grievances that they can’t reconcile, especially when it comes to dividing up the shrinking pile of spoils produced by generations of white people’s labor.
In other words, the Alt Right has rediscovered and articulated for our generation the essential tragedy of the human condition. It has become the voice of wisdom and maturity in a world full of delusions that we can no longer sustain. I have my doubts as to whether Donald Trump has really stumbled across this perspective, much less that he knows what to do with it. But thanks to the inadvertent attention he has drawn to the Alt Right, American politics in the 2020’s could look radically different from the nonsense that has damaged the United States for the past few generations.
@handsome jack
I take your point. Most documentaries and dramas are manipulated depending on the TV channel showing them and what political agenda they are trying to promote. I know that. Books as well, you can’t even trust ‘autobiographies’ because most of them are ghostwritten. History gets rewritten pretty much every single year, according to who’s telling the story, and the political climate at the time. I had a similar conversation a few days ago IRL with a friend of mine who is at least ten years younger than me. He was saying that when he was at school, he was always taught how great the British Empire was and to respect the monarchy. He also said his teachers were in favour of attacking Iraq and also using Trident as a nuclear deterrent, and were eager to justify Hiroshima because of Pearl Harbour. When I was at school, it was pretty different. I had two different history teachers who supported CND and were anti war, and an RE teacher who taught about the holocaust as ‘never again’, I remember his lessons being particularly harrowing. I don’t know what they thought about the monarchy, it never came up other than a cursory checklist of the Kings and queens from the Plantagenets to the Windsors. I do remember being taught at school that trickle down works. And told horror stories about how AIDS is spread and I might catch it from a toilet seat. And that people actually believed that blue M&Ms cause cancer. Maybe the next bunch of kids will get taught how great Maggie was and how she saved the economy? But that’s it, different folk write the history books, different folk make the movies. There will always be revisionism. It’s quite worrying how much we take things to be true which are based on opinions and propaganda, or just pure drama, as everything outside our own experience is second hand, and someone else’s perception of the event.
And they have a lovely habit of replacing every potential character with copy-paste cishet white American dudes. I mean, yeah, all movies do, but there’s a unique surreality to – for example – optioning the true story of a group of Asian people and making all the good guys whiter than me. By that point, what’s the… Erm… Point.
@SFHC
They put a white dude in Stonewall that didn’t exist and downplayed if not completely removed all the trans, bi and people of color.
The Stonewall Riot and modern queer movement was started by two trans women of color and they completely ignored that story for a fucking white boy.
I. Hate. Movies. Based. On. Real. Stories.
Didn’t the director of that Stonewall monstrosity justify the white guy OC with some version of the classic “I thought the audience needed someone they could relate to,” aka “white cis dudes are the default human and default humans cannot possibly relate to the mysterious Other”?
(Netflix keeps trying to recommend that movie to me, by the way. “You’ll rate it 4.5 stars!!” it insists. No.)
@Viscaria
I think so, I think I remember that. If it isn’t, I’d be surprised because that’s the excuse of every fucking movie ever.
@Viscaria
Yep. And when that excuse didn’t fly, he tried a worse one ripped straight from Stormfront. (Don’t click that without a barf bag handy.)
http://img.pandawhale.com/108289-James-Franco-fuck-that-dude-gi-79MN.gif
I read somewhere that Roland Emmerich wanted to adapt Asimov’s Foundation books. I wish for no.
I hate movies based on true stories when the whole point of the movie is ‘look at this true story. Totally happened. Sorta. We’re too stupid and/or lazy to come up with an original pitch. Give us money/awards’. Or, as in the case of Stonewall, ‘gays exist right? Let’s make a movie to get that gay money’ (and the direction and cinematography on that looked like ass from the second the trailer started)
If they’re gonna be inaccurate anyway, at least do something interesting with it. Wolf of Wall Street, Pain and Gain, 12 Years a Slave, Margin Call, The Devil’s Double (people wonder why I have a man crush on Dominic Cooper), Argo, I Love You Philip Morris, etc. Thanks Wikipedia!
Not for everyone, but I got the sense that the ‘true story’ was a stepping off point for those movies. I’ll just not use them as scholarly sources 🙂
I haven’t seen Wolf of Wall Street, but my coworkers in India are huge Leonardo DiCaprio fans, and after that movie came out they had a lot of questions about the US housing market in the 2000’s. It sounded like the movie got a lot of that stuff right, at least.
Nothing of the sort?
Maybe you need to define what you mean by “not much better” then. What is “not much better” than the things I listed? I’m interested in what you think constitutes the “not much better” treatment delivered unto white workers.
No, you did not literally say anything about white workers in the North, but that’s the story you’re distorting by setting it on the plantations instead.
@ WWTH
I’m not sure how well Foundation would work as a modern movie; for all sorts of reasons.
Have you heard this though? If not you might enjoy:
https://archive.org/details/IsaacAsimov-TheFoundationTrilogy