You might think the Alt-Right — that motley gang of Nazis, Nazi-apologists, and Nazi-apologist-apologists that has provided Donald Trump with some of his most fervent support — would be riding high right now.
Their “God Emperor” has been elected president. Traffic to their most popular websites, from Breitbart to the Daily Stormer, is soaring. The latest National Policy Institute conference, which brought hundreds of alt-righters to Washington DC this past weekend, got more attention from the mainstream media than it ever has before.
It’s that last item that’s turning into a bit of a problem — at least for those alt-rightists who like to pretend that they’re not really Nazis at all. Yesterday I posted a chilling video from the event, showing conference-organizer Richard Spencer, clearly feeling a bit chuffed by the at-right’s recent victories, crying out “hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory” to a large crowd, some of whom responded with Nazi salutes.
D’oh! They’re not supposed to be doing that in public.
And so, as the video of Spencer’s speech went viral, posted on countless news outlets and replayed on cable news, a veritable civil war erupted on the alt-right over Spencer’s words and the now infamous “Hail Trump” salutes.
Alt-right fellow traveler (and erstwhile juice seller) Mike Cernovich, clearly upset by the bad publicity the video was bringing to the movement he has hitched his star to, accused Spencer and the Nazi saluters of being secret shills trying to make the good men of the alt-right look like the Hitler-loving Nazis they so often declare themselves not to be.
“Let’s assume your goal is to normalize Nazis, which is what has been said at Richard Spencer,” Cernovich declared in a blog post with the combative title This is What Controlled Opposition Looks Like.
If you wanted to normalize being a Nazi, would you throw up an Heil Hitler in public after you invited over 100 fake news journalists to your event? Think this one through before forming an opinion.
Note: By “fake news journalists” Cernovich of course means real “news journalists.’
Why then were people at the event throwing up the HH? What tactical or strategic purpose could that possibly serve?
This is what controlled opposition looks like.
The Atlantic (and perhaps the CIA) is building up Richard’s brand, giving him millions in free PR. The fake news media ties Richard to Trump. In exchange for these goodies, Richard throws up a HH.
Damn you, The Atlantic (and perhaps the CIA)!
Cernovich was hardly the only one to cry foul.
Fantasy author and bigot extraordinaire Theodore “Vox Day” Beale didn’t go quite as far as Cernovich. But, in a post on his Vox Popoli blog, he declared the Nazi saluters “idiots” and attacked Spencer himself for being “tactically retarded.”
Beale dismissed the whole “Hail Trump” business as a “minor incident” that had been magnified by the evil mainstream media. He then offered a rather spectacularly backhanded “defense” of Spencer
No, I don’t think Richard is a federal agent or an actual controlled opposition figure,” Beale wrote, before twisting the knife a little.
I think Mike would have been more accurate to say “controllable opposition” or “dancing monkey”.
Usually when you’re defending someone you don’t call them a “dancing monkey,” but whatevs.
There was nothing actually wrong with what Richard said. … It wasn’t a big deal. But it was a foolish thing to do. The media is absolutely slavering to be able to have REAL PROOF that the Alt-Right are no-good, very-evil Nazis so that they can use it as a weapon against President-elect Trump, giving them ANYTHING is tactically retarded.
Nazi salutes in public, in full view of the media, are bad for the Trump.
It’s not about Richard. It’s about Donald Trump. If Richard is genuinely supportive of Trump, then pulling that sort of stunt was the very last thing he should have done. Making yourself the news story at the expense of the individual you are supposedly supporting and celebrating smacks of being self-serving. As Mike said, dress up like a Nazi, speak bad German and wear a swastika armband if you want, just leave Trump out of it.
Richard has failed to learn the lesson of #GamerGate and the principles of 4GW. He wants to be the media-anointed leader of the Alt-Right because he believes, wrongly, that this will help him achieve his objectives. It won’t. As Mike and I have both noted, the media elevates fringe figures to “leadership” specifically in order to attack the movement through them.
Oh, but Beale isn’t jealous of the attention Spencer has been getting. Ha! As if! So not jealous.
I am not opposed to Richard or jealous of Richard, nor do I want the attention he is receiving. I rather like him, I simply don’t think he understands that the media intends for him to become a David Duke figure, a weapon available for deployment against any politician or program that he nominally supports.
Yes, how terrible it is that the media compares people with basically the same views as David Duke to … David Duke!
On VDare.com, meanwhile, anti-immigrant crusader Peter Brimelow attacked the saluters, declaring that their “juvenile bravado undercut NPI’s conference triumph, the cause of immigration patriotism, and VDARE.com.”
But Brimelow somehow managed to blame not them but the media and the anti-anti-immigrant left, noting unhappily that fans of his website “came up to me in consternation” after
Spencer concluded his emotional defense of whites with the words, apparently extemporized: “Hail Trump! Hail Our People! Hail Victory!” He got a standing ovation, but several in the crowd added Nazi salutes. We had been assured that the press had been excluded but experience has taught this cannot be relied upon.
Damn those reporters for … actually reporting!
Also, leftists and the media were also responsible for the Nazi salutes themselves — by unfairly smearing totally not racist anti-immigration crusaders like himself. “[T]his continued vilification,” Brimelow sniffed,
has resulted a younger generation of Americans who, 71 years after the end of World War II, are clearly indifferent to accusations of Nazism, even if just out of bravado. This, too, is the fault of the Left and the gatekeepers of our public debate.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it, I guess. One bizarre, wrong way.
The unlovely and untalented Matt Forney offered a somewhat less backhanded defense of Spencer and his fans’ “Roman salutes.”
While Mike Cernovich recently accused Spencer and NPI of being controlled opposition due to several of the attendees jokingly making Roman salutes at the end of the conference, I have to pour cold water on this notion. The alt-Right is increasingly driven by young men who enjoy trolling for trolling’s sake and getting a rise out of the normies.
IT WAS ALL A JOKE HA HA HA HOW could anyone think that a bunch of people who walk like Hitler, talk like Hitler and salute like Hitler could actually have anything to do with Hitler.
Hell, our nametags even had pictures of Pepe the Frog on them.
PEPE THE FROG. Q.E.D.
While I can see why Cernovich might think the stunt was dumb, it wasn’t motivated by anything other than a desire to offend the MSM’s sensibilities. There are certainly feds who have infiltrated the alt-Right—he’s right to warn us on that front—but Spencer and NPI aren’t among them.
An even stranger, er, analysis of the whole kerfuffle comes from the farther reaches of Anton Lavey cosplayer and skull enthusiast Davis Aurini.
Vox Day corrects some of the wilder claims made by Cernovich (it is unlikely that Richard Spencer is a government plant; his hair is too fabulous), but the thrust of the argument remains. We have been using the tactics of the underdog for some time now. As many have noted, we’re the new anti-establishment hippies … but we’re no longer the underdog – and if we continue to use underdog tactics, we will become no different than the neo-hippies whom we are in the process of replacing. We will continue to fight the last war, and we will lose as certainly as Hitler’s Germany did, paving the way for the destruction of our own people.
So is he suggesting that the main problem with Hitler is that he lost? Who knows.
We cannot hope to get anywhere if we continue to be reactionary. The way to crush the Left isn’t to fight them; then we merely become them. The way to crush the left is to return to the upward pull, to build a civilization which glorifies God and which has earned the Mandate of Heaven. To strive for perfection while forgiving imperfection, rather than defining perfection as whatever we are already, while attacking those who are unlike us.
I’m sorry, I dozed off for a minute there.
What of the man at the center of this alt-hurricane? Richard Spencer is taking the Forney Way, declaring that it was all just one big hilarious joke.
“There’s an ironic exuberance to it all,” Spencer told NBC news. “I think that’s … one of the things that makes the alt-right fun, is that we’re willing to do things that are a bit cheeky.”
SO CHEEKY.
Here’s that video again. I don’t know about you, but I’m having a hard time seeing anything he said as “cheeky” or “ironic,” much less “fun.”
Who are you going to believe, Spencer — or your lying eyes?
Pro-tip: if you don’t want to be seen as a Nazi sympathizer, try not saying things like this:
NO. Definitely don’t do that.
I am sick to high fucking heaven of the “boys will be boys” excuse for shitty behaviour. He wasn’t just joking around despite the goddamn Pepe nametags; parading around in a nazi uniform is always a political statement; it isn’t just “getting a rise out of the normies”. When expressed by the assholes in the red armbands, the excuse is another way to say bow your head, and when expressed by everyone else it’s goddamn cowardice. Sick to high heaven of it.
@Axe
I actually had someone respond to trans friend’s journal about transphobia with a statement that they needed to “have an open mind” about the issue, then linked to three separate TERF blogs devoted to delegitimizing trans identity and stalking/harassing trans people. Pseudo-skepticism makes discourse impossible. Apparently one can only be “open minded” if one agrees with the same intolerance that exists in tradition, rather than thinking for oneself and forming opinions based on the evidence at hand. Of course, “thinking for yourself” is also twisted by these pseudo-skeptics into “if you don’t agree with me, you’re a sheep” – quite the irony, that.
Hate to say it, Dan, but the entire Warhammer universe is basically Nazi-fiction-wet-dream. They’re not so much appropriating as they are expressing the sentiments of that setting into the modern day.
EDIT: I have a lot of feelings and thoughts on the pseudo-rationality so commonly seen on the internets (and which I fear about my own far too much). I should write on that sometime.
@Dan Kasteray
Totally Warhammer-illiterate here so the whole “God Emperor” thing I always interpreted as a nod to ancient Egypt and pharaohs who were thought to be gods as well as rulers (and, y’know, slavers).
… when you think about it, the alt-right mythos probably evolved like that, something like Warhammer -> Ancient Egypt -> Kek. Seriously, these guys are a mess.
It’s more like “Warhammer > Warcraft > WoW > kek > Kek”
“Getting a rise” is a funny way of saying, “threatening”.
@Scildfreja:
You could write for days just starting with two words:
Less. Wrong.
(Given the field you work in, I hope I’m not opening up the floodgates too widely by even referring to Yudkowsky’s … sometimes unique take on ‘rationality’.)
I wish I could say this sort of thing was unthinkable in Germany, but it’s not – we have a fair number of neo-Nazis and adjacent types, although they have to tiptoe around bans on swastikas, salutes etc. in public. (Here’s alleged “right-wing populist” Björn Höcke, for instance.)
What horrifies me (but again, we have the same problem in Germany when it comes to media talking about the AfD and Pegida) is the “on the one hand, but then again on the other hand” kind of reporting. Calling Nazis “the alt right” helps normalise them. Treating their bigotry as ideas to be debated helps them. There’s a 1931 poem by German author and antifascist Kurt Tucholsky that makes the point rather eloquently.
(Sorry for the double post – ran out of editing time)
The “dark humor and irony” dodge is similarly a non-starter – even “ironic” promotion of racist, Nazi, and misogynist imagery, terminology, and ideology is still promotion. It normalizes the worst facets of humanity and gives a perceived consensus to the people who actually adhere to those positions, who are now emboldened both by the apparent solidarity and by the reinforced ability to claim that they’re just joking and that their detractors need to grow a sense of humor, even as they openly support negative action against other people. It muddies the waters to the point where it’s not simple – if even possible – to tell the “trolls” from the advocates. As a saying in my family goes, “there’s too much mayonnaise in this Poeslaw”.
I used to be one of those “ironic Nazi” types when I was in high school, cracking Holocaust jokes and giving the salute among my friends, thinking that it was OK as long as I wasn’t “actually” racist. Then one of my friends started honestly and unironically talking about how Hitler had some good ideas about national purity and openly dropping racial vulgarities. I, at fourteen years old (long story, but I started high school early), understood then that I was helping this person believe that there were more people that actually agreed with his racist position, and was shocked out of the behavior. Maybe I was lucky that places like /pol/ didn’t exist at the time, where I wasn’t in an echo chamber that reinforced the idea that I was still OK because I wasn’t personally doing anything to other people (and even if I was, if something bad happened it was the victim’s fault), where people continually told me that as long as I say I’m joking it’s all OK. I’m not looking for adulation for not being an asshole anymore – I’m just trying to figure out what the excuse is for everyone else.
@Jack
Right?
@Margot
In every country I suspect…
@Hawk
That sucks. Sorry about your friend. People who tell others to consider the ‘other side’ never stop to think maybe we have. And we decided it was bullshit. The underlying assumption of the ‘openminded’ is that you’re wrong, they’re correct, and you’d be able to accept their truth if only you listened/stopped being so uppity
This German Canadian thinks they’re all a bunch of fuckin’ Scheißköpfe. All of them, from pretentious Spencer through to schmucky Matty.
I mean, to still believe in an outdated and thoroughly discredited ideology like theirs, they’d HAVE to be shitheads. And to assume that a Silent Majority™ secretly shares it, and to be flabbergasted when it turns out that the vaunted Silent Majority™ doesn’t exist? Shitheadfuckery off the charts.
Just as in Adolf Hitler’s day, when dissent was not tolerated, and the real silent majority were like “Hell no, this is NOT us…now what the fuck do we do?” — THAT is how actual Germans feel about this. We’re not making ready to hail the new Hitler; we’re all palming our collective faces and groaning “Oh no, NOT AGAIN!”
Does that answer the question?
At this point, I think Ramsay Bolton and Negan would be the more likely role models of the Trumpkins.
That video was actually the first time I ever heard someone say the world ‘cuck’ for realsies. It was very off-putting.
For the time period (hell, for ANY time period) the T.Z. had a LOT of very cerebral and very politically involved think pieces. “He’s Alive” was, indeed, a goodie. Lots of T.Z.’s featured analysis of where the mob goes when people get together to be afraid.
p.s., Dennis Hopper, along with Bruce Dern, a couple of the GREAT “unbalanced bad guy” actors (and the queen, Hudson Leick as Callisto on “Xena”)
p.p.s., it’s incredible how MANY Hollywood biggies got their early exposure on Twilight Zone!
This is what scares me about these people: no matter how much they might in-fight, squabble and scream at each other, the ultimate blame is ALWAYS on The Left, The Elite, The Media, The Jews, The Women, The Gays, The Other.
Anytime someone crosses the line, It’s the fault of the left. Someone being harassed? It’s their fault for being sensitive. A hate crime was committed? False flag. Someone was caught on tape? Blame the media.
No matter how bad it gets, blame will be shifted back to their enemies to justify their actions.
Yeah because clearly the guy who came up and coined the term “Alt-right” is a shill.
Worst part is, Theodore and Mike are not even objecting to the views, they’re just objecting to the fact that their buddies were caught on tape.
Also, “tolerance”. Always had a huge problem with that word, and that was before. Now ? We’re asked to tolerate nazis. Right. At least the word is appropriate this time ?
@Dan: Funny you mention that:
#NotMyGodEmperor: Why Are There So Many Actual Fascists in the Warhammer 40K Fandom?
@Jenora Feuer
http://derpicdn.net/img/2015/5/20/900575/medium.gif
n-no idea what you’re talking about! a-ha-ha-ha, no, really, haven’t the slightest…
@Nequam, that’s a wonderful article. Especially:
Rugbyyogi already mentioned this, but it bears repeating:
http://crooksandliars.com/files/imagecache/node_teaser/primary_image/16/11/richard_spencerg_are_jews_people.jpg
Mr Spencer, is this also just kidding around, trying to get a rise, being cheeky?
I has a bad mood – some USians on Facebook were downplaying the Trump-alt right connections, and telling me to shut up because Australia is (a) far away from the US, and (b) light years behind it culturally and politically. They claim the whole alt-right thing is made up by the liberal media. Gah.
Speaking of the beast eating itself, here goes :
Trumpkins aren’t happy Hillary isn’t in jail yet.
It’s a gift that just keeps on giving, huh ? 😐
@Mish
Guess you didn’t get the memo that the US is now officially the peak of civilisation and the rest of us need to shut up and know our place.
Meh.
And here’s some music to get rid of the angries.
Using the word “golem” (and ungrammatically, not “golems”) to insult Jews with…
http://media.tumblr.com/74e91ec9a6e8571ade4580a5412afe91/tumblr_inline_n46d8mTKCs1qcxesa.gif
@Nequam
Yeah when I read that I tough ‘Wait,isn’t the golem a Jewish legend?”. If I recall the Golem was a mythical defender of the Jewish people so using it as insult is more horrible.