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?
@sillybill: Yeah, it’s a Dune Reference. WH40K cheerfully steals from/references a whoooole lotta stuff.
I basically just play with my friend who beats my ass all the time. He’s busy with the new Warhammer RTS game, so I’m hoping that he gets rusty at Dawn of War so maybe, MAYBE, I beat him for once.
The thing about Yudkowsky’s ideas (and singularity stuff more generally) is that they can easily be used to promote a society based on extreme inequality. If you achieve the singularity through a fascist movement taking control of society, the short-term morality doesn’t really matter. Of course, anyone who opposes that movement can be crushed. Trump as God-Emperor of Mankind isn’t that far off from what some people actually believe.
@Troubelle,
VR! thanks for that.
@Jesalin
The worst part is that these people seem to think that they’re the vanguard of new thought, rather than simply finding “new” (read: new-to-them) justifications for the same marginalization that minority groups have endured for centuries. Even if you point out the factual problems with their assertions, they’ll claim the point still stands and that you’re nitpicking, even if the fact you refute is the entirety of their argument.
Re: God Emperors
As a rabid Dune fanboy, my God Emperor is better than yours. He saved an entire planet’s ecosystem from anthropocentric accommodation, ended cloistered theocratic control of the galaxy, and literally bred his own resistance so that he would be overthrown when his people were ready to live without him. If I had to pick a horrible, indefensible tyrant to live under, I’d go with Leto II any day. May his passing cleanse the galaxy.
That’s some good mothering right there. Now come to think of it, I don’t remember my mother ever saying I was too young for anything. She saw me playing GTA around age 11 and simply joked about her relief that I wasn’t gonna start driving IRL anytime soon anyway.
(Disclaimer : I decided to not get a driver’s license for a number of reasons, one being the regular substance abuse, and another being that even sober I’m way too prone to attention lapses.)
Like Jack’s mother, she didn’t really know what was in the games I picked until after I’d played them and told her about them. But she never said anything in the line of “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have”. Then again she lent me a bunch of Grangé books when I was a teenager, and those she had actually read beforehand. That even became part of her reasoning regarding games.
But then it’s a special case I guess, because she’s always been extremely trusting of how I felt on matters that concerned only me. And I’ve been a pretty vocal pacifist from a very young age, so that certainly helped.
@Troubelle
I’ve only ever played one Warhammer video game but from what I remember it was pretty tame (also pretty bad, but it wasn’t one of the RTS, also I don’t really like the Warhammer aesthetic and that’s certainly one of the main reasons I didn’t like the game itself).
But if you’ve played Bioshock, there’s no reason (that I’m aware of) that Warhammer should be considered “worse”, so maybe try telling your father that ?
(Second disclaimer : I don’t have kids, and if my 4 yr old niece is any indication, I probably shouldn’t be legally allowed to voice any sort of parenting advice or opinion. Her mother accuses me of trying to turn her into a viking.)
@Mish
’tis part of my super-seekrit trove of soothing miziq. This one‘s on top of the list. I feel that sort of stuff is essential right now o_o
Isn’t the 40k God Emperor a reluctant one? Like he was wounded during a rebellion and was dying but instead of letting him die his followers stuck him a life support unit and kept him alive over the centuries by force feeding him the souls of physics? Now he’s more like a catatonic figure head who wants to die?
@leftwingfox
yeah the new box set looks pretty sweet. They uped the scale of the figures so they’re more 30mm scale and a lot of the old cardboard pieces have been replaced with plastic ones. here is a video of the official unboxing if you’re interested
I watched playthroughs with Jude (my boy) beforehand and we often play the games together, or I chill on the couch and watch him. Sinkable John already knows I’m a terrible parent who will fake sickies so we can stay home and play Terraria.
@Handsome Jack, I apologise. Hadn’t read (or didn’t remember) your previous comments on your mum, so I misunderstood what you said. My bad.
@John, yay, thanks for more music. I needs a break from sad Nick Cave and sad Leonard Cohen, and this is just the ticket. btw, what’s wrong with turning someone into a viking???
The only piece of media I remember my parents not letting me watch was Silence of the Lambs. I was 10 or 11 when it came out. I’m not sure why that one in particular because I watched tons of slasher movies. They also had no problem with the fact that I’d watched Rocky Horror enough that I’d memorized the audience participation lines. Back in my day kid inappropriate video games weren’t so much of a thing.
Why hasn’t Matt Furie sued these guys for copyright infringement yet?
Yeah, this movement’s days are numbered. Many of the guys who were supporting it only thought it was trendy or edgy, and soon they’ll move on to the next fad (just like how some of them were previously Occupiers, or tea partiers, or Ron Paul people, or all of the above). As for the “true believers”, they will end up turning on Donald Trump (and each other). Already some of them are calling him controlled opposition, since if he wasn’t, he never would have won according to their logic.
And of course there’s always the possibility of another Morris Dees coming along and suing their pants off. They’ve certainly done a lot of legally actionable things (copyright infringement in their memes, libel such as promoting the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, and possibly inciting violence). The KKK never recovered from Dees’ lawsuit. I doubt Spencer or Anglin’s empires would either.
What’s all this talk of pizza?
@Sinkable John
Perhaps I could get him and the cousins to talk about it….
@Fabe
That’s my understanding of the God-Emperor’s situation, roughly.
@Mish
I don’t know D:
Might be when I taught her how to toast, when she was 2. She smashed a few people’s glasses with her plastic baby bottle while trying to get the hang of it. Also she did it while yelling “BWAAAAAAGH !!” and I didn’t teach her that part, so it was innate and totally not my fault.
She also loves punk rock. First time she ever heard some, you could’ve mistaken her for a grizzled mosh pit veteran with a few pints in them. I didn’t teach her that either. She nearly tore down the wall between this room and the one where I sleep. Nowadays she regularly comes up here asking for breton punk, especially this song.
You’ll notice that all of the awesome there comes from her, I just gave her a few nudges without knowing what would happen. Dunno why her mother’s upset with me.
@Hu’s On First
I wouldn’t be that optimistic. It’s the kind of beast that just never dies. Sure, individuals can move on (although most don’t, for reasons which a few ex-nazi friends* of mine could explain better than I can) but the movements themselves tend to stay for a long time, even though the structures change over time. It’s kinda hard to tell how long the alt-right iteration will last : normally I’d say “probably a long time” but this century is still relatively new territory and so far similar movements have faded pretty quickly, so there’s really no way to know. But you can be sure Anglin and Spencer at least are here to stay : they’ve got an audience and that’s all they really need.
As for fascism itself… well, you might wanna read Albert Camus’ The Plague. I read it a good ten years ago and the last page has stuck with me since then – and now that last page feels so fucking relevant it hurts.
Sure, the beast is eating itself right now, but it doesn’t mean it’s gonna die anytime soon. It never really goes away either, it’s always there – it sleeps in your clothes, in your furniture and papers, in your bedsheets, if I remember that epilogue right.
@Troubelle
Hey, good luck with that then :p
For the ultimate bar-setter, try asking about Metal Gear Solid V. You can go through that, you can go through anything.
(for real though, don’t, unless you don’t mind risking spending a few nights with your eyes open incessantly asking WHY)
(great game though)
(but it’s got flaws)
(but mostly, WHYYYYY)
Can I rant? Please can I rant? I just watched the entire “It’s Alive” episode and then I read this and I want to rant.
MY mother wouldn’t let me watch Star Wars when it came out. I was in elementary school. I was the only kid who hadn’t seen it. She asked my older cousins and they said it would ‘scare’ me.
When I finally DID see it. I was all like, FUCK YOU.
Especially when you let me watch shit like this when it was on network TV (all the trigger warnings for childhood nightmares: fire, clowns, dolls). This…still nightmares…gulp. And not just let…it was our “let’s all sit down as a family and watch Love Boat and Fantasy Island!” night!
(posting link, not embedding, because who knows what horrible still is on the thing–it’s from Fantasy Island)
(sorry about that, but thank you…so cathartic to say it out loud)
It’s been like a year of lurking, and it’s 40k that compels me to comment again? I feel like that’s a black mark on my life’s report card. Pls for to not tell the parental units.
Anyway, 40k’s lore is all over the place b/c it’s constantly being rewritten, and the in-house policy for writers boils down to, “Each writer has their own take on the universe.” The IP’s owner doesn’t t maintain a strict guide on tone or detail, so you get a lot of … unevenness in the setting. The end result is that some writers are like, “Emperor, f— yeah!” and others are like, “This setting is a literal nightmare.”
Anyway, yeah, the emperor is (mostly) a corpse on a giant, unfixable machine; he’s kept in some semblance of life partly by said machine and partly through the constant sacrifice of literally thousands of psychic humans (who manifest their power at random, not through choice). He’s important because his existence enables faster-than-light travel, and the Imperium of Man – the only stable, large-scale power left in the galaxy – would collapse (or severely shrink, at the least) if he’s not around to maintain it. It’s more involved than that, of course, but delve into the background at your own peril (OF THE WARP).
… um, anyway, whether he’s a reluctant leader or not varies depending on the various writers. The empire is now dogmatic and unreasonably strict, while in his heyday, 10,000 years prior, he envisioned himself as an exemplar of rationality and peace – but he was also a deeply flawed character who made many questionable choices. It’s basically pulp that’s been augmented by nearly 40 years of writing, to the point that you can get what you want from the setting in terms of tone and theme.
and…doh…it embeds on its own…so sorry.
The other thing to keep in mind about the Warhammer40K is that the setting started as a wargame, and the basic goal of the setting design is that a)there are a lot of heavily armed factions, and b)Cease-fires don’t exist, let alone peace treaties. It’s not important that any of the sides be sympathetic, it’s important that they’re all at war with each other and bring different sets of weapons and abilities to the fight.
@Sinkable John
I’ve done some pretty screwed-up things on my own time, though visualizing them yields mixed results. I think we have The Phantom Pain in the house, however….and I think he’s let my younger siblings see snippets? (Mind that me and both my sisters are considered advanced for our age, and I’m pretty sure he’s let us all see The Matrix at least by now.)
On me making up my own weird shit: I have yet to find and retain an RP partner who is willing to put up with me at my most fucked-up and match me.
@Mish
Regarding Spencer and the golem thing (Not worked out how to quote someone yet):
The full text of his remarks on that was:
“This was the year when random shitlords on Twitter, anonymous podcast hosts, and dissidents working deep within the Beltway Right proved that they objectively understood politics better than the Republican strategists and the political consultants snarking at us every night on MSNBC. It’s not just that they are leftists and cucks. It’s not just that many are genuinely stupid. Indeed one wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem animated by some dark power to repeat whatever talking point John Oliver stated the night before.”
Which is, to my mind, far , far worse. Jew hate front and center (why golem, otherwise? There are plenty of other, more mainstream soulless beings animated by a dark power.) yet given a fig leaf of respectability.
@Dalillama:
Good point.
When I was a teenager and began reading the Warhammer 40,000 fluff (I couldn’t afford enough models to really play) it was pretty evident even to the teenaged me that it wasn’t taken seriously by the writers. It was over-the-top absurdism for its own sake, a typically British piss-taking response to the oversaturated brutality of 1980s sci-fi and the overdone darkness of the 1990s. People fly between the stars in hyperadvanced spacecraft, then descend to the surface in order to bludgeon one another with chainsaw-swords. That’s laugh-out-loud funny.
Nowadays, it seems as if they’ve forgotten that this was intentionally absurd, and are playing it straight. As a fan of absurdist comedy, this saddens me.
Is it bad that i only know who is anton lavey, because of david comparing davis aurini to him? I feel bad for anton lavey…?
@Sinkable John:
http://acmedia.objects-us-west-1.dream.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/viking-kids-sometimes-it-takes-a-child-to-raze-a-village.jpg
*snerk*
@Dali
Y’know, when you put it like that, part of my brain goes “well, yeah, absolutely.” It’s something that I know, that I’m aware of, that I understand. But there’s still a connection that hasn’t been made.
And then another part of my brain suddenly wakes up and connects the dots, and I remember that the alt-right runs all those 40k references, and I remember what fascism is all about.
Fuck. You’ve got a hell of a point here. Fuck fuck fuck.
@Troubelle
I may have exaggerated MGSV a bit, although your mileage may vary. At the very least it needs a few content warnings regarding child soldiers, torture, and the very fact that it was all built around themes like “lookie here, this is how shitty war actually is” and PTSD.
GZ (the standalone prologue) holds the record for how badly I’ve been shaken in a mere 2 hours (those goddamn collectible tapes need some fucking trigger warnings). TPP holds the record for dem feels when I walked out. All in all it’s a freaking great (two) game(s), probably one of my favorites, but also the one I find hardest to recommend to anyone.
I won’t lie, I’ve got a good 8 years headstart on you, but it still feels like a never-ending quest. Even now that I’m basically surrounded by fucked-up people. Good luck with that, heh.
I should probably get some sleep or something, come to think of it.
ETA : @Fishy Goat
Sorry, was typing when you posted D:
This is awesome, but still not quite as awesome as my niece. She doesn’t even need the axe, she headbutts people in the crotch.