More than a week after an exuberantly Naziesque speech by alt-right hipster Richard Spencer inspired a spate of Nazi salutes from attendees at the National Policy Institute, the assorted factions of the alt-right are still debating whether or not the salutes were super-cool, or maybe not so cool, or just fun little jokes, or part of a secret plot to make the alt-right look not so super-cool. (See here for a more detailed breakdown.)
Now everyone’s favorite repugnant “pickup artist” Roosh Valizadeh has weighed in on the subject, offering what is perhaps the most convoluted sort-of defense of Spencer I’ve seen so far.
Roosh has a bit of a strange history with the so-called alt right. After wading gingerly into the Nazi pond with a blog post hailing the anti-Semitic theories of far-right academic Kevin Macdonald last year, he got an invite to one of Spencer’s previous NPI conventions, only to discover once there that neo-Nazis aren’t exactly fans of middle-eastern looking dudes like him who, as Roosh oh-so-hilariously put it, “have ‘defiled’ six million white women,” which doesn’t even make sense as a Holocaust joke. Thus rebuffed, Roosh counterattacked, declaring that “the alt right is worse than feminism in attempting to control male sexual behavior,” which in Rooshland is an insult of the direst sort.
Now Roosh has decided to defend Spencer, sort of. Sure, he admits, the “Roman” salutes at the NPI conference did make the alt-right look a teensy bit bad, at least when filtered through the lens of the evil lügenpresse. The video of Spencer’s speech put online by The Atlantic,
starts with a white man [Spencer] shouting “Hail” to the new President of the United States, whom the media viscerally hates, while a small minority of attendees exuberantly throw up the Roman salute. Even if you are a conservative, you have been programmed to feel revulsion at this display of “Nazism” and immediately condemn it because of its racism. Not long after, the media forced Donald Trump’s hand and he did disavow Spencer. One viral video, one mission accomplished.
Many alt-right apologists and hangers-on, including a lot of people Roosh admires, also “disavowed” the salutes and the saluters. Roosh, while trying his best not to offend any of them, suggests that they should have defended Spencer and his fans.
Let’s imagine a different scenario. When the viral video came out, instead of attack Spencer, we attacked The Atlantic for taking scenes from the conference out of context.
Er, the context for the Nazi salutes was a neo-Nazi conference. But never mind,
We forced them to reveal the truth of attendees being assaulted by violent liberal thugs.
Not quite. There were protesters, and at least one fight broke out, though it seems to have been started by one of the white supremacists.
We disseminated the truth of the conference far and wide. And most importantly, we defended the right of attendees to put up whatever salute they want as part of their free speech at a private event, even if we find it abhorrent.
By not defending the saluters, Roosh argues, “we have given up our own ability to do a Roman salute, even as a joke.”
Roosh asks his readers to imagine what might have happened had “Spencer ‘got away’ with these Roman salutes.” The evil media
wouldn’t be able to attack us for anything. No rape joke, fat joke, or meme would be extreme compared to it. Our free speech would have expanded if we helped Spencer, but that opportunity is lost. We now get to wait for an energized media to attack us, and it most certainly will be for less than a Roman salute.
In other words:
First they came for the Nazi saluters, and we did not speak out, because we were not Nazi saluters.
Then they came for the fat-shaming rape jokers and, damn, that’s us!
Nonetheless, Roosh is confident that the alt-right will survive Salutegate, and still thinks highly of them — even though he knows he wouldn’t be welcome in the all-white America of their dreams.
They will lick their wounds and get stronger, because they don’t need the media and they don’t need Trump. Their sales pitch of “America will be better with only white people” is too seductive for marginalized white men to resist, and in spite of their obsession with race, there is intellect and truth-telling underneath it.
Roosh even thinks that the current infighting between hardcore alt-white supremacists and the alt-lite opportunists who’ve glommed onto the movement is a good thing.
Now that the schism has taken place, men like Mike Cernovich, Paul Joseph Watson, and Stefan Molyneux have a clear path to the top as part of their “new right” platform. There is no Nazi taint to hold them back.
You know, aside from the Nazi taint that lingers from the fact that they’ve all been enthusiastically promoting an essentially fascist movement, teeming with full-on Hitler-loving neo-Nazis, for a year?
As far as I’m concerned, they’re all Nazi taints.
The story of this “schism” is almost certainly going to get weirder from here.
@Hambeast.
My Dad’s motto was a similar intent “it is what it is”. I’d give a limb or two to have him here to say it once more.
@opposablethumbs & everyone on radicalisation
Agreed, the radicalisation angle in that article was fascinating. I’m going to do some hunting on Scholar to see if anyone is doing research on it.
As a couple of people here have already noted, it’s possible that certain young men are susceptible to the ‘your rights have been eroded – here’s how to get them back’ type narrative. The idea that white men are now a disadvantaged group is such a common refrain in certain circles.
Re your link on Castro – I had to get Google to translate for me (boring monolingual person here) but wow.
Right? Usually you can’t get an MGTOW to actually shut up and go away. Perhaps we have met the first MGTOW who actually for realsies went his own way? Or maybe it’s an ironic name and they’re not actually MGTOW
re: other contexts of the roman salute: it’s still used in mexico for flag/allegiance ceremonies, and anything where you’re swearing an oath on the flag–so allegiance but also public servants’ induction oaths. (i think the american equivalent for that is the hand on the bible?)
somehow i doubt they’d be particularly interested in “actually we were saluting the mexican flag” though.
(but now that i live here it adds that extra-extra-extra frisson of distress to interacting with neo-nazis, because i also, y’know, did this every week, albeit nowhere near as well, and now whup! the white supremacists have a monopoly on everything i learned as a feature of interacting with the state!)
@IP
I’m so sorry to hear about your fall. I’m glad to hear that you’ll be seeing your physiotherapist soon.
*****
@Karalora
You’ve put into words some ideas that were rattling around in my head. Well said!
*****
@Hambeast
That’s an excellent motto. Thanks!
@IBH A.
Another pithy, helpful expression. Thanks for that!
I tend to panic because that’s what my father did. On him, however, it didn’t look like panic. It looked like anger. It took me years to realize that the man was filled with fear.
Thanks everyone. I’m fine, but the bruise will be there for a while.
—-
I had a thing with a former friend where we would often say:
Me: It is what it is.
She: ……..Or is it?
Me: ……..yes, it is.
@Christina Nordlander
When I was a girl, I felt very disrespected by my father and my brothers. I mentally wrote them off as hopelessly ignorant. And I very much looked forward to the respect that I would receive from the world when I became a woman. My attitude was based on the happy women in advertisements, movies, television, and comics, and on the innumerable love songs addressed to women. In addition, it was based on my very active imagination. And it was also based on disregarding the evidence that I saw around me of disrespect toward women. (I’ve seen a few episodes of Mad Men, which takes place in the time that I was growing up. Some of the cruelty exhibited toward women in that show is shockingly, viscerally painful to me because in those years I was either unaware of it, or I was only faintly aware of it, or I was spending my energy trying to deny that it existed.)
When I grew older, I was so disappointed to find out that a certain percentage of men disrespect women in ways large and small. And that in some ways society also disrespects women.
Luckily, I’ve always paid attention to respecting myself. That’s the best kind of respect. And there’s no substitute for it.
Hello.
(i take out liberal)
You mean like people who clearly say they used muscle to force women they have sex with to not escape, leading to pain and cry ? You don’t say !
Have a nice day.
Just for the record, the first paragraph in my post at the top of the page was quoting Ariblester. My brain completely died and forgot to put it in quotation marks.
And I definitely don’t think women are immune to radicalisation (of any kind). I’m a young-ish woman, and I can totally feel the pull of the “go and fight/die for the Awesome Cause and become a hero/martyr” rhetoric. Hell, I play Imperium in Warhammer 40k. I’m just fortunate that the equivalent of ISIS or MAGA didn’t get hold of me when I was eighteen.
Interesting article about how to deal with Big Daddy-Elect:
How to Manipulate Donald Trump
He’s an emotional weakling, and his recent interviews give us models for dealing with it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/how_to_manipulate_donald_trump.html
@Everyone who chimed in about radicalisation in men
Thanks to all for your comments, discussion and links. They’ve been a great help in my own thinking about the matter.
@IP
Sorry to hear about your fall. I wish you all the best.
the alexis – I sense that this thread is about played out, but just wanted to say that the drills in the video you linked don’t look particularly nazi-ish to me. If anything, they remind me (just a little) of clips I’ve seen of parades in North Korea. More than anything else, though, that looks like fun!
I learned marching and drilling in high school marching band and basic training for the USAF and always enjoyed it.
Wise words from dads. Mine was fond of
Basically means be polite, be considerate, but if righteous anger is justified, go right ahead and kick over the tables of the money-changers.
@mildlymagnificent
It seems that terrific dads emphasize a sense of proportionality. Thanks!
What is it with neo-nazis, why do they admire a totally failed state that lost the war? Thumped, beaten, totally destroyed.
Ok they had a good run for 3 years (1939-1942) after that they lost totally, their air force was destroyed, their ships and U-Boats sunk, their army beaten on every front. Their cities smashed to rubble.
They lost Prussia forever and many other areas with Germans were totally ethnically cleansed of them and the country was split in two for over 50 years.
That’s losing….big time.
Heck the writing was on the wall in 1940 in the Battle of Britain, when their vaunted airforce got hammered into the ground..
It only existed as a regime for 12 years then it was gone. Totally beaten, crushed in fact.
So is it a bunch of losers admiring …a loser regime? Heck of a lot more were far more successful even just by counting how long they lasted. In fact it is hard to find another regime that had such a short life.
Is it the goose stepping, the black uniforms and all the leather that attracts them? Closeted leather boys or something?