Tag: politics

An actual Alt Right take

Richard Spencer contemplates why Hillary appears to be intent on increasing the Alt Right’s media profile:

Hillary is trying to push the GOP into permanent minority status by empowering the Alt Right—and, believe me, she will be empowering us today. The Alt Right is, in a way, what people wrongly accuse the GOP of being: a nationalist party for White people. Hillary’s Alt Right speech will try to force the GOP to become what it is.

At Milo’s party last month, I made an outlandish self-fulfilling prophecy: “We’ve taken over the Right.” The fact is, the mass media—and now none less than Hillary Clinton—want us to take over the Right.

In fact, they are going to help us do it, if only we would let them.

It’s an interesting take, although I’ve been saying that the GOP needed to become the White Party if it was going to survive. Otherwise, if it insists on trying to continue pretending to play ideological politics as the junior partner in the bi-factional ruling party, it will rapidly go the way of the Whigs in the new identity politics system.

In any event, we’ll find out if he’s right or not soon enough.

UPDATE: If you haven’t re-upped for Brainstorm yet, now is definitely the time. Invites will go out as soon as we can confirm the time, but Richard and I will be debating white nationalism, white supremacy, and whether there is room in the Alt Right for non-whites at a closed Brainstorm session tomorrow night, tentatively scheduled for 7 PM Eastern.

The r/K perspective

Anonymous Conservative is dubious that the anti-Alt-Right campaign will have legs:

Now Hillary is calling attention to the most K-selected corner of the internet, at the very moment that the nation is increasingly turning K. Turning more people into Stefan Molyneux fans, or exposing more people to Castalia House Publishing, just as the nation is turning K, is not going to help Hillary. I think it a good sign that her persuasion specialists are so blinded by the rabbit-like psychology of the r-strategy that they are so completely out of touch with both the nation and reality.

Even better, it is a process that is accelerating. What they don’t realize is that as the nation’s rejection of them drives them more leftward, the psychologies of the nation are undergoing the natural shift toward K that was programmed in by nature. That is making the left vastly more repellant to everyone, the alt-right much more attractive, and leaves the left ever less able to understand the reality they need to understand to succeed. The political polarization created as the extreme left splits farther from the norm due to panic and the rest of the nation heads farther right on a K-shift, do not bode well for leftism’s ascent.

My guess is they will abandon this effort quickly, as soon as they realize that the nation has a large swath within it that will think this alt-right movement espouses a lot of commonsense things they find attractive, and the colorful personalities are very appealing. The alt-right hasn’t gotten this far for nothing.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Team Clinton was already rethinking the wisdom of this approach given the Alt-Right’s gleeful reaction to the news that they’d be coming under media assault. After all, we all know how the anti-GamerGate campaign worked out for Gawker.

The Narrative shifts

Let us all share a moment of silence for the previous “the Alt-Right is a small group of irrelevant teenagers in their parent’s basements” Narrative. Hillary Clinton is running as the American Angela Merkel.

Hillary Clinton will deliver a speech Thursday linking Donald Trump to the “extremism” of the “alt-right” movement. Clinton’s campaign announced Tuesday morning that her Reno, Nev., speech would focus on Trump and his aides’ “embrace of the disturbing ‘alt-right’ political philosophy.”

“This ‘alt-right’ brand is embracing extremism and presenting a divisive and dystopian view of America which should concern all Americans, regardless of party,” her campaign said.

The alternative right, or so-called alt-right, movement has generally been comprised as those opposed to multiculturalism and immigration, according to The Washington Post, and has gained mainstream attention during this year’s presidential campaign as Trump seeks to maximize support among white voters.

Notice how, in nine months, the Alt-Right has scared the Democrats more than the entire conservative movement has since Ronald Reagan left office. This is for several reasons:

  1. The Alt-Right is already a potent force embedded in rising political parties in Europe.
  2. Multiculturalism and immigration are winning issues for the first party to embrace white American identity politics. Throw in gun rights, tax cuts, debt write-offs, and a credible anti-war stance, and you’ve suddenly got a party that is playing for keeps on the national stage. 
  3. The Alt-Right does not consist of professional politicians more interested in their Washington careers than their nations.
  4. The Alt-Right is not a Potemkin opposition, it is a genuine one.

How PACs murdered the Tea Party

Keep the demise of the Tea Party in mind as the Alt-Right grows in popularity. Many, if not most, of these PACs are little more than scams with a political brand.

The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn’t die a natural death. It was murdered—and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds.

I was an employee at one of the firms that ran these operations. But nothing that follows is proprietary or gleaned directly from my employment. The evidence of the scheming is all there in the public record, available for anyone willing to look…. According to Federal Election Commission reports between 80 to 90 percent, and sometimes all the money these PACs get is swallowed in fees and poured into more prospecting. For example, conservative activist Larry Ward created Constitutional Rights PAC. He also runs Political Media, a communications firm. The New York Times reviewed Constitutional Rights’ filings and found: “Mr. Ward’s PAC spends every dollar it gets on consultants, mailings and fund-raising—making no donations to candidates.” Ward justified the arrangement by saying Political Media discounts solicitations on behalf of Constitutional Rights.

Let that sink in. Ward takes his PAC’s money and redistributes it to his company and other vendors for more messaging and solicitations, but suggests critics should rest easy since the PAC gets a discount on Political Media’s normal rate. Constitutional Rights PAC may be extreme but it’s hardly an outlier.

POLITICO last year reviewed the activity of 33 conservative PACs for the 2014 cycle. Combined, they raked in $43 million dollars, according to the POLITICO report. Of that, $39.5 million went to overhead including $6 million to entities owned by PAC operators; candidates got $3 million. Another report analyzed 17 conservative PACs from the 2014 midterm. It came up with different numbers than POLITICO, finding that the bottom 10 PACs in terms of the ratio of spending to actual candidate support received $54,318,498 and spent only $3,621,896 supporting candidates.

Don’t even think about supporting any big-money Alt-Right PACs that come into being in the next 2-5 years. If the real Alt-Right figures want your support, we’ll not only request it directly, but we’ll do so for specific purposes and projects whose progress you can track for yourself. We don’t play the “overhead” game.

Conservatives don’t get it

I genuinely like Ross Douthat. He is generally honest, and he genuinely tries to make sense of what is going on, most of the time, even though he reliably fails to understand what is happening on the right side of the political spectrum or why the Alt-Right exists.

Then finally, among men who were promised pliant centerfolds and ended up single with only high-speed internet to comfort them, the men’s sexual revolution has curdled into a toxic subculture, resentful of female empowerment in all its forms.

This is where you find Trump’s strongest (and, yes, strangest) fans. He’s become the Daddy Alpha for every alpha-aspiring beta male, whose mix of moral liberation and misogyny keeps the Ring-a-Ding-Ding dream alive.

There aren’t nearly enough of these fans to win him the election. Steinem’s revolution (Clintonian complications and all) should easily beat Hef’s at the ballot box this year.

But the cultural conflict between these two post-revolutionary styles — between frat guys and feminist bluestockings, Gamergaters and the diversity police, alt-right provocateurs and “woke” dudebros, the mouthbreathers who poured hate on the all-female “Ghostbusters” and the tastemakers who pretended it was good — is likely here to stay. With time and Christianity’s further decline, it could eclipse older culture war battles; in the pop culture landscape, it already does.

Ten years ago, liberals pined for a post-religious right, a different culture war.

Be careful what you wish for.

Douthat simply doesn’t understand that the Alt-Right is not the 60’s counter to feminism, we are the nationalist reaction to conservatism’s failure. The issues that absorb him are sideshows. The Alt-Right is on the rise across the West because Douthat, and the conservatism he represents as the New York Times‘s token conservative, completely failed to conserve the nation.

They will call us fascists. They will call us racists. They will call us Nazis. They will call us sexists. They will call us anti-semitic. They will call us ultra-nationalists. They will call us white supremacists.

And whether those charges are true or not, we don’t care. Because we prefer to live in Western civilization, among civilized Western people.

The conservative void

Conservatism, by definition, is unprincipled, anti-ideological pose that relies on rhetoric rather than dialectic. It was literally defined that way by the man who articulated American conservatism, Russell Kirk:

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

Translation: Conservatism is FEELZ.

Doesn’t that explain a great deal about both the conservative failure of the last 60 years as well as their inept, rhetorical, fainting-couch responses to the rise of the Alt-Right?

The amusing thing is that they consider themselves “the hard-headed realists”, but they don’t even have an ideological foundation. Their intellectual movement isn’t even built on sand! It’s built on “a state of mind”, something that is intrinsically malleable and subject to emotional manipulation.

Say what you will about National Socialism, but at least it was an ethos! Conservatism is intellectual nihilism, it is an ideological void.

If you are of the Right, stop calling yourself a conservative. It’s absurd. Not only has conservatism failed to conserve anything, it was as doomed from the start as the atheists attempting to fight a religious war without a religion.

One can’t win a gunfight without a gun, and one can’t win a cultural war without an ideology.

Jerry Pournelle, for one, understands this.

Conservatism isn’t an ideology; Russell Kirk called his book “The Conservative Mind”, and when specifics were demanded he wrote a book for his times, A Program For Conservatives; not an ideology.

Damage control desperation

Even the UK media is going to almost unprecedented lengths to convince you not to believe the evidence of your lying eyes:

A person who was filmed in a video that has been seized upon by right-wing groups to suggest Hillary Clinton ‘had a seizure’ on camera has hit back at the outlandish claims. Lisa Lerer, a reporter covering Clinton’s campaign for the Associated Press, was on hand for the latest moment conspiracy theorists have latched onto in an attempt to discredit the Democratic nominee.

In the video, which was shot on June 10 at a muffin shop in Washington DC, Lerer was one of the reporters who ‘shouted’ questions at Clinton about a meeting she had recently had with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. In Lerer’s words, Clinton: ‘perhaps eager to avoid answering or maybe just taken aback by our volume [she] responded with an exaggerated motion, shaking her head vigorously for a few seconds.’

Right. Look at Lerer’s face. That is the face of someone reacting to seeing something go very wrong. Moreover, the suggested excuse doesn’t explain why Hillary imitated the involuntary motion, then made an otherwise inexplicable comment about the chai. There are three obvious indicators besides the involuntary movement itself:

  1. The horrified reaction of Lerer.
  2. The immediate conscious imitation of the movement
  3. The comment about the chai, intended to excuse the involuntary movement.

Watch the video. There is no way that is a response with an exaggerated motion. But the media’s attempt to cover up Hillary’s observable health issues is even more feeble than this.

Hannity also referenced an old picture that was wrongly circulated by right-wing websites recently that showed the Democratic nominee slipping while walking up a flight of stairs. A host of anti-Clinton blogs and websites falsely presented the image as proof the 68-year-old candidate is in poor health.

However, the picture that they claimed to be new, was taken at the top of a staircase in South Carolina on February 24.

Right-wing blog American Mirror started its conspiracy-theorizing post by stating Clinton’s health should be ‘a major issue of the 2016 campaign’.

It then went on to wrongly say the photograph in question is, ‘the latest evidence’, to support its conspiracy – despite the picture being almost seven months old. The blog post was then shared by the Drudge Report, a more well-known right-wing website, along with the headline: ‘Hillary conquers the stairs’.

What does “wrongly circulated” even mean? It doesn’t matter whether the picture was taken in February or taken today, the woman is 68 years old, observably has something wrong with her, is known to have suffered a serious head injury, and can’t even walk up the stairs without help.

The more the media attempts to play Narrative Police with regards to Hillary Clinton’s health, the more it is obvious that they know there is something serious to hide. Ask yourself this question: why is the global media attempting to run interference for Hillary’s health issues when a simple release of her medical records could easily and conclusively address them?