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> These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". No they don't. Most of "these guys", meaning the new right, distance themselves from that term because of

> These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". No they don't. Most of "these guys", meaning the new right, distance themselves from that term because of its association with white nationalism. > They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes. No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right. It's a smear campaign. Your statement is a perfect example. In your eyes, anyone on the right not engaging in Nazi fantasies is really just "hiding it". You're "unthinging" the views of the vast majority of them to pretend that they are uniform in ideology.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. No, Steve Bannon said in an interview that he led Breitbart in giving a spearhead to the alt-right in large media. >This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right. There are really three problems here. * The "center" and "center-left" are already, by historic standards, quite right-wing on economic policy. This really skews the claim that we're talking about a spectrum between a "center-left" and a "right", insofar as we're really just talking about different degrees of permissiveness or authoritarianism on social issues, plus the "center-left" maintaining the barest rudiments of a vestigial welfare-state. * Within the Right, the factions that we could have called "center-right" got tossed out as RINOs long ago. Ronald Reagan advocated employee ownership of firms as the way of the future; today Republicans would treat that as socialist heresy. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is now unheard-of, as are Republican appeals to conservative people of color or immigrants. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell really are far-right, in the sense that Ayn Rand is far to the libertarian right. * The alt-right has deliberately worked to blur the boundaries between the libertarian right and the authoritarian-nationalist right, usually by invoking anti-democratic, nationalistic libertarian thinkers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe. You know, the guy who wrote that, "in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. … [violators] will have to be physically removed from society."[1] When your party has come to have a political spectrum stretching from Ayn Rand on its left to Augusto Pinochet on its right, yes, you are "these guys". Stop now, turn around, purge the alt-right, purge the Tea Party, and reestablish some common-sense and humanity, or else history will remember you as the bumbling enablers of American fascism. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or "physical removal" by death squads: which side are you on? [1] -- https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police
- PoliteTwig 9y ago
  The first time I came across the term alt-right was in this article on Breitbart: https://www.google.is/amp/www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/amp/ https://www.google.is/amp/www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/.... As a ex Ron Paul supporter with a distaste for the GOP and Neo-Cons, I proudly called myself alt-right. I joined a few alt-right forums and found similar-minded people. Libertarians, conservatives, nationalists (in the positive sense). Generally smart people. Not Nazis. Not white supremacists. The term alt-right never seemed to me anything other than right-wing but not Republican. Then I saw a few New York Times and CNN articles using it differently. Mixed freely with Nazis. And I heard that white surpremecists were using it to make their views look more mainstream. Then people started calling me a Nazi. It’s a beautiful strategy to see a word redefined right in front of your eyes for political gain, but sad too. If Bannon said Breitbart supported the alt-right, I’ll assume he’s referring to the definition I first understood from the article on his site, and not the one co-opted by the left-sided media and far-right groups.
  - mercer 9y ago
    Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're in favor of Trump's presidency (which seems likely if you support(?) Bannon), how would you counter the dominant view that he's terrible in all sorts of ways, including racism and misogyny. Is it that he's nowhere near as racist/misogynist as he's made out to be by left-side media? Is it that he's, in hindsight, a bad bet (which I sometimes feel is what Bannon might conclude)? If you're not in favor of Trump's presidency, but supportive of Bannon, could you elaborate on how Trump failed? And, finally, if you're not "pro-Bannon" but nonetheless alt-right by your definition, could you elaborate on the nuance between how the alt-right is presented in (quite possibly left-wing) media, and the alt-right that you are proud of? If you're not comfortable doing this here, I'd love to discuss it over email or something like that. I truly am asking out of interest.
    - PoliteTwig 9y ago
      I do support Trump, despite disagreeing with some policies. I’ll never forget when Ron Paul was called a racist by the media in 2012, and how he was screwed by the Republicans. It still makes me angry today. I don't trust our government, media, or major parties, and all are bad stewards of our Republic. From that perspective, Trump is doing great. This chaos is good in the same way that a controlled fire from time to time is healthy for a forest ecosystem. I don’t believe he’s a racist or a mysogynist though and I feel pretty confident I could argue against every example people give. However, the only thing it would convince them of is that I am making excuses for a terrible person. It’s not worth it. I’ll just say I think he’s a generally good person operating in a tough environment, and came to that conclusion by going directly to source material. As for Bannon, I generally like him but I'm happy he's back running Breitbart instead of in the White House. Too controversal. He gave a good interview on 60 minutes last week that I mostly agreed with. And Breitbart - it can be inflammatory, but I find it a good counterbalance to everything else.
thinkcontext 9y ago
What do you make of the leaks of Breitbart emails Buzzfeed published? That pretty explicitly shows Bannon encouraging Milo to engage with white supremacists but dress them up a bit and hide it. Also interesting was the NYT Magazine piece that reported on the Harvard analysis of the network of links of the media. They talk about your issue head-on. Its conclusion was that Breitbart was not itself an extremist site a la Daily Stormer but that extremist sites link to Breitbart for legitimization. Breitbart had a section called "Black Crime" and it contained story after story after story of true(ish) content that Daily Stormer folks would link to say "Look what the n-words are up to now". Its worth reading the quote: The last thing Yochai Benkler noted before I left his office at Harvard was that his team had performed a textual analysis of all the stories in their database, and they found a surprising result. ‘‘One thing that came out very clearly from our study is that Breitbart is not talking about these issues in the same way you would find on the extreme right,’’ he said. ‘‘They don’t use the same language you find on sites like VDARE and The Daily Stormer’’ — two sites connected to the white-nationalist alt-right movement. He paused for a moment, then added: ‘‘Breitbart is not the alt-right.’’ Yet precisely because articles on the site were often less extreme than their own worst headlines, Breitbart functioned as a legitimizing tether for the most abhorrent currents of the right wing. Benkler referred to this as a ‘‘bridge’’ phenomenon, in which extremist websites linked to Breitbart for validation and those same fanatics could then gather in Breitbart’s comment section to hurl invectives. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/magazine/breitbart-alt-right-steve-bannon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/magazine/breitbart-alt-ri...

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

>No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. No, Steve Bannon said in an interview that he led Breitbart in giving a spearhead to the alt-right in large media. >This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right. There are really three problems here. * The "center" and "center-left" are already, by historic standards, quite right-wing on economic policy. This really skews the claim that we're talking about a spectrum between a "center-left" and a "right", insofar as we're really just talking about different degrees of permissiveness or authoritarianism on social issues, plus the "center-left" maintaining the barest rudiments of a vestigial welfare-state. * Within the Right, the factions that we could have called "center-right" got tossed out as RINOs long ago. Ronald Reagan advocated employee ownership of firms as the way of the future; today Republicans would treat that as socialist heresy. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is now unheard-of, as are Republican appeals to conservative people of color or immigrants. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell really are far-right, in the sense that Ayn Rand is far to the libertarian right. * The alt-right has deliberately worked to blur the boundaries between the libertarian right and the authoritarian-nationalist right, usually by invoking anti-democratic, nationalistic libertarian thinkers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe. You know, the guy who wrote that, "in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. … [violators] will have to be physically removed from society."[1] When your party has come to have a political spectrum stretching from Ayn Rand on its left to Augusto Pinochet on its right, yes, you are "these guys". Stop now, turn around, purge the alt-right, purge the Tea Party, and reestablish some common-sense and humanity, or else history will remember you as the bumbling enablers of American fascism. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or "physical removal" by death squads: which side are you on? [1] -- https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police

PoliteTwig 9y ago
The first time I came across the term alt-right was in this article on Breitbart: https://www.google.is/amp/www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/amp/ https://www.google.is/amp/www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/.... As a ex Ron Paul supporter with a distaste for the GOP and Neo-Cons, I proudly called myself alt-right. I joined a few alt-right forums and found similar-minded people. Libertarians, conservatives, nationalists (in the positive sense). Generally smart people. Not Nazis. Not white supremacists. The term alt-right never seemed to me anything other than right-wing but not Republican. Then I saw a few New York Times and CNN articles using it differently. Mixed freely with Nazis. And I heard that white surpremecists were using it to make their views look more mainstream. Then people started calling me a Nazi. It’s a beautiful strategy to see a word redefined right in front of your eyes for political gain, but sad too. If Bannon said Breitbart supported the alt-right, I’ll assume he’s referring to the definition I first understood from the article on his site, and not the one co-opted by the left-sided media and far-right groups.
- mercer 9y ago
  Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're in favor of Trump's presidency (which seems likely if you support(?) Bannon), how would you counter the dominant view that he's terrible in all sorts of ways, including racism and misogyny. Is it that he's nowhere near as racist/misogynist as he's made out to be by left-side media? Is it that he's, in hindsight, a bad bet (which I sometimes feel is what Bannon might conclude)? If you're not in favor of Trump's presidency, but supportive of Bannon, could you elaborate on how Trump failed? And, finally, if you're not "pro-Bannon" but nonetheless alt-right by your definition, could you elaborate on the nuance between how the alt-right is presented in (quite possibly left-wing) media, and the alt-right that you are proud of? If you're not comfortable doing this here, I'd love to discuss it over email or something like that. I truly am asking out of interest.
  - PoliteTwig 9y ago
    I do support Trump, despite disagreeing with some policies. I’ll never forget when Ron Paul was called a racist by the media in 2012, and how he was screwed by the Republicans. It still makes me angry today. I don't trust our government, media, or major parties, and all are bad stewards of our Republic. From that perspective, Trump is doing great. This chaos is good in the same way that a controlled fire from time to time is healthy for a forest ecosystem. I don’t believe he’s a racist or a mysogynist though and I feel pretty confident I could argue against every example people give. However, the only thing it would convince them of is that I am making excuses for a terrible person. It’s not worth it. I’ll just say I think he’s a generally good person operating in a tough environment, and came to that conclusion by going directly to source material. As for Bannon, I generally like him but I'm happy he's back running Breitbart instead of in the White House. Too controversal. He gave a good interview on 60 minutes last week that I mostly agreed with. And Breitbart - it can be inflammatory, but I find it a good counterbalance to everything else.

thinkcontext 9y ago

What do you make of the leaks of Breitbart emails Buzzfeed published? That pretty explicitly shows Bannon encouraging Milo to engage with white supremacists but dress them up a bit and hide it. Also interesting was the NYT Magazine piece that reported on the Harvard analysis of the network of links of the media. They talk about your issue head-on. Its conclusion was that Breitbart was not itself an extremist site a la Daily Stormer but that extremist sites link to Breitbart for legitimization. Breitbart had a section called "Black Crime" and it contained story after story after story of true(ish) content that Daily Stormer folks would link to say "Look what the n-words are up to now". Its worth reading the quote: The last thing Yochai Benkler noted before I left his office at Harvard was that his team had performed a textual analysis of all the stories in their database, and they found a surprising result. ‘‘One thing that came out very clearly from our study is that Breitbart is not talking about these issues in the same way you would find on the extreme right,’’ he said. ‘‘They don’t use the same language you find on sites like VDARE and The Daily Stormer’’ — two sites connected to the white-nationalist alt-right movement. He paused for a moment, then added: ‘‘Breitbart is not the alt-right.’’ Yet precisely because articles on the site were often less extreme than their own worst headlines, Breitbart functioned as a legitimizing tether for the most abhorrent currents of the right wing. Benkler referred to this as a ‘‘bridge’’ phenomenon, in which extremist websites linked to Breitbart for validation and those same fanatics could then gather in Breitbart’s comment section to hurl invectives. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/magazine/breitbart-alt-right-steve-bannon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/magazine/breitbart-alt-ri...