In Ladoga's defense, this thread and one just prior to this are the first two introductions I've had to the "alt-right" and related lexicon. They may have been around a good while, but I think Trump's candidacy has mainstreamed both the alt-right supporters and the terminology that's been growing up around it.
The alt-right
- Thread starter TheOriginalHappyGoat
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In Ladoga's defense, this thread and one just prior to this are the first two introductions I've had to the "alt-right" and related lexicon. They may have been around a good while, but I think Trump's candidacy has mainstreamed both the alt-right supporters and the terminology that's been growing up around it.
Rock, your response above is the very first post after Goat's thesis on the principles of the Alt-Right, and it mentions racism and Trump.
Rock, then in response (see above) to the fact my post talks about Trump and racism but doesn't address the main topic which is the Alt-Right, you are critical of my post.
Finally, I'll stick to my thinking that anything written about what the so-called Alt-Right might believe, or not believe, along with the ramblings of Trump probably have nothing to do with the policies of Trump if he somehow got elected. To me this is more frightening. More frightening in that we don't really know what Trump would do as president, and what influence the so-called Alt-Right might have. Ironically, those on the so-called Alt-Right should also be concerned about what Trump might actually try to do.
We were sort of discussing this in Aug of 2015,when Trump's campaign first started to take off.We probably didn't call it the "Alt Right" per se,but you started this thread and both Goat and myself linked to some pretty sketchy folks who were supporting Trump...
https://indiana.forums.rivals.com/threads/is-fox-news-ailes-caving-in-to-trump.47064/#post-551049
On an unrelated note, your post caused me to wonder whether the demise of Ailes at FOX and the rise of Trump/embarrassing primary results of mainstream GOP candidates are more directly related than we've generally discussed. I know, I know, Ailes got sued for sexual harassment . . . but that stuff has been going on for a lonnnnng time. The lack of FOX's influence on the GOP primaries this year + Ailes ouster because of that may be the real story of this year's election . . . .
Will NBC, CBS and ABC become more critical of Hillary (for example) in order to drive more former FOX viewers to their programming/stations?
Seems like an open opportunity to steal some market share . . . .
If they are serious about changing course, they should be more critical of her. There's plenty to criticize. In any normal election cycle, she'd be crushed in the general election. And rightly so. The only thing she has going for her now is that she ain't Trump.
And sadly, that'll be enough. I'm going to vote for her- but hold my nose as I do so.
It could also be the result of those news agencies having no spine. For years and years and years we've heard republicans scream about what they call "the liberal media", which I can only assume means anti-republican. Seems like I'd hear that every other week when McCain or Graham would be on all the political talk shows. I saw an article a while back that said McCain had the record for Meet The Press appearances at 69. The record was reportedly previously held by Bob Dole.
Here is a site that has some interesting stats regarding the "democratic lean" of news shows.
http://media.cq.com/facetime/
This only measures Sunday news show appearances. Just scrolling back through the first few years there are an awful lot of (R)s on there.
Aren't many people saying (LOL) that Trump and Bannon are planning to start their own media enterprise?Or is that an idea that's only been floated on CNN?
I am hoping that linking a piece from 2012 will allow this post to stay up. I insist this talk of alt right is simply the latest attempt by mainstream democrats to label their opposition as racist. There is a new angle here every week. It's highly offensive. Additionally, there is no recourse when the offense is perpetrated by the board moderator.
Its clear there are many people who frequent the Water Cooler are unfamiliar with sjw and other terms, which the Clinton Campaign and a few posters here claim are being made mainstream by the Trump campaign. It's a fallacy. The reality is that there is a focused, contrived effort to besmear a candidate and his followers by playing the tired race card. If anyone is blinkered, its democrats who would stoop to such base tactics to boost their unpoplar candidate, simply because the only thing that matters to some of them is winning.
Hillz, I have no idea whether or not Clinton's goal is for the voters to think Trump is a racist, but if you actually read the discussions we've had here, that's not what we're talking about. Let me sum up our various alt-right discussions for you as such:
1. The alt-right is an avowedly white nationalist movement.
2. The alt-right is relatively new, was born online, and became mainstream through its alliance with various nerdworld debates, especially Gamergate, and to a lesser extent, Puppygate.
3. The alt-right has also been trying to take over right wing online media. Their greatest success was with Breitbart, which became an alt-right mouthpiece with the arrival of Bannon.
4. The alt-right has latched on to the Trump campaign, because they believe Trump speaks for them.
5. The alt-right represents an existential threat to true conservatism. They are not conservative in any meaningful sense of the term. They are white identity racialists. This is not an accusation. They admit it gleefully.
This is not about calling Trump a racist. I have no idea if Trump is a racist. Some people on this forum have suggested he might be, but that hasn't been the point of our alt-right discussions. The point of our discussions is that there is a relatively new version of white nationalism in this country, which calls itself the alt-right, and this movement is trying to conquer the conservative movement and Republican party, and remake them in its own image. If anything, conservatives like yourself should be bigger enemies of the alt-right than we liberals, because not only do you (presumably) disagree with their beliefs, but they are threatening your own party and political wing. They threaten to make true conservatism irrelevant, and despite the fact that I consider myself a leftist, I think we can all agree such a development would be bad for democracy. Having a true conservative movement and party as a viable alternative to the liberal Democrats would be the healthy way to maintain a two party system. Allowing the conservative movement to be replaced with white nationalism would not be.
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Many conservatives agree, but Trump's base doesn't agree. Alt-right racism is being mainstreamed through Trump into a Republican Party that can't win nationally without Trump's white racially resentful base.
As James Fallows and others have pointed out, no Republican leaders have yet defended Trump against HRC's contention that Trump is making common cause with racists. This deafening silence speaks volumes. Republican politicians know that Trump is toxic, but they also know that they can't afford to lose Trump's base. To win a national election, the GOP must ultimately sort out how to escape its own toxic, aggrieved base.
Good luck with that, guys.
This has been the case in the past, as we've discussed before, and as Avik Roy explains in this excellent interview essay. No doubt the conservative movement must be remade. However, I don't think it's impossible. I don't think it's a necessity that they continue to court white racists in order be viable. After all, the Democrats ignored their white racists, and they still vote Democrat, anyway. Why? Economics.
All the conservative movement really needs to do is redevelop its economic vision to appeal to fence-straddlers and moderates. Maybe they can find a way to make free markets more environmentally friendly. Maybe they can embrace some social programs in the context of free markets. Most conservatives have no problem admitting that certain industries (fire-fighting, policing, military, etc.) work better as public services than in the free market. Maybe they find a way to expand that list to include, I dunno, health care.
I know that would be a radical shift for most conservatives, but the point is, it's not impossible to develop a primarily conservative economic vision that includes certain exceptions that appeal to moderates that are now basically forced to become Democrats as a response to the right's dramatic shift to the extreme.
Long story short, it won't be easy, but I honestly do believe it is possible for conservatives to follow the example of our own @twenty02 and others, and completely repudiate the white identity politics of the alt-right, while still surviving (or perhaps being reborn) as a viable alternative to the more progressive wing of our political system.
All it requires is a little guts.
I'd question your second point, about "mainstream".
Until the Hugo thread earlier this week I had never heard the term "alt-right". I have now seen the terms "gamergate" and "puppygate". You write that the alt-right "became mainstream through its alliance with various nerdworld debates." I must really be well-removed from the "mainstream" as I've never seen the terms and I have no clue what these even mean or signify. I'm guessing gamergate may refer to who plays or designs games but I haven't played anything since Atari, many years ago. What are these things and how are they mainstream? What the hell is puppygate?
I have no way of verifying this but I would bet the vast majority of people have no idea of what these things mean. Maybe I'm wrong, but these things/debates hardly seem "mainstream".
This seems much like the Peegs (can I even type that here, now?) basketball boards, where comments are made that the great majority of IU basketball fans want Crean gone. The great majority of IU fans are probably not even aware of the forums, however, so any such claims, based on such a small subset of IU fans, are suspect. A couple of hundred fans on the basketball boards wanting a change hardly speak for, or are representative of, the entire universe of IU fans.
So, I'm not sure that this alt-right "group", or whatever you want to call them - maybe obscure, on-line kooks is the most appropriate - "trying to take over right wing online media" is much more than an extremely miniscule and irrelevant factor.
And, Breitbart? I remember someone here several months ago asking what "that" was. Same thing as the above. I'm not confident that we're really talking about significant numbers of people. I thus question their ability to exert any influence over much of anything. Again, just speculation, but I'd guess less than 10% of the US voting population has even heard of Breibart.
So I doubt they're (the alt-right) going to take over the GOP or "the conservative movement". They may be gleeful that they're now getting some attention and publicity so maybe their "membership" will increase from 14 die-hards to 17. Oh, boy.
The salient and masterful stroke in all of this is how the Clinton campaign and their media lackeys have played this into such a damaging body blow to Trump. It's been extremely well-played and at this point it probably really isn't anything more than running up the score. They've taken something so obscure that millions upon millions of people have never heard about, focused the Hubble on it, and turned this small grain of sand into a newly-discovered planet. Kudos on that; it's a political stroke of genius.
We all know Clinton will win. Everything else now is just political masturbation, but with sand paper. It hurts like hell but it sure will feel good when it's over.
One of the interesting things about alt-right is that they claim victory for everything. When Bannon was brought on board, they claimed victory for getting something they wanted. But when they don't get what they want, they claim victory for having the liberals and "cucks" right where they want them.
I agree they are a small movement overall, but one reason I've argued so vehemently against people who are borrowing their dog whistles, using terms like "SJW" and "cuck," is that it's sort of a subtle mainstreaming. We might not be mainstreaming the people, but we are mainstreaming their ideas. And that's a slippery slope that is bad for the right and bad for America.
I'd never heard of alt-right either. Never heard of puppy gate before a couple days ago as well. I had heard about gamer-gate, but had no clue what it was about and didn't care enough to look it up. Figured it was some kind of geek disagreement. Still don't really know what that's about. However, I did get a DNC email that mentioned alt-right this week about the time I saw it here. This is an apparent political play to associate Republicans with a fringe group of people that most Republicans know nothing about and wouldn't like anymore than your average Democrat.
Most Republicans shouldn't like it, but Trump brought Bannon on board, not Clinton, so it's an issue now, and it's his fault.
You are fighting for the soul of your party. Fight on the right side (I'm confident you will).
I'm sure as hell not on Trump's side nor this fringe group I've never heard of before this week.
Unfortunately, at this point, not being on their side might not be good enough. You need to fight.
The last two sentences describe what folks said about Trump in the republican primaries. People though they could "destroy" Trump. Now they're bowing to him, or at least giving him wide berth.
Like goat said, Trump actively bought into the alt-right when he brought in Steve Bannon. Bannon IS Breitbart, for all intents and purposes. And Breitbart is a vile, vile place that represents some of the worst of humanity. That's not hyperbole.
There's a difference between not denouncing those that support you that happen to be racists/crazies (impossible to do) and actively distancing your self from the group's leaders (very easy to do- you don't let them lead your campaign).
and, I don't by the false equivalency (suggested by some) that Trump and Hillary are both bigots. Their actions suggest one is certainly a racist, and one isn't. I think the board is smart enough to figure out which is which.
Or, possibly, the definition of bigot has changed somehow over the years. I guess that's possible.
I think its miniscule and not at all influential. It appears to me to be a contrivance by opponents of conservatism attaching some fringes to the name of one guy's blog. I am not even taking the time to look any deeper. The term is an epithet describing an insignificant portion of the electorate as far as I have now researched it which is as far as I'm researching it.
Alt-right is a small segment of America, just as is the Communist Party USA is. Imagine if tomorrow Clinton named the head of CPUSA's media to be her campaign manager. Imagine your reaction. All the other cons, just imagine your reaction.
By comparison to that hurricane, the left has been nothing but a gentle breeze on the alt-right connection to Trump. But that is the precise analogy. Trump has elevated them to a power far beyond their numbers.
This is exactly the point. The alt-right is a lunatic fringe group that Trump is mainstreaming. Saying so isn't a ploy to slime the Republican Party. It's a warning that Republicans disregard at their peril.
There's just no overstating how toxic Trump is to the Republican Party. A perverse part of me observes this with glee, and that same perverse part of me is gleeful that many Republicans remain oblivious to it. But it really is terrible. As I've said before, with no exaggeration, Trump is the most obviously unfit presidential candidate any major political party has ever nominated in the entire history of the United States.
A couple months ago, McConnell suggested the GOP problems with Blacks started with nominating Goldwater. Goldwater's strong opposition to the voting rights act cast the GOP in that light. So even though the GOP had largely supported the VRA, more than the Dems, the GOP was branded anti-black by blacks. McConnell suggested Trump would create the same issue with Latinos. Surprisingly, didn't he then end up backing Trump.
It is the problem the GOP will have to face. Breitbart will remain what it is long after this campaign, serving to remind minorities who the GOP aligned with in 2016.
I know many conservatives are upset about this. Many of us are Facebook friends with Doug, he is a good example. But more famously would bill Will and Kristol. They have worked hard to build the conservative brand and seem none to happy to see these people change its meaning.
I may never have agreed with Reagan, but I believe he sincerely wanted a tide to raise all boats. I believe there are a lot of Reaganites angered at people wanting a tide to rise some boats. I just don't know about the conservatives who love Reagan and love Trump.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/293534-maine-governor-the-enemy-is-people-of-color
I'm just going to drop this here, so as not to start another post about racism in the country and in particular, this branch of the GOP. Maybe it's just the growth of social media, but it sure seems to me that first with President Obama and now the campaign of Donald Trump has really brought racists out of the closet. I think most everyone knew it was still lurking just under the surface. I'm amazed an elected official thinks this is something that it is ok to say.
I'm just going to drop this here, so as not to start another post about racism in the country and in particular, this branch of the GOP. Maybe it's just the growth of social media, but it sure seems to me that first with President Obama and now the campaign of Donald Trump has really brought racists out of the closet. I think most everyone knew it was still lurking just under the surface. I'm amazed an elected official thinks this is something that it is ok to say.
Also, too:
Donald Trump in a speech last week:
Donald Trump on Twitter this morning:
“The bigotry of Hillary Clinton is amazing. She sees communities of color only as votes, and not as human beings. It is only votes that she sees.”
Donald Trump on Twitter this morning:
Dwayne Wade's cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2016
Trump doesn't even know that Wade's first name is spelled "Dwyane." Don't ask me why Wade's mother spelled it that way, but she did.
The CPUSA and the Socialist Party no longer slate their own party candidates for President. Each has endorsed the Democrat nominee for at least the last three cycles and I have never seen any Democrat nominee deny or reject the endorsement, has anyone? That some fringe group supports a candidate only means something if it ALWAYS means the same thing. Anyone here think the Communist and Socialist endorsement of Obama or Clinton makes them Communists or Socialist Party members?
False equivalency.
Have you ever heard a communist/socialist party member make patently offensive remarks to just about everyone? That's what we're talking about here.
Who cares what those guys do. They're so fringe, I haven't heard about a candidate from them- if they still exist.
Nice try.
Nonresponsive. The alt-right didn't just embrace Trump. By appointing Bannon, Trump has embraced them back. You are side-stepping the point Marvin actually raised.
I am not giving Trump a hard time for KKK support. That is the equivalent. Rather it is Trump allowing someone with like views run the campaign. When Angela Davis is in a paid position for Clinton, I will agree that is a problem. It has yet to happen.
bigot: a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance
I think both fit the first part of the definition to a T. The term also points to those who are closed minded or prejudiced and intolerant to other social groups including religions. I don't think either fall into the second part and racism in itself is not bigotry in total. Like I have said repeatedly I think both are turds, unqualified, dishonest and a host of other assorted definitions. Hillary will get to sit on the throne because she is disliked and distrusted just a teeny bit less than Trump. This nation has a poor set of choices and each set of rabid supporters are trying to polish their turds up.
I don't think Hillary gives a damn about the minority groups or not to the level she proclaims during election cycles. To her they are a voting block and Trump is trying to appeal to that block as well. He is telling the truth when he tells the blacks for example they have nothing to lose. By all major economic and social indicators the current admin has done nothing for the blacks and in fact they have slid backwards. If this were a Republican admin these facts would be pointed out as racism or keeping them down.
By focusing on only a tiny part of weide's post, you are really avoiding the primary point, which is this: what makes Trump unique is not simply that some bigots happen to be supporting him, but that he has actively accepted and indeed courted that support, with actions such as the appointment of Bannon. This is not a small thing. There are racists in the Democratic party, as well, but until Hillary appoints one of them as campaign CEO, there is no equivalency here. The dangerous invasion of the GOP by the alt-right - facilitated now by Trump himself - is an event that has no parallel on the left.
OK.....what specific groups has Trump courted and publicly acknowledged? The alt-right wouldn't make a pimple on my arse it's so miniscule.
You ignore the alt-right at your peril. If you have hope for a healthy conservative movement going forward, you should heed their threat.
I'm not sure what makes you think Hillary doesn't give a damn about minority groups. She and Bill have both had a long history of working with minorities. Has anything she has said or done led you to come to that conclusion? Trump is telling the truth when he tells Blacks they have nothing to lose? Really? Perhaps you should look up to see what some had to say about that. I've read multiple articles in the last few days from people taking offense to that statement. They have plenty to lose by electing a person as unqualified as he is and that brings the racially charged, divisive campaign that has led to the support of the KKK, David Duke, and comments such as the Maine governor. I'd say that's a lot to lose.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/greene-black-people-lose-vote-trump-article-1.2766133 Just one of many responses.
Edit to add link.
You are free to feel that way and keep in mind I am no Trump supporter. What has she done in her work as Senator, Sec of State etc under the Obama admin to improve the quality of life economically and socially for the blacks. In about every key indicator the blacks are much worse off than before Obama became POTUS. And her foundation has accepted donations from nations who trample the rights of women, gays, religion, and that put gays in prison or kill them. Millions and Millions and from some pretty nefarious people as well.
I don't see how telling minorities they have nothing to lose is considered racist as this current admin has done nothing for them. It almost seems racist to considered that statement racist.
I think ALL of us have plenty to lose by electing Hillary or Trump as both are unqualified lying hucksters. So what if the KKK or DD supports him? Trump can't control who likes or supports him anymore than Hillary can. The Black Panthers supported Obama. Is Obama associated with them. Does Hillary support the killing cops slogans, flag burning, and telling white people to the back just because they support her? Of course she doesn't. This association is lame.
Seriously sir what specific alt right groups has Trump actively courted and acknowledge?
He appointed Stephen Bannon as his campaign CEO. Bannon is a long-time outspoken supporter of the alt-right, and is responsible for transforming Breitbart from a regular right-wing blog into an alt-right mouthpiece. I have no idea just how sympathetic Trump actually is to alt-right ideology, but it's not for no reason that the alt-right honestly believe he is one of them.
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