I believe the point that is repeatedly being made (and repeatedly being pointed out to people who offer protests to the idea that Trump is courting the alt-right) is that Trump is courting them by appointing Bannon to run his campaign. Here is some reporting on the way the alt-right views Bannon and credits his work at Breitbart for legitimizing their ideas.
The alt-right
- Thread starter TheOriginalHappyGoat
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I believe the point that is repeatedly being made (and repeatedly being pointed out to people who offer protests to the idea that Trump is courting the alt-right) is that Trump is courting them by appointing Bannon to run his campaign. Here is some reporting on the way the alt-right views Bannon and credits his work at Breitbart for legitimizing their ideas.
The association is not lame. If you haven't noticed the brazenness in which racists are now feeling free to voice their feelings , then you just aren't paying attention. I can give you multiple examples, but I'm sure you know them. And you surely have to understand that TRump dog whistles them all the time. He knows exactly what he is doing and who he is appealing to. From the hiring Bannon, to his retweeting from white supremists websites, to his actual words, I can't comprehend how someone can deny what he is trying to do. I think we should probably let minorities decide for themselves if they have anything to lose and who they should support. And so far, my favorite polls have Trump with zero percent of the African American vote. You don't think there's a reason behind that? You can dislike Hillary all you want, but she is imminently qualified.
Imminently qualified.....sure. By your logic as the Clinton Foundation accepts millions from nations who treat women horribly, persecute gays including prison and death then she must support Sharia law etc. They have also accepted donations from people linked to terrorism. In this case you can simply ignore it and refuse to discuss it. But if the KKK or Duke says Trump is their man he is a blatant and horrible racist jerk.
You seem to forget I think almost identical to you regarding Trump but you seem to go into high gear denouncing him but with Hillary you can ignore the email and private server problems, her lies, and on and on. I find it amusing that here we conservatives think Trump unfit for POTUS but heaven help us if we feel the same about Hillary.
Many here have always said that they agree there is a lot of smoke coming from Hillary but no fire has been discovered. One reason for that is simply the fact that there is so much dark thick smoke added to by the biased media and her rich friends and this admin that you can't see the fire. The woman could kill someone on national TV and some of you would be telling us to prove it. Doesn't any of the stuff continually surrounding the Clintons bother you in the least? To you it looks like Trump is courting the alt right and to me HR looks guilty of several crimes you and I would already be in the slammer for.
I haven't been defending Trump and have made my position on him repeatedly clear. Where I messed up is stating something negative about our next wonder woman POTUS some of you almost have and alter to.
Um...Cajun, you're spending a lot of time bitching about Hilary on a thread that is about the alt-right. Last I noticed, Hilary sucking doesn't impact whether the alt-right is gaining influence in the Trump campaign and the GOP in general.
You asked for information on how Trump is courting the alt-right and then when it's offered you don't comment on it. Instead you shriek about the evils of Hilary, which lends a distinct "So what? Your candidate is bad, too!" screed to your post. Stay on point, bruh. :>)
Hoos has a point. Zeke and Cajun are involved in an off-topic side bar here, and my friend Cajun is ignoring the posts that directly respond to his concerns about the topic at hand. Let's try to move this thread back to the main topic. If someone wants to start yet another thread about Hillary's emails or the Foundation, they can, but this thread is about the existential threat the alt-right poses to the nation and the conservative movement, and the role Trump is playing in enabling it.
EDIT: That's my polite way of saying future forays into these off-topic issues may be deleted. This is an important topic that we've had some good discussion about. Let's keep it that way.
Fine...I will clean my side bar off the board shortly and then it won't disrupt the intended direction. No problem. This includes the responses to it.
Since this is and alt-right discussion please name even of some them specifically and proof that Trump has solicited their support and acknowledged them publicly. Goat even mentioned this which is quite fair I think, "I have no idea just how sympathetic Trump actually is to alt-right ideology".
I am not being facetious here.....inquiring minds want to know. It's easy to point a finger and scream a derogatory accusation based on only suppositions. Something more than appointing Bannon.
I also explained why appointing Bannon is a big deal, for the record. I don't think you should so easily dismiss that.
Hey, it's your party. If you want to let it be taken over by white nationalists, that's on you. But I think that's bad for the GOP, and bad for the Republic.
As has already been explained to you, Trump named Breitbart's CEO Stephen Bannon as his campaign's CEO. If you need something more, there's nothing I can tell you, because, at Breitbart, Bannon proudly proclaimed that "We're the platform for the alt-right."
I hope people take the time to follow your link and read the material referenced therein. I don't know how much more clearly someone can state, "Yes, we are white supremacists."
Are you a member of the Alt-Right?
I have lots of friends who don't mind and might even be proud to admit being a conservative. However, if if I asked them about the Alt-Right , I doubt any of them would know to what I was referring.
At this time, I would argue the Alt-Right exists mainly the minds of those who reached certain conclusions about what they believe is the true philosophy behind many Trump supporters. Apparently Trump selecting Breitbart's Bannon as one of campaign managers solidifies that Trump himself is a closet Alt-Right believer.
The Alt-Right dogma, by the way, judging from this thread comes mainly from the pens of political observers such as Caleb Howe (Red State), Sarah Posner (Mother Jones) and Milo Yannapolous along with our own Goat and Rock.
The question in my mind is whether these pundits have discovered the Alt-Right and what it represents, or have they created it?
I have lots of friends who don't mind and might even be proud to admit being a conservative. However, if if I asked them about the Alt-Right , I doubt any of them would know to what I was referring.
At this time, I would argue the Alt-Right exists mainly the minds of those who reached certain conclusions about what they believe is the true philosophy behind many Trump supporters. Apparently Trump selecting Breitbart's Bannon as one of campaign managers solidifies that Trump himself is a closet Alt-Right believer.
The Alt-Right dogma, by the way, judging from this thread comes mainly from the pens of political observers such as Caleb Howe (Red State), Sarah Posner (Mother Jones) and Milo Yannapolous along with our own Goat and Rock.
The question in my mind is whether these pundits have discovered the Alt-Right and what it represents, or have they created it?
The Southern Poverty Law Center has a story Whose At Right is it Anyway that goes into the history of it.
Simply put, if people heard about the death threats and threats of rape that was gamergate and didn't bother to educate themselves about what is going on, that is on them. The news carried stories, many stories, on gamergate.
Let's recall at one time the fascists were very small groups. But they displayed tremendous energy, far more than traditional pro-right groups. That energy attracted people, made them bigger. Right groups knew thew were smarter than Mussolini/Hitler and could easily control them. After all, M and H were leaders of small groups that had never showed any power. It isn't my party, but Republicans read about these groups. Groups that call YOU cuckservative. Ask yourself if they are from the party of Reagan?
I think we've done a pretty good job demonstrating it is real. I also don't know how many times I have to keep repeating that this isn't ultimately about Trump. If you want to keep your head in the sand, feel free, but don't pretend we haven't offered adequate evidence of what these people are.
I think these people are using Trump, not the other way around. Trump is just an ego, he knows if he says X it gets huge applause. So next time he says X+1.
Goat, you have offered the opinions of Caleb Howe (Red State), Sarah Posner (Mother Jones), and Milo Yannapolous.
When adequate evidence comes forth which indicates the Alt-Right exists in some form or other as an organized political force which actually has some bearing on the upcoming election I will tip my hat to you and Rock. I'll do this to prove, if nothing else, that I somehow managed to remove my head from the sand.
I'm not reporting an entire thread for you. Start with my OP and read this entire thread. The evidence is there. Your depiction of this thread so far is simply inaccurate. Milo? He's not an observer. He's a member of the alt-right.
Again, Trump appointed as campaign CEO the man who proclaimed Breitbart the new home of the alt-right. The alt-right is not a slur. It is a self-label. They exist. They are here. And with Bannon, they are now part of the election.
Goat, think you'll find this piece by Will Rhan to be interesting. I offer it as somewhat supporting your position regarding the Alt-Right. Rhan talks about Brietbart's Milo Yannapolous and Steve Bannon as being the godfathers of the Alt-Right. Also note the part which I put in bold which sorta supports my argument about the Alt-Right as a real force. The Rhan commentary in part has this to say,
Bannon’s Breitbart also realized that there was a large online community that naturally gravitated to Trump, a mix of people who saw themselves as far too radical to be accepted by polite society. Among them, conservative suspicions of diversity, inclusion, feminism, and political correctness had metastasized into something much darker.
This was the alt-right, a collection of racists, pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, and other noxious trolls of the internet. There’s no real dogma or central text to the alt-right, and no Buckley figure, though plenty are interested in taking the mantle. It’s a loose grouping with a few unifying figures, such as Trump and the Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
This was the alt-right, a collection of racists, pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, and other noxious trolls of the internet. There’s no real dogma or central text to the alt-right, and no Buckley figure, though plenty are interested in taking the mantle. It’s a loose grouping with a few unifying figures, such as Trump and the Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
That's a good essay, but I disagree with your implied assumption that a lack of centralized leadership makes a group irrelevant. If anything, it makes them more dangerous, because there is no head you can cut off to defeat the dragon.
The article explicitly details precisely the points being made: (1) the alt-right is proudly racist, sexist, and anti-semitic; (2) Stephen Bannon proudly made Breitbart the "platform for the alt-right"; and (3) Trump proudly made Bannon his campaign's CEO. At that point, the alt-right ceased to be merely fringe nutters and became a central campaign issue for Trump -- whose support, after all, is driven largely by white racial resentment and who is beloved by the alt-right. Yet somehow none of this exists, because you cherry-pick two sentences telling you the nutters lack sufficient ideological cohesion.
My entertainment while spending time on my stationary bike and treadmill for the past year or so has been listening to the Garrison Radio Broadcast with conservative host Greg Garrison which features spokespeople from Breitbart on many of the shows. Their targets are Obama, Hillary, and progressives along with the liberal media. The only racist content has been to question the tactics of protestors at places such as Ferguson and BLM in general while standing up for law enforcement. In addition to law enforcement, support for our military and calls for patriotism are frequent. On free trade, Obama's TPP has been a subject for ridicule.
For the most part, Ted Cruz was the Brietbart/Garrison favorite. The Trump support wasn't all that evident except of course for anti-Hillary sentiment with the typical charges of being corrupt, a liar, and unfit to be president. Dislike for Hillary far and away exceeds the kind feelings toward Trump.
Given all this, I was still surprised when Trump picked Steve Bannon. I am not willing to buy into the idea that Bannon's appointment is a sign that Trump is a racist. I am more inclined to believe Trump wants Bannon's expertise in using the social media. After all, Breitbart has been very successful in use of Twitter and the social media. When it comes to ideas and positions on issues, I don't think The Donald listens to anyone or is influenced by anyone outside his own family.
Trump has run an explicitly racial campaign that has included what Paul Ryan called "textbook racism." Numerous studies show that white racial resentment is the best indicator of Trump's support, which is overwhelmingly white. Trump has selected Stephen Bannon as his CEO, after Bannon made Breitbart into the platform for the racist alt-right, which adores Trump. Somehow, though, you can't see how race enters into it -- on the scientific basis that Greg Garrison's radio show doesn't offend you.
Unlike you, I wasn't surprised when Trump tapped Bannon. It's a logical outgrowth of the white identity politics that have driven Trump's campaign from Day One. ("And some, I suppose, are good people.")
I don't know if Trump is himself a racist, but he's running a racial campaign that speaks to racists not with a dog whistle but with a bullhorn -- and the racists love it. I don't understand your refusal to draw inevitable inferences from voluminous evidence.
Let me begin by saying that calling Hillary a liar and Trump a racist offends me.
It offends me because it takes the presidential race down to its lowest common denominator. Personally, I don't want to be among those who represent the lowest common denominator. I think the political dialogue in our country is helping to divide our country and is one of the chief contributors to dysfunctional government.
By the way, The Greg Garrison show, the Breitbart participants , or the Fox News network which appears on the same station don't offend me because they will be history and don't know it. They also don't offend a Clinton friend Jeff Sumlyan who owns most of the stock in Emmis which controls the radio station, and he loves the ad revenue which conservative talk shows bring in.
Hoot, you are being entirely unresponsive to what is being said in this thread. Why are you even jumping in if your intent is to religiously avoid the discussion itself?
I think your sensibilities interfere with your assessment.
My take, for what it's worth, is that HRC is disliked and distrusted. Some of that is deserved, and some is not. But by any conventional measure, she's a normal, qualified presidential candidate about whom reasonable people might reasonably disagree.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is the most obviously unfit presidential candidate any major political party has ever nominated in the entire history of the United States. His campaign has been routinely vulgar, coarse, and racist -- featuring grandiosity, narcissism, pathological dishonesty, and a conspicuous lack of empathy or remorse. The heart of his base is the lunatic fringe represented by his new campaign CEO.
Somehow, though, what offends you seems not to be Trump's toxic nature and the dire threat he poses, but the unpleasantness of mentioning it. You'd prefer we'd somehow have a decorous discussion about a sociopathic presidential candidate. But since you propose to do this by pretending that the sociopath is normal, I decline.
And both of you are following hoot down his rabbit hole, now.
Even if Trump is perfectly normal, even if Hillary is whatever, and the conservative media are you know, none of that is responsive to the topic of this thread, which is that there is a genuinely modern white nationalist movement that is trying to take over the conservative wing of American politics, and it is now being mainstreamed, not only by supposedly normal establishment conservatives who'd prefer to ignore what the alt-right is and what it stands for, but also by the Trump campaign itself, by bringing the closest thing the alt-right has to a national media director on board to run his campaign.
Some strong conservatives see the threat, and while I disagree with their insistence on shifting the blame for the movement away from themselves and onto liberals, they are spot on that this movement doesn't even really fit on the American left-right spectrum. It's not a conservative movement. It's not even a paleoconservative movement. It's a fascist neo-Nazi movement, and level of stubbornness it must take for so many posters here to read all this, and then just shrug and say, "Nah, it's nothing" absolutely baffles me.
Listen, if someone were off-topic enough to derail the thread, I'd just delete it, end of story.
What I'm complaining about here is that hoot, perhaps in his desire to not offend anyone, perhaps for some other reason, is making a concerted effort to avoid the topic of the thread, and instead move the discussion to a more generic and comfortable (and ultimately meaningless) debate about the appropriateness of calling Trump a racist vs. calling Hillary a liar. Nothing about this thread involved calling Trump a racist, and none of it had anything at all to do with Hillary. This is about the existence and normalization of a modern white nationalist movement in American politics, which can be found piggybacking on the Trump movement, and which Trump has now implicitly courted by appointing one of their spokesmen to run his campaign. It's about just how dangerous it is for us mainstream this sort of movement, which all rational people across the political spectrum should consider to be fringe nutjobs.
Goat, your link states,
Trump may not be alt-right, but he’s certainly winking at them, and they know it.
This pretty much makes the point I have trying to make in this thread. This point being Trump may use the Alt-Right (wink, wink), but dump them if elected. So who cares what the Alt-Right is saying except for those who want to make Trump into a racist by connecting to the Alt-Right.
Because mainstreaming white nationalism is bad for our political discourse, IMHO. Have I been somehow unclear? I feel like I've already answered this question in multiple forms.
I'll take that as a yes.
That's how you introduced it. But this is the Interwebs. Discussions drift. The thread becomes what it becomes, nearly always for the worse. [Go to the free BB board; anything over twelve posts long turns into a Crean Sucks! thread no matter what the original subject.] Pretty hard to expect a thread with over 100 replies to stay within narrow confines. Given this ones length and subject matter, I'd say it's stayed truer to the topic than most.
Yeah, I know. And I'm saying this particular drifting, IMO, is obscuring the most important part of this discussion.
This thread is a huge nothingburger
Goat, you spent considerable time and effort in another thread telling us Vox Day was nothing but a two-bit failed science fiction writer and a screwball moron to boot, and now you hold him up as the next great modern political thinker who will shape the GOP into the future? Good grief. He wrote a blog post. That has all the weight of a post here on the cooler.
As for Bannon's comment about the alt-right, he said that weeks before Day wrote his blog post. Nobody has posted anything suggesting Bannon ever saw Day's blog post let alone agreed with it.
Nobody's really knows WTF the alt-right is and certainly nobody sanctioned Vox Day to explain it.
Whether white people like Trump's message because of what Day says means exactly zip. There are many reasons why Trump ended up in the position he is in. Race might be one reason. People being fed up with all the influence peddling and access to the levers of power being sold like a commodity is another.
Democrats have been calling Republicans racists and white supremacists since Goldwater ran. Your point here is just more of the same with a 21st century tinge.
Nothing to see here.
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I wish I could agree with you. The world would be more pleasant if I did. I'd like nothing better than for these people to be a bunch of nobodies whom no one cared about and had no influence on anyone else.
But for the reasons already outlined, I don't agree with you. I think this is a dangerous political development that all of us - especially conservatives - ignore at our peril.
I guess only time will tell us who is right.
You know, there was a time when people blew off this small fringe party called the National-Socialist German Workers' Party. They were just a small group of white guys who felt victimized, felt all their problems were due to minorities, and were vehemently anti immigration. They wanted to make Germany great again in their eyes. People didn't take them seriously. They were nothing more than an annoyance.
I've read all the posts in this thread and I am amazed you guys actually think the alt-right, gamergate, pussygate or doggiegate or what ever the hell gate is like the rise of Nazis in the Republican Party. Trump's rise is nothing more than folks fed up with Washington and a vote of protest. After he gets killed in the general election everyone will move on and try to impeach Hillary for four years or maybe she will just go nuts in office and Kaine will take over.
I'm saying we shouldn't totally ignore and/or write off every little extremist fringe group. Especially when their sympathizers are given a prominent position in one of our two major political party's presidential campaigns. That's what I'm saying. I'm also saying there are similarities between the alt-right and the nazi party. Unless you're a member of either this shouldn't bother you. Feel free to say what you want about democrats and republicans. I'm neither so blast away. Feel free to say what you want about "liberals" and "conservatives". I don't even know what those are and someone has yet to define the terms.
