Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Iamwhomiam » Thu May 05, 2016 3:27 pm
by coffin_dodger » Thu May 05, 2016 3:34 pm
^^^^ Good. If they're all in one place we won't need that much gas.
by jakell » Thu May 05, 2016 3:48 pm
jakell » Thu May 05, 2016 6:57 am wrote:That title sounds good doesn't it?.... good ole conference expelling bad people who are fooling them.
Reading the article though, I suspect that the conference would have gone ahead as is, except that they have had the sweaty fingers of concerned and self interested folks poking them until they capitulated. AD's article are full of such self congratulatory people crowing about how they have manipulated some event or another, it's just that this one is a little less shrill.
It would have been better for them to simply monitor the conference and see if the Evil Greg started pushing his external ideology (and then heckle him), rather than simply talking science fiction.
This sort of activity won't make such folks go away, but simply drive them together as in the successful Yiannopoulos/Hoff/Crowder event, it's short sighted
Iamwhomiam » Thu May 05, 2016 7:27 pm wrote:^^^^ Good. If they're all in one place we won't need that much gas.
by American Dream » Thu May 05, 2016 5:27 pm
Is the Alt-Right for Real?
BY BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS
The suspicion that populist revolutionaries might not mean everything they say has surrounded Trump’s campaign from the beginning.
A strange, fascinating story broke last week, one that contains the darkness of the Trump campaign and that has, like the Trump campaign at times, the cadence of a joke. A thirty-two-year-old man named Colin Lokey confessed to Bloomberg that, until days earlier, he had been one of the unknown authors of Zero Hedge, a blog that combines analysis of the financial markets, emphasizing the essential corruption of Wall Street, with what CNNMoney once called “a deeply conspiratorial, anti-establishment and pessimistic view of the world.” Each post on Zero Hedge is written under the pseudonym Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s character from “Fight Club,” a workingman’s nihilist. Lokey revealed to Bloomberg last week that Durden was actually three men: two wealthy financial analysts, Daniel Ivandjiiski and Tim Backshall, and Lokey, a recent M.B.A. from East Tennessee State University—their hired hand.
By his own account, Lokey was writing as many as fifteen posts a day, among them most of the political pieces. The gig had a certain formula, he told Bloomberg: “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” For Zero Hedge, Syria was a special obsession, a sign of the essential strength of authoritarian regimes and the weakness of democracies. (“Putin Is Winning the Final Chess Match with Obama,” one Zero Hedge article claimed last fall.) The pace of the propaganda was too much for Lokey; last month, he checked himself into a hospital, believing he was on the verge of a panic attack. The populism seemed false to him. “Two guys who live a lifestyle you can only dream of are pretending to speak for you,” he wrote. The “unmasking” that Bloomberg promised in its headline was really two, one inside the other. Remove the Tyler Durden mask and there were Backshall and Ivandjiiski, two successful bankers pushing populism. Remove the mask again and there was Lokey, pretending to be them. “This isn’t a revolution,” Lokey wrote. “It’s a joke.”
The suspicion that populist revolutionaries might not mean everything they say has surrounded Trump’s campaign from the beginning. His personal ambition to be President has seemed almost painfully obvious, but about the populist nature of his candidacy there has been more room for doubt. The wall at the border, the religious tests for immigrants: Could he really mean that? Last week, Paul Manafort, one of Trump’s chief advisers, tried to reassure Republican National Committee members that the candidate has been simply “playing a part” for the primaries. Then Trump doubled down on some of his most outrageous positions. The wink between Trump and his supporters has been so sustained that it’s hard to tell which parts of his populism each side understands as theatre, and which parts are for real.
You could ask some of the same questions about the alt-right, the loosely assembled far-right movement that exists largely online, and that overlaps with both the Trump campaign and with the politics of Zero Hedge. Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who came up with the term “alt-right,” described the movement in December as “an ideology around identity, European identity.” But the alt-right has often seemed more diffuse than that, more of a catch-all for the least presentable elements of the online right: white nationalists, neo-reactionaries, the male-victimhood clique of GamerGate. Late last year, BuzzFeed proclaimed that the movement, with a boost from the Trump campaign, “has hit it big,” and ever since anxious alarms have been issuing from the conservative mainstream. The Times columnist Ross Douthat worked to distinguish the reactionary tradition from the open racism of the alt-right. National Review denounced the “racism and moral rot” that characterized the movement. Commentary described the alt-right as a gathering force, and warned of a “coming conservative dark age.”
And yet, as an ideology, it can be hard to take the alt-right seriously. When Spencer named the movement, he was the managing editor of Taki’s Magazine, whose founder and namesake, Taki Theodoracopulos, is a monarchist man-about-Gstaad and the society columnist for the London Spectator. Its own propagandists often say they are joking. The right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, of Breitbart, himself a leading fellow-traveller, claimed that some “young rebels” are drawn to the alt-right not for deeply political reasons but “because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms.” The alt-right exists mostly online, and so it is shrouded in pseudonyms.
The strains that run through the alt-right—that wrap together the vicious misogyny and plaintive victimhood of GamerGate with Prussia-venerating neo-reactionaries—are in their essence not matters of substance but of style. They share with the Trump movement a haughty success theatre that complicates their populism: the alt-right’s defense of the white working class, Yiannopoulos insisted, is not an instance of self-preservation but of “noblesse oblige.” The two also share the instinct for provocation. “If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything—an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster—don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest fucking thing in the world,” the blogger Mencius Moldbug wrote to Yiannopoulos.
The alt-right often seems to be testing the strength of the speech taboos that revolve around conventional politics—of what can be said, and how directly. Can you insist that science supports racial differences in intelligence? Can you threaten rape? Can you Photoshop an image of a Jewish reporter who has written critically about the Trumps so that she appears to be in a concentration camp? How far can you go? It is easy to notice the flood of Nazi imagery that has been tweeted from anonymous accounts at reporters, and harder to determine how many people are sending these images. Even the most careful reporting into the less crude edges of the movement usually has to resort to calling the alt-right’s influential voices by their message-board monikers (CisWhiteMaelstrom, JCM267) rather than by their real names.
One way to understand the alt-right is not as a movement but as a collective experiment in identity, in the same way that many people use anonymity on the Internet to test more extreme versions of themselves. Moldbug, when he stepped out from behind his pseudonym, turned out to be a Silicon Valley computer programmer who had started as a commenter in the factional circles of libertarian message boards. CisWhiteMaelstrom, who convened the pro-Trump hordes that swallowed the politics sections of Reddit, turned out to be a law student in his early twenties who was looking forward to a job in which he could make the most money possible. These are familiar conservative types, in the same way that the alt-right pioneers John Derbyshire and Taki Theodoracopulos are familiar conservative intellectuals, who first came to prominence at National Review. And as pointed as Zero Hedge’s Russophilia is, it was the Virginia co-chair of the Ted Cruz campaign who flew to Syria last week to assure Bashar al-Assad that President Cruz would be on his side. The tone of Trumpism and of the alt-right conceals a more familiar politics. Partisans of the alt-right are often described as “shock troops” of the Trump phenomenon, in the same way that Trump voters are understood to be outsiders invading the Republican Party. But my suspicion is that these descriptions get them wrong, by imagining that they are a new group of people rather than the same old group during their off hours, trying out a different form of play.
Just before the New Hampshire primary, with Trump far ahead in the polls, establishment Republicans in the Granite State kept insisting to reporters that they could not name a single Trump voter. But when the exit polls came out, the Trump voters turned out to have come from the social center, not from the fringe. Trump’s support was not isolated in any subgroup of Republicans—it spanned them all. The income of Trump voters turned out to be essentially indistinguishable from those who supported Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton. Trump rallies, in light of these demographic details, no longer look so much like the invasion of a foreign army. They look more like the Republican base, moved by conventional grievances, trying out a different way of expressing them. Is the revolution a joke, as Colin Lokey, despairing, insisted it was? Yes, in a way. But, then, jokes are complicated.
by American Dream » Fri May 06, 2016 7:51 pm
Dangerous White-Collar White Power Movement Believes It Has Newfound Relevance Thanks to Trump
By Hannah Gais/ The Washington Spectator
May 5, 2016
“Thank God for Donald J. Trump,” cried National Policy Institute director Richard Spencer into the microphone.
Spencer, 37, has a boyish, straitlaced look about him. With his well-tailored suit and a nicely kempt undercut, he’d meld perfectly into the swarms of youthful think tank employees trotting down Massachusetts Avenue. But NPI is no ordinary Washington think tank. Founded by an heir to a conservative publishing fortune, it drew white nationalists and sympathizers from around the country—and at least one from Canada—to its innocuously named “Identity Politics” conference a couple of days after Donald Trump dominated the field on Super Tuesday. For $45, I snagged the last ticket designated for millennials.
It is the rise of the bombastic Republican frontrunner that brought this amalgam of aggrieved crusaders together for an evening of cocktails, appetizers, and songs of praise to the candidate who’s inspired them to dip a toe into the stream of establishment politics.
To get in, I waded through a throng of protesters gathered around the entrance of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, yelling “Nazi,” “racist,” and “KKK” at attendees. A few protestors got close enough to snap pictures.
The ambience among the crowd upstairs was more staid. A quick glance around the room confirmed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s description of the NPI as a “suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old.” Aside from a few conspicuously shaved heads, conference attendees appeared to be a clan of “professional racist[s] in khakis,” as a SPLC writer described Spencer, rather than heavily tattooed, Swastika-donning brownshirts.
Most of the attendees were men. Most, but not all, were white.
Spencer kicked off a night of talks with a demographic analysis of the group—a welcome relief from an awkward conversation I had been trapped in a few minutes earlier with a few attendees, about whether it was good (or not) to describe one’s self as a racist. When Spencer asked who is under 30, at least 20 people raised their hands—myself included. He seemed delighted. The movement, he said, needs that “youthful” energy.
Spencer told the crowd to ignore the protesters outside the doors of the Reagan Building. Engagement, we were told, is what they want, so it’s best to ignore them.
Most, of course, had already done so. “Almost none of them interacted with us at all, and I recall them often trying to avert their eyes as they made for the entrance,” Scott Green, an activist who had also protested NPI’s conference in November, told me.
Spencer, however, didn’t appear to be bothered.
“I never thought I had such a fan club,” Spencer continued, referring to three protesters holding effigies of him and the two other conference speakers. The crowd was amused.
Then he hopped off the stage as blaring rock music and a slideshow of various right-wing memes welcomed self-described “shitlord” and video-blogger, Paul Ramsey. Among this crowd, he is better known by his pseudonym, Ramzpaul.
The gregarious blogger outlined his three-point plan for the amorphous, mostly web-based movement known as the alt-right, or alternative right, a reactionary form of conservatism that views itself in contradistinction to mainstream politics. “Identity,” the bedrock of the alt-right agenda, rests upon three pillars: sex realism (“men and women are suited for different roles”), race (inexplicably broken up into “race realism, nationalism, and Jews”), and natural order (a nebulous and quasi-mythical construct that appears to amount to the naïve, tautological, and politically irrelevant idea that society should resist acting against what is deemed “natural”).
A man with a Confederate-flag tie nodded to the small press pool on the opposite side of the room and whispered into a woman’s ear, “The photographer with the black hair is Jewish.” He stared knowingly at the woman and took a seat. Ramzpaul proceeded to identify several cultural scapegoats. The latest Star Wars is bad because it shows that women can be epic warriors and have better command of a fictional psycho-spiritual “force.” The military is bad because it’s putting dainty lil’ ladies right up against tough guy machismo. The media is bad because it dubs all adherents to race-conscious ideologies white “supreeeeeeeeeemists,” without considering the nuances of their high-minded intellectual exercise!
I was slightly taken aback when Ramzpaul broke up his Powerpoint-heavy presentation to tell us it was time to make friends. We were encouraged to turn to our neighbor and give him a gift. Mein Kampf was mentioned as a possible option. I ended up with a printout bearing the image of a red pill, a metaphor used by right-wing movements, from men’s rights activists to the alt-right, to describe a moment of “awakening,” a la Neo in The Matrix.
So white, so right
The National Policy Institute was founded in 2005 by William Regnery II who, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a “prime mover and shaker” within academic white nationalist circles. As an heir to the conservative Regnery Publishing, which brought us Trump’s campaign screed Time to Get Tough in 2011, Regnery has thrown his fortune behind a number of white nationalist causes. In 2001, he founded the Occidental Quarterly, whose pseudo-scientific agitprop makes it “sort of the Nature of academic racism,” according to Mother Jones. Indeed, NPI’s Identity Politics conference featured one of the Quarterly’s higher profile contributors—Kevin MacDonald, a disgraced former academic who maintains that Jews are responsible for an influx of non-white immigrants to the United States. (MacDonald also sits on the institute’s advisory committee.)
Richard Spencer came onto the scene after a stint at the American Conservative, where he was fired, and later, Taki’s Magazine, a paleoconservative online site created by AmCon cofounder Taki Theodoracopulos. Spencer left in 2010 to start his own webzine, Alternative Right, which helped bring the term “alt-right” to the Internet’s attention and provided a sort of intellectual center for the budding alt-right movement. Contributors ranged from Matt Forney, who now writes for the men’s rights activism site, Return of Kings, to Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian fascist, writer, and academic who provided much of the intellectual foundation for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Ukraine.
About a year later, Spencer took over as president after the death of Louis R. Andrews (who once claimed he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 to destroy the Republican Party so it could be reborn as a party supporting the “interests of white people”). According to the organization’s most recent publicly available Internal Revenue Service Form 990 (NPI is registered as a 501(c)3, as most of its activities are “educational”), Spencer receives no compensation for his work at NPI. (Some have speculated he’s independently wealthy.) Most of the institute’s money goes to events and conferences, many of which have taken place in the D.C. area, despite the fact that Spencer spends most of his time in rural Montana.
“It’s about saying, ‘What is your identity?’ Basically, saying that [identity] must be the basis for any sort of political action ... foreign policy, social policy,” Spencer told me. Race is the building block on which all else rests, largely because it’s the only aspect of our identity that can connect a community through multiple generations.Under Spencer’s guidance, NPI has helped lead the North American crusade for what Spencer calls “identitarianism”—an ideology that has its roots in the French far-right and posits that identity (in this case, racial) is the crux of any political, religious, or political movement.
“Identitarianism is something that’s shocking and new for America. It’s something that we don’t take to naturally; it’s something that almost strikes us as foreign. But the fact is that we do have these identities. If you’re a white American, you’re connected to something much older than 1776. You’re connected to something much older than our people’s experience on the North American continent,” he continued. “You’re connected to it through blood. Through your mentality, the way you look at the world, the things you love, the things you’re proud of, the things you value. ... You can find your identity by looking into yourself.”
It’s tempting to brush off Spencer and his ethno-racial identity-first argument as highfalutin but web-friendly racist blather. Spencer’s vision for the alt-right isn’t a revived Ku Klux Klan, and it’s, oddly, too inclusive for regulars on some neo-Nazi platforms, such as Stormfront and Daily Stormer. Although Spencer is delighted that some more mainstream conservatives—such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos—have undergone some degree of “alt-right-ification,” other allies have been less enthused. When Yiannopoulos published an explanatory piece on the movement, the Daily Stormer (“the world’s most visited alt-right site!”) followed up with a meme-laden takedown entitled, “Breitbart’s Alt-Right Analysis is the Product of a Degenerate Homosexual and an Ethnic Mongrel.” In a similar vein, the article’s author, Andrew Anglin, retracted his support for NPI’s November conference upon discovering one of the speakers was “an open homosexual.”
That’s not to say Spencer’s strain of white nationalism is any less insidious or divisive. Rather, it highlights NPI’s role in acting as a unifying “center” for a more far-flung alt-right movement.
“NPI is playing the role of being one of the big institutions and one of the essential institutions,” Spencer told me. “It’s going to be the one hosting the conferences where people meet each other. It’s going to be publishing some of the best work.”
“The alt-right is really big, and what we’re doing is right at the center of it,” he said.
Trump the übermensch
After that startling exchange of gifts among the identity-conscious agitators, Kevin MacDonald took the stage. Applause filled the room as the 72-year-old stepped to the podium. The guy’s some fucking hero, I noted. This is a standing ovation.
MacDonald—true to his RateMyProfessor assessment—is dry. Yet he sounded more like a disgruntled uncle reflecting on the good ol’ days of white supremacy than an academic.
With as much glee as a crusty old racist can muster, MacDonald told the room, “There’s something about crowds of cheering white people that terrifies America’s elites, especially when the speaker is criticizing their long-standing immigration policies.”He appears too staid to be capable of feeling awe, but if he’s ever had a sense of wonder it’s a result of Trump’s immigration proposals and apparent unwillingness to kowtow to a Jewish lobby. Contrary to some anti-Semitic canards, MacDonald’s secret Jewish cabal can be defeated through political activism.
Trump, the engrossed crowd was told, intends to smash an oligarchic system “stacked” against white America. The only way to break free from the system that blocks ordinary white Americans from fighting against the “disease” of multiculturalism and the unilateral rule of the American elite is to get behind a candidate with tremendous cultural capital who is also capable of funding his own campaign in full. (Despite these frequent claims, Trump does not fund his own campaign in toto. In fact, most of his campaign is funded by zero-interest loans, which he’ll likely pay off using funds raised on the campaign trail.) Trump’s refusal to grovel before the American Defamation League (a favorite MacDonald target) or the neoconservative establishment allows him the freedom to “[cut] to the core issues—issues like immigration—which are implicitly white issues.” If we listen and abide, MacDonald continues, we, too, can “Make America Great Again.”
The room went wild.
Spencer closed the evening with an ode to the “gold-plated fascism” of the Trump campaign. Under a Trump presidency, Putin would triumphantly walk the streets; neoconservatives would tremble in their boots as the Republican Party they worked so hard to build comes crashing down around them. Trump—the outrageous, egomaniacal celebrity that he is—may not be the ideal vessel for America’s identitarian shock treatment, but underneath all his “vulgarity and lies,” he’s providing what America needs.
He’s more than a presidential candidate. “Trump is a thing in itself,” Spencer said. “Trump represents that will to thrive to be great, to be something more than a man.”
This message is not for everyone. But if you believe MacDonald’s claim that white Americans aren’t going to public swimming pools because of the hoards of multiethnic rapists, and that waves of lawless people are coming over our Southern border, then Trump’s appeal isn’t first and foremost his promise to make America great again. Instead, the brash, orange-tinted billionaire “is showing white men how to be strong again,” as conference attendee Angelo John Gage, a former Marine and American Freedom Party activist, said in a video on his YouTube channel. On a deeper level, Trump is a bulwark against a calamitous decline—in which faceless, nameless, stateless immigrants will once and for all undermine the economic stability of white Americans.
What then? “If the government, especially at the federal level, is no longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in The Nation this winter, “then it’s grassroots initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap—perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era.”
This time, they might be wearing suits and ties.
by American Dream » Sat May 07, 2016 3:56 pm
Debating with the Nouvelle Droite: What did I learn?
My closing line in my response to de Benoist was the following: „The ND is merely the intellectual face of what Jean Baudrillard saw as the rising tide of a white, fundamentalist Europe, which is simultaneously promoted by radical rightwing populist parties, more violent and outdated extraparliamentary forces, and, at times, by mainstream political parties.“4
In short, the apogee of the ND’s strength was in the late 1970s and 1980s. Today the ND is losing its media and intellectual vitality. It seeks scandals in order to gain supporters. These polemical debates allow it to play the cult of victimhood against a supposedly „liberal-left-wing“ scholar like myself.
Despite the ND’s fall from the media and intellectual spotlight in France, ND ideas on immigration, national identity, and the loss of national sovereignty are increasingly accepted by many Europeans. The question we might ask today is why has the cultural climate shifted so dramatically to the right since 1968, the year the ND was created? Is it the post-9-11 climate? The Paris terrorist attacks? The refugee crisis? The rise of radical right political parties in the 1980s and especially 1990s? The co-optation of radical right-wing ideas by mainstream parties and through coalition governments? The dramatic decline of the radical left, as Slavoj Žižek once suggested? The problems of the EU? Capitalist globalization and its excesses? Is it the slow cultural change in mentalities engineered by the ND? Or, the increasing orthodoxy of neo-liberal or Anglo-American New Right solutions worldwide?
For the ND, the authentic right is neither neo-liberal, nor a republican, establishment right. It is a right that hearkens back to Europe’s dark past; a right of homogeneous regions, nations, and Europe; a right where internal homogeneity will be achieved through cultural and legal means. We need to be aware that fascism can return with the most innocent of disguises.
by American Dream » Sat May 07, 2016 9:12 pm
ALT RIGHT WRITER MILO YIANNOPOULOS SPEAKING AT UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
MAY 7, 2016
The Alt Right’s new renaissance is being facilitated by crossover points into the semi-mainstream that it needs to survive. Infowars connects it to conspiracy theory and militia movements. Donald Trump mainstreams their narratives about nationalism and immigration. Breitbart, and its hip younger correspondents, are helping to bridge their fascist perspectives with the fashionable right-wing side of Conservative America.
As we covered at length in an early article on Breitbart’s portrayal of the Alt Right, Milo Yiannopoulos has become the primary vessel for that Breitbart crossover. Milo’s primary goal seems to be insulting and offensive to what he derides as the “PC culture” of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and micro aggressions. Since he describes himself as a libertarian, his language choices are often intended to make him simply sound like a brash, iconoclastic attention-seeker. It is the fact that he openly admires and identifies with the Alt Right and that he uses a fascist lining in his rhetoric that is making him of interest to anti-fascists.
In Eugene, Oregon, which recently saw a visit by Donald Trump and has been seeing threats on students of color from KKK affiliates, the University of Oregon chapter of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) is bringing Milo to campus for an evening of “trigger warnings.” YAL has been around since the 2008 failed candidacy of Ron Paul, and generally brings together the right-wing cultural side of the Paul campaign that has always bridged paleolibertarianism with white nationalist influences. Their Visualize the Debt campaign was their largest effort, which was a relatively generic national debt alarmist approach to force in aggressive austerity cuts to social services. They have done general rabble-rousing things like handing out cigarettes at “no smoking” college campuses and making issues about GoProud’s invitation at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
In a more real way, they are filling the space that was earlier occupied by Youth for Western Civilization (YWC). That organization, founded by right-wing activist Kevin DeAnna who is now a member of the Wolves of Vinland, was an edge organization that used conservative cover for nationalist goals. Hosting people like anti-immigration extremist politician Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan’s offensive sister, Bay Buchanan, they flirted openly with people like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor. Members of YWC went on to form White Student Unions as well as the Traditionalist Youth Network, while somehow Kevin DeAnna has maintained his connections to the broader Beltway conservative movement through a staff position at the Leadership Institute and World Net Daily.
The campus activism of YAL does seem to be slightly more libertarian focused in terms of economics, but its social space is intended to be exactly what Milo represents. Thomas Tullis, the YAL organizer bringing Milo, says that they don’t agree with everything he says, but it is sort of a litmus test for Free Speech. Milo’s version of the Alt Right is one where by certain pieces of the ideology are pulled out of context, while others are softened. He does acknowledge the racial identity and anti-egalitarianism of the Alt Right, which he seems to share, but he says that much of the more blatant white nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism are really just offensive jokes meant to attack progressive PC culture. It is this false characterization that has gotten him critics on the Alt Right, most loudly Andrew Anglin of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer.
by jakell » Sun May 08, 2016 4:22 am
by American Dream » Sun May 08, 2016 4:41 pm
FASH THE CAMPUS: IDENTITY EUROPA, MILLENIAL RECRUITMENT, AND THE BERKELEY ALT RIGHT SAFE SPACE
What was the purpose of having an Alt Right ‘Safe Space,’ other than to mock the idea that people need safe spaces sometimes?
When the idea was announced only a few days ago it seemed like an insulting media stunt, and it was, but it was also a strategic point for the growing Alt Right and its attempts to market racism and bigotry to Millenials. Richard Spencer of the Radix Journal and the National Policy Institute put together a video and a plan, to promote an outdoor meeting at the historic Sproul Plaza on the University of California and Berkeley campus. This was a place where 60s radicals joined together to confront the Vietnam War, and to build the Berkeley Free Speech movement. The point they were trying to make is that Berkeley is no longer a bastion of free speech because of the Political Correctness that has run rampant. Though this seems like the embarrassing overreach of angry children who are stomping their feet about no longer being able to say the N-word in public, what they are tapping into is a feeling in much of middle America of not understanding the new developments that have come in confronting interpersonal oppression.
Nathan Damigo, Identity Europa
The event was put together and manned primarily by Richard Spencer along with Nathan Damigo and Johnny Monoxide. Damigo is running the organization Identity Europa, whose name seems intended to conjure up the French organization Generation Identity that the American Alt Right often fawns over. That organization is built as a more radical alternative to the fascist Front National political party run by Marine Le Pen, which they think is too reformist and populist. Generation Identity has been pushing the “Identitarian” identification, which brings them somewhat in line with the fascist philosophy of the Nouvelle Droite movement and people like Alain de Benoit and Guillaume Faye.
Identity Europa began as the National Youth Front, but after a Christian group of the same name threatened to sue, Damigo changed it. That organization went into disarray when Nathan’s co-founder,Angelo John Gage, left the organization in October. When it was still the National Youth Front it had a back and forth relationship with the fascist and populist American Freedom Party, where they automatically registered NYF members with the AFP when they turned 35. NYF hit more hurdles when their fundraising efforts were canceled by both GoFundMe and IndieGoGo for violating the terms of service, which comes from the fact that you can only strategically phrase things so much before the open racism becomes obvious. The only real press that the NYF got on campuses was for trying to target professors at Arizona State University and Boston University for being “anti-white.”
Nathan is an example of the kind of middle ground that the Alt Right has always been on. Good looking, well spoken, dresses and combs his hair like a hip Banana Republic model; he is a good advertisement as he looks far from a Klansman (looks a lot like Richard, to be exact). He is an Iraq war veteran, but he is also a felon for a hate crime. Several years ago, after he returned from Iraq, he brutally attacked a Muslim man on the street, and robbed him. He went to prison for this, and, to be fair, is generally publicly apologetic for his behavior, but it actually reveals a driving set of perspectives that lie under his fashy hair. He has hoped that by being open about his conviction he would be spared of ridicule, but it is actually just provides more background about who he is and what has inspired his organizing program.
Though Identity Europa seems to be little more than his brainchild and attempt to coordinate with young people, they seem to attempt to be largely the same project that Youth for Western Civilization, the Traditionalist Youth Network/Workers Party, and the various White Student Unions are. They wish to make whiteness an identity battle, and present white advocacy as the same as Black and Latino rights organizations, including reaching out to communities of color to find “allies of color” who think that whites are being discriminated against on college campuses.
Johnny Monoxide at Burlingame Trump event.
Johnny Monoxide is another level of racism piled on, which may be a testament to the way that the Alt Right has been mainstreamed by gutter podcasts like the Daily Shoah. In fact, Richard Spencer had moved on from even using the term Alt Right and was simply referring to himself as an Identitarian in the French model, but after places like The Right Stuff started popularizing the phrase he returned to it. Monoxide is best known for hosting the short-lived podcast on the Right Stuff/Daily Shoah podcast network, The Current Year Tonight. This is a joke from the Daily Shoah lexicon referring to how liberals will respond to racism on social media by saying something like “racism, its 2016,” so now they will just respond by saying “it’s the current year.” Monoxide matches the angry racialism of Mike Enoch and Seventh Son, yet, unlike them, he shows his face in videos quite often. In a recent set of videos at the Burlingame, California Donald Trump appearance, he made a series of videos where he mocked protesters, using racial slurs and “calling the Jew ‘the Jew.’” He was interviewed and filmed heavily by Infowars, the conspiracy website that has taken a hard right turn and now spends most of their time mocking women and leftists.
by Jerky » Sun May 08, 2016 7:41 pm
jakell » 08 May 2016 08:22 wrote:It's all starting to look a bit complicated compared to the old days, One would think a complicated field would tend to produce more nuanced responses, but it doesn't, we still get the old "close 'em all down, every single one" in an atmosphere of violence and confrontation. (the antifa types anyway)
At least we have one poster on here who doesn't mind expressing this, ie "gas them". Silent as ever, it seems you have no answers.
by jakell » Mon May 09, 2016 2:40 am
by Sounder » Mon May 09, 2016 6:38 am
^^^^ Good. If they're all in one place we won't need that much gas.
by jakell » Mon May 09, 2016 7:19 am
Sounder » Mon May 09, 2016 10:38 am wrote:^^^^ Good. If they're all in one place we won't need that much gas.
Sure, I suppose that if you did it in a highly moral, ethical and strategic way, that would be OK.
by Luther Blissett » Wed May 11, 2016 5:03 pm
No Future: How Richard Linklater and Eric Bogosian’s ‘SubUrbia’ Foreshadowed Donald Trump’s America By Russ Fischer
Disappointment is powerful and insidious. When an object of desire slips away, particularly something we believe we deserve, the sense of loss can be intense. It’s not that we failed to get something; that thing was taken from us. The characters in Eric Bogosian’s 1994 stage play SubUrbia, and the 1996 film version by Richard Linklater, boil with this disappointment—for perceived promises unfulfilled, for the stacked odds against fame, success, happiness. The emotion is transmuted into a sense of victimization, and anger.
The venomous spit of SubUrbia wasn’t out of place in 1996 as the mainstream accommodated an influx of indie culture in the arts, but the film played like the bitter b-side to Linklater’s sunnier Dazed and Confused. What can we glean from a bunch of malcontents, high school friends now in early adulthood, who express feelings of futility and pain plus racism as they drink away their nights in a parking lot? Few of the characters are likable, with many exuding an odious sense of entitlement. This skewed snapshot of the stereotypically disaffected Generation X has largely fallen off the radar, in part due to years of poor home video availability, despite Linklater’s growing reputation as a major American filmmaker.
Looking at the film anew two decades years later, SubUrbia howls with middle-American anxiety, the same voices that have been resounding through political rallies for the past six months. This movie is more than a mid-’90s time capsule: It’s a potent advance warning of the crippling sense of American loss and failure that fueled the political rise of Donald Trump.
Trump courts a voter base made up of a spectrum of Americans dissatisfied with economic status, security, and race relations. The long-since eroded American middle class—adults whose early 20s might have looked a lot like characters in SubUrbia—is his feeding ground. He galvanizes moderate and conservative voters without college educations who believe they’ve been abandoned by a system skewed toward elites, especially in racially tense states. Only a bit of clever editing would be required to make SubUrbia look like a Trump campaign ad.
As a precursor to the abrasive post-rock soundtrack that accompanies most of the film, Linklater opens SubUrbia with the more gently ominous “Town Without Pity” by Gene Pitney. “How can anything survive?” in a place like that, Pitney sings. Indeed, as so many citizens we see in fictional Burnfield, Texas turn their anger and frustration outward, rather than devoting energy to fixing their own problems, we watch what little community they have wither away.
Linklater doesn’t tame Bogosian’s characters (the playwright scripted the film), but the director’s slowly roving camera reveals sympathetic notes in the small-town group of friends, who hang out near a convenience store drinking and talking and harassing the store’s immigrant owners. Linklater amplifies the humanity of the going-nowhere characters without diluting their bile. Several may be unlikable, but they are not at all inscrutable.
he most strident town crier of dissolute American Dreams is Tim (Nicky Katt), a discharged Air Force pilot. Mean-eyed, with a bushy, grown-out crew cut, Tim haunts the side parking lot of a convenience store, off to the side near the dumpster. He’s the alpha ringleader for a trio filled out by pizza shop worker Buff (Steve Zahn, reprising the role he originated on stage) and layabout Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi).
Katt imports the brutish bravado of his Dazed and Confused character Clint (who beats the hell out of Adam Goldberg’s nerdy Mike), contributing to the sense that SubUrbia is a mirror image of Linklater’s earlier film. The scorched-earth suggestion of the town’s name is echoed by Tim’s virulent outlook. He’s a needler, a provocateur, and the most expressly racist of the film’s would-be rebels.
Behind Tim’s smirk and hair-trigger anger is a sad awareness of his pathetic behavior. His depression and sense of failure are sublimated into impish goading of his friends, and he’s blatantly aggressive toward Nazeer and Pakeesa, the Pakistani operators of the convenience store Tim treats as his playground. Once a promising athlete and military recruit, he’s become a drunk bully willing to wield a pistol as a threat, blaming immigrants for the job and success he failed to attain. “I was born here, I’m an American,” he insists, “and I’m owed something. They took it from me.”
So many hallmarks of the modern “alt-right” are embedded in this instigator: open, reactionary racism; jealousy; an embrace of gun culture; and an understanding of language and psychology as weapons. Uniting it all is that disappointment, the sense of opportunities lost and intangible factors spinning out of control.
These traits run deep in America. Their expression in SubUrbia, and the surge in the political sphere of 2016, are points on a continuum. Yet these parking-lot rats aren’t cut from the same cloth as political conservatives. Theirs is the image of “alternative” ‘90s counterculture, soundtracked by Ministry and Sonic Youth. These kids rail against the system like young progressives. They could have been something different, and seeing how quickly their own looming failures have limited their outlook, they fall back into anger.
In this regard, Bogosian’s standout creation is Sooze, played on film by Amie Carey. Her outrage is rooted in youth, love, and sexism; her romantic relationship to Ribisi’s character Jeff is fading along with any motivation he has to succeed. As a budding performance artist, Sooze is informed by the Riot Grrrl movement but lacks introspection. She proclaims idealism and a desire to raise consciousness about “sexual politics, racism, the environment,” yet her nascent third-wave feminism hasn’t quite developed to include empathy for Pakeesa. Sooze’s stomping performance art, culminating with cries of “Kill all the men!” doesn’t translate to action when faced with Tim’s racism.
Sooze falls under the spell of Pony, the town’s closest thing to a celebrity, when he swings by the convenience store after a local gig. He’s a high school nerd turned shaggy-haired musician, enjoying a brush with fame thanks to MTV; his new status, however, is likely to fizzle quickly if his limp songs are any indication of his future. To Sooze, even a hint of success is more than anyone in Burnfield can offer.
Lanky Jayce Bartok plays Pony with a grinning, earnest ease, as if Wiley Wiggins’ young Mitch from Dazed and Confused grew up to be a pop star—or as if Linklater himself ended up on a different path. The filmmaker’s own experiences shape his movies more than most, and Pony’s status as an analogue for the director adds an ironic layer to the character’s wan creativity and aw-shucks approach to fame.
Even the successful are disaffected, as Pony idolizes the relatively low-stress Burnfield life he left behind to become a rock star. “You guys are real,” he enthuses, ignoring their ugliness and disdain. The soft-rocker invites the audience’s scorn; we can see, especially with the benefit of hindsight, how limited Pony’s future is likely to be. Jeff perceives Pony’s pathetic nostalgia and flips out a bit as he takes stock of his own limitations. “I can do anything I want,” he rants, “as long as I don’t care about the result.”
Narratively, SubUrbia stumbles in its final third, when Tim’s sexual impotence turns his manipulative machinations into a big plot twist. (In order to retain some sense of suspense for those who’ve yet to see the film, we’ll simply say an unsuccessful sexual encounter seemingly ends in violence.) The turn nearly works because we’re so ready to believe this agitator would do such horrible things.
Jeff believes that Tim may have become a monster; when the truth comes into focus, Tim scolds Jeff for falling into the same credulity we experienced as an audience only minutes earlier. “You’re gullible and you’re gutless,” he says. In this supremely smug moment, Katt practically auditions to play Trump in the inevitable biopic of the mogul/candidate’s life. Like an entomologist pinning a specimen, Tim precisely targets Jeff’s weakness, and our own.
We want to believe the worst about Tim. That dark gullibility, when applied as a general rule, engenders a worldview where we fall prey to suspicion and fear. As with so much of SubUrbia, this idea is pushed toward an extremity—a vision of America very much like the political landscape of 2016, where disappointment and resentment guide emotional reactions, where the demagogue seems like a natural leader.
Burnfield, this town without pity, might have been an outlier, just a good place where things all went bad. Is everyone living with this unease, their disillusionment festering? “You want to believe so bad,” as Tim says to Jeff, “you’ll buy anything.” Even if that means buying into the wrong thing.
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