The “Alternative Right"

[Luther Blissett]

SEPTEMBER 28, 2016
Defining the Alt Right and the New American Fascism
by SHANE BURLEY

As Hillary Clinton gripped the podium in Truckee Meadows Community College, she jumped from a jovial introduction into a line of rhetoric that was almost frantic in delivery. Until now she had walked a line on calling out Donald Trump’s racism, a choice that made sense since his racially motivated quips had actually propelled his rise. Instead, her focus had been to make inroads with the left populism of the Bernie Sanders camp before going after low-hanging fruit. Trump’s “dog megaphone” racial language had finally seen a tipping point, and the Clinton campaign decided to run a campaign ad and delivery a speech outlining Trump’s KKK support, the champion he has found at Breitbart and Infowars, and his Internet fandom on the Alt Right.

“Race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-Immigrant ideas –– all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”

Hillary went on to discuss the Breitbart and Alex Jones connection to the Alt Right, going after the conspiratorial claims of Infowars and offensive headlines at Breitbart that were especially hateful towards women. She drew a straight line between the social media culture of the Alt Right white nationalism and the populism of Trump, making the angry racism bubbling over at his campaign appearances a key point of her counter-strategy.

For those who have been watching the growth of the Alt Right as a frightening evolution of fascist politics, her unequivocal identification of their role could be seen as vindicating. At the same time, while media outlets are scrambling to figure out how a fringe political movement threatens to sway a Presidential election, most are confused as to where the movement came from, how it relates to conservative media empires like Breitbart, and how to break down its ideology.

Dissidents to the Right

The Alt Right saw its earliest beginnings as a growing dissident movement at the end of paleoconservatism began coalescing around explicitly racial politics and the influence of European New Right philosophy. Richard Spencer, a former Assistant Editor at the American Conservative who had moved on to Taki’s Magazine, coined the term along with right-wing academic Paul Gottfried. Both had been involved in the H.L. Menken Club, a proto-white nationalist organization that attracted people like VDare founder Peter Brimelow, paleoconservative ideologue Pat Buchanan, and advocates of race and IQ arguments like Steve Sailer.

Within this world Spencer noticed a growing disaffection with conservative politics, which had become the territory of Neoconservatism and hawkish foreign policy. Instead, Spencer idolized the “Old Right” class of isolationism, the aristocratic conservatism of people like Madison Grant, and often considered himself more an acolyte of Friedrich Nietzsche than William Buckley (He used to jokingly refer to himself as a Nietzsche-con).

Inside of these circles he was meeting hardline libertarians, radical Traditionalist Catholics, Heathens returning to pre-Christian European religions, race realists, eugenics proponents, and other people who were more right wing than they were “conservative” in the American sense.

It was with this thrust that he left Taki to create Alternative Right, a webzine that would bring together these dissident forces under a “big tent” of far right wing ideas. In its first few years it gained prominence by publishing people like Jason Richwine, who lost his position at the Heritage Foundation after his Harvard dissertation surfaced where he cited “racial differences in intelligence.”

Since then the term Alt Right has gone on to signify a certain type of politic, namely a form of white nationalism that attempts to define itself as an intellectual movement with a hip internet culture. Instead of the blue-collar roots of many white nationalist movements of American history, the Alt Right had more in common with the neo-fascist intellectual and political traditions in Europe. As the movement grew and diversified, it became a catchall for an Internet focused white nationalism that more and more relied on internal jargon, key philosophers, and a few central tenants.

Race is Their Politics

It was not until places like The Right Stuff entered the foray that the Alt Right became the Twitter-force that we know it today. The Right Stuff, and its signature podcast The Daily Shoah, was birthed in message boards and private Facebook groups by men dissenting from radical libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism. Heading into a racialist mindset, they wanted to take the fun they had with “shock jock” radio shows like Opie and Anthony and give them a white nationalist groove.

With their signature podcast The Daily Shoah they wanted to mock Jewish claims that another Holocaust could be brewing, and they were dedicated to sacrificing all the sacred cows of contemporary liberalism. In doing so they took the intellectual currents that the Alternative Right had built its philosophical underpinnings on and reclaimed a casual racism along with it. Racial slurs, Holocaust Denial, genocide jokes, and trolling attacks on leftist writers would all be a part of their tools. Since they relied on anonymity and catchy memes they did not have to take part in the consequences these views often hurled on their proponents.

While the Daily Shoah helped to popularize many of the key Alt Right talking points, American Renaissance (AmRen) had been crafting that message for twenty years. Begun in 1990 by former West Coast editor for PC Magazine Jared Taylor, AmRen was founded to be a voice for the newest stage of the white nationalist movement.

Focusing on what they called “race realism,” the newsletter published studies on race and IQ by blacklisted scientists like J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn. Once they founded their conference in 1994, they rode the wave of The Bell Curve into becoming a focal point for arguments about black crime, intelligence, sexual restraint, and ability to create “civilization.”

Right from the start AmRen did something that most white nationalists never dreamed of: they invited Jews. Over the years their speakers have included nationalist politicians from Europe, former beltway conservatives like John Derbyshire and Sam Francis, and have had a range of people from controversial university professors to Aryan Nations racist radicals.

It was AmRen that helped give the growing Twitter army its baseline ideas about race, crystalizing talking points that they could shoot out to “prove” the perils of diversity or the mental differences between ethnic populations. This segment of the Alt Right really developed on its own through the power of social media, mainstreaming the ideas of AmRen through the hyper-offensive language of The Daily Shoah.

The ideas, both race realist and politically nationalist, were crystalized once Richard Spencer took over the National Policy Institute. Here he created an entire “indentitarian” brand, launching the Radix Journal and using its publishing wing, Washington Summit Publishers, to give a voice to controversial philosophers. Spencer’s notion was to take many of the “meta-political” approaches that European nationalists had developed over the years, building an “intellectual movement” that could be a sort of “Frankfurt School of the radical right.” Besides AmRen, the National Policy Institute’s conference became a “whose who” of the Alt Right, mixing the snark of The Right Stuff with the prowess of European fascist academics like Alain DeBenoit.

Over the years NPI has only grown, including musicians from the edge of the neo-folk music scene, long criticized for its connection to fascist organization and “folkish” European pagan revivals. At this November’s upcoming conference they will even host Asian reality star Tila Tequila, who in recent years has become open with her anti-black racism, Holocaust Denial, and flat earth theories. Though Spencer wants to brand the Alt Right as something akin to serious political movement, even he cannot reject the appeal of celebrity.

The Essence of the Alt Right

As Alternative Right headed into its own, and its podcast Vanguard Radio became popular in the growing Alt Right scene, Spencer was pressed about what the “essence” of the Alt Right was. He was able to answer that without much trepidation: inequality. Whether it was joining National Anarchist Keith Preston on Voice of Reason Radio or speaking to the Traditionalist Britain Group, he noted that the Alt Right was built on the truth that “all men were created unequal.”

In Jared Taylor’s most recent video attempting to define the Alt Right in response to the giant wave of traffic his websites had garnered, he said that while it was a range of perspectives, “They all agree about one thing: equality is a dangerous myth.”

This focus on inequality is the broadest agreed upon position in the Alt Right, where the say that egalitarian thinking is a war on the “distinction” between peoples. People are unequal as individuals within racial groups, and racial groups themselves are unequal when compared to each other. This comes down to one of the key political precepts of the movement, agreed upon no matter if they identify as Nazis, neo-monarchists, or neoreactionaries. A society is healthier when it has strict hierarchies, castes, and stratifications.

The distinctions they cite are solidified in the racial nationalism that has become central to the Alt Right. As the confusion has grown between the traditional Alt Right and what they are calling the “Alt Lite,” which is outlets and individuals mainstreaming their message in a softer form such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart, many places like the Radix Journal, The Right Stuff, and The Daily Stormer have fought to make their more extreme ideological positions clear in the Alt Right brand. Greg Johnson, the publisher behind the Alt Right book house and website Counter Currents, published an article recently called The Alt Right is White Nationalism… Or It Is Nothing. This white nationalist perspective, the idea that white people should live in a monoracial “ethnostate,” is monolithic within the Alt Right. While they often state that they support racial nationalisms for other groups, they are clear that this is a white movement for white people.

This focus on inequality and racial nationalism comes together in the common acceptance of Human Biological Diversity, a term coined by Steve Sailer to update a movement previously known as Race Realism. This is the notion that different racial groups have had recent evolution that has given them different innate qualities. Unsurprisingly, white nationalists attempt to prove that black people have lower innate IQs, are more prone to crime and sexual violence, and do not have the genetic gifts necessary to build “Western civilization.” They are continuing to resurrect discredited theories about eugenics, the biological essentialist differences between men and women, and the belief that we need an aristocratic elite caste to rule the masses that are of a lower intellectual and spiritual level.

The racial ladder used often puts African descended folks and Australian Aborigines at the bottom, with whites towards the middle and East Asian people far above them. The top spot, however, is saved for Ashkenazi Jews, which edges at the source of the anti-Semitism that is a staple in the Alt Right. As people have seen with the (((echo))) meme and other caricatures of Jews, the conspiracy-laden rhetoric that Alt Right trolls recycle is the same that led up to Kristallnacht. Jews are seen as powerful players in government, finance, and media, using “degeneracies” and multiculturalism to undermine Western host societies. This anti-Semitism has taken a few steps further as they have centered on a few anti-Semitic tracts, specifically by former University of California at Long Beach professor Kevin MacDonald. Over the course of several books, MacDonald put out a theory that Judaism was a “group evolutionary strategy” to beat out other ethnic groups for vital resources and social standing.

A World of White National Empire

This plays largely into the Alt Right’s notion of geopolitics where global conflicts can be reduced to ethnic sectarian conflicts, manifesting both as consciously and unconsciously racial wars. MacDonald proposes that Jews use their high IQs and ethnocentric values to create ideological smokescreens that penetrate the “healthy racial consciousness” of European whites. This would be the source of capitalism, communism, Freudianism, the Frankfurt School, and, of course, mass immigration. While this may sound like the ranting from the back row of the Internet, it is central to almost all the most popular Alt Right commentators, from The Right Stuff to Millennial Woes.

In a macro sense, there is some disagreement inside of the Alt Right as to where they would like to be once the modern world has been brushed away. The neoreactionaries often glow about a time of monarchism before the French Revolution wiped away natural castes. Many of the racial pagans want to reignite the Viking warrior spirit, or return to the sacrificial steps of the Roman Empire.

While the specifics vary, it is usually a type of “traditionalism” that they argue, returning to an ethnically homogenous society where the traditional family reigns, women knew their places, and there was a clear, and enforced, hierarchy. Esoteric philosopher Julius Evola has become a favorite, as he has been in some of the most extreme movements in European nationalist terrorism. His view of the world, based on a reading of the Vedic prophecies, was that we were in the Kali Yuga, or Dark Age when proper hierarchies have been abandoned and degeneracy runs wild.

Many on the Alt Right stand with a similar assessment, wanting to return to a priestly age, a palingenetic mythic past that, historically, exists only in their minds. Their view is often that the West is a culture that is genetically linked to European descended peoples. Through this vision, which is also echoed by establishment voices like Pat Buchanan, they have resurrected far-right writers like Oswald Spengler. In his book The Decline of the West, Spengler outlined an apocalyptic vision where the uniqueness of Europe would be destroyed by non-white immigration at the hands of the Jews.

Through the Alt Right’s attempt to create an academic canon similar to left-wing intellectual traditions there has been an effort to dig even deeper into some of the more marginalized philosophical traditions. The Conservative Revolution that influenced the nationalist cauldron that formed the National Socialist movement has been key, as have the alternative vision of traditional ethnocentric living offered up by French authors like Guillaume Faye.

A Uniquely American History

While they bring their philosophical character from Europe, their growing ideological kernel started from inside of the American Conservative Movement. The National Policy Institute was originally founded around the ideas of Sam Francis, a paleoconservative author made a move to explicit white nationalism and traditionalism. Francis really made a name for himself at the Washington Times and with the National Review crowd, but his connections to American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens could no longer be ignored after making statements in his regular column condemning miscegenation. Even today his books are being put into print by Spencer and Washington Summit Publishers, a move that helps the Alt Right to carve out its own niche as a mix of different fascist ideologies with the edges of the paleoconservatism.

Though the paleoconservative movement may have hit a high water mark with the 1992 Pat Buchanan Presidential bid, there are still echoes of it in mainstream conservatism through places like the American Conservative and National Review. The hardline racialist elements dissipated into the Alt Right, leaving behind the strong libertarianism for Ron Paul and the Mises Institute.

While those most racially inclined from paleoconservatism headed into the white nationalist institutions that have evolved into the Alt Right, the same can be said for most explicitly racist organizations as well. Though appearing new, the most organized and ideological of these Alt Right institutions all trace directly through America’s racist history to moments where nationalism and nativism broke into the public mind. The White Citizens Councils, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, the National Youth Alliance, the Liberty Lobby, and David Duke are all features that have made their way into places like American Renaissance and the National Policy Institute. Combining with a new generation of tech-savvy angry white men they have found a new voice for old bigotries.

Ur-Fascism

When the ideas are put onto paper, when the principles are outlined in detail, they are indistinguishable from the KKK. In the recent slew of attention on the Alt Right, many commentators have put out videos and statements attempting to define it, especially to separate it from the more moderate “Alt Lite” phenomenon of Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos. Places like Counter-Currents, the Right Stuff, and the Daily Stormer agree: the Alt Right is defined by racial nationalism, the inequality of people and races, the need for traditional gender roles, the necessity of hierarchy and general anti-democracy, and anti-Semitism. When compared with screeching neo-Nazis waving Swastika banners what separates the Alt Right is its tech savvy adherent, clever memes, and upper-middle class, college educated constituencies.

In the cleanest sense it can be described as the most updated and maintained stage in an ongoing fascist movement, one started in the interwar period as the crystalized political expression of the impulse towards reactionary violence and the reinstatement of traditional power.

Most of history has treated fascism as a brief political movement defined by authoritarianism and a sort of “anti-philosophy,” but there are conscious social ideas that run at its core even if the associated populism are not as keyed into the philosophy. The Alt Right then represents those ideas becoming conscious, advocating for fascist politics in a 21st century, tech-dominated social technocratic society.

Most fascist politics, especially specific sub-topics like race realism or anti-Semitism, need crossover points into the general culture. Anti-Semites in neo-Nazi circles did this for years by gaining entry into conspiracy theorist communities with Holocaust Denial, attempting to “teach the controversy” and to exploit a general distrust in dominant narratives about state and power. Inside of Palestinian support circles they have tried to activate latent anti-Semitism by confusing Israeli state policies with its Jewish citizenry, drawing historical caricatures and theories about Jewish power into the real political issues during the siege on the Gaza Strip and the settlements in the West Bank. People like David Duke have developed an entire career trying to exploit these gray areas, taking left talking points about Israel and supplementing a political critique with an anti-Jewish narrative.

The Alt Right’s trolling has brought in many of the younger men who would be attracted to a “hip” reactionary current, one that has been developed on backchannel web boards and first made public in Men’s Rights and Pick-Up Artist sects. The space to mainstream Alt Right politics, their crossover point, has been found in the “edgeysphere” of Bretibart, Milo, Ann Coulter, and Donald Trump. This “Alt Lite” sector has provided them with enough of a political crossover to gain entry to the culture, popularizing terms like Cuckservative and anti-feminist talking points while providing a stepping-stone to their own brand of white nationalism. With this they can have a political outlet that is not burdened with their race and IQ arguments or Holocaust Denial right off the bat, but can inject their unique jargon and personality into general conservatism so that they can easily move new readers over to their more extreme corner.

The growing popularity of Alt Lite websites and commentators has been so meteoric that it has even created a problem among the actual core Alt Right sources. While the Alt Lite softens their edges, it has also allowed many to dismiss the Alt Right talking points as unserious trolling and to even allow Jewish writers to don the Alt Right label. Richard Spencer, Greg Johnson of Counter Currents publishing, and the Right Stuff are all advocating for maintaining the hardline about Alt Right politics so as to keep the white nationalism central.

Popular Anger

The Alt Right itself is seeing a moment of overwhelming attention unseen in decades of white nationalist attempts at popular attention. Using the populism of Donald Trump and the white angst of a white working class that has been abandoned, they have created a cultural force that has the ability to influence both elections and racist street violence. With the ‘Trump Republican’ phenomenon they have been provided with shock troops that can grow their ranks and make their rhetoric more than just podcast banter.

The question this inspires is what kind of longevity these movements actually have and what challenge the organized left can present. This means re-engaging the white working class, creating a strong movement to undermine systemic and individual racism, and understanding the fundamental nature of the Alt Right. As their blogs multiply and more Twitter handles are injected with raw ideology, the left needs to be able to identify their politics clearly so that a movement can build to confront its fascism in the same way that anti-racist movements have challenged these ideas historically.

What the Alt Right wants, more than anything is to get their talking points into the culture and to create new converts without challenge. Now that they are gaining more clicks and headlines the anti-racist left needs to use this peak in web traffic and public awareness to shift the conversation from one of iconoclastic right-wing politics to the threat of impending fascist revolutionaries. As Black Lives Matter and indigenous solidarity movements grow, this creates a multiracial and multicultural base to build movements that can not only confront fringe racist movements like the Alt Right, but also to continue target institutional and interpersonal racism that echoes through our culture daily.

The challenge to the Alt Right is baked into the ongoing struggle against racism, and now we have the tools to make that struggle just as conscious as the racist right has become.

[American Dream]

https://antifascistnews.net/2016/10/01/ ... eat-again/

ALT RIGHT CONFERENCE IN HOLLAND WANTS TO “MAKE NETHERLANDS GREAT AGAIN

The Alt Right has come out as the newest branding attempt in a long history of neo-fascist movements grasping at respectability. Though it has a populist element to it, there is an intellectual elitism at its core that draws from its New Right political inspiration, Human Biological Diversity pseudo-science, and its attempts to appear as a right-wing philosophical movement just as legitimate as Frankfurt School Marxism in the discourse of Continental Philosophy. Over the last year the “big tent” of the Alt Right has concentrated into a general spectrum of ideas with a common culture: scientific racism, populist talking points, deep anti-Semitism, esoteric Aryan ideas, and various other distinct tidbits that fascists have been working on since World War II.

While the Alt Right has been a distinctly American invention, its popularity as a branding tool and way of dividing up the movement into common cultures has been influential back in Europe as well. This “success” is exactly what led to the formation of the Make The Netherlands Great Again conference, a grouping that really tries to take its queue from the boon that the Donald Trump campaign in the U.S. has given to the Alt Right movement.

Organized, in part, by French nationalist Guillaume Durocher, the conference was essentially a nationalist group funded through “foreign money.” Durocher has been making the rounds in American Alt Right circles, joining Richard Spencer at the Radix Journal podcast to discuss far-right organizing and ideas, and going on Counter-Currents radio to do the same thing. Their organization is called Erkenbrand and was started as a study group where they read books like “SJWs Always Lie,” an “Alt Lite” science fiction author who is known for supporting Alt Right fascist publications even though he is of multi-racial ethnicity.

Their conference hosted different Alt Right speakers, including Greg Johnson of the white nationalist publishing house Counter Currents and F. Roger Devlin, who writes about “race realism” and co-authored the Radix Journal guide to racial thinking that they use in their intro section. They have had limited coverage in American circles, mainly the Occidental Observer and Red Ice Radio, so the conference was on the small side.

Happened on September 27th, the conference was not well attended and was hard to get into. What this shows, however, is that the Alt Right branding is going to be critical for the far right, both in America and Europe, and so the counter-organizing can have a broad effect when it is focused on the Alt Right. So much of the Alt Right’s success hinges on the Alt Lite’s ability to mainstream it, meaning how well people like Milo and places like Breitbart repackage their message, and how they can leverage the Donald Trump campaign. Once both of these support vessels go away, the vast number of white nationalist organizations and publications that have hinged their success on the Alt Right branding will take a massive hit. What is critical is to continue naming the Alt Right as a white nationalist, neo-fascist movement and to not let it obfuscate the discourse to minimize the baggage that their ideas are saddled with.

[8bitagent]

The Alt-Right are not "merry politically incorrect pranksters" as Milo wants his readers to think. I cannot stand Hillary Clinton, but she is right that the "alt right"(which virtually all of the old and new guard neo Nazi groups now call themselves) are the tipping spear of modern violent hatred. The real bulk of the alt right believe in a pure white "ethnostate" by any violent means necessary, yet seems confused and fractured along Templar Knight Christian LARPers, Hitler Nazi cosplayers and Odinist neo Pagan adepts. In this confused "white nationalist" world, brown non white dictators named Rodrigo Duterte and Augusto Pinochet are worshipped, along with Japanese anime nerd culture(and on the Counter Currents esoteric side, Chinese and Tibetan Dharmic Buddhism/Tibetan spiruality, ect) The alt right openly wishes for an army of Dylan Roofers and Andres Breiviks, yet worries that such characters "tarnish their name". They spread the neo Turner Diaries violent racial 4chan meme of "D.A.K. 10.16.16", whilst worrying that such Gladio far right terrorism will hurt their cause in the national spectrum. Yet, posting feverish paranoid "Kike this, Jew that" conspiratorial articles like it's 1937 and violent anti black articles is par for course. The neo Nazi(oops, I mean "alt right") love of Asian culture is embarrassing, speaking as an Asian person.

[SonicG]

The Alt-Right are not "merry politically incorrect pranksters" as Milo wants his readers to think... The neo Nazi(oops, I mean "alt right") love of Asian culture is embarrassing, speaking as an Asian person.

Very cogent...as I have said before, it is the bizarre death-throes of an ideology quickly being torn apart by demographics...The nod to the east, a nod to their soon-to-be new masters...

[8bitagent]

The Alt-Right are not "merry politically incorrect pranksters" as Milo wants his readers to think... The neo Nazi(oops, I mean "alt right") love of Asian culture is embarrassing, speaking as an Asian person.

Very cogent...as I have said before, it is the bizarre death-throes of an ideology quickly being torn apart by demographics...The nod to the east, a nod to their soon-to-be new masters...

The biggest knee slapper to me is that the modern neo nazi(alt right) subculture constantly calls themselves "red pilled", referencing of course the Matrix. As delivered by the African American actor Lawrence Fishburne as Morpheus

[SonicG]

There's a lot of general confusion across cultures I'd say...its cliche or a canard but, whatever, the institutions that used to gird social life are crumbling and thus there is a lot of grasping at a lot of disparate straws...

[American Dream]

How the Left Can Circumvent the Rise of the Alt-Right

By Shane Burley

A Racial Caste System

First and foremost, the alt-right believes that "race is real." It argues that race is a defining factor in each particular region's civilization, and that the development of each society is the result of the genetic qualities of those who built it. This notion comes from "race-realism," often called "human biological diversity" today, which says that race is a real biological dividing line and that different races have different innate personalities, levels of intelligence and degrees of sexual restraint.

The primary focus of this argument was, and has always been, to argue that Black and Latino people are less intelligent than whites. The vast majority of alt-right publications have focused on promoting these falsehoods, which tie in with others, such as the argument that Black people are more prone to crime and more inclined to sexual assault, and do not have the innate ability to "maintain civilization."

This fictional "race-realism" informs their primary political idea: white nationalism. Spencer, Taylor and almost all others on the alt-right agree on the idea that they need a white "ethnostate." This would be an exclusively white nation, with other races placed in separatist enclaves of their own. This white nationalism has been the ideological kernel that has carried through Aryan activists and skinheads for almost a century, and while the alt-right uses semi-academic rhetoric to support its arguments, the ideological thought process is much the same.

Along with this traditional white nationalist talk comes anti-Semitism, a core component of the alt-right's Internet culture. Drawing on anti-Semitic caricatures and theories of people like Kevin MacDonald, alt-righters believe that there is a question of "Jewish power" in society, in which Jews "wield disproportionate influence" in politics, finance and the media. MacDonald, a former psychology professor at the University of California at Long Beach, has published several books outlining Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy" that Jews use to outcompete non-Jews for resources.

Generally, the alt-right wants to "return" to a form of "traditionalism," a mythic past where society was "pure" before the influences of "modernity." This has deep roots in fascist philosophy, especially perennialist thinkers like Julius Evola. In most of his work, Evola outlines a spiritual "tradition" that, he argues, emanates from all world religions. He argues that this "tradition" is manifested in internal hierarchies, and structures of initiation can supposedly be seen in religions in all cultures, though over time, modernity robs them of their stratified and prescriptive nature. He asserts that a strict hierarchy needs to be established and that today, we are in the Kali Yuga, or "dark age," where those hierarchies have been abolished and where "lesser races" now rule over those peoples who should have authority in society.

This idea of the importance of hierarchy is key, because the battle against "equality" is what unites the alt-right in spirit. The belief that no two people, and no two races, are equal is what drove Spencer from the beginning. The alt-right argues that society needs to be stratified, with a ruling elite that is bred to rule those on the bottom. Races, genders and ability levels are viewed vertically, and the alt-right wants to establish a strict authority to maintain this stratification.

More at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3781 ... -alt-right

[American Dream]

The Republicans Have Been Trumped

by Charlie Post

For over eighty years, the reformist left in the United States has sought to transform one of the capitalist parties into a “people’s” party. Both the Communist Party’s popular front strategy and the social-democratic strategy of “realignment” (formulated by the brilliant ex-Marxist Max Shachtman) sought to transform the Democratic Party. The Democrats, through the 1950s, were a coalition of urban real estate developers, Jewish and Catholic capitalists and southern planters who enjoyed the voting support of northern industrial workers, black and white, middle-class liberals, and most southern whites. The reformists’ goal was to drive out the conservative, pro-capitalist elements—especially the Dixiecrats—leaving the labor officialdom and middle-class liberals to dominate a “labor-liberal” Party. As Paul Heideman pointed out in a recent essay in Jacobin,1 there was a realignment in the Democratic Party in the 1970s—but not the one the reformists hoped for. The southerners abandoned the Democrats for the Republicans, but with urban growth the non-WASP capitalists were joined by new capitalists in high technology and the media, and an increasingly neo-liberal urban middle class. Rather than becoming a labor-liberal party, the Democrats moved sharply right in the 1980s as the official leaders of the labor, civil rights, and women’s movements were marginalized.

Today, we are seeing a realignment within the oldest party of industrial capitalism in the U.S.—the Republicans. The party establishment—those with the closest historic ties to old-line, WASP manufacturers, bankers, and financiers—have lost control of the party to a right-wing populist, Donald Trump. Since the 1960s, the mass voter base of the Republican Party has been made up primarily of older, suburban, white, middle-class small-businesspeople, professionals, and managers, many of whom are self-described Christian fundamentalists, and a minority of older white workers, including a minority of union households. Until recently, the Party base’s particular passions—especially its hostility to the democratic gains of people of color, women, and LGBT people—could be contained. Minor concessions to the social conservatives on abortion, affirmative action, voter restrictions, and same-sex marriage/legal equality maintained their loyalty, while capitalists set the substantive neo-liberalagenda for the Republicans (and the Democrats as well). As in the Democratic Party, the non-capitalist elements of the Republican coalition were clearly junior partners to capital.

In 2016, a radical, right-wing, middle-class insurgency that began in the wake of the world economic crisis of 2007 – 08 has displaced, at least temporarily, the hegemonic capitalists in the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate is the most recent act of a struggle for the leadership of the party that began in the aftermath of the global recession and the election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate. While capital did push back against the first wave of middle-class radicalism in the Republican Party—the Tea Party—during the 2014 Congressional elections, these rebels were not vanquished. In fact, they have become even more radically nationalist and populist, imposing a Presidential candidate hostile to the neo-liberal agenda.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2007 – 08 global recession, the mainstream media predicted, and much of the left hoped for, a sharp turn to the left in both public opinion and state policies. Growing support for “socialism”—more capitalist state regulation of the market economy and the expansion of social welfare—seemed to sound the death knell of neo-liberalism across the advanced capitalist world. The 2008 election, when Obama and the Democrats scored large majorities with vague promises of a return to “New Deal” policies, seemed to confirm these prognostications. However, within two years of Obama’s election it was clear that the U.S., like other capitalist societies, was experiencing a sharpening political polarization. While capital and mainstream political leaders remained committed to austerity and deregulation, there was widespread rejection of neo-liberalism from both the left and the right. On the one hand, a significant portion of youth and working people were moving left—as manifested in the Wisconsin Uprising, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and, electorally, in the massive support for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries. On the other, we saw the radicalization of the older, white middle classes around a right-wing populist program that targeted both people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBT folks, and the “corporate establishment.”

The Bush and Obama administrations’ bail-outs of banks, the auto industry, and some homeowners was the catalyst for the radicalization of the Republican electorate.2 The “Tea Party” began as an alliance between a grass-roots rebellion of older, white, suburban small-business people, professionals and managers, and elements of the capitalist class. The middle-class ranks of the Tea Party railed against “corporate welfare” and “bailouts for undeserving” homeowners, in particular people of color who held sub-prime mortgages. Capitalists like the Koch brothers saw an opportunity to advance their libertarian agenda of defeating Obamacare and privatizing Medicare and Social Security pensions.3 Broader layers of the capitalist class encouraged the Tea Party’s mobilizations as long as it championed the weakening of unions, further deregulation of capital, and social-service austerity. Capitalists were also happy to manipulate hostility to Obama’s health care plan to force the Democrats to increase subsidies to the private health care and insurance industries.

This alliance continued through the 2010 Congressional elections, when the Republicans won a majority in the House and deprived the Democrats of their filibuster-proof “super majority” in the Senate. While particularly right-wing capitalists like the Koch brothers helped finance the Tea Party, most capitalists continued to hedge their bets electorally. Capitalist donors slightly preferredthe Democrats over the Republicans in 2010. The rise of a new populist right targeting immigrants, people of color, and unions for the current economic crisis represented a radicalization of the white, suburban middle classand a minority of older, white, native-born workers. Capital was more than willing to use this nativist, racist, and anti-union movement when their interests coincided. However, the new right has an agenda independent of and, at points, opposed to that of capital.

The issues of immigration and the possibility of a Federal credit default distinguished the Tea Party right from the political establishment. The minority of older white workers who voted Republican viewed undocumented immigrants as competitors on the labor-market; while the older small businesspeople and professionals who made up the majority of the Tea Party cadre and voters viewed undocumented immigrants are a threat to their “quality of life” and competitors for scarce social services. Mass deportations and denying the undocumented any path to citizenship (and access to social services), with lower Federal deficits, would protect the “earned benefits” (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) upon which they rely.

Capitalists, however, have a very different perspective on both immigration and the debt ceiling. Not only do high-tech industries want access to skilled foreign professionals, but labor-intensive industries like agriculture, construction, landscaping, domestic service, child-care, healthcare, and hospitality rely on low-wage, vulnerable immigrant labor. Capital wants a precarious migrant workforce without legal status, disciplined by selective deportations, to labor for substandard wages in these industries. The two most important “business lobbying” organizations—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—are leading the fight for an immigration reform that would create massive “guest worker” programs and a long, difficult and complex “path to citizenship” for those in the U.S. without papers, while opposing wholesale deportations and other policies that reduce the size of the immigrant workforce.

Capital supports massive cuts to social spending in the U.S. and a reduction of the Federal budget deficit. However, the Tea Party’s political brinkmanship—its willingness to let the U.S. default on its public debt by refusing to raise the debt ceiling in 2011—estranged capital from the Tea Party. Both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable led the opposition to attempts to “shut down the government” as a threat to the U.S. and global financial system upon which capitalists depend.

The fall 2013 government shut-down marked the end of the uneasy alliance between the Tea Party and the capitalist class. The campaign to “Fix the Debt” was launched in 2012, bringing together dozens of former Senators and Congressmen and over one hundred fifty CEOs of some of the largest U.S. transnational corporations in support of a “grand bargain” of closing corporate tax loop-holes while lowering the overall tax rate “in exchange” for “restructuring” (i.e. massive cuts to) federal pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. While the “bargain” garnered the support of Obama, the Democratic leadership, and mainstream Republicans, key leaders of the Tea Party refused to accept this compromise, sparking the government shut-down of fall 2013.4

In the midst of the 2013 budget crisis, leaders and staff of key elements of the “business lobby,” (National Retail Federation, National Federation of Independent Businesses, National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable) and the “Fix the Debt” campaign began to wage primary campaigns against Republican lawmakers who had engineered the government shut-down. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce led the mobilization for mainstream Republicans. Scott Reed, the Chamber’s chief political strategist launched “Vote for Jobs,” targeting key Senate and House races to defend incumbents like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and defeat Tea Party intransigents. “Vote for Jobs” made very effective interventions in the Republican Congressional primaries and in the general election in November 2014. Only one Republican was elected to the Senate without the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce.

Initially, the capitalist class’s attempts to discipline the Republican Party appeared to be successful. Despite calls by the still sizeable Tea Party contingent in both chambers to shut down the government to block Obama’s Executive Order on immigration, bipartisan coalitions in both the House and Senate pushed through the nearly $1.1 trillion spending plan in late December 2014. But while a government shutdown was avoided, the greatly reduced Tea Party contingent in the House and Senate was able to block serious discussion of a pro-corporate immigration reform. Their continued influence was most clearly seen when John Boehner, Republican Speaker of the House, was forced out of Congress despite having successfully navigated several budget deals. While his replacement, Paul Ryan, is considerably to the right, he has clearly distanced himself from the populist insurgency that has metamorphosed into the Trump campaign.

Donald Trump’s “outsider” campaign for President marked a deepening of the right-wing radicalization of sections of the middle classes and of the crisis of capitalist hegemony in the Republican Party. When Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in June 2015, few political commentators took his campaign seriously. With a field dominated by mainstream Republicans like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, most believed that Trump’s campaign would be short-lived. However, within a month of announcing his bid for the presidency, Trump was out-polling a crowded Republican field. And in July 2016, he became the official nominee of the Republican party.

What makes Trump unacceptable to the Republican establishment and their corporate backers is not merely his unabashed racism and misogyny, his casual references to his penis size, nor does their hostility flow from electoral calculations, though it is true that Trump is likely to lose the presidency and possibly help return Democratic majorities in the House and Senate—Trump, in many ways, is a radical, right-wing opponent of capital’s dominance over the Republican Party.5 Not only does Trump express the xenophobia and racism of his populist base, but he rejects central tenets of the bipartisan neoliberal agenda that has impoverished segments of the middle class along with working and poor people. Capital is clearly uneasy with Trump’s stance on immigration and the federal debt—he floated the idea of trying to persuade creditors to accept less than full payment on loans to the U.S. government.6 The corporate elite is even more disturbed by his ideas about foreign policy and global “free trade.”

Trump rejects the established “U.S. role in the world”—a muscular, imperialist foreign policy ready to use military force to protect the global interests of U.S. capital. While there have been debates within the U.S. ruling class over where and when to send troops since Vietnam, no segment of the corporate class questions the U.S. alliance with the most stable capitalist power in the Middle East, Israel, the justice of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the maintenance of nuclear hegemony. Trump has also made incendiary comments on “bombing the shit” out of the Islamic State forces, threatened to break off negotiations with the Iranian regime, and called for U.S. allies to pay for U.S. military and political protection. Not surprisingly, those allies are uneasy: “In many capitals, Mr. Trump’s formal and off-the-cuff foreign policy proposals: his threat to pull out of NATO; his musings about removing the United States nuclear umbrella over Japan and South Korea; his pledge to slap huge trade tariffs on China—are regarded with a mix of alarm and confusion.”7 As an advocate of an “America First” politics that has been rejected by the U.S. corporate elite since the 1940s, Trump is perceived as a much less reliable agent of U.S. capital globally than a committed and experienced imperialist politician like Hillary Clinton.8

Even more disturbing for the corporate elite are Trump’s positions on “free trade” and taxation. The removal of any and all political obstacles to the free movement of capital and goods—but not labor—has been a fundamental element of neo-liberal orthodoxy for well over thirty years. From Bill Clinton’s signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the entire U.S. capitalist class and its political representatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties have promoted the liberalization of trade and investment. Equally important to the neo-liberal agenda is the lowering of taxes on U.S. corporations and wealthy individuals, theoretically to promote investment. Trump is opposed to both of these pillars of neoliberalism. He blames NAFTA and other trade deals for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, and calls for tariffs as high as 40% on imports to protect U.S. jobs against “unfair” competition—despite warnings that this could spark a global trade war that could damage the role of U.S. corporations in the world economy.9 Nor do any sections of capital in the U.S. support higher taxes on wealthy individuals or punitive taxation on those who “export American jobs.”10

Despite winning the nomination, Trump’s politics have alienated a broad swath of the Republican establishment. Within a month of the Republican National Convention, more than seventy prominent Republicans sent a letter to the Republican National Committee urging it to cut off funding to Trump’s campaign, and instead shift resources to vulnerable Republicans in House and Senate seats.11 The New York Times estimated that over 110 Republican leaders had, by late August, declared that they could not campaign or vote for Trump.12

Trump’s right-wing nationalist populist positions on foreign policy, trade, and taxation help explain why growing segments of the capitalist class in the U.S.—including former Tea Party backers like the Koch brothers—attempted to block his nomination.13 Even more ominously for Trump, traditionally Republican corporate funders are either sitting out the Presidential election or supporting the more reliable spokesperson for capital, Hillary Clinton. A USA Today survey of 156 individuals, corporations, and organizations that have donated at least $1 million to super PACs since January 1, 2015 found that many who usually donate to Republican candidates “up and down the ticket” are not providing funds for Trump. Some are actually donating to Clinton, while others are focusing their donations on “down ticket” Republican candidates for the House and Senate. Not only has Clinton been successful in raising funds from investment bankers,14 but the usually Republican defense industry is backing her 2 to 1 in campaign donations.15

Continues at: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2016/10/fie ... en-trumped

[American Dream]

Stock Fraud, Drug Trafficking, & the ‘Alt-Right’

When Donald Trump’s campaign manager Steve Bannon was recently exposed for using a vacant house in Miami as his legal residence, he hastily changed his legal address to a beach house in Sarasota, Florida owned by a writer at his Breitbart.com website.

His hurried move— made more urgent by Trump’s adoption of ‘voter fraud’ as one of his signature issues— has unexpectedly given a gift that keeps on giving to investigators probing the financing of the newly-emergent “Alt-Right.”

http://www.madcowprod.com/2016/09/28/st ... alt-right/

[tapitsbo]

The Alt-Right are not "merry politically incorrect pranksters" as Milo wants his readers to think. I cannot stand Hillary Clinton, but she is right that the "alt right"(which virtually all of the old and new guard neo Nazi groups now call themselves) are the tipping spear of modern violent hatred. The real bulk of the alt right believe in a pure white "ethnostate" by any violent means necessary, yet seems confused and fractured along Templar Knight Christian LARPers, Hitler Nazi cosplayers and Odinist neo Pagan adepts. In this confused "white nationalist" world, brown non white dictators named Rodrigo Duterte and Augusto Pinochet are worshipped, along with Japanese anime nerd culture(and on the Counter Currents esoteric side, Chinese and Tibetan Dharmic Buddhism/Tibetan spiruality, ect) The alt right openly wishes for an army of Dylan Roofers and Andres Breiviks, yet worries that such characters "tarnish their name". They spread the neo Turner Diaries violent racial 4chan meme of "D.A.K. 10.16.16", whilst worrying that such Gladio far right terrorism will hurt their cause in the national spectrum. Yet, posting feverish paranoid "Kike this, Jew that" conspiratorial articles like it's 1937 and violent anti black articles is par for course. The neo Nazi(oops, I mean "alt right") love of Asian culture is embarrassing, speaking as an Asian person.

How do you feel about the actually existing ethnonationalism in Asia?

The confused and embarrassing factions you are talking about are hopeless because they are oriented around a non-existent "white nation". They are acting out a kind of identity theatre that is cultivated as an outlet to keep actual challenges to the ideology of the American nation from developing.

Meanwhile the framing of "whiteness" is for now still firmly in the hands of elites who are hostile to almost all Americans regardless of their colour or ethnicity.

I believe that race is real the way professional wrestling is real, like JackRiddler said in the other thread. "White" insurgency is more likely to be putty in the hands of think tanks than a real threat to you guys' academic gigs and such.

[American Dream]

How the Alt Right is trying to create a ‘safe space’ for racism on college campuses

Shane Burley and Alexander Reid Ross October 6, 2016


A murmur began in May around Berkeley and the surrounding Bay Area as posters appeared overnight on the sides of buildings and wrapped on poles. Adorned with images of statues of antiquity, these classical images of European men depicted as gods were intended to light a spark of memory in the mostly white faces that passed by them. With lines like “Let’s become great again” printed on them, the posters were blatant in their calls for European “pride,” clearly connecting romanticized European empires of the past to the populism of Donald Trump today.

The posters were put up by Identity Europa, one of the lesser-known organizations amid that esoteric constellation of reactionary groups and figures known as the “Alt Right.” They were part of a campaign around the country enticing college-age white people to join a new kind of white nationalist movement. While similar posters emerged elsewhere on the West Coast and Midwest, in central California they pointed toward a public event — one directed specifically toward the tradition of free speech at the University of California at Berkeley.

Shortly after the posters went up, a brief announcement came from Alt Right leader Richard Spencer and his think-tank, the National Policy Institute. They, along with Identity Europa and other white nationalist organizations, were planning to hold an “Alt Right Safe Space” in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza on May 6. The “safe space” is a play on words for the Alt Right, using the phrase that many leftist-oriented facilities use for a code of conduct that bans oppressive or bigoted behavior. Instead, they intended to make a “safe space” for white racism, the public declaration of which has become unwelcome in most any space. The plan was to show up and publicly proselytize on the problems of multiculturalism and the need for “white identity.”

Identity Europa founder Nathan Damigo joined Spencer, along with Johnny Monoxide, a podcaster and blogger from the white nationalist blog The Right Stuff, which has become popular in Internet racialist circles (racialist being a term they use, since racist carries a negative connotation) for its internal lingo and open use of racial slurs. Alt Right media outlet Red Ice Creations teamed up with Monoxide to livestream the event, bringing the white nationalist crowd together with their international audience of conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccine activists and alternative religion proponents.

While live streaming to their crowd, they came ready to argue. “This guy’s anti-dialogical! He’s anti-white,” yelled Damigo when challenged on the racialist content of his talking points.

Race and identity

For decades, both the institutional and radical left in the United States has relied on campus activism as a key part of its organizing base. From the antiwar movement of the 1960s to the development of feminist and queer politics to the growing youth labor and Black Lives Matter movement, colleges have been a center for political encounters and mobilizations. The radicalization of students has often leaned to the left because the left’s challenges to systems of power seem like a perfect fit for people expanding their understanding of the world.

Amid major shifts in U.S. politics, a space has opened for revolutionary right-wing politics that have not traditionally been accessible to those outside of the most extreme ranks of the white nationalist movement. Today, the Alt Right is repackaging many of the ideas normally associated with neo-Nazis and KKK members into a new, more middle-class culture by using the strategies and language traditionally associated with the left. This means a heavy focus on argumentation and academic legitimacy, as well as targeting campus locations (and millennials) for recruitment.

Until Hillary Clinton’s August 21 speech, most people had never heard of the Alt Right. However, it is a movement that has been growing for almost a decade in backroom conferences and racially-charged blogs. It is a kind of cultural fascism, one birthed out of the post-war fascist movements of Europe and given character by a culture of Twitter trolls and populist American anger. Yet, when it appears on campus, the Alt Right’s recruiting is hardly different from the Klan’s attempts to openly recruit members by leaving bags of leaflets and candy at people’s doorsteps.

While the Alt Right Safe Space was put together as a joint effort with several nationalist organizations, Identity Europa emphasizes focusing on the youth most of all. The name and branding of Identity Europa are new, but the organization was started years ago as the National Youth Front.

Nathan Damigo was an Iraq war veteran going to school at the University of California at Stanislaus when he took over the organization, shifting its ideological orientation from “civic nationalism” to “race realism,” the notion that whites have higher average IQ’s and a smaller propensity for crime than blacks. While Damigo notes that they have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to gay members, he said that bi-racial and transgendered people would be turned away.

For Damigo and others who trade in white nationalist talking points like “race realism,” the differences between races are significant.

“Ethnic and racial or religious diversity can actually wreak havoc on a social system, and cause tons of problems,” Damigo said. “I do believe that there are differences between human populations … [T]he distribution of genes that affect behavior and intelligence are already known to not be equally distributed between all populations.”

Identity Europa then represents a sort of “fraternal organization” where “European-descended” people can meet and network, working their way towards a kind of campus activism that challenges discourse and educational plans embedded with multiculturalism and egalitarianism. Such organizations have a long history on the right, stretching back to the 19th century fencing clubs and fraternities that popularized the pan-German ideas of Georg Schönerer — an immediate influence on Nazism.

As organizers, however, Identity Europa do not follow the standard playbook for campus activism, which usually involves breaking broad political ideas into organized demands with reachable goals. Instead, they simply want to cultivate a subculture whose constituents will intervene in public discourse, thereby seeding their well-rehearsed talking points about racial inequality, white sovereignty and the return to heteronormative social roles. While Damigo brags about the growth of Identity Europa, it likely does not have membership beyond a few dozen people on campuses around the country at this point. However, there are reports of Identity Europa posters appearing at different places around the country almost weekly.

Outreach to millennials

Through its brand of social interruption, Identity Europa intends to foment a revolutionary right-wing culture — precisely the goal shared by Richard Spencer and his National Policy Institute. Spencer has been in right-wing politics for years, first joining as an assistant editor at the American Conservative after an article he published on the Duke Lacrosse sexual assault scandal made him a minor star.

He later went to the controversial Taki’s Magazine, known for giving a voice to the shrinking paleoconservative movement and staffing dissident voices from the right who are regularly accused of racism. As he further cemented himself in this “dissident right” world, he developed the term “Alternative Right” to indicate the different strands that he saw uniting against multiculturalism, equality and American democracy.

It was in this climate that Spencer founded the website Alternative Right, giving voice to a growing white nationalist movement that built on fascist intellectual traditions in Western Europe and challenged the right-wing connection to the American conservative movement.

He eventually went on to take over the white nationalist think-tank, the National Policy Institute, or NPI, originally founded by William Regnery, using money inherited from the conservative publishing house, Regnery Publishing. The organization was meant to center on Samuel Francis, a former columnist with the Washington Times who was let go as he shifted further into white nationalism and associated with racialist organizations like American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens. Spencer took over the organization after Francis’s death, molding it into the intellectual core of the growing Alt Right movement.

Spencer’s goal has always been the creation of a “meta-political” movement rather than one founded on contemporary political wedge issues. He hopes to draw together ideas like “white identitarianism” — a term used to brand the movement as being about European heritage — and the eugenics-invoking “human biodiversity.” Both are terms fostered by the so-called “European New Right” and its leading ideologues.

What immediately distinguished Spencer’s role in the white nationalist movement from the older generation was his explicit focus on millennial outreach. For instance, his expensive NPI conferences are dramatically discounted for those under 30, and his new Radix Journal is marketed directly to an Internet culture of disaffected and angry white youths. He was an early proponent of podcasts as a main voice of the movement, a move that has given the Alt Right its conversational tone and made its ideas more accessible.

With Damigo, Spencer developed the Alt Right Safe Space idea to exploit the projection of free speech on college campuses, despite the movement’s general rejection of human rights.

“I think it’s symbolic as a way of saying, ‘we’re here,’” Spencer explained.



Two young Trump supporters, Matt Duffy (left) and Volodymyr Kolychev, at a Portland State University Students for Trump event in April.

Continues at: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/al ... -campuses/

[Jerky]

How the Alt Right is trying to create a ‘safe space’ for racism on college campuses

Two young Trump supporters, Matt Duffy (left) and Volodymyr Kolychev, at a Portland State University Students for Trump event in April.

Continues at: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/al ... -campuses/

Have you ever, in your life, seen two more punch-worthy smirks on human faces?

Trump really is bringing out the best in us, that's for sure.

Jerky

[American Dream]

NYC Antifa Fall Newsletter





If our blog has looked a little slow recently, it might be because the work of an antifascist is overwhelming in 2016. We’ve also taken to updating our twitter account more frequently, as we are moving towards the blog being mostly for original content.

After the repression against Occupy and Arab Spring movements in 2010, global political trends have backslid into deeply regressive populism. The ascendance of Trumpism and the Alt-Right in the US are a result of the same fascist impulses that have solidified the power of Viktor Orban in Hungary, Putin in Russia, and Erdogan in Turkey — and convinced thousands to join the cause of ISIS.

As most realize that our only electoral alternative to neo-Nationalists and alt-right creeps is the continuation of the State’s atrocities at current levels with Clinton, we urge our readers to get organized now. Create or join an antifascist group to monitor your local Trumpists. Link up with immigration advocacy groups and start considering how to block ICE raids. Link up with prisoners who are struggling for their lives. Attend Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Use the fear and outrage of the election season to keep you going, and remind yourself, whatever you do, that voting (and mouthing-off on social media) is never enough

More at: https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2016/10 ... ewsletter/

[Wombaticus Rex]

Have you ever, in your life, seen two more punch-worthy smirks on human faces?

Trump really is bringing out the best in us, that's for sure.

Tribal inter-group competition. That's all there is, bud, no sci-fi future for we primates.

"Punch-worthy" -- you know, like racist cartoon frogs

If you want to get into a streetfight, just go do it, guys -- don't pretend it's some kind of social justice stance.

[American Dream]

I will not judge for others, but I've never considered street fighting as part of my personal praxis. I did witness a Nazi skinhead get the shit beat out of him on Haight Street and I know one person who threw a bottle towards Nazis as his group was chasing them away...