Attacks on the Alt Right

The New Yorker writes

The alt-right has no consistent ideology; it is a label, like “snob” or “hipster,” that is often disavowed by people who exemplify it. The term typically applies to conservatives and reactionaries who are active on the Internet and too anti-establishment to feel at home in the Republican Party. Bizarrely, this category includes the Republican nominee for President.

This is uninformed or crazy. The Left fears and despises Trump and the Alt Right because they do have a coherent ideology.

Just listen to a Trump speech. Or read an Alt Right site like the Gateway Pundit.

The extremist fringe is represented by Richard B. Spencer. See this Mother Jones article trashing him as a hateful racist.

Spencer granted interviews, but there are not any quotes to back up the extremist epithets. He is quoted as saying:

The alt-right is in a way conservatives who don't have anything to conserve anymore

Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity

I think white identity politics is inevitable. You can't become a minority and not understand yourself as in jeopardy in some way

I think there is something within the European soul that we haven't been able to measure yet and maybe we never will, and that is a Faustian drive or spirit — a drive to explore, a drive to dominate, a drive to live one's life dangerously … a drive to explore outer space and the universe. I think there is something within us that we possess and that only we possess.

If you want more extreme statements, try Daily Stormer. But the mainstream media refuses to mention that site. Perhaps they are afraid of getting trolled.

Mother Jones writes:

Years later, Spencer would through his Radix Journal help spread a metaphor used to explain the jarring experience of waking up to a different worldview. In the 1999 movie The Matrix, the character Morpheus (who is black, incidentally) offers Keanu Reeves a choice between taking a blue pill — "the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe" — or a red pill, which shows "how deep the rabbit hole goes." In the alt-right's telling, the so-called "normies" swallow the blue pill, digesting the fiction of racial equality, while those who get "red pilled" are stripped of the virtual-reality cloak that blinds them, waking up to the shattering realization that liberalism is just a mirage designed to obscure the hard, ugly truths of a world programmed by genetics. "You're destroyed by it," Spencer says, "and put back together again."

The metaphor is more common used to discuss myths about sexual equality.

The simplest and funniest definition of the Alt Right is that it opposes the Ctrl Left.

Update: The NY Times explains:

Pepe the Frog, Nasty Woman, #NeverTrump.

Internet memes, the viral in-jokes of online culture, have emerged as a potent force in the presidential race, serving to build up and tear down candidates. ...

A hashtag that really took off was #AccordingtoPalin, which was just a running joke about remarks that she had made that were very questionable, like, “You can see Russia from Alaska.” ...

Pepe didn’t become political until Donald Trump endorsed it by retweeting a Trump version of the character, which led to a mass influx of pro-Trump Pepes.

You have to consider social media’s political climate leading up to 2016, which has been heavily marked by the gender war and identity politics. These things led to the emergence of a reactionary movement, namely the alt-right, and Trump was kind of the natural poster boy for that.

Pepe plugged into the ideology of the alt-right because it was a reaction against the people they call “normies.” Pepe had been a symbol of the disenfranchised, social outcasts. It was Trump’s natural audience. ...

But the real trigger point that led to mass production of Nazi and other offensive Pepes was after Hillary Clinton released a denouncement of the meme, which is a milestone in meme history.

No meme has ever been denounced by a presidential candidate.

I think what Palin said was actually correct. You know that the Left has lost it when they complain about green frogs on the internet.