The NY Times has a piece about the Alt Right today.
The whole article is worth a read. Here are a few snippets.
“I don’t think that Trump is a rabid white nationalist,” the alt-right blogger Millennial Woes said at a speech in Seattle days after the election. “I think that he just wants to restore America to what he knew as a young man, as a child. And I think he probably does know at some level that the way to do it is to get more white people here and fewer brown people.”
…
How big is the movement? There is a “hard core” of thousands or tens of thousands who are “taking us seriously on a daily basis,” Mr. Spencer said. But both members and detractors have an incentive to exaggerate the alt-right’s size. The National Policy Institute, at this point, would have trouble holding a serious street rally, let alone turning into a mass political party.
Even so, this more narrowly defined alt-right may be a force. In the internet age, political consciousness can be raised not just through quarterlies, parties and rallies but also through comment boards, console games and music videos. The internet solves the organizing problem of mobs, even as it gives them incentives not to stray from their screens. The adjective “alt-right” does not just denote recycled extremist views — it also reflects the way those views have been pollinated by other internet concerns and updated in the process.
I meant, why are the media using “Alt-Right”… they can call themselves whatever they want, but if a convicted murderer calls himself a ‘vigilante of justice’, is that what all the news outlets should call him too?
Well, my understanding was that alt-right also encompassed a lot of the gamergate/PUA crowd, as well as neo-reactionary “thinkers”. So just calling them neo-nazis or white supremacists – or even white nationalists – wouldn’t have referred to the group as a whole. That doesn’t mean you can’t call the actual neo-nazis neo-nazis, it just means that you need a broader term. Hillary used “basket of deplorables,” which they instantly co-opted into a badge of honor, but the media seemed to a) not want to parrot a talking point whenever they referred to a group, and b) want some level of softening when they spoke about the group. Plus it’s just a pain in the ass to call them racists, sexists, xenophobes, and anti-Semites. Maybe something like “white christian male supremacists” would be a more direct and inclusive term.
Which has a lot of neo-nazis and white supremacists in it and white nationalists so calling it that isn’t a huge problem is it? If you don’t like being labeled with the company you keep, change the company you keep.
There are a lot of neo-nazis and white supremacists in America, too, but just referring to Americans as white supremacists would be difficult to take seriously. Again, it’s not that it’s a problem to refer to white nationalists or whatever as what they actually are, alt-right was just intended as a broader term for a certain tear-down-the-Cathedral mindset. Not everyone who thinks SJWs are misguided also thinks black people are inferior. You can call them racist because their ideas open the door for racist ones, but white supremacist, white nationalist, and neo-nazi all have specific connotations and implications that are simply not an accurate way to describe the entire “movement”. The real point is that alt-right should be just as negative a term as neo-nazi, despite being broader.
Oh get real. GG and that group is not even close to the the size of the American people. GG is full of racist and misogynists and the others in that group are too afraid to separate themselves from that group hoping to further their cause by having those people in their ranks. GG was just a prelude to Trump… exact same problem and same defense too.
I agree with that, and I think a lot of folks who supported GG probably ended up supporting Trump, but my problem with the calls to just start referring to everyone as a white supremacist is that it’s a really slippery form of guilt by association. If person A says “I don’t think think we need every superhero to suddenly start getting a female version” and person B says, “I agree with you completely – all these SJWs are feminizing our media, we need to stand up for men’s rights!” does that mean that person has to either retract his (or her) statement or be a sexist gamergater and therefore a white nationalist also? Sure, you can say that anyone who is a proud booster of the alt-right is at least comfortable with white nationalism, but most of the people even on message boards with a lot of that kind of discussion are in favor of some points and not others.
So if I favor calling “illegals” illegal because they are, I am a racist. I have been called that on line. And yet, isn’t that just semantics? Isn’t that just taking a cause to the Nth degree and calling everyone who disagrees with you the nastiest name you can think of for them?
It would seem that the term illegals is pretty offensive term in general, and it’s purpose is to dehumanize.
So, going out on a limb, I think that the term illegals is something I would associate with racists using, as opposed to people on this forum. I would be saddened if people I know used that term freely as a blanket statement.
If you know that person B is part of your group and you do nothing or put in a token effort to disassociate your group from that group then yes, you’ve basically let a racist, sexist and white supremacy group take over your movement. There was a call early on for GG to be ditched and a new attempt, a new group formed because it became too toxic and entwined with group B. They refused to do it. If you pose with a bunch of people in white sheets, smiling and hoping they can carry your ideal forward, you don’t get to claim later hey guys, look I realize the white sheets throws things off but you see I’m just in the middle, not wearing a white sheet so I get a pass.
How do you know their legal status? I personally don’t have a problem talking about someone’s right to live and work in a country, but largely these conversations are often had with one group making huge assumptions about things they have no idea about. I would also not use the term “illegals” either though. I would stick to what the issue is. If they don’t have a right to work in the country, then talk about their right not to work in the country. The term illegals is not appropriate.
This is interesting. The IRS defines “immigrant” as:
"An alien who has been granted the right by the USCIS to reside permanently in the United States and to work without restrictions in the United States. Also known as a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR).
Permanent Resident Alien - An alien admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident. Permanent residents are also commonly referred to as immigrants;
This makes the term “illegal immigrant” a contradiction, does it not?
However, that same DHS definition also includes:
the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) broadly defines an immigrant as any alien in the United States, except one legally admitted under specific nonimmigrant categories (INA section 101(a)(15)). An illegal alien who entered the United States without inspection, for example, would be strictly defined as an immigrant under the INA but is not a permanent resident alien.
The term that seems widely accepted now, “undocumented immigrant”, can be a bit misleading, though. One could assume that the lack of documentation could be due solely to an administrative error.
This same argument is made against BLM because its members haven’t been sufficiently denouncing the few who did bad things and supported the movement. It has also been made against Muslims because there apparently isn’t enough denouncement of terrorism perpetrated by Muslims (though there is a lot of it, so this statement ends up more as “I haven’t personally been exposed to a lot of Muslims denouncing terrorism, so they are all basically terrorists”). Agreeing with a racist doesn’t make you racist (though agreeing with statements that are themselves racist obviously does). Failing to “sufficiently denounce” or “put in enough effort to disassociate with” someone who says or does bad things does not mean you support those bad things and are just as bad as that person. It’s an incredibly slippery standard, for one thing, and it also requires not just that you personally believe in decency but that you are confrontational about it.
Trevor Noah basically had a similar argument with Tomi Lahren the other night, where she said that BLM was responsible for and supported the killing of police in Dallas and all violence that has occurred during their protests. We’ve had that argument on these boards. You can’t disband your group and try to create a new one every time a supporter says or even does horrible things. You simply need to make clear what you stand for and why.
So again, the uniting principles of the alt-right seem to be the desire to dismantle the “Cathedral” (or “drain the swamp” or “burn it all down” or whatever version of that) and to roll back or fight back against PC culture, SJWs, and special snowflakes. I don’t agree with these principles and I think the second of them is particularly intolerant, but I also think it’s possible to support these positions without also believing that whites are the master race or that America is and should remain a white Christian country. So dismissing the whole movement as white nationalists is as unhelpful as dismissing all BLM supporters as cop haters.
EDIT: One additional point re: Trump. Trump isn’t racist because racists support him. Racists support him because he says racist things. If he didn’t say racist things, I wouldn’t care that the KKK supports him. They all probably voted for Romney too, but he didn’t say things to explicitly encourage them.
Sorry I missed it. I might use it a little more often, read a lot more often, this year than I did before, but I am terrible at recognizing it.
Didn’t we use undocumented workers or something like that before… which I don’t think quite workers either.
I mean i get why people want to point out that there are people here illegally, as in they either didn’t follow our laws to get into the country or they didn’t follow our laws to stay here after legally entering the country. I think the terms legal and illegal are okay, but to turn it into a noun… not so much. What are we gaining by doing that… basically short-hand to label a bunch of brown people since we can’t be bothered to really go into anything in depth within all our fake news articles and opinions.
