#Alt-right discourse

[centrally-unplanned]

I saw this slightly-old post making the rounds recently by former alt-right memelord Walt Bismark, on how the alt-right "won" in the late 2010's - positing that as the cause of why it generally vanished. I agree overall with the vanishing part, its not gone-gone ofc but it waned as a cohesive movement. But I saw a lot of people (and generally not alt-right figures) agreeing with its conclusion and I am a bit more skeptical of those.

Its largely a personal essay so I wont address most of it, but it has a summary of five main points that outline essentially "the agenda of the Alt Right at the beginning" to evaluate success upon. Bismark thinks they won on all five, but overall I think this is playing a trick of inventing an enemy to claim you defeated. Anyway, the points:

1: Shift the “Overton Window” of acceptable public discourse to make it politically viable to openly discuss the interests of white people in mainstream politics, in the same way black people or Jewish people discuss their collective interests. 

This one I will grant a partial victory - there was a legitimate intensification of "white as identity" in politics, a making explicit what was implicit in the 2010's. Now ofc I consider this to be a classic horseshoe moment; the hard left at the time was also extremely interested in abandoning race neutrality and valorizing racial identity as an organizing principle, and did it in a very ham-fisted way that the right capitalized on, so it was an easy battle to win - but that is what it is, ofc the wider environment defined the goals & strategy. I mention it however because I do think this is only partial, and the gap between implicit and explicit isn't that relevant. He mentions as an example of this success:

Affirmative action was of course squashed by SCOTUS and the necessary legal infrastructure is being deployed to burn it down. Mainstream conservatives are mobilizing a lot of resources and energy to this end.

But conservatives have been fighting affirmative action for 20+ years, easily. Here is a 1999 article on precisely such a campaign, I literally just googled "conservatives affirmative action [year]" and I get results each time, 2003 had big cases (the Bollinger cases) on AA, etc. I remember "affirmative action bake sale" memes from like 2006 at my uni! What changed between Bollinger and 2023's Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is that conservatives had just had enough time to stack courts, and wait for Supreme Court justices to die. That just...takes time to do! The strategy hadn't changed between 2003 and 2023. And meanwhile, did they win? They won that court case, sure. What do you...think the ethic makeup of the next Harvard class is gonna be? Wanna take some bets?

His other listed victories are things like:

"Vivek defended the Great Replacement Theory on national television and remained a major Trump surrogate. The SPLC would have marginalized him for that 10 years ago. Today because of polarization and MAGA closing ranks they can’t do shit."

And like, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have successfully marginalized a Republican politician in idk 2003 are you completely high right now? Strom Fucking Thurmond was an active Senator in 2003! This is the repeated tactic here, the imagined enemies - there was never a time where liberal institutions could consistently force conservative politicians to kowtow, so you can't claim it as a change.

This is why I mention the social justice horseshoe, because he has this point here:

These days you can complain about quotas etc. being unfair to you as a white man and it’s not inflammatory or low status among centrists and conservatives. Even non-woke liberals won’t really hate you for it, just quietly think you’re a bit of a chud. This was not the case in 2015. 

And this is partially correct, I agree there was some norm shift. But that is because in ~2010 there really weren't any quotas against white men, it wasn't a thing almost anywhere outside of university applications, so the complaint would make no sense. What happened was that starting in ~2012 a huge left cultural movement started that just openly supported active discrimination against whites, Asians and men. They were a small minority of course, and never had much power, but they got enough power in certain institutions like non-profits and universities that there was a string of just very obvious cases of clear racial discrimination against in particular whites & asians (both men and women, white women often got it very bad in this wave). And the large majority of people just saw that and went "uh yeah racism is still bad?" and so now you can say that because its actually relevant to say. From that lens, is this a successful cultural victory on the part of the alt-right? In some sense sure, but really its more a cultural failure of the hard left. The status quo just kept on chugging along.

Ugh that point went long, the others repeat so we will go through them quicker.

2: Elevate identity issues like anti-immigration and the promotion of traditional gender norms to the center of Republican politics. 

A fake enemy here - anti-immigration was already a huge issue for Republicans in the 2000's. It had a huge wave under Obama actually, it goes in cycles like that. And it responds to material conditions; it's a big issue again right now because the immigration numbers spiked massively under Biden, its just way worse of a problem now (primarily due to the booming economy of course). Again a partial victory for the first part, I agree its more salient due to Trump platforming it, but I'm skeptical that it is a big shift - people are memory-holing the Tea Party movement really badly here for example.

And the second point is just obviously false, Republicans always cared about that, and they care about it less now, giving up the ghost on gay marriage for example. The Alt-Right coincided with a decline of the influence of the Religious Right, and it shows on this issue, 0 points.

3: Make it socially acceptable to discuss HBD and the resulting moral implications for leveling mechanisms like affirmative action. 

Peak "log off" moment, it was always acceptable to discuss this outside of liberal/professional circles and there it still isn't acceptable to discuss it. Charles Murray wrote the Bell Curve in 1994 and his been an American Enterprise Institute Scholar for this entire span of time. This is confusing churn for change - the mid-2010's had a bunch of big, mainly online fights about HBD, and then everyone just sort of moved on with the status quo pretty much unchanged. Nothing like education policy, even in Republican circles, has shifted over this.

4: Convince conservatives to stop ceding moral authority to liberals and allowing them to determine who on the Right is verboten or beyond the pale. Make it unacceptable among conservatives to “punch Right” or purge people for wrongthink. 

Sigh, again when have Republicans ever ceded moral authority to liberals? Harvard University could not condemn Newt Gingrich in ~2009 and make him change his mind about anything. And "Republicans don't self-criticize while Liberals eat themselves alive" has been a complaint for literally decades, you would hear that as far back as say Clinton and things like the 1999 WTO protests. Its both true and exaggerated - the Tea Party primaried Republican candidates for wrongthink in 2010, and Trump did the same thing! With disastrous results for the Republicans in 2022. I really, really don't think you can look at Trump's Republican party and say they solved the Wrongthink problem.

5: Expose and dismantle the hypocritical attitude that allows neocons to militantly support Israeli ethnonationalism while brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically.

This one is just a lolwut moment, "brutally repressing any white identity politics domestically", like what does that even mean? Name the concrete policy proposals George Bush implemented in 2007 than Donald Trump didn't in 2018 around this topic. Again a fake enemy, they were never repressed by the right, and ofc are still hated by liberal institutions like universities.

Moving on from any specific point, I think its very telling that very little about free trade vs protectionism or isolationism/support of autocracy abroad enters this list. Because beyond immigration those are the big shifts the Trump movement (which is the mechanism the alt-right has to claim for making its impact) has ushered into the party. They didn't change its stance on sexual politics or "race & IQ" or anything, those haven't changed, but meanwhile the party has completely flipped on things like tariffs or opposition to Russian military expansion. But of course those don't align neatly at all with the issues the Alt-Right fought about in 2015.

The reality the Alt-Right can't escape is that they used Trump as their mechanism for change, and Trump never really cared about any of their goals beyond immigration. He used them and then pursued either bog-standard Republican policy or his own mercurial, autocratic whims, eventually channeling all of this energy into election denialism. I really don't think if you pulled aside frikkin Ryan Faulk in 2014, asked him to put down his graphs about Raven's Progressive Matrices of black Caribbean students, and said "Hey 10 years from now all of this energy is being channeled into pretending that a failed real estate mogul didn't lose the 2020 presidential election", that he would look at that outcome and think Mission Accomplished.

I don't want to fully oversell, there are for example wins Bismark doesn't mention (School choice comes to mind, the biggest conservative win of the past decade besides the protectionist swing). The Alt Right was an influential movement, it earned its place in history. But I do not think it is an example of being a "victim of its own success". I think instead it should be understood as part of the "radical froth" of the 2010's, that bubbled over and then evaporated like its more intense leftwing peers did. It made some mark and then got left in the dust.

Net ranking of the 5 points: 0.5 for Point 1, 0.25 for Point 2, 0 for the rest, 1.25/5.

[skellagirl]

Gordon/Barney/Alyx is really really funny to me conceptually bc it's like, two hot geniuses in their 20s who look at the 40-something smartass who hangs around and go 'yeah that guy. we both want him carnally'

[the-final-sif]

just to be clear, the thing she was vaguing about was an unexplained allegedly misogynistic joke george made to somebody at some point. the among us thing was why she believed it was a pattern of behavior. still so unserious

I've gathered that, but honestly at this point the only actual matter of fact that she's put forward is that at one point ages ago, George ignored her in an among us lobby.

I'm done engaging with the whole "secret person totally told me something but I won't tell you" nonsense. If you make a public claim like "George has serious issues with misogyny" and the only actual factual piece of evidence that you're willing to provide is "one time he ignored me in an among us lobby" then that's all the evidence you get. You don't get secret evidence nobody else gets to see or respond to. I'm not playing by alex jones rules here. If you want to make a claim, you have to present your evidence.

The only actual fact Sophie offered to support her claim was George ignored her once in an among us lobby. That's all the evidence she offered so that's all the evidence I'm going to consider or engage with. She made that vague post, and then she was only willing to offer this. So this is all that vague post is based off of until she proves otherwise.

[yinyuedijun]

I always thought this webbed site was kinda toxic but then hsr metaheads always prove me wrong by showing me the TRUE meaning of toxicity 😍

[orangememesicle]

my hottest religion take: *primarily* blaming the origins of the alt right/american fascism on the early 2010s reactionary atheist subculture and not the christian hegemony and white supremacy baked into american culture is not only wildly disconnected from reality, but actively exonerates the role of christian nationalism in its formation

[shoujoboy-restart]

By Mary Harrington, May 6 2024.

[...] Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”("sure I was wrong about trad life, but my racism is still right you will see")

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”("if I don't give up of my constitutional rights, which I keep claiming the left.wanta to take away, my husband will be so sad tho" like damn ma' you

“I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”. With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

“He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”.

Talk about imperfect victim, right?

Lauren should be criticized and reprimanded for her racism, bigotry and general alt-right fuckery. But obviously no one deserves to suffer domestic violence and abuse from their partners, I hope she fully wakes up and realises part of the reason she even got herself in a lifestyle that is a catalyst for abuse is because part of her mindset was the need for a "strong (white) man to care for her and protect her (from them immigrants)" she was also sold while fear mongering immigration.

Again, she should be criticized and reprimanded for her divisive ideology, not mocked for thinking she would be a exception to the actual reality of trad life.

I'm hoping she never has to experience this sort of abuse ever again in her life no matter what, hoping she also becomes a better person and leaves behind these regressive bigoted ideals of her too.

[cynical-crypt]

i really hate that anti/proship even has to be a label on the internet. like i try really hard to respect everyones dni to the point that i check every single persons tumblr page for any mention of either before i interact at all to make sure they aren’t antiship and it drives me fucking crazy sometimes because i just want to reblog/like things without having to worry any of that shit. and if i accidentally forget to check i panic and worry that i reblogged from an absolute psycho anti who would publicly gut me

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[butchladymaria]

tags smh

[dogin8]

Think there's a lot of superiority that people find or see in the way in which somebody conveys ideas.

Like disregarding what somebody is saying because they are emotional

So I want to clarify that a Bigot who appears calm and collected and seems to listen well and opens themself up for debate is IN NO WAY better than somebody of a marginalised community who appears angry and emotional, who talks over others and who is set in their beliefs.

I'll always promote learning how to convey opinions and ideas - so that they can be understood and interpreted well by the most people - but NEVER disregard somebody's ideas because of how they are presented.

Assholes love to appear intelligent because frankly, the outcome of their fucked up and harmful views will Never end up hurting them, so they don't need to get mad because they're so far removed from it all. And they find a level of superiority in the fact that the people they argue against often DO get mad, and DO get emotional, because it ACTUALLY effects those people ( 'CRAZY SJW OWNED' videos rely entirely on this premise ).

Basically what I'm saying is, if you focus on what somebody is actually trying to say instead of how they are saying it, you take a lot of power away from these Alt Right debate bros. Whether somebody is willing to listen, or debate, or explain their beliefs, or appear polite is completely irrelevant compared to what that person ACTUALLY believes

[wouldyoudoanythingforme]

Wealth oppression is still oppression and even if a human is still 99% privileged in all other aspects, they are STILL oppressed under capitalism if they are a worker.

Neoliberalism is the ultimate evil, and the harm it did to our political landscape is insurmountable. If The Left hadn't been so staunchly pro-capitalism in the early 00s, maybe so many poor white people wouldn't have fallen victim to the anti sjw to alt right pipeline.

I know it's fun to always criticize the other side, but some introspection never hurt anyone. Do you guys know WHY anti-sjw videos were so popular among poor white teenage men in particular? Do a YouTube search for anti-sjw debunk videos. The videos are all set up in exactly the same way: respond to accusations of social injustice with arguments of economic injustice to prove that you have it "just as bad" as everyone else does and "not all white people are rich."

None of us were class conscious enough at 15 to pick up on this was what was happening, so we just responded with "lol white male tears" ironically sending these teenagers the message to suck their pain up and deal with it because it's not real and doesn't exist- engaging in toxic masculinity standards ourselves while berating men for being "toxic."

Now, pause, I am not writing this as a defense of white men or asking you to forgive neonazis. Please understand that all relationships are two way streets and analyzing how we can do better next time is not asking you to forgive the sins of racist murderers, okay? Insane I have to write this but neurotypicals gunna neutrotyp.

Okay, back to it. So, if you really analyze what these white men were saying, it boils down to "you say white men are the problem but im living proof that I have no "privileges," because I'm poor or homeless x y z," and instead of really engaging with that response, the left just kind of made fun of men for expressing their feelings? And I am not saying they were right for how they responded and the level to which they took it there, but analyzing the way the rich have set us up against each other will only help prevent them for creating more neonazis in the future.

Socialism has been kind of painted as this response to whiteness, if you really think about why the anti sjw pipeline was so effective especially after a black man became president in 08, and therefore it has become associated with the black man's response to the white man. It really all started with rich men like Ben Shapiro making YouTube videos claiming that sjws are full of shit and then peddling hundreds of millions into making sure poor men were tuned in and listening as social justice warriors became increasingly frustrated with how ignorant everyone was to injustice in America.

If you read the new Jim crow, it discusses the LONG history of Rich Whites pinning Poor Whites against each other and how effective that has been in upholding Capitalism, Colonialism and Patriarchy for centuries. I really recommend reading that book because then this post will make a lot MORE sense when you see how the same tactics described in that book were used by rich men like Ben Shapiro to funnel millions into literal anti-black and anti-socialist propaganda on the internet for years before Trump was elected.

Why do you think the right has been calling the left communist for decades now, even when neoliberalism was the main form of left ideology in the U.S. at the time? Because they were equating the economic solution for poor white people's problem with the social solution for everyone else's problems being one and the same (eat the rich= they're coming after you, your children and they want thing you don't even have out of revenge for things that happened centuries ago).

This is why white people see white privilege as economic privilege and economic privilege only because for a long time, they were pretty synonymous. However, capitalism is a self-eating system and eventually the social privilege will fall to economic privilege because not everyone can be rich means not every white person can be rich (a truth that's hard to swallow for poor whites who have been racist for decades under the guise of "economic freedom"). Now we're in "late stage capitalism," which is what white people are calling normal capitalism but affecting a huge amount of whites now.

This is why there was a huge anti-feminism crave that came along with the anti-sjw wave because if white women start realizing gender is a social concept + our role in creating gender inequality everywhere but Europe, where our husbands did that for us, we can convert our white male family into socialists and they can't have that. This is why in colonized countries, Feminism Appropriating Reactionary Transphobia (FART) is more mainstream feminism now. They cannot have people realize that capitalism/Colonialism created gender inequality because once they do- once women wake up to what our gender really is, it's fucking over for the capitalists.

Women with gender studies degrees are all coming to the conclusion that our gender was created as a way to instill capitalism into the world, and this scares the shit out of feminists because feminists are- at their core- racist as fuck. Feminism is an ideology that was created to protect White Supremacy and it will react in the exact same way any other White Supremacist organization does when threatened.

Anyways, I say all of this to say that it's all connected. Everything has always been connected and poor whites need to grow up, wake up and realize rich whites have been playing them for fools for centuries. Eat The Rich doesn't mean attack all white people because they're so privileged, but this is at the heart of many neonazi fears today. They don't want to die for revenge when they have nothing to give.

If we start saying "yes, white men are oppressed. Not because of any social injustice but because economic injustice is truly colorblind." And we start explaining to these young teenagers and men that what they are feeling IS oppression, just not social oppression, they will be much less likely to fall victim to the anti sjw to alt right pipeline. Because they will know that black people aren't the problem, Rich Whites are.

Stopping poor whites from aligning with Republicans has been a consistent weak spot for the left for decades now and it's because of neoliberalism's love for capitalism. Admitting that white people do feel economic oppression is the first step in deradicalizing and preventing radicalization to begin with.

[skywitchmaja]

oh my god. just saw a post that pissed me off SO MUCH. ugh. in short:

[rhododaktyl]

my lgbt assimilationist phases were in retrospect fucking hilarious. like i'll find an old tumblr post wherein i earnestly claim that of course there are more than two genders, but not bc gender should be superseded or anything, but bc there are, as was obvious to me at the time, "like 4 or 5" genders

[bluedestinybluebird]

Apparently, you can gain a lot when filling in visa application.

[mondonguita]

[moth-manss]

Treating young white boys like they're subhuman isn't activism btw. Idc wether or not it's part of the alt right pipeline treating little boys like shit doesn't help anyone