Tuesday, August 20, 2019

No one is actually defining the "Alt Right" correctly.

If your definition of "Alt Right" excludes Ben Shapiro and Paul Joseph Watson then you're actually excluding the core cultural center of how the "Alt Right" works.  And possibly the same can be said about Stephen Molyneux and Stephen Crowder.

The Alt Right is largely defined by how undefined it is, there is no actual ideological common denominator, every one of them on at least one issue takes a position that in modern American Political Discourse is considered a very far right position.  But there is no single issue that unifies them all.

One of the more common attempts to define the Alt Right based on an actual policy position is to say it requires "Advocating for a White Ethno-State".  Which can be easily justified by the fact that a couple of the most prominent websites calling themselves something like "altright dot com" are indeed doing a form of that, and attacking some of the names I listed above for not being that.  But the thing is that designation existed before it was an officially trademarked domain name.

The thing that all forms of the Alt Right actually have in common is that they are Trump Supporters, that is why it first entered public discourse during his Presidential Campaign.  But not all Trump Supporters, not people who were gonna vote Republican no matter what because "anyone but Hilary" not even necessarily every vote he eventually got in the primaries (which was less then 50% of votes cast in the Republican 2016 Primary).  But the people who were enthusiastic Trump supporters in 2015, and didn't do so just because they liked him best on one issue important to them.  They are the people who considered his inflammatory style a feature rather then a bug.  The people who care more about "triggering the libs" then any actual Conservative policy.  And because of this the label can include people who are constantly attacking each other, just as different kinds of Fascists in the 1920s and 30s often didn't get along with each other (Mussolini and the Nazis actually had a very hostile partnership), they are united only in their support of Trump.

Trump himself I don't call Alt Right because I don't think he believes a single thing he says.  But the Alt Right were those people predisposed to find him appealing the moment his campaign started.  Many of them came out of GamerGate and the 4Chan /pol/ board.  But that is not me agreeing with those saying all of Meme Culture is Alt Right or even all of 4Chan, I think most of 4Chan looks at /pol/ with annoyance.

You see some people want to separate the Alt Right from the Kekistani flag wavers, but the Kekistani flag wavers are specifically who the term was first coined to describe, attempts to attach it to a more specific ideology came later.

Now a lot of this desire to define the "Alt Right" to exclusively is specifically fans of Jordan Peterson and Sargon of Akkad wanting to keep the label from including them.  So I will say here I don't currently have an opinion one way or the other if either of them qualifies because I don't know if they ever supported Trump, much less soon enough or strongly enough to have the proper MAGA street cred.  But they certainly have been allied with people who qualify.  It is only specifically the White Nationalism variety they are hostile to.

I am not making this post with any specific desire to condemn someone I don't like as being Alt Right, this is my truly unbiased observation of what the movement is.

In 2015 I was still "Paleo-Conservative" enough while also being rebellious enough that I could have easily became a founding member of the Alt Right, but I didn't, I always looked at Trump with distrust and in a way his rise helped drive me out of the Alex Jones listening community.

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