What is the "alt-right"?

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

I know plenty of alt-righters identify as Libertarians in mixed company to present as something less threatening, although deep down, they felt free markets and brown people don't mix.

The ultimate goal of the alt-right was to become the new Republican Party. Sadly, they failed spectacularly at the goal.

So being alt-right is acting like a libertarian but secretly you're a nazi?

No, that seems like the definition the media is currently using, but not a very legitimate one. Unfortunately, alternative is a very very wide category, much like with music, it's everything except the mainstream. So some alt-right are more centrish than the republican party, some are further right, some have some crazy pet issue or another, some are just republicans who feel the existing republicans have betrayed them...

The Tea Party was alt-right. The weird tiny neo-nazi groups are alt-right (most of the time). But they aren't THE alt-right. THE alt-right is, for lack of a less lame term, the "silent majority" who theoretically have conservative values but don't particularly like the republican party.

 

[Andrei Tarkovsky]

All of the Above and None of the Above.

 

[ICametoLurk]

http://altrightnotright.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/AltRight-NotRight171130.compressed.pdf

Nick Griffen made an 88 (lol) page pdf about how the EDL are funded by Zionists, the right has been infiltrated by homosexuals, the radicals are being controlled by security services and pagans, etc.

Beyond the EDL-Zionist ties he's even woke on Atomwaffen's pagan infestation, so he's definitely keeping himself very informed. He's a Labour supporter now haha.

 

[Stoneheart]

I have been Called Alt-right alot on the internet recently... im not alternative or rightwing. i just like my Kaiser and dont think polish are people. thats nothing new or groundbreaking, it has been a family tradition for a millenia.

 

[Hal]

The boogie man to the left.

 

[AF 802]

Anyone in the internet drama communities ngl. You're either a literal Nazi or a (((DSA))) supporter in current year tbh.

 

[Smug Chuckler]

either:

1. A modern day Satanist

2. Russian bot

3. white male

4. A gay furry convention

 

[RichardMongler]

So being alt-right is acting like a libertarian but secretly you're a nazi?

I take it you never heard of the "libertarian to alt-right pipeline". Even @14⚡⚡ weev ⚡⚡88 has commented on this phenomenon before, stating that you can't have free markets and brown people at the same time.

Here's an interesting take on the subject. I do not endorse anything this guy is saying, but this will hopefully be instructive on this talking point you'll inevitably encounter.

Choice comments from that video:

 

[reddit superstar]

What is the alt-right?

The majority of the alt-right are low-effort leftist trolls using victim hoaxes to RP as a neo nazi/white supremacist bigots for that sweet sweet sympathy.

 

[ICametoLurk]

They are literally the same as the New Left in the 60's except Right-Wing. Sam Hyde's Government book is literally the same as the Steal this Book Book. They keep thinking that they will wake people up but they lack materialism. They are gonna end up the same fate as the hippies. Becoming what they hate.

Wanna go more into detail about this.

First there's the highly self-expressive nature to their politics where they feel like the sleeping masses of whites largely agree with them and they just have to "wake them up" through these performative displays like Charlottesville. And when that backfired some of the more extreme members have taken to self-expressive acts of violence like these mass shootings; of which there has been quite a few by now. The choice of targets is different from the communist radicals in the 1970s, who didn't kill very many people – although there were some exceptions like the 日本赤軍 – but the trajectory seems like it rhymes. 日本赤軍 is a strange story, they what happens when you go full MTW, they were basically 'read Settlers' and 'read Mishima' at the same time after some point, case in point the Israel massacre.

Also the culture-jamming stuff is similar. Sam Hyde who is this prankster symbol for the far right reminds me of these greasy New Left jokers like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Hyde wrote a book winking at terrorism and insurgency like Hoffman's "Steal This Book" which is a guide on how to build crude devices and hack payphones to create havoc in "the system."

I'd encourage people to look up old videos of Rubin too, and they're interesting because he'd be interviewed by normies and would be asked: "Were you ever a member of the Communist Party?" And he'd go "pfft, no way lady! The Communist Party were squares compared to us! They're basically conservatives, lady. We're way more radical than the Communist Party ever was!" There are some historians who suggest the New Left and its performative radicalism was a reaction to the collapse of traditional institutions on the left, namely the aforementioned Communist Party and the labor unions which were the left's organizing base. So what are the traditional institutions on the right today and are they in collapse?

This is a different discussion but a lot of them do seem to be in decline. The churches are in decline as so goes the Religious Right, and Cold War anti-communism isn't really as functional as it used to be. A lot of the traditional conservative intellectual houses have also collapsed, and what's left are Trumpy tabloids and frauds like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson who operate entirely on bad faith. Richard Nixon used Left Communist logic to be against the USSR (THEY ARE STATE CAPITALIST, NOT COMMUNISM!) and ranted about how they were Utopians. Even John Bolton who is running U.S. foreign policy right now is a B-team player who just isn't as good at it as the old guys who staffed up the Nixon, Reagan and Bush 1.0 regimes.

On the decline of institutions: the implosion of organised christianity is a big-un, and this is mostly a result of the right losing "the first culture war". You see there is a growing analysis that we are currently actually in the second culture war, the first of which was fought in the 1980s and 1990s. The big issues of this time were: abortion, gay (specifically gay) rights, drugs, and general permissiveness. Now these issues were inherently tied to religious dogma, which why in-part nu-atheism rose in response to it. In most countries in the west the conservative elements of society lost. We are now in the second phase, over all sorts of bollocks, but the point is that it exists without a unifying feature: there is no inherent morality or body to stand behind.

And you know how you can tell this is legit? The places where the church is still strong: Spain, Hungary, Poland where these struggles still are playing out. It's why everyone doesn't know what the fuck to do with Vox because everyone is like "oh they are a nationalist populist party like Front National or UKIP" but then they'll be like "THE GAYS ARE COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN" which runs contrary to the Milo-style rehabilitation of homosexuals that a lot of this right has undertaken. The last gasp of the American right in Culture War 1.0 was W's re-election campaign in 2004 that leaned hard into homophobia. I am old enough now to remember this. At the time the idea was that gays would help usher in the destruction of Western civilization and all this mumbo jumbo while "the West" had to bash Muslims (Sunni? Shia? Americans were very confused). Now they rehabilitated gays as *part of* Western civilization and to protect them we must …. bash Muslims. The reason for this is because Neoconservative theory is that liberal democracy without an external enemy has no purpose so it has to define itself by creating opponents. Without an OTHER Liberal Democracy falls apart. You will have Left Liberals just calling Right Liberals Nazis and Right Liberals calling Left Liberals Communists.

So yeah, this is what reaction looks like without religion, and it's kinda disgusting.

 

[Lemmingwise]

I think you can't really understand what alt-right is, without understanding that it is a 4 dimensional concept. By that I mean that it has a different meaning depending on what time it is used. Prior to the 2016 election it was a word for a large collection of non-establishment right-wing ideas. In some sense it meant "non-neocon right-wing". During the 2016 election, and Hillary's shout-out against the alt right ("PEPE!"), as well as Charlottesville, meant it had become much closer associated with identitarianism.

If I hear someone call themselves alt-right today, I assume it's someone who is 14 at least, but possibly 1488. If I hear someone call someone else alt right, it tells me it's someone between moderate left and far right.

The question has interested me for some time and it's why I used google-history searches to see what alt-right was originally used to refer to. But it would be a genetic fallacy to presume a word only means what it means when it is first used.

 

[Y2K Baby]

If I hear someone call themselves alt-right today, I assume it's someone who is 14 at least

At most.

 

[Vitoze]

The alt right was an ad hoc group of white right wing people prior to 2017. After 2017 it ceased to exist in practical terms. Most people who think it still exists are hardline near 1.0 WN types or leftists.

So yeah, this is what reaction looks like without religion, and it's kinda disgusting.

Memes about catholicism aside, you can have a reactionary movement without religion. The "alt right's" issue was its big tent nature and the resulting ideological incoherence.

 

[KiwiFuzz]

I see this term kicked around in the media, and while I think I understand the term as the media uses it, I don't think the media is using the term as self-defined alt-righters would use it.

For example, I see the alt-right equated with white supremacy by the media; however, my impression is that that's grossly simplistic and many alt-righters don't tie their political beliefs to race. Or I see the term used as shorthand for fascist, but again, that doesn't seem like everyone. Worst of all, I see it equated with supporting Trump, and I don't see how supporting the sitting US president can be alt-anything.

So again I ask: What is the alt-right? And how does it differ from being a mainstream Republican in 2020?

 

[Bumblino]

In the beginning it was a smear term to encompass gamergate people because plenty of them didn't adhere to the republican party (because republicans were saying videogames were the devil for years). It was supposed to imply a new brand of right-wing more focused on racism and sexism than anything else and that's all the thought they gave it, like a republican boogeyman if you will.

 

[break these cuffs]

It was made up as a term to encompass anyone who wasn't a lolberg or neocon and now it's a glownigger op to honeypot this generation's militia larpers and white nationalist retards.

 

[The Pink Panther]

A farce.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Originally, the term got started to describe anyone who was to the right of Bernie Sanders that wasn't a Democrat and wasn't affiliated with the neocons and traditionalists/fundies that became dominant in the Republican Party. Basically, it was a loosely defined group of lolberts, "South Park Republican" types, secular fiscal conservatives and moderates, and at the absolute most the fringe WN's who didn't go for Christianity

It wasn't until later that the media actually used the term alt-right to describe the far-right and the white supremacists around the time of GamerGate since they needed to demonize their opponents but they couldn't use the fundie Bible-thumper trope since most of the GG crowd were also against the Religious Right, which is also why they started to more heavily invoke the "fedora man" atheist lolbert strawman as well (granted, guys like Sargon and Ethan Ralph made it easier for them to do that though)

TLDR - It was a media boogeyman "catch all" for anyone the Woke Left and the corporate elite didn't like more or less from the start

 

[Not Really Here]

A bunch of liberals so assmad over Obama calling them racists after electing him that they said "fuck it maybe those nationalist socialists have a point about niggers".

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Nowadays it's just a bogeyman used in left-wing fear-mongering, along with the term boogaloo which I've also seen sometimes. Back in the 2010s it generally referred to white nationalists before being diluted by massive overuse to refer to conservatives in general.

The main reason the alt-right failed was that they failed to distinguish popular "silent majority" positions from stuff generally considered mad by most of the public. Hating child drag shows is normal, throwing Hitler salutes in pubic as Richard Spencer did just makes you look like an embarrassing idiot who doesn't understand public relations. Carl Benjamin's UKIP campaign was a good example of this, where UKIP's actual policies (Brexit and free speech) were actually quite popular but going around saying you wouldn't even rape people and it depends on the child isn't.