Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This fight is for everything.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

We still have time to mess this up!

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Bark louder, little dog.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Peak wingnut was a lie.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

You are here: Home / Organizing & Resistance / Enhanced Protest Techniques / The “Alt-Right” Is… Neither an Alternative, Nor Correct

The “Alt-Right” Is… Neither an Alternative, Nor Correct

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From the Washington Post, company paper in the town whose monopoly industry is national politics:

On the eve of a planned speech here on Donald Trump’s ties to the “alt-right,” Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Wednesday accused her Republican opponent of “taking a hate movement mainstream.”

Clinton is scheduled to deliver remarks Thursday about a conservative movement often associated with white nationalism and fervent anti-immigration views that has cheered Trump’s candidacy, including his campaign’s recent hiring of the chairman of a website that caters to the alt-right.

“Donald Trump has shown us who he is, and we ought to believe him,” Clinton told host Anderson Cooper Wednesday night on CNN. “He is taking a hate movement mainstream. He’s brought it into his campaign. He’s bringing it to our communities and our country.”…

The alt-right began with a speech conservative writer Paul Gottfried delivered in 2008, after the Republican Party’s electoral wipeout. Gottfried called for an “alternative right” that could defeat “the neoconservative-controlled conservative establishment.” That idea was soon adopted by the “identitarian” nationalist Richard Spencer, who founded an Alternative Right website, but it was also claimed by supporters of Ron Paul and conservatives who opposed multiculturalism…

And “misogynist neo-Nazi xenophobes” just didn’t seem mainstream-friendly.

… But it was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign that brought the movement into the mainstream. From the moment he told a national audience that Mexico was sending rapists and drug-dealers across the border, Trump surged in the polls….

Trump’s campaign has been more aggressively targeting Clinton in the wake of a leadership shake-up that included the installation of Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon as the campaign’s chief executive.

Bannon has described Breitbart News as “the platform for the alt-right.” He has said that the movement is not inherently racist, arguing it’s guiding philosophy is “nationalist” but not “white nationalist.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, the alt-right “is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value.”

As a sidebar, Dave Weigel (who’s been reporting on these guys for years) has “What’s the alt-right? A primer” — although it’s more like a lexicon, explaining some of the cult’s cant.

There is (of course) much, much more… just wanted to post this before the media tsunami starts after Clinton’s speech.

Reader Interactions

156Comments

  2. 2.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    How many true “alt-right” people are there? My guess: 85K people with 1million Internet accounts.

    Chop that number in half and I think he’s got it right. The number of people who are, however, “alt-right curious”, if you will, or at least sympathetic to the racist portion of it (as opposed to the SovCit people, the chemtrail people, the anti-vax people and the apocalyptic murder cult folks) are in the millions.

  3. 3.

    burnspbesq

    Raw Story is reporting that Minnesota Republicans may blow next Monday’s deadline to get Trump on the ballot.

    link

  8. 8.

    shomi

    It’s such a surprise that someone like Drumpf with a long history of well documented bigotry and outright racism is embracing bigots and racists. So shocking. Never saw that coming. Please continue keeping us infromed (sic) about this developing story.

    Clearly we need to overanalyze this till our eyeballs bleed because it’s just so hard to understand poorly educated low IQ racists.

  10. 10.

    lollipopguild

    @burnspbesq: If I am laughing out loud about shape-shifter Trump’s use of new words to describe his position on immigration AND the Minnesota GOP’s competence at getting him on the ballot AND I fall down and hurt myself, can I sue Trump?

  11. 11.

    Face

    @burnspbesq: They’ll get it submitted at 11:58PM Sunday. Negative brazillian percent chance the Repub White Wonder is AWOL from a state ballot. It’s amusing that they’re so late, but in the end it’s a nothingburger.

  12. 12.

    schrodinger's cat

    This current wave of immigrant bashing predates 2008. I waded through those sewers during Bush’s failed immigration reform. Many of the immigrant haters are immigrants themselves, Peter Brimelow comes to mind.

  14. 14.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The alt-right is in the process of taking over the GOP.

    Which means the GOP needs to go the way of the NSDAP.

    Annihilation.

  16. 16.

    hovercraft

    Are older voters the YOLO generation of the 2016 election?

    Trump makes it clear this is the YOLO election, and he’s the YOLO candidate. “You only live once” means giving no thought to the consequences of one’s actions, and it sums up the candidate’s campaign strategy pretty well. For Trump, YOLO translates to random, erratic midnight tweets and a crisis response strategy that can be boiled down to “LOL just kidding.” It’s a tactic perfected by toxic ex-boyfriends across this great nation that consists of making the recipient feel crazy for not “getting” something that wasn’t a joke to begin with.

    Call the leader of the free world the founding member of a terrorist organization? LOL it’s called sarcasm? Call for the assassination of your political opponent? LOL, it’s just a joke. Invite a foreign enemy to hack into our state department. LOLOLOLOLOL.

    But the drivers of the YOLO election aren’t the millennials who have embraced the acronym — it’s their parents.

    A Morning Consult poll from July showed white older voters favored Trump by a significant margin. Trump has a 16-point lead with white voters over the age of 65 and similar leads with voters ages 45 to 64. Even those between 35 and 44 years old tend to favor the businessman by a smaller, but still significant, 5 points.

    Meanwhile, younger voters, while incredibly diverse in many ways, have one thing in common: a distaste for Trump. The same Morning Consult poll gave Clinton a 17-point lead with voters under the age of 29. An August McClatchy-Marist poll of 1,132 young adults ages 18 to 30 put Trump in last place — not just after Democrat Hillary Clinton, but after Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

    “Older voters are more pessimistic about the future because they’ve seen a slow and steady decline in opportunity and seen the middle class destroyed,” Grasso told Vox. In other words, millennials see the world half full, with room for improvement, naturally, but have generally held a more positive view of the future. That’s not exactly what Trump is selling.

    “We feel like there are solutions to the problem, and holding politicians accountable, if anything, is an expression of optimism,”Grasso added. Trump is running a campaign that doesn’t have the inspiration-factor that young voters are looking for, which can partly explain the youthful and grassroots support for Bernie Sanders.

    What may be driving older voters to Trump are generational differences in policy concerns. A Morning Consult poll showed that older voters tend to prioritize national security — something very few millennials place at the top of their priority list — over the economy, which will affect young voters for decades to come, if not already. Trump’s aggressive language around foreign policy and Cold War-esque approach to fighting terrorism could be appealing to an older generation of voters who feel worried about the future.

    It’s not that millennials aren’t afraid of terrorism, but for many of them it’s been a fixed variable for most of their existence. For many voters under the age of 30, it’s difficult to conceptualize a pre-September 11 world because they witnessed the September 11, 2001, attacks at the beginning or midpoint of their lives. But for older voters, Grasso said, “terrorism was never on their radar.” This means “we view things differently because that is the new normal for us.”

    Of course not all older voters have a rosier view of the past, because, well, racism. For older folks who are not white, there is no better past to go back to, and that could explain why race hugely determines whether an older voter backs Trump.

  17. 17.

    one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer

    Ivanka, Uday and Qusay should be trembling as they watch the value of their names evaporate.

    Say what you will about Bernie Madoff, at least he was actually kind of a nice guy on a personal level.

  18. 18.

    Ajabu

    Completely OT but I need to get this in here somewhere:
    My long time (45 years) friend and significant writer, Joyce Carol Thomas has died.
    I spoke to her oldest son yesterday and will be attending a memorial soon.
    I’m very grateful that my wife and I – having returned to the West Coast – were able to visit with her over the past Xmas holidays so we have recent good memories.
    Joyce is an extraordinary example of personal achievement: Born into poverty in Oklahoma she LITERALLY went from picking cotton to international renown as an author or African-American childrens books.
    And, more importantly, she was just a hell of a great Black lady! I’ll miss her forever.
    Here’s the NYT blurb from yesterday:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/books/joyce-carol-thomas-who-wrote-of-african-american-life-dies-at-78.html?_r=1

  19. 19.

    hovercraft

    It better be really small, cause these people are scary. 85 K are way too many.

    That’s a striking level of prominence for a movement that until recently was extremely obscure. A movement lurking in Reddit and 4chan threads and in community blogs and forums, a movement of right-wingers who openly argue that democracy is a joke. That it’s weak, it’s corrupt, and it caters to the whims of a fickle electorate rather than the needs of the citizenry. That Congress and the president must be replaced with a CEO-like figure to run the country as it truly should be, without the confused input of the masses.

    For some in the movement, Donald Trump really is that figure. For the hardcore, even the most authoritarian-styled presidential candidate in decades isn’t good enough.

    Welcome to the alt-right.

  21. 21.

    Calouste

    Older voters are more pessimistic about the future because there is not a lot of future left for them.

  24. 24.

    dmsilev

    @hovercraft: Sometimes, Godwin’s Law kicks in because the discussion turns to actual Nazi-esque people. More fascist in general than Nazi per se, but yeah.

  27. 27.

    dmsilev

    @Betty Cracker: Among other things, I wonder whether the Trump Sedation Team has a full set of tranquilizer darts ready and whether they’ve managed to hide his phone again.

  28. 28.

    Iowa Old Lady

    If the Clinton campaign does it right, they might be able to use the Foundation controversy to their advantage the way they did the Benghazi hearings. Talk about the Clinton Criminal Foundation has floated around. Here’s a chance to talk up what the Foundation actually does. I like the defiant line that if providing AIDs drugs makes you vote against Clinton, go to it.

  29. 29.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Ajabu:

    I’m very sorry for the loss of your friend who was, by all accounts, a wonderful person. I read about her death yesterday in the NYT and on FB, and had known her previously by reputation. How fortunate you and your wife were to have her in your lives — and what a comfort to her son and other family members that you will help remember her at a service.

  30. 30.

    hovercraft

    @Calouste:
    As “good Christians” aren’t they supposed to care about the ones left behind and the planet they’ll be left behind on? Oh sorry I forgot those who are left behind are going straight to hell, so why bother with the conditions they leave us. It’s always FUIGM.

  31. 31.

    schrodinger's cat

    From the Vox article, word salad that would give Palin indigestion.

    Moldbug in particular views American society as a kind of Indian-style caste system. He views the Democratic Party as a coalition of Brahmins (liberal intellectual types who went to fancy schools), Dalits (poor, mostly black or Latino people), and Helots (Mexican immigrant workers). “What the Dalit alliance gives progressives is more than just a vote bank,” he writes. “What the Dalits are is muscle, a militia, a mob. … Basically, the Brahmins have every possible Machiavellian interest in encouraging an invasion of Third World barbarians. The more, the nastier, the better. Their real hereditary enemy is the native barbarian — the half-civilized Vaisya, the ignorant megachurched Okie redneck, the Huckabee voter, the Bircher and McCarthyite, America Firster and Coolidge voter.”

  35. 35.

    burnspbesq

    @Face:

    I wouldn’t be so sure of that. As I understand it, MN law requires that both electors and alternate electors be selected at a statewide convention, and they oopsed on the alternates. They might be able to get a quorum of delegates on GoToMeeting between now and Monday, but if I were a vindictive Democrat with a sense of humor, I would make a court decide whether that constitutes a “convention.”

    And the fun that can be had with this in ads is endless, e.g., “would you trust a guy who can’t even get himself on the ballot in all 50 states with the launch codes?’

  36. 36.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ajabu:

    I’m so sorry — it’s hard to lose a friend. It sounds like she touched many lives and had work that she was proud of. I hope you and her family will be able to take some comfort in the condolence notes and posts from strangers whose lives she touched with her art.

  37. 37.

    one_particular_harbour, fka Botsplainer

    @hovercraft:

    So my RWNJ mom (the woman who voted George Wallace in 1968, lamented the notion that Ameuca didn’t split during the Civil War, who was always saddened by the notion of people making fun of Archie Bunker because “Archie is right”, who was upset about the negativity of Watergate reporting because it wasn’t a big deal, and “they all do it”) told me yesterday that she was watching the earthquake coverage on the 700 Club and felt bad because Italians aren’t “savages” like some other people are.

  39. 39.

    nonynony

    @burnspbesq: So if I’m reading it correctly, the story is:

    1. MN GOP elected presidential electors in May
    2. MN GOP did not elect alternate presidential electors in May
    3. MN GOP did not realize that state law requires both (WTF?)
    4. MN GOP scrambled to get alternates in violation of their party “constitution” – NOT the state constitution
    5. MN GOP is fighting about whether or not those alternates should “count”

    If that’s what’s going on, then I’m going to say that the state will go ahead and put Trump’s name on it and let the MN GOP fight it out over this violation of their own constitution. The state shouldn’t care – unless the state law is stupid enough to actually enshrine the MN GOP “constitution” into law. Then the legislators responsible should all receive a swift kick in the butt. The MN GOP can then fight with themselves about the violation of process. Idjits.

  41. 41.

    bluehill

    @hovercraft: Unfortunately, there have been other times in history when a group of people who believe that they have hit rock bottom (even if they haven’t – they have refrigerators, tvs and cellphones!) willingly embrace a dictator who promises to make them great again. I think there are lot more people who think that illegal immigrants and minorities have stolen their prosperity entitlement. They may not call themselves alt right, but they are sympathetic to its beliefs. Too bad they don’t blame the repubs whose policies have done more to transfer wealth to the top 1% than any group of minorities, although I guess they are blowing up the repub party so there’s that.

  43. 43.

    nonynony

    @Mnemosyne:

    And if you weren’t sure yet that Wikileaks is now operating as an arm of the alt-right, they seem to be the ones behind the hacking of Leslie Jones’ social media accounts.

    I for one am shocked – SHOCKED – to discover that Julian Assange might be an alt-right sympathizer.

    Just shocked.

  44. 44.

    Bitter Scribe

    So WTF is Kaus’s point? That Hillary is overreacting?

    It doesn’t matter how many alt-right followers there are. It matters that a major party presidential candidate is reaching out to them.

  47. 47.

    Kay

    @hovercraft:

    A Morning Consult poll from July showed white older voters favored Trump by a significant margin. Trump has a 16-point lead with white voters over the age of 65 and similar leads with voters ages 45 to 64. Even those between 35 and 44 years old tend to favor the businessman by a smaller, but still significant, 5 points.

    This is why I get so bent out of shape when people attack millenials. Whatever issues they may have, they aren’t as horrible as white people my age.

    Good fucking God. Tell me again about “participation trophies” and a lack of “civics education”. At least young people aren’t dumb and nasty enough to give Trump a majority. We should be apologizing to them rather than scolding them. They’re not the problem. We are.

  48. 48.

    Bitter Scribe

    @Calouste: Exactly. They conflate their own physical deterioration with the breakdown of the entire world.

    I just turned 60, and if I ever cop an attitude like that, I hope someone shoots me.

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @hovercraft:

    “Older voters are more pessimistic about the future because they’ve seen a slow and steady decline in opportunity and seen the middle class destroyed,” Grasso told Vox.

    Gosh, older white voters, it’s almost like repeatedly voting to destroy our society by “starving the beast” and making our schools and infrastructure worse had actual consequences that are now affecting you. Who’d ‘a thunk it, right?

  53. 53.

    Kay

    @hovercraft:

    North Carolina Republicans have worked so hard to suppress AA votes maybe he feels confident. The court caught them attempting to suppress minority votes and they’re still walking around pretending they’re respectable people.

  56. 56.

    Chris

    @hovercraft:

    Trump makes it clear this is the YOLO election, and he’s the YOLO candidate. “You only live once” means giving no thought to the consequences of one’s actions, and it sums up the candidate’s campaign strategy pretty well. For Trump, YOLO translates to random, erratic midnight tweets and a crisis response strategy that can be boiled down to “LOL just kidding.” It’s a tactic perfected by toxic ex-boyfriends across this great nation that consists of making the recipient feel crazy for not “getting” something that wasn’t a joke to begin with.

    Someone on LGM, a few months back: “I’ve been gaslighted by an abusive partner before. Arguing with conservatives bears important similarities.”

  58. 58.

    Kay

    @Mnemosyne:

    It’s why I treasure the elderly activists we have locally. How did they manage to buck the crowd and not become bitter assholes? It’s a triumph of the spirit! :)

  59. 59.

    Anoniminous

    @hovercraft:

    Morning Consult is a PR firm nobody heard of until they jumped into the GOP primary with a series of Trump-friendly polls. IMO we need to treat their news releases with skepticism.

  61. 61.

    gene108

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    This current wave of immigrant bashing predates 2008. I waded through those sewers during Bush’s failed immigration reform. Many of the immigrant haters are immigrants themselves, Peter Brimelow comes to mind.

    America’s had a hatred of non-European immigration forever.

    Asian Indian and Chinese immigration was flat out banned in the 19th century and people from these countries were not allowed to immigrate here until the mid-20th century.

    Anti-immigration hysteria in America goes back a long, long ways.

  63. 63.

    Cacti

    @Kay:

    This is why I get so bent out of shape when people attack millenials. Whatever issues they may have, they aren’t as horrible as white people my age.

    White millennials aren’t significantly less prejudiced than white boomers or white X’ers, all are less prejudiced than white silents.

    The millennial generation is less prejudiced overall against people of color, because it is the least white U.S. political cohort at present.

  64. 64.

    Shell

    Trump gave one of his new immigration speeches in Virginia and now in New Hampshire. Do these states have a big immigration problem?

  65. 65.

    1,000 Flouncing Lurkers (was fidelioscabinet)

    @Ajabu: My condolences–she sounds like a wonderful person to have known and loved, and one who devoted her talents and gifts to building a better world.

    Also, Fuck HepC; the sooner we have a cure up and running and easily available, at a reasonable cost, the better.

  66. 66.

    Patricia Kayden

    The alt-right began with a speech conservative writer Paul Gottfried delivered in 2008, after the Republican Party’s electoral wipeout.

    Interesting for two reasons. First, the alt-right started as a direct result of President Obama’s election in 2008, just like the Tea Baggers. Second, instead of becoming more inclusive, Conservatives decided to move towards the fringe right and become more racist (or at least more openly racist) despite the fact that this country is becoming more racially diverse.

    Fascinating. I hope Secretary Clinton knocks it out of the park with her speech on the alt-right today. Really looking forward to it.

  68. 68.

    Kay

    @Cacti:

    The fact remains that it isn’t younger voters who are giving Trump majorities. It’s older voters. Not just “elderly” either. The same people who insist younger voters lack “civics education”. Okey-doke.

    Focusing on white younger voters as the problem when white older voters are flocking to douchebag in numbers that matter is worthless.

  69. 69.

    SenyorDave

    @Kay: At least young people aren’t dumb and nasty enough to give Trump a majority. We should be apologizing to them rather than scolding them. They’re not the problem. We are.

    I jokingly apologized the other day in the name of 55+ white males for our support as a group for Trump. I did qualify it since I am Jewish, I know Trump has virtually no appeal in the non-orthodox Jewish community.
    I am appalled at his appeal to working class white males. I live in the Baltimore area and was reading an article about how a historically Democratic legislative district is overwhelmingly for Trump. It is the district that used to have the Sparrows Point Bethlehem Sttel plant (I Believe at one time was the largest steel plant in the US). This district is also the one with the lowest percentage of people who have a college degree in the entire metro area. A large portion of them seem to believe that Trump will somehow get the steel plant to reopen. I guess its like the WV coal miners believing that he’ll revive the coal industry, somehow overlooking the fact that it is dying more in reaction to the fact that it is no longer economically feasible.

  70. 70.

    scav

    @hovercraft: This is certainly the election that is really pulling back the veneer of a solid number of ‘good’ ‘Christian’ people. My Reverend Aunt has stepped forward as a Islamophobic, gullible, impact-indifferent, (still-closet racist), preening intellectal and self-appointed moral arbitror over all (O! and the killer unltimate trump card to end all dispute? Her Daddy knew Reagan!). Only took a weekend in her presence to cement the re-evaluation of just who she is. I suppose the charitable interpretation is dementia.

  71. 71.

    Chris

    @hovercraft:

    That’s a striking level of prominence for a movement that until recently was extremely obscure. A movement lurking in Reddit and 4chan threads and in community blogs and forums, a movement of right-wingers who openly argue that democracy is a joke. That it’s weak, it’s corrupt, and it caters to the whims of a fickle electorate rather than the needs of the citizenry. That Congress and the president must be replaced with a CEO-like figure to run the country as it truly should be, without the confused input of the masses.

    This has been standard far on “mainstream” right wing blogs for as long as I’ve been reading them, or at least a very slightly toned down version of this. The publicly acceptable version is the “we’re a REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY” they’ve been bleating for eight years, which stripped of its bullshit means “it doesn’t matter if Obama won or if his proposals are popular because the majority doesn’t mean anything.” On their own blogs, it usually takes the form of regularly fantasizing about banning this or that group from voting. Bringing back poll taxes is a really popular one, as it’s assumed that anyone too poor to pay taxes isn’t invested enough in society or responsible enough to be allowed to have a voice. Banning native-born citizens from voting is another. Banning dual citizens is another. Banning American citizens living abroad is yet another. And of course, there’s all the fantasizing about a coup against the unconstitutional dictator Obama. Like that nice man Pinochet did in Chile.

    If they’re feeling sophisticated, they’ll break out a (possibly apocryphal) quote from one of the founding fathers saying that our constitution is only good for the self-rule of a moral and righteous people. Implicit logic: the American people are no longer moral and righteous (a combination of immigration by people who refuse to assimilate and corruption by liberal immorality), and so we really need to shed this “democracy” thing. Let’s get us a dictatorship or an oligarchy or a herrenvolk democracy.

  72. 72.

    schrodinger's cat

    @gene108: Its the fear of the other. We had a discussion last night about none other than Benjamin Franklin and his distaste for swarthy beer drinking Germans. Irish and the Italian also went to through the same bad mouthing that is reserved for present day Mexican immigrants. Racism is the icing on the nativist cake.

  73. 73.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Ajabu:

    “There are black American stories somewhere between slavery and ghetto that also deserve telling.”

    Joyce Carol Thomas sounds like a cool person to have known. I will have to search out and read her novels. May she R.I.P.

  74. 74.

    bluehill

    @Mnemosyne: Exactly. They believed “government” was the problem. Voted for people who did everything to weaken it and they are upset?!?! Government isn’t the problem. Government run by inexperienced ideologues is the problem. So now rather than learning their lesson going to leave us with one last parting gift.

  76. 76.

    Kay

    Democrat Hillary Clinton tops the magical 50 percent mark among American likely voters, leading Republican Donald Trump 51 – 41 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University National poll released today.

    10 points is nice but above 50 is extra nice.

    Most women still loathe Donald Trump, sensibly and rationally, like the decent people they are.

  77. 77.

    Betty Cracker

    @eclare: I updated my comment…was mixed up on start time due to time zone. It’s airing at 3 PM ET according to CSPAN!

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

    I’m sorry to say that my generation (Generation X) is, for the most part, filled with conservative assholes who thought Ronald Reagan was the greatest American who ever lived, so we’re all going to be stuck with loudmouthed conservative assholes my age for a long time to come.

    I’m sorry, America.

  84. 84.

    slag

    So, “alt-right” is obviously a euphemism for “insanely racist, misogynist, xenophobic right”. Before that the euphemism was Tea Party. Before that the euphemism was rightwing. How long before we need a euphemism for “alt-right”?

  85. 85.

    Chris

    @bluehill:

    Really, government run by people who hate the government is the problem. Electing people who believe in the government doesn’t guarantee that it’ll work, but electing people who don’t believe in the government pretty well guarantees that it won’t. It’d be like asking a pacifist to run the military and then, when your military deteriorates further and further, angrily saying that you knew all along that the fucking military was no good and this proves it.

  86. 86.

    Jeffro

    @redshirt:

    Death throes.

    That’s what this era of American politics is all about. The fading white majority lashing out in fear and anger.

    @hovercraft: (re: YOLO)

    You’re both right…this is about both the older AND whiter U.S. slowly turning into a younger AND more multicultural U.S. Another election or two and the majority of the Boomers will have passed on. It’ll be a whole ‘nother world.

    Now if some of my Gen Xer cohort (which I am convinced is the vast majority of the dolt-Right) could get with the program and let their memories of Saint Ronaldus fade a bit, we might get something positive done for the next generation

  87. 87.

    Patricia Kayden

    @scav:

    I suppose the charitable interpretation is dementia.

    That explanation doesn’t work for the young people like Milo who are heavily invested in bigotry.

  88. 88.

    catclub

    @gene108:

    Anti-immigration hysteria in America goes back a long, long ways.

    Yep. It was also religion based as well. Some people getting upset about Trump saying we should forbid Muslims from immigration don’t know our history, and say the US would never do that.

  89. 89.

    Kay

    @Mnemosyne:

    I can make myself tear up when I see the genuinely elderly volunteers at the HQ every four years. Imagine the peer pressure to be assholes when they go to McDonalds for coffee with their “cohort” :)

    Talk about brave.

  91. 91.

    Jeffro

    @Mnemosyne:

    I’m sorry to say that my generation (Generation X) is, for the most part, filled with conservative assholes who thought Ronald Reagan was the greatest American who ever lived, so we’re all going to be stuck with loudmouthed conservative assholes my age for a long time to come.

    I’m sorry, America.

    My bad, you said it better before I did at #86
    LOL
    I’m right there with you, mmm

    ETA: sheesh, i see several folks had already noted the same things (both about Trump voters being both older and whiter, and the Gen X issue)…I really need to read the full thread before jumping in.

    Wait…if I do the reading/my homework, doesn’t that disqualify me from ever being on a CNN panel?

  92. 92.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Kay: Great news. Assange is promising an October surprise to bring down Secretary Clinton. He must not understand how much many of us loathe Trump and will do whatever we can to make sure that he is utterly and thoroughly defeated in November.

  93. 93.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    Trump gave one of his new immigration speeches in Virginia and now in New Hampshire. Do these states have a big immigration problem?

    @Shell: They sure as shit do, you ever tried to get Mexican food in New Hampshire? Can’t even find a fucking Taco Bell there.

  94. 94.

    Peale

    @Mnemosyne: Yep. The boys in my high school in the middle of Wisconsin were all wearing oliver north haircuts when that was in style and discussing that Trump would be president some day. So, um, yeah. Based on the number of white-boys my age who’ve been complaining about political correctness since the 1990s and the “we’ll show you who the real racists are on campus by inviting White Power speakers to the chapel” stunts the young republicans pulled in college, I’d say Trump is a nostalgia candidate for aging GenXers who are now on the other side of middle age.

  95. 95.

    Anoniminous

    As a friend likes to point out Fascism is the failure mode of liberal democracy. The successor states to the Austro-Hungarian Empire started out as very liberal and very democratic and under the pressure of economic failure they, one-by-one, flipped to single party, corporate, authoritarian states. The difference is their economic failure rose from external circumstances while our economic failure is the direct result of federal policies based on Neo-Classical Economics, a thought system that is at best orthogonal to reality and at worst off in LaLaLand where Magic Flying Unicorns poop rainbows.

  97. 97.

    Chris

    @Mnemosyne:

    My impression, and it’s mostly anecdotal, is that your generation is also where libertarians peaked. Not necessarily hardcore believers in the total Movement Conservative package, but the too-cool-for-school, vaguely nihilistic, both-sides-do-it, South Park Republican types.

    Which isn’t to say that most GenX-ers are South Park Republicans, but most South Park Republicans (of my acquaintance) are GenX-ers.

  98. 98.

    catclub

    @Chris: It was the LGF guy who realized (about 2009-10) that all the conferences he was going to in Europe had mostly white nationalist groups, and he dumped them.

  100. 100.

    Cacti

    @CONGRATULATIONS!:

    you ever tried to get Mexican food in New Hampshire? Can’t even find a fucking Taco Bell there.

    Having a Taco Bell wouldn’t solve the problem of not being able to find Mexican food. ;-)

  101. 101.

    p.a.

    @Chris: I don’t know the name of the logical fallacy wingnuts use, but it’s: government is not perfectly efficient therefore it’s useless.

    Now in my life I’ve worked for Humongous Corp., Large Private Education Entity (nonprofit?), Moderate Family-Owned Company, and Small Owner-Operated Co. NONE of-fucking-course are perfectly efficient, but that fact doesn’t fit their politics.

  102. 102.

    NorthLeft12

    @redshirt: @Kay: I was going to argue with redshirt regarding his use of the “white majority lashing out” comment, then I read Kay’s comment that whites over 45 appear to be mostly [16% margin over Hillary] supporting Trump…….!

    Well FFS. I am at a loss to explain why my generation [I’m nearly 60] are so mean and nasty. It wasn’t supposed to be that way when we were younger.
    And to Kay; I have been apologizing to my kids and nieces and nephews and their friends for years over how my generation and my parents have fucked almost everything up. I wish them all the best in cleaning up our mess.

  103. 103.

    Barbara

    An op-ed in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/opinion/campaign-stops/the-downwardly-mobile-for-trump.html?ref=opinion&comments#commentsContainer) tried to interpret the recent Gallup poll on Trump supporters to distill the factors that make a voter likely to support Trump. The brief answer is that people who perceive that they or their children are worse off than their parents — the “downwardly mobile” — appear to overlap with the traits Gallup found to be highly correlated with a likelihood to vote for Trump. So, yes, Trump is making an appeal to nostalgia, but I believe that this appeal is most powerful for people who are “racialists” if not actually “racists.” That is, there is lots of literature on the importance of “relative status” as a marker for the perception of well-being. So even if you stay the same but other people around you are rising, you feel less well-off. These people are primed to see the world in racial terms and when they see non-whites succeeding where, perhaps, their children have not, they feel that they have lost something, even if it is something they got through no merit of their own.

  105. 105.

    Mnemosyne

    @SenyorDave:

    For some reason NPR’s Marketplace has made a sudden turn to the left, which means I can now listen to it occasionally without wanting to punch Kai Risdahl in the face. This week, they had on Michael Kimmel, author of Angry White Men, to talk about the “enraged entitlement” of many white men in this country (his term). It sounds like a really interesting, if depressing, book.

  107. 107.

    Cacti

    @Chris:

    My impression, and it’s mostly anecdotal, is that your generation is also where libertarians peaked. Not necessarily hardcore believers in the total Movement Conservative package, but the too-cool-for-school, vaguely nihilistic, both-sides-do-it, South Park Republican types.

    Which isn’t to say that most GenX-ers are South Park Republicans, but most South Park Republicans (of my acquaintance) are GenX-ers.

    There’s a bit of a generational divide even with generation X. The older X’ers are the Reagan youth, the younger ones are the Clinton kids. Older X’ers tend to be you Alex Keaton, standard Republican types. Younger ones had the more libertarian, everyone’s corrupt so why bother, Ron Paul vibe.

  108. 108.

    Kay

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Assange is promising an October surprise to bring down Secretary Clinton

    I refuse to pay attention to what he says. I don’t like threats, or people who make them. Put up or shut up. It’s a tactic used by sleazebags. It’s meant to intimidate. A legit good government person wouldn’t make threats. He says the docs speak for themselves. Okay. Stop talking then.

  109. 109.

    Peale

    @Patricia Kayden: Yep. I’m to the point with Assange that were something to happen to him. Say an accidental poisoning – I wouldn’t be pushing too hard for an investigation.

    But honestly, if Wikileaks wants to die up the freedom to harass black comedians hill, more power to them. How does showing her boobs advance their cause? Were the NSA to hack their lives, again, I wouldn’t object too much at this point.

  110. 110.

    Turgidson

    @Kay:

    As someone straddling the age border between Gen X and Millenials, I feel like I have the right to say both groups are by and large OK but certainly have their share of morons. Old guard Gen X’ers were way too supportive of St. Ronald of Reagan. And the Millenials revealed a fair amount of cluelessness in going so fucking overwhelmingly for Bernie, IMO. But who am I to talk. In 2008 I was an unabashed OBot in my late 20s. Some dude in his mid-30s probably would have thought I was the clueless moron at that point. Fortunately, Obama proved worthy of my support and admiration many times over. Some of my OBot comrades from that era disagree, never forgiving him for appointing Rahm, or Geithner, or DROOOONES, even saying they regretted supporting him over Hillary. But then becoming Hillary-hating BernieBro types, because of course they did.

    So I guess I’m saying there’s morons everywhere. Present company excluded of course.

  111. 111.

    Gelfling 545

    @shomi: If you would inform us of your location we could call 911 to rescue you from the person forcing you at gunpoint to over analyze pr indeed analyze anything whatsoever.

  112. 112.

    SFAW

    @Shell:

    and now in New Hampshire. Do these states have a big immigration problem?

    Dey got de Canucks what smuggle deyselves over de Border, eh? (Well, actually, they go to Maine first — gotta spend some time in OOB — and then they sneak across the unsecured border between ME and NH. Some of them make the journey on rafts on the treacherous waters of Great East Lake, some go to Umbagog in the frozen North. )

  113. 113.

    Chris

    @catclub:

    Yep. It was also religion based as well. Some people getting upset about Trump saying we should forbid Muslims from immigration don’t know our history, and say the US would never do that.

    Part of the reason I’m so sympathetic to Muslim immigrants to the U.S. today is that everything, absolutely everything, that’s being said about them is just a copy-paste of what was standard nativist hysteria against my own religion (Catholicism) for the first 150/200 years of American history.

    (Made even more accurate by the fact that there really were a lot of things in the Catholic world in those days, and for that matter today, that were deserving of criticism, as there are in the Islamic world today. But nativism was never about that, and it still isn’t today).

  114. 114.

    Kay

    @NorthLeft12:

    I admit I like them. I like that generation. I like what I see as earnestness and genuine openness. I get that they’re easy to make fun of- I don’t care.

  116. 116.

    Barbara

    @NorthLeft12: Whenever you see polls like this it is really important to understand the regional variation. I used to read Brad DeLong’s blog, and he broke down polls on Obama’s favorability ratings with whites by region, and East, North and West were pretty similar — nearly parity, 46/54, 48/52, etc., but in the South, he was off the charts unfavorable, like 35/65. The South alone brought the overall average way down to something like 40/60, which is why someone like Mitt Romney could think that Obama was electorally more vulnerable than he was. So this trend is probably present in all states and regions, but its intensity varies a lot.

  118. 118.

    Mnemosyne

    @Peale:

    I’d say Trump is a nostalgia candidate for aging GenXers who are now on the other side of middle age.

    I don’t think you’re wrong. I, too, am old enough to remember when Donald and Ivana were the power couple whose faces were splashed all over the covers of every available magazine of the 1980s. They were reality stars before reality TV existed.

  119. 119.

    scav

    @Patricia Kayden: Let me assure you, I’m not suggesting it as a blanket excuse. I’m just struggling to get a rationale so I can be pleasant with the woman because my dying, medically senile, uncle adores her. Everyone else gets their spots labelled as such.

  120. 120.

    SFAW

    @Barbara:

    but in the South, he was off the charts unfavorable, like 35/65. The South alone brought the overall average way down to something like 40/60,

    Really? I wonder why there was such a difference. The South used to be OK with Dems, once upon a time.

  122. 122.

    Kay

    @NorthLeft12:

    My daughter is more demanding of employers than I was. Not just individual employers. Employment generally. She thinks it has to be a good fit for her as much as for her employer and she thinks she brings something of value.

    I admire that. I think it’s a necessary correction to 30 years of Reaganesque groveling, where the employer is king and we’re all “lucky to have a job”. You have to meet her high standards as much she has to meet yours. She doesn’t accept that she’s the supplicant. It’s healthier- a better balance.

  123. 123.

    Shell

    Really, government run by people who hate the government is the problem

    So is voters with this mindset of ‘The system is so corrupt we have to burn it all to the ground so we can rebuild it right.’ Seems to be the thinking of seemingly rational people who are supporting Trump. And they’re sure they have the perfect arsonist in him.

  125. 125.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    I’m sorry to say that my generation (Generation X) is, for the most part, filled with conservative assholes who thought Ronald Reagan was the greatest American who ever lived, so we’re all going to be stuck with loudmouthed conservative assholes my age for a long time to come.

    @Mnemosyne: Seconded. Even our liberals are largely, at best latte/limousine liberals, and the people I see on my Failbook page who I went to high school with, in general, espouse beliefs (won’t dignify their worldviews with the term “philosophy”, as it’s not like they ever bothered to think about anything) well to the right of Hitler.

  126. 126.

    BruceFromOhio

    @Mnemosyne: I heard that piece, and it was very interesting.

    NPR does not equal MarketPlace. MP is its own brand from American Public Media, and while they will occasionally skirt around the ideologies, David Brancaccio and Kai Ryssdal and the rather splendid group of writers and contributors do not suffer fools gladly. The stories and reporting typically dig for the facts with no spins, just straight-up reporting. It was eye-opening listening to the cattle rancher talk about avoiding producer futures because “it’s Las Vegas without the lights,” and the real challenges of running a ranch – and nary a word about those damned fools in CO. While I’ve chafed occasionally at how this topic or that person seems to be represented in the stories, on whole they go where the stories are, and that’s all over the place.

    @Kay: Gosh, this again. It’s so James-O’Keefe-y. (I’m just going to follow you around the rest of the day and say, “what she said.”)

  128. 128.

    Turgidson

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Assange has proven to be such a clueless dolt, he’s might very well be sitting on some long-known nothingburger and thinks it’ll be a huge bombshell. Like when Fucker Carlson and his pals thought they were going to swing the election to Romney by releasing already-seen footage of Obama speaking at Harvard Law, or video of him saying, paraphrasing, “I support redistribution if it is meant to give everyone a shot”. Both clips already having been covered in 2008 with a collective yawn.

  129. 129.

    Chris

    @catclub:

    IIRC, there was actually another step in the process: he came home from the Gates of Vienna conference and reported what he’d seen, only for most of his readers to go “fuck you, this is political correctness bullshit, stop slandering the few brave Europeans that are left, why are you sounding like such a fucking liberal anyway?” At which point he finally realized that yes, the kind of people who read LGF are complete and literal fascists and the hippies saying so were right all along.

  130. 130.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    Having a Taco Bell wouldn’t solve the problem of not being able to find Mexican food. ;-)

    @Cacti: As a SoCal native I more than agree with you but goddamn, you gotta start somewhere. I would have killed for an El Torito for fuck’s sake. I couldn’t find tortillas in supermarkets to make taco shells with. Was gonna go crossover on ’em and make lobster tacos. The state is culturally bankrupt.

  132. 132.

    1,000 Flouncing Lurkers (was fidelioscabinet)

    @Gelfling 545: I have concluded that our frequent visitor was raised in isolation, with all socialization provided by PUA materials online, with the result that their efforts to engage with people they’d like to associate with regularly are based on the theory that negging will make people feel compelled to make an effort to interact with them.

    It’s possible that, given time and more interaction with well-socialized humans, we’ll see some improvement, but frankly, I think it’s a crapshoot.

  134. 134.

    NorthLeft12

    @Barbara: Thanks, for the analysis. So that begs the question…..what the hell is wrong with the south? or the Midwest for that matter.
    Honestly, I believe that the great divide is more between urban and rural.

  135. 135.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

    I was talking to a friend who was complaining about Millennials feeling “entitled” on the job and that they have no loyalty to their employers, and I said, “You know what? WE taught that to them. They watched their parents get laid off and mistreated and saw that employers have absolutely no loyalty to their employees anymore, so Millennials see no reason to show any loyalty to their jobs. If employers want loyal employees, they’re going to have to be better employers first.”

    She’s a Democrat, so she got what I meant. ?

  136. 136.

    bluehill

    @Turgidson: With the Russians and Assange working together, I keep expecting that there will be some smoking gun, but that’s probably because I’ve been so conditioned by conservative propaganda over the years to expect it. We’re entering a whole new world of ratf-king that I wouldn’t be surprised if they just start making up emails. I didn’t think that the kind of stuff they did to Obama could be topped, but I think I’m going to be wrong.

  137. 137.

    redshirt

    @SFAW: Fun fact: OOB’s winter population is about 5K, and in the summer, 100K. Most of that increase is French Canadians, turning the town essentially French for a good part of the year.

  138. 138.

    Captain C

    @burnspbesq:

    And the fun that can be had with this in ads is endless, e.g., “would you trust a guy who can’t even get himself on the ballot in all 50 states with the launch codes?’

    A picture of a sad or deranged looking Trump with obviously photoshopped tiny hands as the center of focus. Narration: “He couldn’t even get himself on the ballot in all 50 states as a member of a major party. Donald Trump just can’t finish the job…”

  139. 139.

    Chris

    @Mnemosyne:

    Generational pride isn’t really very high on my list of identity politics, but economics tends to bring out that part of me. Chiefly because the millennial generation has, objectively, been saddled with a shittastic economic situation, which pretty clearly was not of our making, and 90% of the whining about how “entitled” we supposedly are is a way for older people to change the uncomfortable subject when this is brought up, avoid taking any responsibility, and redirect the blame onto the people they’ve screwed.

    (Note: inter-generational generalizations are rarely helpful, and blaming entire generations for the world millennials were brought into would be fallacious for a whole lot of reasons. But the kind of people who whine about “entitlement” among millennials are generally the people whose voting record has, in fact, worked hard to make things worse. Heck, there are some of them even in our generation. Right wingers whining about how much their generation sucks and how it makes them look bad and how they wish they were born in an earlier time when men were still men and work ethic was still a thing…)

  141. 141.

    Mnemosyne

    @bluehill:

    It’s gonna get crazy because, on a subconscious level, the alt-right is afraid of black men, but has contempt for women. What’s heading towards Hillary Clinton is going to be a lot more similar to the shit that has been flung at Michelle Obama than what was flung at Barack Obama.

    Brace yourselves.

  142. 142.

    redshirt

    @Chris: GenX thought the same thing. As demonstrated in the seminal book “Generation X” by Douglas Copeland.

    Don’t read it, unless for research purposes.

  143. 143.

    mike in dc

    The best thing about Clinton’s speech is that it will accomplish two big things:
    1. Compel the media to report on the alt right movement for a few days.
    2. Force the Trump campaign to take a position on the alt right movement, or else look even more ridiculous.

  144. 144.

    Captain C

    @hovercraft:

    African and African American are not the same thing.

    Strangely enough, though, the same people seem to have had a really good handle on the difference (though not who was actually who) when they were getting all riled up about Obama’s birth certificate.

  145. 145.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Kay: If the documents speak for themselves, why does he insist on doing a play by play? And I answer my own question: he’s an attention whore.

  147. 147.

    Captain C

    @Chris:

    herrenvolk democracy

    I briefly misread that initially as “hemorrhoid democracy;” which is kind of the same thing.

  148. 148.

    Captain C

    @Patricia Kayden: I wonder if Ecuador is starting to get a little worried about Assange’s constantly crowing about how he’ll try and tilt the U.S. election from their soil. Don’t they use the U.S. dollar as their currency?

  149. 149.

    Mnemosyne

    @Chris:

    People who went to good public schools and got free in-state college tuition are complaining that Millenials feel “entitled” because they didn’t have the same advantages. It’s maddening to hear, and it’s even worse when it’s coming from people in my own age cohort who are basically ignoring our shared history.

    It’s somewhat useful to group people into generations because groups of people in the same age cohort tend to have shared experiences and collective memories, except when some of them try to pretend they don’t. It’s definitely not the be-all and end-all, though.

    And, hey, who are the people who raised those “entitled” Millennials? For the most part, it’s the same age cohort that is now complaining about them. Maybe you guys should have been better parents, hmmmm? ?

  150. 150.

    gorram

    @schrodinger’s cat: The racism is blatant but anyone catching a whiff of antisemitism (maybe a touch of anti-LGBT sentiment too) off the idea of those hoity-toity liberals arts types? Triple yikes.

  151. 151.

    gorram

    @Mnemosyne: They literally won’t stop comparing her to a gorilla. All the shitty things they’ve gotten disapproving looks for saying about Michelle Obama in the wrong crowd, they’ve done and worse against Jones in a matter of weeks. These people have to lose the election and lose bad.

  152. 152.

    mike in dc

    As a late blooming Gen Xer who went back to school and found himself semi-unemployable with a law degree and six figure debt, I find it a little bit easier to relate to the situation of Millenials. Of course, I also have late-Boomer older siblings and Silent Generation parents, so it pays to be empathetic.

  153. 153.

    Mnemosyne

    @gorram:

    Mrs. Obama and Leslie Jones are both getting hit by what is probably THE most toxic combination our society has: racism + misogyny. That particular combination of fear, hatred, and contempt is really, really ugly.

    And, frankly, Hillary is going to get smeared with some of the racist shit, too, because she is vocally supporting Mothers of the Movement and other black women’s organizations. I’m hoping that witnessing some of that will wake up some of the more clueless white feminists I know (note: I am a white feminist myself).

  154. 154.

    The Other Chuck

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Assange is promising an October surprise to bring down Secretary Clinton. He must not understand how much many of us loathe Trump

    He certainly doesn’t seem to understand how many of us loathe Assange, and how many more are coming to that view every day. I used to be a supporter of his. Now I say we just close the Ecuadorian embassy if they won’t kick him out of theirs.

  155. 155.

    NorthLeft12

    @Mnemosyne: I have told anyone that has worked for me or with me that loyalty means putting in an honest effort every day at work. It does not mean working for nothing, never criticizing the company, its policies, or its leaders, and especially does not mean never looking for another job opportunity.
    I have made it clear to more than a few co-workers that if it is in the company’s best interest, they would put us out on the street in a heartbeat. That might be an over exaggeration, but in general I believe it. Every individual worker owes it to himself, his family, and even his fellow workers to do what is best for her, and if that means leaving to take another job, then she should do it.

  156. 156.

    No One You Know

    @hovercraft: Would it be too dark to say that older voters are more pessimistic about the future because it’s increasingly obvious that it soon won’t include them?

    I am as riveted by sociological significance as anybody, including the role of mortality.

    But I am grouchy, and need coffee.

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