Dangerous White-Collar White Power Movement Believes It Has Newfound Relevance Thanks to Trump
Ramzpaul,The gregarious blogger outlined his three-point plan for the amorphous, mostly web-based movement known as the alt-right, or alternative right, a reactionary form of conservatism that views itself in contradistinction to mainstream politics. “Identity,” the bedrock of the alt-right agenda, rests upon three pillars: sex realism (“men and women are suited for different roles”), race (inexplicably broken up into “race realism, nationalism, and Jews”), and natural order (a nebulous and quasi-mythical construct that appears to amount to the naive, tautological, and politically irrelevant idea that society should resist acting against what is deemed “natural”).
I was slightly taken aback when Ramzpaul broke up his Powerpoint-heavy presentation to tell us it was time to make friends. We were encouraged to turn to our neighbor and give him a gift. Mein Kampf was mentioned as a possible option. I ended up with a printout bearing the image of a red pill, a metaphor used by right-wing movements, from men’s rights activists to the alt-right, to describe a moment of “awakening,” a la Neo in The Matrix.
It’s tempting to brush off Spencer and his ethno-racial identity-first argument as highfalutin but web-friendly racist blather. Spencer’s vision for the alt-right isn’t a revived Ku Klux Klan, and it’s, oddly, too inclusive for regulars on some neo-Nazi platforms, such as Stormfront and Daily Stormer. Although Spencer is delighted that some more mainstream conservatives—such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos—have undergone some degree of “alt-right-ification,” other allies have been less enthused. When Yiannopoulos published an explanatory piece on the movement, the Daily Stormer (“the world’s most visited alt-right site!”) followed up with a meme-laden takedown entitled, “Breitbart’s Alt-Right Analysis is the Product of a Degenerate Homosexual and an Ethnic Mongrel.” In a similar vein, the article’s author, Andrew Anglin, retracted his support for NPI’s November conference upon discovering one of the speakers was “an open homosexual.”
“If the government, especially at the federal level, is no longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in The Nation this winter, “then it’s grassroots initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap—perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era.”
This time, they might be wearing suits and ties.