Students trying to start “Alt-Right” club at the University of Wisconsin
By
Nora Gehin -
January 25, 2017
If you haven’t heard of the Alt-Right yet, I’m shocked because it’s been in the media a lot lately. However here’s a quick definition for you: the Alt-Right are pretty much Neo-Nazi’s and white supremacists that are trying to rebrand themselves as a “movement” (you can read the whole article about them on Wikipedia).
And last week an Alt-Right leader had the internet asking “Is it okay to punch a Nazi?” Watch the video in the tweet below to see an Alt-Right leader get punched in the face by a protestor.
Anyways, now a group of students (or possibly just one student) at the University of Wisconsin – Madison are trying to start an Alt-Right club. Check out the Facebook post below (also how I found out about it):
As you can see, it’s been shared 431 times, has 331 likes and 47 comments! People at UW-Madison are pretty fired up about it. I, a UW student myself, found out about this from Facebook. Side note, isn’t it great that we can share things with each other on social media so we don’t have to wait for the news on TV to tell us things? Sometimes social media can be a great tool in increasing awareness and bringing about social change.
Anyways, this is disgusting. First of all, it’s not possible to racist against white people because white people have never been systematically oppressed due to their race. You can be prejudice towards white people, but not racist. Secondly, I didn’t know there was “anti-white racism” at UW! Seriously?! The student body on our campus is approximately 72% white, so it’d be pretty hard for there to be an “anti-white” sentiment, but that’s just my opinion.
So honestly curiosity got the best of me so I decided to look at their website:
It looks pretty amateur and they have a recruitment video on it with Pepe the Frog. Which if you don’t know who Pepe the Frog is, he’s pretty much the Alt-Right’s mascot, so you can just guess what he stands for. There are a lot of memes online with Pepe the Frog supposedly made by Alt-Right members, just do a google search for it and you’ll see what I mean.
Their Youtube recruitment video has since been removed for having hate speech (good!) so they created another one (shocking) and reposted it on their site. And just from reading the comments on the Facebook post I learned that their Facebook page was removed as well. Also, UW-Madison is “investigating” the matter, but people have been trolling them on social media and they only gave the one response saying they are investigating. So we’ll see what they have to say but they seriously better not allow this on campus. This is disgusting.
The guy in the video Daniel.. something can’t understand his last name claims that there are “anti-white” policies at UW-Madison! I literally can’t even. Just wow. He makes a lot of other crazy claims but like I said, I can’t even.
Yes we have free speech and people should be able to stand up for what they believe in. But that doesn’t involve hating on other people and discriminating against people based on religion and race. It just doesn’t and it definitely doesn’t have a place at UW-Madison.
I took it upon myself to tweet at #UWAltRight:
"#UWAltRight please kindly change your name to UW Nazis. Thanks!"
One user responded by saying: [email protected]/* */ Nazis’s [sic] didn’t anger millions with a cartoon frog. The Alt Right gains its momentum from comments like yours.”
Umm really? Just no! I am not making this group gain momentum by calling them out. No way. I am calling them out because I am a journalist and it’s my job. It’s my job to tell other people about these atrocities so that maybe they will stop happening. If we just stand by and don’t say anything that’s what is dangerous. Because if I didn’t bring attention to it, guess what? It would still be happening. The people need to know. Knowledge is power.