A month has passed since Hillary Clinton recklessly brought the term “alt-right” into the political mainstream.
In a speech accusing Donald Trump of “taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe of the Republican Party,” Clinton did more to directly publicize the alt-right than Trump ever has. Unfortunately, the time to identify the mere existence of such a political movement has come to pass. We now face an urgency of definitively stopping the alt-right for good before it spreads any further.
So, what is the alt-right?
The movement is a disgusting mix of white supremacy, Nazism and despotism, fueled by an army of pissed off white people with Twitter accounts.
The ideology of the movement is best embodied in this quote from alt-right blogger Michael Perilloux: “Is Trump likely to cancel the Constitution, declare martial law, declare himself emperor to be succeeded by his children, nationalize the banks and media, hang some of the worst criminal bankers, send the Israelis back to Israel, call the National Guard to roll tanks into Harvard Yard, place all communists and other anti-American elements under house arrest, retire all government employees, replace the U.S. government with the Trump Organization, and begin actually rebuilding America and Western civilization?” If that doesn’t make you terrified of the alt-right, I don’t know what will.
The tragic part is that we may actually need divine intervention to destroy this menace.
I wish I could say that keeping Trump out of the White House would permanently bury the alt-right. In reality, far-right and other outright Fascist parties exist in nearly every European country. These parties also are in direct control of the governments of Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland and Norway. More are gaining footholds in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, as evidenced by the recent Brexit vote.
The fact that the alt-right’s patriarch, Donald Trump, is so close to becoming president signals a political state of emergency, one where whatever good still left in this world is in immediate danger.
Most shocking about the alt-right is the diversity of its other figureheads. While Senate candidate and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke may be a bizarre figure, no one is more fascinating and repulsive than Breitbart writer and self-titled “free speech activist” Milo Yiannopoulos.
If you’ve ever heard Milo speak, you’ll recall him as an apologist and inciter of racist internet trolls: “Just as the kids of the ‘60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock n’ roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations ... Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the ‘80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.”
What Milo and other “free speech activists” fail to comprehend is the inherent meaning of speech and words. To downplay the true meaning of words is to downplay language itself. Furthermore, any censorship laws intent on stopping these morons will likely result in the censorship of other speech viewed as dangerous by those in power.
After the crash of 2008, the political center of the world shattered — the ensuing vacuum seized upon by right-wing groups. The inability of the left to offer an alternative has allowed the most racist and violent parts of our society to become politically appropriate. If the left remains unable to appeal to the disenfranchised masses, then the neo-Fascism of the alt-right will become a dominant ideology.
luwrobin@umail.iu.edu
