Showing posts sorted by relevance for query alt-right. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query alt-right. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, November 21, 2016

Bannon, the Alt-Right, and the National Socialist Vision

What, exactly, is Trump advisor Steve Bannon's relationship to the Alt-Right? Is he a white nationalist, or merely a nationalist? There is no need to trust secondary media sources when we can go to the primary material.

Over the weekend, the Alt-Right held a conference in Washington DC. The event was live streamed and included a press conference. Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the Alt-Right and its de facto public face, answered these questions rather directly in the clip below. Neither Trump nor Bannon are part of the Alt-Right as it defines itself, although the Alt-Right certainly supports Trump enthusiastically.



(Should start @4h29min and run for 90 seconds.)

More:



Here is the NYTimes take on the conference and Spencer:
NYTimes: By the time Richard B. Spencer, the leading ideologue of the alt-right movement and the final speaker of the night, rose to address a gathering of his followers on Saturday, the crowd was restless.

In 11 hours of speeches and panel discussions in a federal building named after Ronald Reagan a few blocks from the White House, a succession of speakers had laid out a harsh vision for the future, but had denounced violence and said that Hispanic citizens and black Americans had nothing to fear. Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

... Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.

The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”

Mr. Spencer suggested that the news media had been critical of Mr. Trump throughout the campaign in order to protect Jewish interests. He mused about the political commentators who gave Mr. Trump little chance of winning.

“One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” he said, referring to a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews.

Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Spencer said, was “the victory of will,” a phrase that echoed the title of the most famous Nazi-era propaganda film. But Mr. Spencer then mentioned, with a smile, Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader who advocated a Jewish homeland in Israel, quoting his famous pronouncement, “If we will it, it is no dream.”

The United States today, Mr. Spencer said, had been turned into “a sick, corrupted society.” But it was not supposed to be that way.



Should start @1h29min. Spencer really gets going after 1h31min on the theme of America as a "normal country"...

Does History repeat? Spencer evokes Nietzsche, Weimar, and the fiery oratory of a young Austrian named Hitler.

See this autobiographical Q&A from 2011 for Spencer on the origins of the Alt-Right.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

A Professor meets the Alt-Right

Thomas Main, Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College, is working on a book about the Alt-Right, to be published by Brookings. Below you can listen to a conversation between Main and prominent Alt-Right figure Mike Enoch (pseudonym).

It's an interesting encounter between academic political theory and a new political movement that (so far) exists mostly on the internet. Both Main and Enoch take the other seriously in the discussion, leading to a clear expression of Alt-Right views on race, immigration, identity politics, and the idea of America.

See also Bannon, the Alt-Right, and the National Socialist Vision, and Identity Politics is a Dead End: Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword.


Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Normies Lament


This interview with the Irish Times (not Ezra Klein) is much better than the one I originally linked to below.



###############

Ezra Klein talks to Angela Nagle. It's still normie normative, but Nagle has at least done some homework.

Click the link below to hear the podcast.
From 4Chan to Charlottesville: where the alt-right came from, and where it's going

Angela Nagle spent the better part of the past decade in the darkest corners of the internet, learning how online subcultures emerge and thrive on forums like 4chan and Tumblr.

The result is her fantastic new book, Kill All the Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, a comprehensive exploration of the origins of our current political moment.

We talk about the origins of the alt-right, and how the movement morphed from transgressive aesthetics on the internet to the violence in Charlottesville, but we also discuss PC culture on the left, demographic change in America, and the toxicity of online politics in general. Nagle is particularly interested in how the left's policing of language radicalizes its victims and creates space for alt-right groups to find eager recruits, and so we dive deep into that.

Books:

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

SubAltern Homesick Blues


New York Magazine seems to have dedicated an entire issue to the Alt-Right. If you don't recognize any of this subterranean internet stuff you should probably have a look. Somehow they left out the Illuminati, though.

See The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Subaltern Postcolonial Gramsci Homi Bhabha Babble.
BEYOND ALT: THE EXTREMELY REACTIONARY, BURN-IT-DOWN-RADICAL, NEWFANGLED FAR RIGHT

... what follows here is an attempt to really reckon with the alt-right and its fellow travelers: to organize and catalogue influences, philosopher-kings, and shit-posting foot soldiers; to track the movement’s history, its future, and the story of how the modern internet made it possible; to study its grievances, its media savvy, its symbols, its heroes and villains, its president and its critics of the president, its billionaire supporters and the underemployed message-board-dwelling “advocates” who serve as its creative engine. The movement is not a monolith — though it would also never be mistaken for a rainbow coalition — and part of what we’ve focused on is just how the various wings work together in concert. How does Steve Bannon relate to Russia Today, and what do conspiracy theorists have in common with pickup artists and Nazi Furries? How do memes like milk become weaponized, and just when did 4chan get political? How do its beliefs get amplified into the larger culture?

For all its theoretical anti-modernity, the alt-right is a uniquely modern movement, after all, enabled in reach by the connective tools of the social internet and by the clever use of the sort of irony that every young American raised on TV and memes recognizes as our pop-culture lingua franca. It’s an irony they’ve used as armor, too: If you take them seriously, they’ll claim you missed the joke. But of course, by treating them as a joke, you can miss their importance ...


Spooooky!
The Techno-Libertarians Praying for Dystopia

... people who believe that the future of our species involves shedding our humanity in a marriage with AI; this is known as transhumanism, and it has not unreasonably been called a new tech religion. Though the movement has no explicit political affiliations, it tends, for reasons that are probably self-explanatory, to draw a disproportionate number of Silicon Valley libertarians. And the cluster of ideas at its center — that the progress of technology will inevitably render good ol’ Homo sapiens obsolete; that intelligence, pure computational power, is to be pursued above all other values — has exerted a powerful attraction on a small group of futurists whose extreme investment in techno-libertarianism has pushed them over an event horizon into a form of right-wing authoritarianism it might be useful to regard as Dark Transhumanism.

Monday, September 05, 2016

A secret map of the world (Venkatesh Rao / Ribbonfarm)

This is Venkatesh Rao's conceptual map of the world (as seen from Silicon Valley / the internet). Details in the video and this blog post.



In case you can't make out all the features on the map, here is a hi-res version. See also this other map.

Some places of note:

Isle of Deep Learning
Isle of Physics
Moldbug's Lair
Alt-Right Hills
Dark Enlightenment Volcano
Paleo Crossing
Satoshi Mines
Secret Cloud Empire of Amazon
Fjords of Sisu
Algomonopolia (Google, Facebook, ...)
a16z Unicorn Hunting Ground
Lean Startup Town
SJW Cathedral
Manosphere Tar Pit
Global Bro-Science Laboratory
NSA
Academia
Efficient Market Temple
Graveyard of Boomer Dreams
Ghost of Industrial Past

If these memes are unfamiliar, you need to spend more time on the internet or in the bay area :-)


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