Awakening white men


Here 3 broadsheets (contemptible mainstream media in alt-right talk), the NY Times, Telegraph and Guardian, analyse who makes up the ambitious far-right and what they want in the US.   NOTE: Alt-Right is Alternative Right, meaning a return to true right-wing values uncontaminated by political correctness as the Republican party has been.


Richard B. Spencer, a leader of the far right, addressing a conference on Saturday in Washington. Photo by Al Drago/The New York Times

White Nationalists Celebrate ‘an Awakening’ After Donald Trump’s Victory

By Alan Rappeport and Noah Weiland, NY Times
November 19, 2016

WASHINGTON — For years, they have lurked in the web’s dark corners, masking themselves with cartoon images and writing screeds about the demise of white culture under ominous pseudonyms. But on Saturday, in the wake of Donald J. Trump’s surprising election victory, hundreds of his extremist supporters converged on the capital to herald a moment of political ascendance that many had thought to be far away.

In the bowels of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, three blocks from the White House, members of the so-called alt-right movement gathered for what they had supposed would be an autopsy to plot their grim future under a Clinton administration. Instead, they celebrated the unexpected march of their white nationalist ideas toward the mainstream, portraying Mr. Trump’s win as validation that the tide had turned in their fight to preserve white culture.

“It’s been an awakening,” Richard B. Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right, said at the gathering on Saturday. “This is what a successful movement looks like.”

The movement has been critical of politicians of all stripes for promoting diversity, immigration and perceived political correctness. Its critics call it a rebranded version of the Ku Klux Klan, promoting anti-Semitism, violence and suppression of minorities.

Intellectual leaders of the movement argue that they are merely trying to realize their desire for a white “ethno-state” where they can be left alone. Mr. Trump, with his divisive language about immigrants and Muslims, has given them hope that these dreams can come true.

“I never thought we would get to this point, any point close to mainstream acceptance or political influence,” said Matt Forney, 28, of Chicago. “The culture is moving more in my direction.”

Emboldened by Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, Mr. Forney said he expected people openly associated with the white nationalist movement to run as candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. The rise of populism and the decline of political correctness, he said, present a rare opportunity.

Robert Taylor, 29, described the conference as a “victory party.” Mr. Taylor was a committed libertarian, he said, working for Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns and even moving to New Hampshire for a project organized by the like-minded. If Hillary Clinton had won the election, he said, he would have advocated secession.

“I thought I had all the right answers and had read all the right books,” he said. “I heard about the alt-right movement, and it just lit a fire in me.”

Mr. Taylor said that with Mr. Trump, “we have breathing room; we have a little time.”

Mr. Trump has shrugged off any suggestions that he has connections to the alt-right. But his hard-line views on immigration and his “America First” foreign policy have captivated members of the movement. His appointment as chief strategist of Stephen K. Bannon, who has called Breitbart News, the website he long ran, a platform for the alt-right, has reinforced the notion that the incoming president is on their side.

The white nationalist embrace of Mr. Trump was on display Saturday at the gathering, which was the annual conference of a group called the National Policy Institute. Guests nibbled on chicken piccata while discussing ways to reorient America’s demographics. Many of the attendees, who were mostly white men, wore red “Make America Great Again” hats. T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Trump’s face sold quickly.


Richard Spencer speaking at his National Policy Institute, an alt-right, white supremacist organization based in Arlington, Virginia.

It presents a lobby for “white nationalism” and seeks to provide an alt-right “intellectual vanguard”.[3] Its president as of 2016 is Richard B. Spencer, a founder of the blog Alternative Right.

While the enthusiasm inside the conference was evident, the resistance to the alt-right remains powerful. A recent surge in hate crimes and reports of verbal and physical assaults on minorities are putting new pressure on groups that promote racism.

Many sites will not host their events, and some of their members have had their social media accounts suspended in response to vicious trolling of Jewish journalists and critics of Mr. Trump. A large group of protesters marched around the Ronald Reagan Building, which, as a federal property, could not decline to host the conference.

“These people have their right to freedom of speech, but the values they represent don’t represent America,” said Jon Pattee, 48. “I characterize them as the shirt-and-tie arm of the white supremacist-nationalist movement.”

Republicans who are more mainstream are also unlikely to accept the movement’s more provocative ideas.

“They have to grow up and start shedding some of their more controversial elements,” said Erick Erickson, a conservative blogger and commentator who has been critical of Mr. Trump. “I don’t think they will ever be accepted wholeheartedly in the Republican Party.”

Nonetheless, alt-right leaders said they planned to use their newfound influence to pressure Mr. Trump to take more “heretical” policy positions, such as a moratorium on net immigration for the next 50 years. White Europeans, Mr. Spencer said, would be given preference.

“In the long run, people like Bannon and Trump will be open to the clarity of our ideas,” said Jared Taylor, the founder of the white nationalist publication American Renaissance.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Spencer, who has become the face of the alt-right, derided NATO as “clumsy and ineffective.” He called for friendlier relations with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, and for the deportation of undocumented immigrants, drawing chants of “build that wall.”

“I think moving forward the alt-right as an intellectual vanguard can complete Trump,” Mr. Spencer said. “We can be the ones who are out front, who are thinking about things that he hasn’t grasped yet.”

Although alt-right leaders say they want to become more politically active, it remains unclear how they will react to being more closely aligned to the establishment or what they will do if Mr. Trump starts to moderate his views. His outreach to African-Americans during the final months of the campaign angered some of his white nationalist followers, raising concerns among them that Mr. Trump might not be so different after all.

“It’s a fleeting moment of optimism,” said Al Stankard, 29, of Baltimore, who goes by the pseudonym Haarlen Venison online and was handing out his novel, “Death to the World.”

Mr. Stankard said he thought it was unlikely that Mr. Trump would be able to do things like end affirmative action, even though he believes that the president-elect sympathizes with the plight of “white racists.” He predicted that Mr. Trump might disappoint white nationalists in the same way that President Obama disappointed some of his supporters by failing to bring postracial unity to the nation.

“These are semi-delusional fantasies,” Mr. Stankard said.


Nazi salutes and white supremacism: Who is Richard Spencer, the ‘racist academic’ behind the ‘Alt right’ movement

By Chris Graham, The Telegraph
November 22, 2016

A video has emerged showing Richard Spencer, a leader of the so-called “alt right movement”, leading a white nationalist crowd in salutes of “Hail Trump!”

Many of the more than 200 attendees at the conference appeared to give the Nazi arm salute as they echoed Mr Spencer’s declaration.

Here’s what we know about him so far…

Who is Richard Spencer?

As president of a think tank called the National Policy Institute, Richard Spencer has been credited with coining the term “alternative-right”, or “alt-right” for short.

His non-profit group, which promotes the white nationalist movement, is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States”.

Mr Spencer, who has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”, says he dreams of a “new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans”.

Before heading up NPI, he founded the now defunct website Alternative Right, which was “dedicated to heretical perspectives on society and culture – popular, high, and otherwise – particularly those informed by radical, traditionalist, and nationalist outlooks”.

The nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Centre, which tracks hate groups, has described Mr Spencer as an “academic racist” who backs creation of an Aryan homeland.

Mr Spencer is banned from the UK and 26 other European countries, after he was deported from Hungary for organising a conference for white nationalists.

His views on Trump

As a supporter of Donald Trump, Mr Spencer’s profile grew throughout the US election campaign. The president-elect has distanced himself from the movement and Mr Spencer, himself, says the celebrity businessman does not represent the movement.

However, he adds: “I think that Donald Trump is the kind of first step toward this new kind of politics that I’ve been outlying. It’s maybe the first awkward, maybe vulgar step in that direction.

“I think that’s a very good thing. And I think Donald Trump has appealed to the right people around the world,” he told ABC’s The Hack programme in Australia before the election.

“I am part of a movement that is bigger than Trump. Trump was a first step towards an awakening of identity politics, towards an awakening of a new European spirit in the world.”

Hillary Clinton, however, warned of the movement’s links to the Republican. In a speech in August this year, the Democratic nominee said the alt-right had “taken over” the Republican party.

“The de facto merger between [politically conservative news website] Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the Alt-Right. A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party,” she said.

Trump’s transition team has continued to denounce racism.

“President-elect Trump has continued to denounce racism of any kind and he was elected because he will be a leader for every American,” Trump-Pence Transition spokesman Bryan Lanza said.

Why has he been in the news?

He hit the headlines most recently when he saluted Mr Trump’s election saying “Hail Trump!”, prompting some of the 200 audience members to join the salute with apparent Nazi arm gestures.

Addressing the gathering sponsored by his institute, Mr Spencer used racist imagery and invoked Nazi terminology as he blasted the media as “Lügenpresse” – the term, meaning “lying press”, that the original Nazi Party used in Germany.

“One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” Mr Spencer said, referring to a Jewish fable as he criticised the media and Jews.

A week before, he railed at Twitter for suspending his account. “I am alive physically, but digitally speaking, there has been execution squads across the alt-right,” he said in a YouTube video [see above].

“It’s corporate Stalinism, in the sense that there is a great purge going on, and they’re purging people on the basis of their views,” he added.

Who else is linked to the alt-right?

Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s chief strategist, is probably the most high-profile figure to be associated with the alt-right. In 2012, he took over Breitbart News, a website which attracts 21 million hits a month and is described by Bloomberg as “a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained”. Breitbart News is the alt-right’s most prominent platform and fed the lie that Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim.

In an interview last week with The Wall Street Journal, Mr Bannon said the alt-right was only “a tiny part” of the views that Breitbart represented.

“Our definition of the alt-right is younger people who are anti-globalists, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment,” he told The Journal, adding that the alt-right had “some racial and anti-Semitic overtones.”

Milo Yiannopoulos, a 32-year-old  British journalist for Breitbart, is also a prominent figure of the “alt-right” movement. He was barred recently from speaking at his former grammar school in the UK after the Government’s counter-extremism unit intervened. In July, he was banned from Twitter in July after he was accused of harassing Leslie Jones, a black actress online who starred in the new Ghostbusters film.

What Spencer has said

On Mr Trump’s plan during the campaign to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the United States, Mr Spencer said:

“I think one thing he’s saying is just, ‘We don’t want that here.’ I think identity does play a role in this. He’s basically saying that if you are a nation, then at some point you have to say ‘There is an Us, and there is a Them. Who are we? Are we a nation?’ In that sense, I think it’s really great.”

Mr Spencer defended Mr Trump after a video emerged showing Mr Trump talking about “grabbing women by the p****”.

“At some part of every woman’s soul, they want to be taken by a strong man.”

In explaining the rise of the alt-right movement, Mr Spencer told ABC’s The Hack programme:

“It feels like all of politics and culture are united against us. That our status is falling. That our future is being cut off. So there’s a lot of rightful frustration, amongst white men.

“I think white men are really facing some tremendous struggles. It seems like all culture is against us. Whenever people use words like, ‘we need more diversity at this corporation,’ what that means is – less white men, period.”

He also jumped to Mr Trump’s defence over claims the Republican admired Vladimir Putin.

“I admire Putin, too. Who wouldn’t? I love empire, I love power, I love achievement.”

 


Donald Trump’s ‘alt-right’ supporters express dismay at disavowal

Some spoke out on Reddit and 4chan after Trump distanced himself from the far-right movement and appeared to walk back on his most extreme policies

By Nicky Woolf, The Guardian
November 23, 2016

Richard Spencer at the largest white nationalist conference of the year last weekend. Photo by Linda Davidson/AP

 

‘President-elect Donald Trump’s disavowal of Richard Spencer and his far-right thinktank the National Policy Institute, a day after video of Spencer’s supporters giving the Nazi salute at an event in Washington DC surfaced, has dismayed some of his supporters on the “alt-right”.

“This constant virtue signalling needs to finally end, otherwise our civilization will simply collapse,” a commenter wrote underneath the article of Trump’s disavowal on rightwing news site Breitbart.

People in the myriad “alt-right” communities that have flourished online in recent years are also expressing their displeasure that Trump appears to have abandoned the most extreme of his policies – at least for now – such as building a wall and prosecuting Hillary Clinton.

They also objected to his visiting of the New York Times for an on-the-record meeting on Tuesday, at which Trump described the news organization as a “world jewel”.

On /pol/, the political discussion board of the anonymous message-board 4chan, one poster wrote: “Already reneging on his word before he even takes office?! People will remember that.”

A post on Reddit’s r/altright board, one of the movement’s home bases, linked to Trump’s disavowal at the New York Times meeting and asked: “Anyone here feeling bamboozled by the Donald?” Dozens of commenters responded.

“You are fooled if you think Trump was going to give us some sort of permission slip to start cleansing America. He isn’t our ‘man on a white horse’,” on said.

Another wrote: “Trump can’t be non-negative on the alt-right. We support him because he agrees with us on important policy goals, not because he flatters us.”

Over on 4chan’s /pol/, fierce discussion was raging on the issue of how to deal with Richard Spencer and his neo-Nazi event. Many thought that Trump was right to disavow him.

Another wrote: “The leaders of the Alt-Right no longer look like attractive, young, rebellious counter-culture intellectuals, but now they look like fat, dumb racists.”

Opinion on the board was split, with many saying that the entire debacle was a “false flag” operation cooked up to discredit their movement, and others – a small minority – calling for the board to rally in support of Spencer.

On Reddit’s r/The_Donald board, one of the most popular pro-Trump corners of the internet, supporters urged patience in the face of signs discouraging to the “alt-right”, like the rumours that Mitt Romney was the frontrunner for secretary of state.

One post urged people to “stay fucking calm” until the appointment of Romney – who is a reviled figure amongst the “alt-right” – was reported by Breitbart.

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