The Alt-Right

[Ranbay]

Sounds a bit like Fight Club with a business model

There was some guy who started the EDL with Tommy Stephen what ever he calls himself now, and he fucked off and was well into all this stuff, then started selling merch.... with most of these cunts the merch is a great cash cow for them. When the EDL was in full swing they where raking in thousands selling face covers, tops and badges

 

[Bernie Gunther]

There are some interesting stories about serious fights over mailing lists between different US far-right / UFO cult / jeezonutjob groups.

This stuff is has always been a business, just not on the scale it's now reached.

 

[camouflage]

Yeah that's exactly the sort of stuff I'm on about in my previous post.

Consortiumnews a milita nut / jeezoid / neo-nazi / alien autopsy alt-right nut site as per your previous post... wut?

 

[hot air baboon]

far-right and jeezoid millenarian conspiracies collided with ufo-cult stuff in the early 90s

....the fusion pre-dates that by several decades in fact...to the extent they were ever entirely separate ...

George Hunt Williamson is another figure in the Adamski influenced UFO movement we must examine. He was an editor for the occultic journal called Valor of William Dudley Pelley

The White Supremacist and fascist 'UFO Contactees'

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Consortiumnews a milita nut / jeezoid / neo-nazi / alien autopsy alt-right nut site as per your previous post... wut?

More like, the content of that story shows the authorised / stigmatised distinction very clearly.

 

[Dogsauce]

Re: gamergate link, a games journalist wrote this a few days ago, which gives one look at how they are linked (obviously not as in-depth a discussion as is needed, but provides a little background on some of the links for those perhaps not aware of the gamergate stuff).

A quote:

This line in the article reminded me of one factor that I think has contributed:

As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist

There has been some emphasis in the press in recent decades (particularly the BBC) about taking a 'balanced line' when reporting and 'giving both sides of an argument a fair hearing'.

Where this falls down is when one side of the argument is barely plausible and comes from a position with little authority or evidence behind it, yet is given 'equal weight' such that it gains undeserved legitimacy. The most prominent example of this has been climate change - where cranks with no scientific background are given a platform equal to that of people with significant knowledge and experience backed with strong scientific evidence. It legitimises a position with little scientific support and raises the status of moonbat conspiracy theories, all in the name of 'balanced journalism' (in some cases there is also a desire to 'create a conversation' by platforming loons - on other issues this has also included Choudhary, Farage, Mensch, various 'controversial' Question Time guests etc.).

I think this has had a part in creating this 'post factual' world we are now in, fuelling distrust of experts. Climate scepticism has been a big part of the mainstream political far right in America, strong within tea party and republican groups, aided with significant money (largely funding sceptic think tanks) from fossil fuel billionaires keen to protect their income stream. I think this has spilled over into wider distrust of 'experts' and dismissal of clearly evidenced facts, portrayed as rebelliousness rather than idiocy. Contributing also are the religious right who see reason in conflict with their creationist beliefs.

The Alt-Right is thriving in this anti-factual atmosphere, seeing themselves as contrarians on every issue, where brownie points are awarded in a big internet circle jerk for the most iconoclastic stance.

In this country, where nominally left/liberal people on my Facebook are posting about the terrible effects of Brexit on the economy and stock market, the Alt-Right probably do have a fair claim that they are the counter-culture.

 

[Idris2002]

I'll just leave this here:

 

[butchersapron]

I'm a bit confused by what people are taking as the alt-right. For me it's places and people like

Counter-currents (Greg johnson esp)
Daily Shoah
Daily Stormer
Radix
The political cesspol
The Right Stuff
Arktos publishing

Is that the stuff other posters are on about?

 

[cantsin]

I'm a bit confused by what people are taking as the alt-right. For me it's places and people like

Counter-currents (Greg johnson esp)
Daily Shoah
Daily Stormer
Radix
The political cesspol
The Right Stuff
Arktos publishing

Is that the stuff other posters are on about?

+

http:// boards.4chan.org/pol/
milo
breitbart

 

[butchersapron]

These sprats?

 

[snadge]

+

http:// boards.4chan.org/pol/
milo
breitbart

The only ones that I would be concerned about are the chans, there are some seriously fucked up people on those boards.

What is it with Milo anyway, he's a pedo apologist that no one takes seriously.

 

[BigTom]

I think like Cantsin I associated the term alt-right more with the MRA scene than with the far-right sites that BA has posted.
4chan/8chan plus reddit and twitter (but those two obviously being much wider places as well)
milo and the prominent gamergate people (whose names I've forgotten which says something)

Crossover to the far right in people like Breivik but also lots of libertarians (links to the whole bitcoin political stuff you posted about elsewhere) so wasn't clear to me then how much this was part of the far right nationalist/racist scene or possibly that has deepened in the last couple of years.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

I think like Cantsin I associated the term alt-right more with the MRA scene than with the far-right sites that BA has posted.
4chan/8chan plus reddit and twitter (but those two obviously being much wider places as well)
milo and the prominent gamergate people (whose names I've forgotten which says something)

Crossover to the far right in people like Breivik but also lots of libertarians (links to the whole bitcoin political stuff you posted about elsewhere) so wasn't clear to me then how much this was part of the far right nationalist/racist scene or possibly that has deepened in the last couple of years.

It seems to me that those who self-identify as alt-right are a fairly broad spectrum of "anti-establishment" right-wingers ranging from the Brietbart trolls to neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer.

Despite their different tones and intellectual trajectories however I would say that the following are values that all alt-righters adhere to:

* masculinism and anti-feminism
* anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism
* Islamophobia
* "anti-establishment" (regard themselves as rebels)
* promotion of conspiracy theories
* championing the cause of white people
* anti-political correctness and anti-liberal
* anti-communist and anti-socialist
* pro-Trump
* believe in biological determinism, natural hierarchies and social darwinism

 

[Bernie Gunther]

"Anti-establishment" could stand a bit of unpacking I think.

Seems like rejection of some or all of consensus reality in favour of a closed and self-reinforcing alternative world view, enabled to a large degree by the ability to form online echo chambers, hence the conspiracy theorist/entrepreneur comparison I was making earlier.

For the alt-right it's specifically the bits of political consensus reality that let's say: Bush, Blair, Clinton Obama et al could more or less agree on. Neoliberalism, but with some boundaries. You can oppress racial minorities but not call them nasty names and if you want to do major war crimes you have to hire a really large quantity of PR people to keep things normal etc.

Rejecting this normality outright opens the door to ideological entrepreneurs who can put the bits of a wide range of stigmatized ideologies and fringe theories, ranging way beyond the traditionally political, together in new and exciting ways, leveraging 'anti establishment' controversy to draw punters, to target new market segments.

Once serious money goes into enabling the rejection of consensus reality as we've known it for the last century or so, then pretty much anything at all becomes fair game ideologically because it's only really been that consensus that kept things stable within unstated bounds.

 

[teqniq]

Major German companies have stopped advertising on Breitbart

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Video: White Nationalist Responds to Texas A&M Protests

 

[butchersapron]

Major German companies have stopped advertising on Breitbart

Victory

 

[bluescreen]

There are some interesting stories about serious fights over mailing lists between different US far-right / UFO cult / jeezonutjob groups.

This stuff is has always been a business, just not on the scale it's now reached.

The scale of the right wing tentacular reach over the net is frightening. The alt-right, PUAs, gamers, troofers, 4chanitors are living symbiotically on something much vaster and scarier. The smart ones know how to game Google, their stories get amplified by Farcebook and twitter. A long article on this in last week's Observer, pulling in stories and research about fake news, Google autocomplete, data mining and the possibilities they provide for money and manipulation. Carole Cadwalladr was shocked by the results when she typed "are Jews " into Google. Later she typed "are women "

I talk to Danny Sullivan, the founding editor of SearchEngineLand.com. He’s been recommended to me by several academics as one of the most knowledgeable experts on search. Am I just being naive, I ask him? Should I have known this was out there? “No, you’re not being naive,” he says. “This is awful. It’s horrible. It’s the equivalent of going into a library and asking a librarian about Judaism and being handed 10 books of hate. Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better.”

He’s surprised too. “I thought they stopped offering autocomplete suggestions for religions in 2011.” And then he types “are women” into his own computer. “Good lord! That answer at the top. It’s a featured result. It’s called a “direct answer”. This is supposed to be indisputable. It’s Google’s highest endorsement.” That every women has some degree of prostitute in her? “Yes. This is Google’s algorithm going terribly wrong.”

Last week Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of communications at Elon University in North Carolina, published the first detailed research on how rightwing websites had spread their message. “I took a list of these fake news sites that was circulating, I had an initial list of 306 of them and I used a tool – like the one Google uses – to scrape them for links and then I mapped them. So I looked at where the links went – into YouTube and Facebook, and between each other, millions of them… and I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

“They have created a web that is bleeding through on to our web. This isn’t a conspiracy. There isn’t one person who’s created this. It’s a vast system of hundreds of different sites that are using all the same tricks that all websites use. They’re sending out thousands of links to other sites and together this has created a vast satellite system of rightwing news and propaganda that has completely surrounded the mainstream media system.

He found 23,000 pages and 1.3m hyperlinks. “And Facebook is just the amplification device. When you look at it in 3D, it actually looks like a virus. And Facebook was just one of the hosts for the virus that helps it spread faster. You can see the New York Times in there and the Washington Post and then you can see how there’s a vast, vast network surrounding them. The best way of describing it is as an ecosystem. This really goes way beyond individual sites or individual stories. What this map shows is the distribution network and you can see that it’s surrounding and actually choking the mainstream news ecosystem.”

Long article, worth the read - as is Albright's research, linked, much longer.
Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

/derail

 

[teqniq]

Victory

Yeah I reckon, of a kind. Probably one of the most significant ways to hurt these people is in their pockets.

 

[Buckaroo]

Victory

Hail Victory

 

[J Ed]

I'm a bit confused by what people are taking as the alt-right. For me it's places and people like

Counter-currents (Greg johnson esp)
Daily Shoah
Daily Stormer
Radix
The political cesspol
The Right Stuff
Arktos publishing

Is that the stuff other posters are on about?

I, possibly wrongly, assumed it was a sort of umbrella term used for the people you describe there but also various MRA groups, Breitbart, the nastier bits of Counter-Jihad groups and so on.

 

[inva]

I, possibly wrongly, assumed it was a sort of umbrella term used for the people you describe there but also various MRA groups, Breitbart, the nastier bits of Counter-Jihad groups and so on.

so what's the common thread that makes them alt right instead of far right/whatever?

 

[J Ed]

so what's the common thread that makes them alt right instead of far right/whatever?

In my non-expert and non-precise opinion, their intensive and relatively sophisticated use of social media and it's not instead of, it's as well as.

 

[inva]

In my non-expert and non-precise opinion, their intensive and relatively sophisticated use of social media and it's not instead of, it's as well as.

would that make Britain First alt right?

 

[J Ed]

would that make Britain First alt right?

Good question, not sure of the answer!

 

[dylanredefined]

Local far right group is called Pie and Mash. Supposedly a group of blokes who like pie and mash and Britain the way it used to be.

 

[Dogsauce]

would that make Britain First alt right?

Not sure they have the same 'tone' - Alt right lot seem to be more full of themselves, pseudo intellectuals thinking they have some kind of entitlement because they're so smart, and that they're victims if society (or women) deny them this. BF seem kind of clumsier, more anti-intellectual than pseudo-intellectual. There will be a class thing in there somewhere.

 

[J Ed]

Not sure they have the same 'tone' - Alt right lot seem to be more full of themselves, pseudo intellectuals thinking they have some kind of entitlement because they're so smart, and that they're victims if society (or women) deny them this. BF seem kind of clumsier, more anti-intellectual than pseudo-intellectual. There will be a class thing in there somewhere.

Yes, much less breaking out racial IQ graphs etc, less Evola references. I think you are on the right lines here.

 

[Manter]

Came across some group calling themselves Knights Templar, which , going by what they post on line- are basically Nazis but claim they are the new Knights Templars and want a new crusade and that. There may be more than one of these Templar groups.

Ah, I encountered a racist who claimed to be a medieval knight on Facebook last night. I thought he was just off his meds, had no idea it's a thing

 

[toblerone3]

I would say Stefan Molyneux is alt right

Stefan Molyneux - Wikipedia