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Did the alt-right ever even exist? I remember when Trump first came on the scene and people were freaking out, there were articles everywhere and people making tons of YouTube videos about the alt-right and how they were recruiting people. Nobody ever asked the question recruiting them to what? Could you even join the alt-right?
Seriously, from what I can gather, the alt-right was basically some podcast networks (TRS) and then Richard Spencer's tiny organization. His NPI conferences had maybe 500 people. Other so called members of the alt-right like Jared Taylor had already been around for decades with American Renaissance. Even when they got together at their biggest event with Unite the Right in Charlottesville, there were barely 1,000 of them and they were vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters. And a bunch of these were old school white nationalists like David Duke who came on the scene over 30 years before that.
As far as I can tell, nobody has ever seen or heard of a gathering of more than 1,000 of them together at one time. There is no alt-right to join or be recruited to and is not an organization. It has no leader or leaders. It basically doesn't exist. The mainstream media and Democrats basically made it up either as a psyop or just convinced themselves that it exists. It's probably a mix of both. This wasn't like recruiters online targeting vulnerable Muslim kids to go fight for ISIS where you could go literally join ISIS which was an organization that actually controlled land and had an army. You join the alt-right and do what exactly? Shitpost on 4chan and post edgy memes on Twitter?
Their strongest argument probably is that there were some lone wold terrorist attacks. But there were already lone wolf white nationalist attacks before Trump like the OKC bombing. And none of the closest things to leaders of the alt-right had ever committed and violence as far as I can tell. And I would argue that the mainstream media's reporting on this issue did much more to create lone wolf shooters who they gaslit into thinking we were on the cusp of a race war and gassing the Jews than any alt-right "recruiters" did.
Am I crazy here? My theory is that the Hillary Clinton campaign saw they were a good boogeyman to scare people about Trump and then the media ran with it and people convinced themselves of something on a societal level that never even existed. It's actually insane if you really think about it.
Hradzka has a good bit on what he expected Richard Spencer was trying to do with the term to start with, and what a lot of progressives were doing as well. Or see this New York Times piece (by Singal, of course) that separated the 'alt-right' from the 'alt-light' -- and contrast, even contemporaneously, other pieces.
There's a lot of if-by-whiskey, where sometimes the alt-right was just the nutty white nationalists when defining their ideology, others where it was people who hadn't denounced them heavily enough, and then other times the alt-right was pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. And to a lot of the progressive and leftist movements, the difference was kinda marginal : if you think Mitt Romney was a white supremacist, you're worried about all of them.
That mitt romney article reminds me of one from the bush campaign where they claimed that the John Kerry kids were awful and rude and used slurs and a bunch of other bullshit.
His kids at the time were two-four years old. People will write literally anything during campaign years, so long as it makes the other side look bad.
This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.
My understanding of American presidential elections is that they have always pretty much been a no-holds-barred cage match, behind the scenes, with both parties (not their ticket headers but lower figures) continuously accusing the other party's candidate of everything under the sun and negative campaign galore being the theme of the day.
However, there's now a suggestion that in this particular election, with this particular candidate, the Dems should have refrained from all this and, in effect, fought with one hand behind the back, that there was something particularly ungentlemanly about going after Romney in the typical way. And the people claiming this don't even really like Romney all that much!
I would guess that most of the people complaining are more concerned about who he was running against. And for some of those people, more specifically the race of that person.
Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is. Especially when that group is "this forum," please.
It's only weakmanning to show how bad a group is if you assume that Gdanning thinks there is something bad about disliking Obama for his skin color.
I haven't assumed anything. But if you're suggesting that Gdanning should have been modded under "speak plainly" instead, your suggestion has been noted.
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