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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.
I'm glad that some posters mentioned Romney in all of this. The unbelievable leftist smear campaign against him in the 2012 campaign season, which was clearly motivated by nothing else but the sense of urgency to prevent the nation's first glorious African-American leader from going down in history as a one-term disappointment, was an obvious wake-up call to many otherwise moderate rightists, and convinced them that, unlike in 2008 and 2012, the GOP should actually try running a candidate who stands a chance and isn't a cuck. This had an obvious galvanizing effect on dissident right-wing politics, I think.
To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004. Not that either side cared much about morality to begin with when it comes to campaigning, but my point is that this is a long story and both sides have been pulling dirty campaign tricks since the parties came into existence. There is nothing new about what they did to Romney, and that kind of dirty campaigning is not at all unique to the Democrats.
Weird example. Kerry was a worse candidate than Hillary, and he hoisted himself on his own petard by trying to run as a war hero when he was anything but. There was nothing shifty about swiftboating, unless using a candidate's own words and actions against him is now somehow sus.
He at least actually served in Vietnam, but he got railroaded by the campaign team that was fighting for a guy who spent the war safe in the US. Whether Kerry was a war hero or not I don't know, but Bush didn't even show up to the war.
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Kerry was a better candidate than Hillary, and by the fundamentals, is the best 'losing candidate' (not counting 2000 for either side) in recent political history. Remember, the War wasn't unpopular yet, the economy was still fine, and Dubya still barely won. Honestly, the GOP should've seen that as a problem back then that John Kerry almost beat them, as opposed to treating it as a mandate and trying to privatize Social Security.
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I can't believe I'm leaping to Kerry's defense, of all people, but based on my memories of reviewing his service record, he's much closer to war hero than pretender.
They really did him dirty.
I’ve just read the Swiftboat Vets article on Wikipedia and their own website. I can see where both sides made points and both left out details. One point which seems pertinent to me is how the Swiftboat Vets group claims they include people who were his peers and superiors, while the vets who joined Kerry’s campaign tour were his subordinates. But never having served myself, I can’t evaluate the events some fifty years ago other than as a civilian citizen hearing everything thirdhand or worse.
I don’t disparage vets for their service, but Kerry did after he got back, and that’s the part I can’t fault the Swiftboat Vets for emphasizing.
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I mean we're talking about the same John Kerry that threw his Vietnam medals over the Whitehouse fence but magically had them back to display on his office wall in Congress, right?
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Did the majority of the mainstream media join in the swiftboating, or was it just basically Fox News, talk radio and right-wing blogs?
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