The use of "peripheral audience" seems to indicate EH was referring to the Let This Motherfucker Burn vote, who preferred both Bernie and Trump on a nonpartisan antiestablishment basis, as well as those Trump voters who wanted Trump vs. Bernie to ensure an antiestablishment outcome.
I agree that was a line of thinking I saw.
However, claiming that falls under alt right as a group still infuriates me. Alt right has literally just become another label for nazis, for fascists. (Both also often misused, but at least pre-existing and misused for much longer than just the most recent election cycle.)
Alt-right as a word, basically doesn't exist. It just the nickname given to the "enemy" by the left wing. A label to dehumanize people so they don't need to consider their opinions.
No, its not. I've been using this term for half a decade now.
It refers to a decentralized online conservative movement that has adopted the language of progressives but with the opposite aims. Stormfront, Breitbart, and extremely racist/anti-immigrant forums (like /r coon town) form the "white nationalist" (not that I'll ever use such a respectful term for them) branch of the alt right. So some Neo-Nazis are contained within the alt right, but not all racist/anti-immigrant groups are alt right. For example, the KKK wishes they were part of the anti-immigrant Trump coalition, but they aren't. This is because they lack one of the core methods the alt-right needs, which is deniability. If I go on a news site and make a post about how black people are a plague, I need to be able to say "wow, so triggered" or "shows how much respect the left has for dissenting views" when I get downvoted into oblivion. And the other alt right guy in the comments needs to be able to go "wow, we're not ALL like that guy." The KKK has official membership and is already known as a hate group, with them you lose that transparent veil of deniability. Thus even tho they want to be part of the vastly more successful than them (in modern times at least) Brietbart coalition, they cannot be allowed in.
But that "neo-nazi" branch of the movement (which yes is not all LITERALLY neo-nazis but are so ideologically similar that its a fair label) is just one branch. You've also got the anti-feminist branch. This consists of MRAs, /r theredpill, and pretty much any forum where you can say you've been friendzoned and no one will call you out. These groups commonly assume the trappings of progressive and activist movements but they commonly espouse conspiracy theories about women. Expect them to claim feminists have much more power than they actually do, and to act like women owe them sex. If you remember Return of Kings, they pretty much summarized the whole thing. If someone in the youtube comment sections says "we should lower the price of pussy" you know where they came from.
Those are, IIRC, the two main branches that are big enough to be called branches. There's also smaller ones like gamergate. The alt right target audience of young angry white guys has always been floating around on the internet, congregating on place like 4chan, but now things have gotten *slightly* more centralized and explicit (which is why people are now equating 4chan with ideological movements instead of just random trolls; the archetypical 4chan user is exactly the kind of person that would log into the wrong subreddit and be like "wow, they're saying what I really think", so a lot of them really did get lapped up into the alt right). The power of the alt right is controlling conversation. Sometimes this means using bots and heavy moderation to create the illusion that everyone agrees on things. Sometimes it means using trolling to obscure whether you're serious or not. But more often than not it means moving the goalposts by mis-defining tolerance and free speech so that they defend you (I can go into detail on that if anyone cares).
The age gap in the Republican party is much more extreme than the one in the democratic party. Until a few short years ago the religious right still had a death grip on the far right dialogue and they still do influence a large number of older voters. But young extremists in the Republican party are almost invariably alt right instead of fundamentalist. Even tho those two groups are objectionable to outsiders for similar reasons, they're very different from each other on a lot of levels. Anyway, there's another split in the Republican party, which is that younger (and some middle aged) economic issues Republicans tend to be libertarians. More accurately they're part of a wider young moderate (well, more accurately just not extreme) coalition that also notably includes the pot legalization movement, which is huge among all young people right or left. This crowd is not part of the alt right, but is vaguely more sympathetic to them than everyone else is and also rubs shoulders with them a lot on the internet. While actual dual membership in both the young Republican and alt-right coalitions isn't that common AFAIK, the young Republican coalition is bleeding members into the alt right. Those two coalitions together formed the crowd that was sympathetic to Bernie Sanders. Angry young people who saw him as another outsider screwed by the system. They admired his frank attitudes, the fact that he's a white guy who's pro-legalization, and the fact that he too was screwed by Shillary/democrats/the system. This was always the overlap between Trump supporters and Bernie supporters, that they both wanted to elect an outsider. The irony is that the far left and the far right got in bed together based on essentially an illusion; those few foolish Bernie supporters that actually voted for Trump haven't got what they wanted and Trump supporters damn well wouldn't have gotten what they wanted out of Bernie.
Author
Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4459706 times)