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MBS

(9,688 posts)
Fri Aug 26, 2016, 06:03 AM Aug 2016

LA Times article on the alt-right and Trump

I think that there is no way to overstate the danger these folks pose to the democratic foundations of our country. We really, really have to win this election - preferably in a landslide, so that there is no doubt about what the majority of Americans think. And we also need to remain vigilant- since these guys and their violent ways will still be around after the election.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-main-alt-right-trump-20160825-snap-story.html

Starting in the 1960s, anti-Semites, overt racists, and John Birch Society adherents were cast out of the political mainstream. These outcasts lay low for a while, but they didn’t just disappear. Now their ideological descendants are trying to take over the Republican Party (as well as the country).
The Alt-Right supports the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and protectionist trade policies. It opposes feminism, diversity, gay rights, globalism, gun control and civil rights.
Alt-Right leaders, unlike Neo-Nazis or KKK supporters, are intellectually and rhetorically sophisticated. Jared Taylor, editor of the American Renaissance website, holds degrees from Yale and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. On his site, Taylor published “An Open Letter to Cuckservatives” — the Alt-Right’s insulting term for moderate conservatives — laying out his beliefs.

. ..
Richard B. Spencer of the National Policy Institute, who went to the Universities of Chicago and Virginia, is openly anti-American. In an interview last July with the New York Times he said: “America as it is currently constituted — and I don’t just mean the government; I mean America as constituted spiritually and ideologically — is the fundamental problem…I don’t support and agree with much of anything America is doing in the world.” He despises “cuckservatives” because “we’ve recognized the bankruptcy of this ideology, based on ‘free markets,’ ‘values,’ and ‘American exceptionalism.’” In short, this new strain of reactionary thought goes beyond the garden-variety racial prejudice of yore — which certainly was bad enough — to a root-and-branch rejection of American 21st century values. The Alt-Right represents the first new philosophical competitor to liberalism, broadly defined, since the fall of Communism.
. . .
So the Alt-Right has an audience — and in Trump, it has a candidate. Trump’s rants about Mexican rapists charging across the southern border, his attacks on an American-born judge of Mexican descent, and his calls to ban Muslims from entering the country, are all in line with Alt-Right ideology. Accordingly, Alt-Right organizations made robocalls for Trump in the Iowa, New Hampshire and Utah primaries.
. . But VDARE isn’t the Alt-Right flavored publication most closely associated with Trump. That distinction goes to Breitbart News, whose former chair, Stephen K. Bannon, is now the Trump campaign CEO. Bannon has described Breitbart as a “platform for the Alt-Right.” The site even published a helpful “Guide to the Alt-Right” which explained that “young rebels” are drawn to the cause “for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s: because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand.” Those norms apparently include tolerance and the concept of racial equality.

The Alt-Right is the first explicitly anti-American political movement to attach itself to a major-party presidential candidate since 1948, when Communists supported the Progressive, former Vice President Henry Wallace. All schools of American political thought — and especially mainstream conservatives — must reject this dangerous ideology.
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