🐱 2018 was the year the ‘alt-right’ failed

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CatParty
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/alt-right-2018/


Since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the “alt-right” has received much international attention. We have seen white men pouring white milk on themselves in the name of racial purity, and we have read about deeply violent acts like the man who stabbed and killed two people on a Portland train who were defending the target of the killer’s racial slurs. Then there was Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a horrifying spectacle of white supremacists carrying weapons and swastikas marching through the city over a fallen Confederate monument. In many ways, Trump’s consistent dog-whistles and policies against marginalized people would make you believe that the “alt-right” is only getting started.

Or, you could argue, the sound of that momentum is the alt-right’s death knell.

No doubt, in 2018, there were more moments of spectacle and violence that the alt-right’s ideologies produced: the July stabbing death of Nia Wilson by a suspected alt-righter in Oakland; violent clashes in Portland and New York City with the Proud Boys; the killing of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by racist, anti-Muslim shooter, Nikolas Cruz; the strange emergence of Kanye West as a visible Trump supporter; the October shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh by a shooter with alt-right leanings.

But while the alt-right has proven itself as a movement reliant on acts of violence to gain notoriety, it has also suffered consequences. And such consequences have hindered its power and stuck fear among its followers.

After violent clashes between the supporters of alt-right thought leader Richard Spencer and protesters at Michigan State University in March, Spencer posted a video to YouTube where he canceled the rest of his college speaking tour. “I really hate to say this, and I definitely hesitate to say this,” he said. “Antifa is winning to the extent that they’re willing to go further than anyone else, in the sense that they will do things in terms of just violence, intimidating, and general nastiness.”

2018 has also been a year of rampant doxing of the alt-right, which has led to many of them losing employment. This scrutiny has perhaps led to the movement being unable to gather large numbers for many of its demonstrations. At this year’s Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington D.C., the crowd of a few dozen alt-right supporters was far outnumbered by counterprotesters. The recent Proud Boys rally in Philadelphia also had dismal attendance numbers, and some were even denied cab service by drivers as they attempted to leave the demonstration.

Furthermore, the alt-right has lost a lot of money. Milo Yiannopoulos is allegedly $2 million in debt. In the past year, fundraising platforms, like Patreon, PayPal, and GoFundMe, have banned various members of the alt-right, Yiannopoulos included. Many personalities like InfoWars’ Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes of the Proud Boys have also been banned from social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Then, there is Kanye. One of the most famous Black rappers in the world touted pro-Trump views and even attended a highly publicized meeting with the president. But after much public outcry following their chat, Kanye declared on Twitter that he was used to spread messages he didn’t believe in. Even the attention-hungry can see that not much good comes from aligning yourself with the alt-right.

To be clear, though, the alt-right isn’t a fad that burst and faded over the past few years. The movement can be traced back to 2008, utilizing online propaganda, white male disillusionment, and acts of white supremacist heroism meant to inspire youth. Alt-righters congregated and ideologized on 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, and Twitter for years before they made national headlines. “The alt-right is definitely a re-branding of white supremacy for the digital generation,” Mark Potok of the SPLC told the Daily Dot in 2016.

The movement also has given hate a mouthpiece and emboldened it. Hate crimes continue to rise in this country, and according to a recent study, there are roughly 24 million Americans who have alt-right beliefs. But for every active alt-righter, there are many more anti-fascists and generally kind and caring people working to curb the appeal of an alt-right brand of fascism and racism.

Places like Haymaker Gym in Chicago—which hosts anti-fascist, self-defense training—campus groups campaigning against alt-right speakers, and organizations suing alt-right leaders over their actions, are doing the day-to-day work. Then there are the masses who show up in protest, who report harassers on Twitter, who organize groups and GoFundMes to ensure justice is served and bigotry is shut down. The left’s ability to organize and focus will defeat the alt-right. Even Spencer has admitted as much.

In 2018, we made steps toward showing the alt-right that we won’t tolerate their lightly disguised, hate-mongering rhetoric, but in 2019, we can do better by expanding our networks of organizing and understand that beliefs held by the alt-right don’t just go away. Moving forward, we must find new ways to build community, share information, and have conversations with the complacent people around us. We have to think beyond the political theater of rallies, demonstrations, and street scuffles. We have to use our voices and show that we really are “willing to go further than anyone else” to stamp out hate.
Disclosure: Milo Yiannopoulous was the founder of the Kernel, a publication the Daily Dot acquired in January 2014.
 
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After violent clashes between the supporters of alt-right thought leader Richard Spencer and protesters at Michigan State University in March, Spencer posted a video to YouTube where he canceled the rest of his college speaking tour. “I really hate to say this, and I definitely hesitate to say this,” he said. “Antifa is winning to the extent that they’re willing to go further than anyone else, in the sense that they will do thingsin terms of just violence, intimidating, and general nastiness.”
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Hooray we bullied a guy with opinions we didn't like into silence. What a good year.
 
So, is Alt-Right this massive juggernaught that is going to destroy everything unless brave snowflake underdogs stem the tide -or- is it a tiny bunch of losers on their way out?

Can these people make up their mind?
 
I just want to voice my appreciation for the word filter.

"No doubt, in 2018, there were more moments of spectacle and violence that the alt-right’s ideologies produced: the July stabbing death of Nia Wilson by a suspected alt-righter in Oakland; violent clashes in Portland and New York City with the Proud Boys; the killing of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by racist, anti-Muslim shooter, Nikolas Cruz; the strange emergence of Kanye West as a visible Trump supporter; theOctober shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh by a shooter with alt-right leanings."


So, "murder, streetfights, Kanye likes Trump, murder"? Damn, what a bunch of totally comparable, equally disturbing events.

", Spencer posted a video to YouTube where he canceled the rest of his college speaking tour. “I really hate to say this, and I definitely hesitate to say this,” he said. “Antifa is winning to the extent that they’re willing to go further than anyone else, in the sense that they will do thingsin terms of just violence, intimidating, and general nastiness.”

Yeah, Antifa will cross lines of decency that no-one else will, like driving cars into crowds of protesters, or shooting up a synagogue... oh, wait.

Antifa are exceptional, but the far right hand-wrining about "OMG I cant believe theyd use violence!!" is fucking hillarious.
 
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When everyone you don't like is alt right you can basically make up whatever narrative you want. In reality, its get woke go broke that is defining things. There has been a rejection of progtard ideology. There's still a long way to go, but their time is running out because their shit is getting more and more ridiculous.
 
Funny how Cruz is shoe-horned into "alt-right" territory when he shot up a fucking school - as opposed to anywhere politically significant - and was a classic school shooter type, but anything for the narrative, I suppose...
 
2016 was the year American politics finally shat the bed, and then they kept shitting in 2017, and even more shit in 2018.

I predict an onslaught of bullshit in 2019, even more in 2020, and you know where this is going.
 
Ahh the daily dolt, yes this must be true except for all the other articles that have said the alt-right are growing and youtube is a hotbed of alt-right activity that is indoctrinating children.

Which is it you disingenuous fuckheads?
 
That "survey" cited in the article is such bullshit.

Movements like the Alt-Right are correctly classified as racist. However, there are elements to these kinds of movements beyond simple racial animus, anxiety, or resentment. Although the racist right can be ideologically diverse and make many different arguments, there are three key sentiments that are widely shared across these movements: 1) a strong sense of white identity, 2) a belief in the importance of white solidarity, and 3) a sense of white victimization. Although someone who rates high on all of these views may not necessarily identify with the Alt-Right or a similar movement, we can anticipate all or nearly all individuals who are involved in white identity politics to share these attitudes.

The 2016 American National Election Survey (ANES), which was conducted over several waves during Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency, included several helpful questions on racial attitudes. Some of these were new additions to the survey. Respondents were asked how important their race was to their identity on a five-point scale ranging from "not at all important" to "extremely important." They were also asked a question measuring their feelings of white solidarity: "How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?" This followed the same five-point scale. Finally, we can assess survey respondents' feelings of white victimization from their answers to the question of how much discrimination whites face in the U.S., also on a five-point scale, ranging from "none at all" to a "great deal."
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Essentially, these questions relating to each of the values they identify are framed in a very broad, amorphous, and deceptive way, especially the second one. Yes, how fucking dare a group of people not want laws to be unfair to them; that's not a position that the Alt-Right have a monopoly on (hell, this survey makes a major error in assuming that they do on the affirmative to any of these questions), and if it were directed at any group of people almost everyone, including the majority of whites, would be in agreement and not see it as a bigoted/immoral position.

The survey included 3,038 non-Hispanic white respondents. Among these respondents, only a minority expressed high values on any of the above questions: about 28% expressed strong feelings of white identity; about 38% expressed strong feelings of white solidarity; and about 27% felt that whites suffer a meaningful amount of discrimination in American life. A much smaller minority, about 6% of respondents, expressed all three opinions. It is worth noting that a 2017Washington Post-ABC News poll estimated that about 10% of respondents supported the Alt-Right.
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The study even admits that these views are not commonplace among white Americans, assuming the results are accurately representative of their beliefs. If anything, it indicates that white Americans are not particularly tribal, which correlates with my personal observations. If these questions and values were aimed at blacks, Hispanics, or Asians, I guarantee you'd see much higher affirmative responses to all three questions, and all the pearl-clutching progressives who were probably fearmongering about how 10% of white Americans are Nazis either wouldn't care or even express positive sentiments. In other word, ethnic nationalism/solidarity is like saying the word nigger: it's only a problem when white people do it.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
So, is Alt-Right this massive juggernaught that is going to destroy everything unless brave snowflake underdogs stem the tide -or- is it a tiny bunch of losers on their way out?

Can these people make up their mind?
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It's whatever it needs to be to fit whatever agenda they're pushing.
 
W-We totally did it guys
F-Fuck Drumpf
Orange Man Bad

21bg3e.jpg
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
So, is Alt-Right this massive juggernaught that is going to destroy everything unless brave snowflake underdogs stem the tide -or- is it a tiny bunch of losers on their way out?

Can these people make up their mind?
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well considering how gamergate is super duper dead and never coming back and also A LARGE LOOMING THREAT THAT WILL DESTROY THE WORLD at the same time...
 
Someone archive this thread somewhere so next year we can laugh at "2019 is the year that the alt right failed"
 
The same author wrote this article (archived because Daily Dot's website design is poison and the amount of ads, popups, and automatic videos that play have the smell of "dire financial straits" all over it):

Overcoming the silence of growing up Black, gay, and with an immigrant father
Prince Shakur—
2018-06-28 06:00 am | Last updated 2018-06-28 12:42 pm

The night that I found out my stepfather was arrested seemed like any other back then. I was 13, living on the east side of Cleveland. He was away on yet another business trip, the nature of which was never truly explained to me. While talking to him on the phone that week, I’d followed my mother’s rules and called him my uncle.

For the previous year, I had adjusted to the strange habits my brother and I were encouraged to adopt regarding my stepfather’s whereabouts. There was the month when we spent every weekend shooing away rats with brooms and wiping caked-on dust off the appliances of my stepfather’s new apartment in a ghetto on the west side of Cleveland that had more damaged businesses, abandoned homes, and random men yelling outside than our own neighborhood; the kind of place I’d imagine my mother would usually tell us to never hang out. The only explanation I was given was that he simply “needed an extra place to stay." Even at school, I was told to rarely mention him.

At the time, I simply chalked it up to another truth that children simply shouldn’t know. In retrospect, it was the way my family had to cope with having an undocumented man as a father.

In the days following his arrest, our family made sure to cover our tracks. Late one night, my mother instructed us to roam through dressers, closets, and the attic for as many items of his as possible. By the time the night ended, most of his belongings were in a storage unit and I knew exactly why, even though my mother didn’t tell me.

We had to remove his presence from our home, act as if he had never really lived there, in case the police suspected we had aided the man who had raised us.

. . .

Days turned to weeks. Eventually, my stepfather was sentenced to four years at a correctional facility in Youngstown, Ohio. I started high school and my body began to change in new ways. I grew facial hair. My voice deepened. When I looked in the mirror, I no longer hated myself. Maybe it was growing up in a family of secrets that had taught me to keep the deepest secret of my own: I was gay and I had no idea how to come out to my family.

My stepfather’s loss was most apparent during family dinners on Sundays. His spot at the table stared back at us, empty. Despite discovering my passion for writing that year, I hated writing him letters, just like I hated the phone calls. After all the secrets about how our family was held together, it made me sick to spout niceties about the shiny parts of my teenage life.

On one hand, I felt selfish for being angry with him. He’d driven me to bookstores as a child, marveled at my art projects, and calmed my mother when her temper flared. I knew that my phone calls, letters, and visits mattered to him because every detail I provided helped him understand the man I was becoming from behind bars.

At the same time, however, I wondered if he’d ever really want to know the real me. No one had helped me prepare for the imploding of our family’s facade, just as no could prepare me for what would happen when my own illusion, my heterosexuality, could no longer hold. I believed any conversation about coping with loss would only add stress to an already stressful situation and be more shallow than what I desperately needed.

. . .

Prison visits took up entire Sundays. We would wear nice clothes, drive to the private prison, and pass through the metal gates. Inside, we had to strip our pockets, show our identification, walk through metal detectors, and appear content with this treatment. I hated the way the prison guards casually handled their jobs as captors. Despite “the talk" that every Black child is given while growing up, seeing the mass of Black and Brown men in orange jumpsuits was the first time this realization hit home: This country jails us so casually.

On one visit in particular, I was the most agitated I’d ever been. My brother was leaving soon for the military. My mother and I had been having horrible arguments for weeks. Instead of being interested and reassuring about what was actually bothering me, my mother chose this visit to encourage my stepfather to tell me to shape up.

But I was reaching my limit with facades.

“You’re gone," I said as I looked at my stepfather. “Now my brother’s leaving. All I’m gonna have left is…"

My mother’s expression went slack. Neither of them responded.

. . .

I was 15 years old when a teacher assigned us to write a speech about “how the government had affected our lives personally." I wrote about how kind my stepfather had been to me and what it felt like to stand in the middle of the emptiness he left behind. Apparently, the strength to speak out such loss did not need to be pulled out of me. It had been there all along.

Living with my father’s absence forced me to wage war against all the other shades of shame I’d acquired—mentally rehearsing having to live on the streets if my parents kicked me out for being gay; the future wedding that my mother would choose not to come to, or that my stepfather legally could not; the letters, the phone calls that I hadn’t responded to quickly enough.

I decided then that it was time to no longer be afraid of being gay, of not being the right kind of Black boy for anyone, of being in a family in which such a loss could happen. When I finished my speech, my classmates gazed back at me, tender. Many of them had lost someone to prison or street violence, so what about airing the truth had made me so afraid?

It was because—and Trump’s America proves it—shame is used to silence people, to hold steady an illusion that benefits some but hurts many others.

. . .

Months after that prison visit, my mother woke me up in my room and asked me the question I’d been dreading: “Are you gay?"

Though I felt relief for finally speaking that truth, there was no solace in the fact that I couldn’t control what my mother chose to do with it. The next months at home were even lonelier as my mother’s only acknowledgement of my sexuality was to ask with a grimace, “Are you still having these feelings?"

I wrote and called my father less frequently. By the time college acceptance letters and high school graduation arrived, my father’s release date was set. I’d always suspected that my mother would reject my sexuality, but deep down, I had hope for my father’s open-mindedness.

I spent the summer before university with my stepfather in Kingston, Jamaica. Kingston, the capital, is where, in the documentary Gully Queens, LGBTQ Jamaicans are forced out of their homes, end up living in the storm drains, and sometimes have to fend off knife attacks in the night.

Nerves had eaten me up the entire trip. It was a hot day when I called him into my room.

“I, I have something to tell you and…" I froze and took a breath. “Would you care if I was gay?"

He fiddled with the ring on his finger for a long time and then closed the bedroom door.

“What did you just say?"

“It doesn’t have to change anything. I just… You’re my father and I wanted to tell you."

The look on his face was grave. For the next hour, I stumbled through trying to answer his offensive questions. The part that stung the most, though, was when he said, “I love you, but I don’t want that to be part of my life."

The comment haunted me even as I took a shower later that day, as I packed my bags to leave, and as I broke down in the airplane bathroom. The irony was that I’d never asked for an undocumented father, and yet I had embraced him wholly for as long as I could. I’d yearned for him to return the favor; so much so, I’d made the effort to open up to him.

I left Jamaica, never really able to see him the same. But when he calls, I answer. I don’t want to be part of the silence that plagued our family for so long.
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I have a feeling he has some cognitive investment in the idea of a nefarious network of right-wing oppression lurking everywhere he goes - or he's just making shit up for clicks. It's the Daily Dot, so I know which I'd bet on.
 
Übertroon said:
If the alt right is finished, why the constant purity purges of entertainment?
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also if the alt-right is done for
i guess they can't be blamed for anything ever again
and watch as two days later there's a new article about how the alt-right is doing something new
 
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