The American people have witnessed the rise of a new so-called political movement with the rise of unorthodox Republican Candidate, now President-elect, Donald Trump. Witnessing its rise mainly through the internet, the innocuous term of “alt-right” goes to a degree where it presents itself just like any political movement. Like their name states, the alt-right maintains the beliefs of the Republican party, but “alternative” in the way that it is rallied behind Donald Trump, where his political incorrectness and anti-establishment rhetoric combines with a large internet subculture of self-proclaimed “counter social justice warriors”. These two internet subcultures converge into what can be perfectly shown as the Reddit.com’s forum, r/the_Donald, where 300 thousand subscribed members show that their movement is no way based in anti-establishment politics, but an overt movement based in prejudice and white supremacy.
Reddit.com’s forum r/the_Donald, can be considered in many ways to be the echo chamber and “Mecca” of the alt-right. Even the man himself, Donald Trump has held an AMA (ask me anything), on the thread, in addition to all the other threads linking to Breitbart News, headed by Steven Bannon, Trump’s pick for White House Chief Strategist.
As the echo chamber of the alt-right, Bannon’s right wing news website approves headlines like “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew” which is in response to the Kristol running as a 3rd party conservative to undermine Trump, along with “LGBT Rainbow Hate-Flag Replaces American Flag Over Reno City Hall”, intending to smear LGBT rights campaigns.
Critics blasting the headlines as bigoted, and anti-Semitic, are met with rebuttals and justified by saying that not everything has to be politically correct often by the members of the alt-right. They reference that their movement is politically incorrect, going back to its main idea of fighting political correctness, but with headlines like such doesn’t take a lot to see the truth behind the alt-right.
As the alt-right normally does, they express their internal color of bigotry by turning the tables on social issues. They see the coverage of LGBT issues as discrimination, on themselves, straight Caucasians. When Breitbart referred to the LGBT flag as a “hate-flag” in the headline, it reverses the rhetoric on LGBT issues to how expressing LGBT pride is discrimination on straight people, especially when the rest of the headline states that the flag “replaces American flag over Reno city hall.” In the mind of a bigot and nationalist, the headline proves that straight white Caucasians of the alt-right cannot adapt to equality in America, they see that they must maintain their position above minorities.
If this is not enough to convince the American people, the alt-right can be seen as even more deplorable when viewed from another angle, its political elites. Richard Spencer, a well-known white nationalist and consequently, also the head of the cleverly named National Policy Institute (NPI), a think-tank that describes its goal as “an independent think-tank and publishing firm dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States, and around the world.”
When it is put like the NPI is “dedicated to the heritage, identity or European people”, it sneaks the idea that the NPI is innocuous, and is like any think-tank or institution that deals in cultural preservation. However, like the underlying reason of the hate-flag headline from Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, the disguise of the NPI true intentions show at the annual conference of the National Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., where Spencer was caught on video Nazi saluting two hundred attendees, and also, not kidding, also said that “America was until this past generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” in addition to also commenting that there should be “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”
When the self-proclaimed father of the alt-right calls for ethnic cleansing and Nazi salutes the crowd, it’s a sign that your movement might be a white supremacist movement. Spencer himself has been so overt with his racism that his account has been suspended from Twitter.
So it’s time for America to see the alt-right as what it is, a white supremacist movement that hides behind the internet.
