Logical Meme

While his recent book on the Alt Right was fairly balanced and rather level-headed, yet still politely condemned the AR itself, George Hawley’s recent speech to the (ahem) “Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Politics” is smug and gloating, and more clearly reveals both the gross simplifications he has of the AR and just how deep his contempt is for the AR.

There are some great Hawley howlers in this talk:

• He describes AR involvement with the Unite the Right rally in C-ville as stemming from disingenuous opportunism, asserting that, prior to C-ville, “the AR had not shown much interest in Confederate heritage.” (32:20).
• Throughout, Hawley repeatedly equates openly violent Antifa types (who initiate the vast majority, if not all, violence at AR events) as, for example, ‘anti-racist counter-protesters’.
• Of the recent low turnout at Richard Spencer’s last campus engagement, he provides no details as to why this may have been the case, simply noting that there were “aggressive counter-protesters”. The implication is that actual interest in the ideas being discussed has waned.
• As a sidenote: around the 49:00 marker, Hawley goes on a bizarre tangent that attempts to tie Steve Bannon to various regional, Alt-Right styled political candidates.

Listen to the ‘globalist’ attendees snicker when Hawley describes people losing their jobs simply for having attended the C-ville rally (35:50). These people revel in the misery that doxing creates. After all, if it’s okay to punch a ‘Nazi’, then it’s certainly okay that he be fired from his job for attending an event.

Hawley is mystified that, upon the Parkland FL school shooting, AR trolls would feed a ravenous and unscrupulous MSM a false story that the shooter was a member of a fringe WN group. “How many people saw the initial headline, but never saw the correction?” Hawley wonders. “So, the Alt Right simply handed its opponents a major propaganda victory, for the sake of a rather juvenile joke.” (45:30)

That Hawley concludes this tells me: No matter how much he studies and writes about the AR, Hawley still doesn’t get it.

At another point, he says: “In the real world, the Alt Right is being out-organized and out-maneuvered and at every turn.” (47:50). So… having near-Orwellian, police-state levels of campus/government/corporate deplatforming efforts taking place, as well as Antifa violence being not only condoned but heralded as ‘anti-racism’, and having a fever-pitch normalization of doxing (and employment-termination) as well as actual violence against Alt Right figures taking place… is described as being “out-organized and out-maneuvered”?

Necessity is the mother of invention, and in the wake of increasing corporate deplatforming; intensifying Antifa violence (and threats of violence); weak (or even accommodating) college administration responses to Antifa disruption, all of which serves to stymy attendance levels, and the like, the Alt Right is retreating back into the predominantly online, organic, creative, innovative, social force it was always best at. It will continue to grow in this environment. Post C-ville, the intensification of deplatforming, doxing, and anti-1A that we see taking place against the AR will obviously cause setbacks to the movement’s otherwise natural growth rate, but it is causing an explosion of interest in the so-called Alt-Lite, which itself a good thing, a bridge to Awakening.

One has to view all of this stuff as part of a dialectical process. It can certainly be argued that the Overton Window is shifting in the AR’s direction. The very existence of the more extreme AR figures and ideas makes, for example, the positions of various Alt-Lite figures as more ‘reasonable’ or ‘moderate’. Would the opinions of, say, Tucker Carlson (esp on the issue of immigration and how it is radically changing national identity) have been imaginable on the Fox News of 2015? Not likely.

We may not be gathering in the town square with signs. In fact, as the H.R. Department preaches “Diversity is our strength!”, we will be the ones clapping the loudest. But, quietly, and autonomously, we will be exerting our influence. Being forced underground only makes the means by which we cloak ourselves, communicate with each other, and organize, more innovative.

The Alt Right is adapting, organically. It is certainly not “collapsing”.

Progs are desperately trying to establish an “Alt Right is Dying” narrative, which they of course hope will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Amanda Carpenter has written a piece in Salon titled “Alt-right is dying, but powerful conservatives are mainstreaming its ideas”:

Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been carefully spooning out increasing amounts of white nationalist rhetoric to his audience for months now, much to the delight of white supremacists. These days, it’s often hard to tell Carlson’s show from the rantings of white nationalists on Twitter.

Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, Jason Wilson has piece titled “The alt-right is in decline. Has antifascist activism worked?”. He gloats that “on the terms it set itself, antifascist organizing in the United States has worked.” Discussing various deplatforming and doxing tactics, he revels in the personal misery doxing causes:

These materials, as well as media reporting, have been used to identify and expose far-right activists to their families, teachers and employers, in the communities they live in.

For many on the alt-right, this has led to serious legal consequences…

And major tech platforms and their advertisers have been pressured to exclude far-right voices, and they have been responding.

In true Stalinist fashion, Wilson revises history and otherwise justifies Antifa’s incivility, opposition to free speech, and even violence:

Antifascist groups have been the target of criticism from across the political spectrum during the first year of the Trump presidency. The right has made them the basis both of moral panics about violence, and conspiracy theories of subversion. And other leftists have questioned the wisdom of antifascist tactics and strategy.

The morality of political violence is a weighty, and always important topic, which we need to constantly scrutinize and revisit. That said, most of the antifascist tactics described above are nonviolent. And a lot of antifascist violence has been defensive, notably in Charlottesville.

As to tactics, the proof is in the pudding…

[I]t seems that the white supremacist alt-right will not survive the Trump era as a coherent movement. If so, antifascist activists can take a large measure of credit.

So, a guy who is basically tipping his hat to Antifa violence is allowed a column in a major British newspaper, but teaching a pug to salute Hitler is a punishable crime.