Thursday, August 25, 2016

Hillary Clinton to Give Speech Attacking Donald Trump and the 'Alt-Right'

So, this is the big deal for the day.

Hillary's gonna smear Donald Trump and the "alt-right" as reactionary racists threatening a Fourth Reich in America.

Oh brother.

I posted on the alt-right in May, "Trump Trolls, the Alt-Right, Neo-Reactionaries, and Anti-Semitism."

Frankly, the movement's mostly harmless, especially the Milo Yiannopoulos brand. Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson (Prison Planet) are pretty harmless too.

I would warn against some of the more hardcore varieties, however, folks that cluster more closely to the Stormfront types. You've got real racism over there, and of course some anti-Semitism. Naturally the media's gonna highlight these latter groups as totally representative of the "alt-right," thus smearing Donald Trump and his legions of supporters. These are the regular everyday folks in flyover America, those whom Salena Zito has been talking to all election season. See, "Stumped by Trump's Success?"

In any case, David Weigel (no friend of mine who blocked me on Twitter years ago) has a background piece up at WaPo, "What’s the alt-right? A primer." Weigel was at the libertarian Reason years ago, but he increasingly moved left. For a while he had that prime gig posting the "Right Now" column at WaPo, but was then outed (and fired) in the JournoList scandal as a pathetic partisan hack who made ugly attacks on opponents of homosexual marriage. (For some reason, WaPo rehired Weigel a couple of years ago, as if nothing ever happened. I guess the idiot got down on his knees for forgiveness, or more.)

So, FWIW, here's this from his piece today (via Memeorandum and Hot Air):
On Thursday, with an unusual amount of fanfare, Hillary Clinton will give a speech denouncing the "alt-right" and delineating ways in which Donald Trump has inflamed racist sentiment. On the alt-right itself, the speech is being welcomed as a sort of coming-out party; alt-right figures are finding their phones and email boxes glowing with new messages, asking to explain who they are and what they think.

While reporters like Rosie Gray, Olivia Nuzzi, and Benjy Sarlin have reported on the alt-right's success for a year, and while the Southern Poverty Law Center has closely monitored its success, the movement remains elastically defined, harboring some terms and personalities that remain obscure or impenetrable. This is a guide — which can and will be updated — to the basics.

'The Camp of the Saints'

A 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail, published as "Le Camp des Saints," which envisions an immigrant invasion of France, and which many on the alt-right view as prophetic. In a 2005 essay for the American Conservative, after riots in France, commentator (and future Michelle Bachmann collaborator) Jim Pinkerton cited Raspail's novel at length to ask why Europe had not realized it was committing "national suicide."
As Raspail describes the scene aboard the immigrant convoy, “Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers … a welter of dung and debauch.”

But France is persuaded that these people are a “million Christs,” whose arrival will “signal the dawn of a just, new day.” In other words, Raspail writes, what the French are lacking is a proper sense of national-racial consciousness, “the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest.” Instead, he concludes, after having been beaten down by decades of multicultural propaganda, “the white race” has become “nothing more than a million sheep.”
Raspail's vision has been cited frequently at Breitbart News, especially when a major Western leader criticizes anti-immigrant sentiment. "Now, as in the novel, prominent political officials are urging on ever larger waves," wrote Breitbart's Julia Hahn in 2015. "Secular and religious leaders hold hands to pressure blue collar citizens to drop their resistance; media elites and celebrities zealously cheer the opportunity that the migrants provide to atone for the alleged sins of the West — for the chance to rebalance the wealth and power of the world by allowing poor migrants from failed states to rush in to claim its treasures."
Keep reading.

Via Memeorandum.

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