Alt-Right Archives - Forget The Box

Imagine for a moment, there is a terrorist attack based on ethnic hatred that took place in the heart of America. Now imagine that the President of the United States went on TV and said the victims are just as much to blame as the terrorists. Well, that happened yesterday.

To recap, there was a so-called “unite the right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia which ended up being a unite fans of the Confederacy with the KKK and neo-Nazis. I’m not exaggerating. There were flags with swastikas on them. There were Hitler quotes on t-shirts. David Duke was there. And this followed a nighttime march where they carried tiki torches and chanted Nazi slogans.

There was also a counter-protest made up of people from groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter and some who just didn’t think those proud of their racism and hatred should go unchallenged. If hatemongers can use free speech to defend their ignorant, white supremacist views then it’s good that some people are there to point out that this is, in fact, hate speech and fight it.

Then someone rammed a car into the counter protest, killing one and injuring many. If ramming a car into people on foot is terrorism when an Islamic extremist does it in London, then it clearly is terrorism when a white supremacist does it in Virginia.

Eventually Donald Trump, current President of the United States, made a statement:

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides.”

Um, wait, what? The hatred and bigotry were clearly only on one side in Charlottesville (hint: it’s the people carrying the swastika flags, not those opposing them). The violence, in the form of mowing down people with a car, was only on that side, too.

Groups against race-based police assassination of innocent people and groups opposed to fascism in all of its forms, new and old, are not hate groups, they are defenders of human rights. Nazis, the Klan and their associates are hatemongers and a threat.

That is a simple concept that shouldn’t need someone murdering people with a car to prove. But now, even with a white supremacist terrorist attack, the President is still on the fence.

Things couldn’t be clearer. I’m all for nuance, but this time it’s black and white. The guys with the swastika flags, they’re the bad guys. Those with the confederate flags, they’re associates of the bad guys. If you can’t see this, you are either truly ignorant or so obsessed with not alienating your own base that you don’t care if they are the scum of the earth.

If it’s the latter, at least, for now, you’re presidential material. For the rest of us, it’s another sad day when racists can kill and not be labelled as the terrorists that they are.

You may have heard the term alt-right quite a bit lately. It has been everywhere ever since President-Elect Donald Trump appointed Steve Bannon to a senior adviser position. Bannon had bragged about turning Breitbart “News” into “a platform for the alt-right” when he was CEO of the website.

But just what is the alt-right? The easiest explanation is that it’s a new term for white nationalists, which is, itself, a whitewashed term for white supremacists. So basically racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, Islamophobic anti-Semites with suits and computer skills.

Of course, many in the alt-right movement argue vehemently that this is not the case. Bannon himself even told the Wall Street Journal last Friday that he has “zero tolerance for the anti-Semitic, racist elements of the alt-right.”

Bannon’s claim, though, is called into question by the headlines that appeared on Breitbart when he was in charge and completely debunked by what happened this weekend in Washington.

On Saturday, the National Policy Institute was holding its annual conference in the Ronald Regan Building. Most of the speeches were subdued, but after dinner, when most of the press had gone home, Richard B. Spencer, the man who had originally coined the term alt-right and is considered a leader of the movement, took the stage.

The Atlantic still had their camera rolling and caught a speech that began with Spencer shouting “Hail Trump!” and many in the crowd responding with Nazi salutes. Spencer also brought back the old Nazi term for media detractors “Lügenpresse” and applied it to the US media.

As if not subtle at all references to the Third Reich weren’t enough, Spencer also went on to defend racial inequality and suppression of minorities as some sort of right with complete ignorance of American history.

If you already know about racism in the so-called alt-right and what a Trump Presidency is bringing with it, you don’t need to watch this nastiness. If you know people who aren’t convinced, though, this video can be a real eye opener to what they really are supporting or brushing off: