Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve written a few columns on the dangerous ideologies of the alt-right, culminating with a rather long one over at LifeSiteNews on Friday. Several of the alt-righters have been very irritated by this, and a fellow calling himself “Hunter Wallace”—his real name is Bradley Griffin—wrote a condemnation of one of my columns on Richard Spencer’s website, which spurred a bit of a stampede over to my Twitter feed. For the last few days, my phone has been buzzing with nonstop notifications, and since I’ve had to read through all their incoherent chirping, I figured I’d share a few of the things I’ve learned about the alt-right.
Most of them use fake names, because for all their bluster about their mighty tribe, they’re afraid that their employers will find out that they like to bash the Jews on Twitter and fire them.
Many of them seem to be “the South Will Rise Again” neo-Confederate types. It’s kind of ironic to have someone inform me that the alt-right is necessary because every other movement has failed when their profile picture is a Confederate battle flag.
In the alt-right’s version of history, America has been a bastion of Whiteness until all the immigrant-loving cucks showed up. It’s almost weird how they seem to forget that the aboriginals were here when white people arrived, the United States annexed a decent chunk of Mexico and a large number of Hispanic people at the same time, and African Americans, by and large, did not come to America of their own free will. They love to inform people that their movement is based in a correct historical understanding of the United States, but only by ignoring any complexity and all inconvenient facts can they manage to cobble together their strange ethno-nationalism.
For centuries, leaders in Christian Europe that needed a scapegoat used the only discernible group in society that could be portrayed as “the other”: The Jews. Jews were barred from nearly all guilds, and in many places were not even permitted to own land, which meant that they were often restricted to just a few occupations. Pogroms and persecution were frequent, one reason being the age-old impulse of leaders to dodge responsibility for their own failings by blaming a faction in society that was different from the rest. The alt-right pseudo-intellectuals are attempting to do the same thing that anti-Semitic lords and nobles did in the not-so-distant past: blame the Jews for society’s problems, and put responsibility for our disintegrating culture on the shoulders of “the other.” The Twitter peasants seem to be buying it.
The alt-righters spend much of their time calling their opponents gay and then giggling amongst themselves and “hearting” each other’s adolescent wit. It’s very cute how they all affirm each other incessantly. In the process of his apparently intellectual interlocution, Bradley Griffin called me a “queer bait” and demanded to know if I was married or had any kids yet. And this is apparently one of their less troll-like fellows. Most of their conversations resembled a classroom of bearded 7th Graders.
Many of them don’t seem to realize that people such as myself, who are traditionalist, are just as disillusioned with political conservatism as they are. I’ve asked the question in many of my speeches and in my own book: What does conservatism do when there’s nothing left to conserve and everything left to fight for? The difference between myself and the alt-right is that I see their ideology as another poisonous problem, not the solution. Anti-Semitism in any form is an instant disqualifier for any movement with any cultural aspirations.
A large number of the alt-righters seem to believe that you can believe in eugenics–including the (forced) sterilization of those human beings they deem “lesser—and still be a Christian. The Christian view is very simple: God created everyone, He created them equal, and He created them in His likeness and Image. That goes for everyone. God doesn’t make mistakes. The alt-right’s identitarianism is based on evolutionary junk science that was used in North America and Europe for a few decades but abandoned after the Nazis gave eugenics a more emphatic try, and is utterly incompatible with Christianity. (Chapter 6 of my book, The Culture War, deals with the history and consequences of eugenics.)
On one hand, the alt-righters are very militaristic and like to choose macho Twitter profile pics, but on the other hand they have a massive persecution complex. Those inferior to them, it turns out, are still capable of perpetrating what amounts to “white genocide,” and it appears that the feminists and the leftists and the post-modernists have been beating them like a rented pony for quite a long time. This explains some of the lashing out on Twitter.
I see my Twitter feed is still exploding, so I’m sure there are new delights to come. My final thought is a simple one: If the future of the white race is a swarm of Internet philosophers complaining about people who don’t look like them and calling those who disagree with them “gay,” then at least they’ll have a harder time proselytizing than I thought.
