This week the champion of the alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos, was banned from Twitter after the horrific racial slurs by a large community against Leslie Jones, the black Ghostbuster star.
This alt-right zeitgeist is a part explanation for those who support the Trump movement, as well as those in the New European Right.
It goes without saying that the alt-right hold views that many will find offensive.
Summary of the Alt-Right by a Liberal Progressive
Scott Alexander (not an alt-right) paints a picture of alt-right philosophy – this is long but a must read to dig deeper into this zeitgeist. Read here.
On the Lack of Free speech in Liberal Societies
“Western society has been moving gradually further to the left for the past several hundred years at least. … If you catch up to society as it’s pushing leftward and say “Hey guys, I think we should go leftward even faster!”, society will call you a bold revolutionary iconoclast and give you a professorship.”
On the Benefits of Colonisation
“of colonial Britain or very-insistently-non-colonial USA, guess which one ended up pacifying Iraq after three months with only about 6,000 casualties, and guess which one took five years to re-establish a semblance of order and killed about 100,000 people in the process?”
On Diversity
“There’s a saying I’ve heard in a lot of groups, which is something along the lines of “diversity is what unites us”. This is nice and memorable, but there are other groups where unity is what unites them, and they seem to be more, well, united.”
The alt-right from the Horses Mouth
Radix Journal – What is the #AltRight?
Radix Journal is a website which firmly holds alt-right views. This link is an article where it describes itself.
“How large is the alt-right? Really impossible to tell, but some estimates have placed it around 4 million people (mostly in the USA and Europe) and growing rapidly.”
“Trump. Many mainstream journalists seem obsessed with the fact that many in the alt-right support Donald Trump. Yes, many (but not all) do. Nonetheless, the alt-right would still exist without Trump.”
“One thing commenters have correctly noted is how young the alt-right is. While there is no objective way to determine the average age of the alt-right, I would place it in the early 20s.”
Breitbart – An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right
Written by and Allum Bokhari Milo Yiannopoulos
“this group began a gleeful demolition of the age-old biases of western political discourse. Liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism were all put under the microscope of the neoreactionaries, who found them wanting.”
“Needless to say, natural conservatives’ concern with the flourishing of their own culture comes up against an intractable nemesis in the regressive left, which is currently intent on tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria in the UK, and erasing the name of Woodrow Wilson from Princeton in the U.S.”
Why this is all relevant now?
One of the editors of The Echo Chamber looks at why it’s important to be discussing the alt-right in the mainstream press.
John Stuart Mill and Why the Media is Letting Us Down
John Stuart Mill is the poster boy for freedom of speech. He writes that if we do not discuss new ideas out in the open, even when they appear abhorrent and wrong, then we do not give ourselves the ability to strengthen our philosophies.
Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this … the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
J.S Mill — On Liberty
Here, Mill says that even if the political system and doctrine you subscribe to is watertight, it is important and beneficial to seriously discuss alternative points of view.
- The community who subscribes to the doctrine will not forget why they believe in their doctrine
- The community who subscribes to the doctrine will always be able to argue why their doctrine is the best
- The community will always behave and act according to the doctrines principals — and the good coming from the doctrine will better permeate through society
In order to do all these things, we must seriously document alternative points of view, and we must argue and criticise new movements in the strongest form that they exist.
Otherwise, new and weak doctrines will grow in momentum. Their leaders will discuss their ideas in a forum that you have no access. They will slowly recruit those who cannot remember why we have the system we do.
Given those on the alt-right have just as much a right to vote as you do, don’t you think it’s about time you started to learn and intelligently discuss an idea that is becoming more and more powerful?
Don’t you think this is the responsibility of the mainstream press?
Don’t you think that it is the responsibility of the mainstream press to take a stand against the way Leslie Jones was treated, and do everything in their power to stop that behaviour happening in the future?
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[…] the past few months we’ve touched on the American election three times. We looked at the alt-right and the philosophical arguments against neoliberalism. Another time we looked at personalities in […]