“As a right-wing conservative and founding member of the Freedom Caucus, I never expected that the co-worker I would work closest, and best, with at the White House would be a ‘globalist,’ ” Mulvaney said in a tweet. “Gary Cohn is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.
.. Globalist belongs in a class of words (“cuck” is another one, as is “othering”) that tends to say a great deal more about the person who uses it than it does about the person he says it about.
.. To be an anti-globalist, on the other hand, does specify something. It means someone who is convinced that serious business is transacted at conferences like Davos or Bilderberg or Munich, and that 500 or so people run the world at the expense of everyone else.
.. anti-globalism is economic illiteracy married to a conspiracy mind-set.
.. Who in the White House is left to tell the president he’s nuts when he tries to pull out of Nafta?
.. expats are our real globalists, representing the things that make America great:
- adventure,
- engagement,
- commerce,
- openness to new ideas, and
- a love of America honed by a combination of critical distance and a new depth of appreciation.
Make no mistake about it: the alt-right is a cult, and this is how its members lure people in
They have created an esoteric private language with terms like cuck, red pill, deus vault. People are seduced by a combination of humour (everything is ‘ironic’ so it has plausible deniability) and a secret language
the alt-right is a moving target, able to tease, and able to deny the authenticity of their content because of its comedic packaging; in the words of Jason Wilson, “the alt-right have stormed mainstream consciousness by weaponising irony, and by using humour and ambiguity as tactics to wrongfoot their opponents” . It is rare that they advance a straight argument, or in fact any argument at all.
But they are indeed a cult. Their power comes from a series of social media sites such as Elders of the Black Sun; Stop Degeneracy; Nazi Tinder; Art of the True Right; Strictly Ubermensch; Men Among the Ruins; Trumpenreich. The subcultural and cultist elements effectively disarm potential critics via their very oddity.
.. This occurs precisely at the point in American history where the nation is poised to lose its white majority, a critical juncture.
.. African Americans are a particular target. One crime of a black person is the crime of all black people everywhere, a familiar Goebbels-style rhetorical trick. The alleged mannerisms and culture of African Americans are caricatured in parodies which are beyond crude. They also mock the aspirations of African Americans to their own heritage: “we wuz kangz (kings) and sh*t”.
.. Yet the alt-right is not an organisation but a disorganisation. The process is essentially crowd-sourced, originally via the message board 4Chan. Exactly like Isis propaganda
.. Here then is the gathered harvest of personal bitterness. Lonely individuals map onto these causes their own frustrations. Underlying it all is an appeal to solidarity, the community of shared views and values.
.. The common denominator is a hatred of American and European liberalism
.. It seeks neither to harangue with argument nor beguile with rhetoric, but to ridicule, and to elude the scrutiny of conscience by virtue of its levity and lack of seriousness.