The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the alt-right “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”
.. “Immigration is a kind of proxy war — and maybe a last stand — for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile,” Mr. Spencer wrote
Where did Donald Trump get his racialized rhetoric? From libertarians.
The intersection of white nationalism, the alt-right and Ron Paul
Trump’s style and positions — endorsing and consorting with 9/11 truthers, promoting online racists, using fake statistics — draw on a now-obscure political strategy called “paleolibertarianism,” which was once quite popular among some Republicans, especially former presidential candidate Ron Paul.
.. it’s incredible how many of the same white nationalists and conspiracy theorists to whom Ron Paul once catered are now ardent Trump supporters. It’s because Trump and Paul speak the same language.
.. Mainstream libertarians have been agonizing over this legacy among themselves for some time, hoping that either the elder or younger Paul would definitively denounce the movement’s racialist past, but no such speech has ever come.
.. There had always been some sympathy for racism and anti-Semitism among libertarians — the movement’s house magazine, Reason, dedicated an entire issue in 1976 to “historical revisionism,” including Holocaust revisionism. It also repeatedly ran articles in defense of South Africa’s then-segregationist government (though by 2016, the magazine was running articles like “Donald Trump Enables Racism”).
.. Rothbard even published a chapter in his book “The Ethics of Liberty” in which he said that “the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children,” although he didn’t specify the races of the children who might be sold.
.. Rothbard also invoked the “exciting” former senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin — not because of his economic views but because he was a brash populist prone to doing erratic things. Rothbard’s description of McCarthy seems eerily similar to the campaign that Trump has been running:
.. To solve the problem that few Americans are interested in small government, Rothbard argued that libertarians needed to align themselves with people they might not like much in order to expand their numbers. “Outreach to the Rednecks” was needed to make common cause with far-right Christian conservatives who hated the federal government, disliked drugs and wanted to crack down on crime.
.. the highly lucrative newsletters frequently stoked racial fears, similar to what Trump has been doing this year, though they went further — one even gave advice on using an unregistered gun to shoot “urban youth.” Another issue mocked black Americans by proposing alternative names for New York City such as “Zooville” and “Rapetown,” while urging black political demonstrators to hold their protests “at a food stamp bureau or a crack house.”
.. Rothbard’s call for “sovereign nations based on race and ethnicity” is very similar to beliefs Trump’s alt-right supporters express today.
.. After Rand Paul came to the Senate in 2011, and as he eventually began planning his own presidential campaign, there was some speculation that conservatives might be entering a “libertarian moment.” Things didn’t turn out that way. Instead, the American right seems to have entered a paleolibertarian moment.
At The Privilege Factories
Rob Montz, an alumnus who is concerned about the monstrous culture of “weaponized grievance” destroying the core of the university.
The First Time Hillary Clinton Was President
What her Wellesley classmates remember about Hillary’s first term—in 1968.
.. She had just spent much of her summer in Washington, interning on Capitol Hill. At a historic juncture of acute anti-establishment fervor, she told them to trust the system. Progress at Wellesley, she explained, “often results through action taken by the Senate of the College Government Association.”
.. During a period of immense social upheaval, she was the most prominent intermediary between her increasingly radicalized fellow students and a change-resistant faculty and administration.
“Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro told me.
.. centrist, cautious, respectful of authority, progressive but never at the expense of maintaining access to the seats of power.
.. “She knew how to temper things.”
.. The graduation speech offered a largely progressive message, but she delivered it in language that was far from incendiary, more of a manifesto of moderation than a revolutionary’s battle cry.
.. The thrust of the thesis was what Rodham viewed as the inherent limits of radical activism
.. by the spring of her freshman year, his daughter was the gung-ho head of Wellesley’s Young Republicans organization.
.. “If we get this going, maybe we’ll see a change before we graduate,” she announced, according to the next day’s Boston Globe—one of the first public signals of her patient, incrementalist disposition.
.. In a letter to a friend from high school, she said she was an “agnostic intellectual liberal” but “an emotional conservative.”
.. “Can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?”
.. Her platform, such as it was, characteristically leaned heavily on a faith in Robert’s Rules of Order.
.. Black students who had founded a civil rights group called Ethos threatened a hunger strike if the administration of the college wouldn’t agree to their demands for more black students and more black professors. All of them considered Rodham a friend.
“Hillary was always supportive of the African-American students,” Karen Williamson, one of the most active Ethos members, told me. “I know she signed the petitions.”
.. Rodham helped put together—she stood up to an economics professor who suggested students not going to class was “a know-nothing attitude” and not much of a sacrifice.
.. the typed-out minutes of the meetings Rodham ran as college government president show an interesting, unmistakable pattern: Rodham is mentioned actually relatively infrequently. She opens the meetings, and she usually closes them. The rest of the time, it’s almost always other people doing the talking.
.. She was a capable orator, many of them told me, but was much more comfortable as a listener.
.. she stressed that this wasn’t just a vehicle for student demands. “The committee,” she explained, “will include nine students, four faculty members and the president of the college …”
.. “Alinsky’s conclusion that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board ‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed,” she wrote. “Catharsis has a way of perpetuating itself so that it becomes an end in itself.”