The alt-right is not a fashion statement · 10:39pm Jan 15th, 2021
This has been written in a rush. Pardon the roughness and typos.
Big-Tech and liberals think right-wing ideas are getting out of hand and censoring them is not enough. De-platforming must go on, and there’s no telling where they will stop: Right now it is revealing who creates and pays for tools that amplify right-wing voices while shutting down their access to mainstream platforms.
A functional society works because ideas can be freely exchanged. Shutting down people’s ability to communicate, by cutting them off social media or more insidiously by creating new types of wrongthink, will lead to societal balkanization.
It is impossible to fix our problem if we cannot discuss it head-on. That implies ideas, especially those deemed risquées. No real solution can be achieved without considering all parties and finding a compromise or some decent form of mutual understanding.
Pro-censorship people fail to realize how counter-productive they are. Shutting down all ideas but the sanitized and politically correct has never helped and only brought us to a standstill since they appeared years ago.
Furthermore, young people are drawn to counter-cultures. They always have — from rock in the 1960s and 70s, metal in the 80s, baggy clothes and gangsta rap in the 90s, to the alt-right and conservatism now. Censoring always makes something all the more attractive.
Plus, if right-wing ideas were really as misleading as the blue checkmarks claim they are, it should be easy to debunk them. Debating an Alex Jones, a Richard Spencer or any other boogeyman and ridiculing them intellectually should be enough.
But instead, leftists just ban them.
Really makes you think.
You may recognize this statement; it is quite common these days. Maybe you even recognize yourself in some of the positions above. If so, please stay.
Drastic and rushed. Measures like bans and de-platforming do not come up in a vacuum. They try to excise a metastasis. Something has gone terribly wrong, and the emergency response personnel is late to the party. They ought to do something and this is the best way they have at the moment to try and salvage some kind of mess. Too little too late. The resulting mess? A country if not several.
Not everything is a slippery slope — treating an illness isn’t one
Calling out a slippery slope is often a mask. Behind it lay the more personal fear that one’s own way of life could be at stake. One’s comfort. And indeed, your way of life is on the balance, but not at the hand of left-wingers or nebulous antifas. There are people in our midst that would rejoice if swaths of the population were killed tomorrow, were to disappear forever. They may think it covertly, or profess it outwardly, but in the end those ideas are the fertile ground for radicalization, political violence towards minorities, and in the end attempts to seize political power.
The charge of a slippery slope zooms on the means of an action, rather than its goals. A goal that is clear, and has been for decades. And yet, it only faced belated inaction. In 2002, the FBI testified before the Senate that “Right-wing groups continue to represent a serious terrorist threat (link)”. In 2019, the Senate discussed the bill S.894 which stated that “the Congress found: 1) White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States. (2) On February 22, 2019, a Trump Administration United States Department of Justice official wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “[...] Regrettably, over the past 25 years, law enforcement, at both the Federal and State levels, has been slow to respond [...]” (link)”. This is where the USA is at: Years of inaction that culminated in a right-wing assault on its legislative institutions. Yet another event to check on a list of recent terror acts, from murdering LGBT in the streets — in total 350 transgender people were murdered in 2020 (link) — to white supremacist marches, and furthermore.
In this context, what is to be done? Laissez-faire already led us to this.
When a cancer has been let grown to an advanced stage because the patient first wanted to try homeopathy, it is not a slippery slope to attempt chemo. Them shouting “And then what? Radiotherapy?” is an issue of its own. The USA has failed to address an issue upstream and now it might have to go through an extensive treatment instead of a vaccine. Chemo and radio cause their own kind of damage, that’s why care has to be involved.
There is a tangible fear that the current measures will reinforce the surveillance, capitalistic state we’re in, especially because companies and governments so often go hand in hand when the wealthy’s advantages come to be challenged. That is absolutely true, and leftists are well aware of that. Oppression of left-wing groups is an old western tradition. Pinkerton, the famous union breaker, was founded in 1850 after all.
Too little too late by the powers in place, however. Regressive and stagnant forces in many institutions have led to this situation where there is no good answer. Letting people with authoritarian tendencies or outright white nationalist bends roam is off the table. That kills people. So is a corporate state that defiles human lives for the profit of an abstract green arrow.
Dealing with authoritarianism is a long term endeavour, with a currently short-term urgency. But the issue of the state is not forgotten.
But If something is true about leftists, it’s that they’re in for the long run, one hundred and seventy years on fighting. It’s not because they are focusing on the white nationalists at hand that they forget about the state.
Right now, authoritarianism and whitenats like the 6MWE ProudBoys, the NSC, etc. are here to stay and have come to roost thanks to the laissez-faire attitude of the republican party who thought they could ride the tiger and milk it for cash and celebrity. The big orange beast has come to share its stripes and people like Ted Cruz still think they’re out of claws’ reach. The tiger must be put back into its cage and shutting off its way to sink its teeth into people is a must.
So. Dealing with the far-right and authoritarianism isn’t a slippery slope towards jiving with you unless you’re yourself part of that crew. If there is a slippery slope, it’s enabling the surveillance state, but that’s water that has been flowing under the bridge for a long time and people have been trying to build dams for as long. Pointing at this now is a smokescreen to hide that you might feel threatened by people going after someone wearing a Camp Auschwitz shirt.
If that is so, consider how you’ve arrived at that stage: considering your lifestyle threatened because people are going against the alt-right, seditious republicans, and pundits who’ve stoked the fire of anger for years. You relate to potential nazis in a way that should make you frown.
The myth of the free exchange — an idea is as worthy as the megaphone it’s spilled through
Ideas aren’t free. And they aren’t equal either. The value of an idea in a capitalist system is left to the best PR financing, the loudest megaphone, the sniveling-est lawyers. Who has the best change to be heard between Gavin McInness and a homeless black person person in New York who has to waste their time waltzing from shelter to shelter miles apart from each other to reach the only place where, exhausted and having been frisked yet again, they can finally ask for food and supplicate for at least a shower? They deplore the lack of help for the downtrodden. But who’s there to listen?
A marketplace has its own compounding effects, its monopolies, its cartels, its anti-competitive behaviours. Competition is never welcome of course, they’re bad for the market share. And so free exchange of ideas has never existed. People have always been repressed, murdered, executed over them by both private and public interests. Freedom of thought and expression is laughable when white nationalists are allowed to march through black neighborhoods.
Markets have gatekeepers, voluntarily or not. And ideas are not happily living one next to the other.
“People should be able to afford healthcare” and “Transgender people are mentally ill freaks that should be shunned and deprieved of human rights” are not equal ideas in a marketplace. What’s more concerning is that the ideas of the latter kind are inherently violent, repressive, and dehumanizing. They will push out, marginalize, and likely lead people to kill or be killed.
Coexistence between people who are fighting to exist and those who’re vying for the very repression of those people is a laughable concept. You don’t ask a rich southern klanner how to solve distitution in the black community in the US.
Political Correctness is about making people aware that some ideas hurt and marginalize people because they feel unwelcome because they are black, because they are LGBT, because this or that. And this phenomenon of marginalization is as old as oppression. Being PC is contending with how ideas clash with reality, hurt people, and exclude them. What about the nazis we might exclude? Fuck them. They can stop being nazis and it’s fine. But they can’t let people stop being LGBT, or black. Well they want and might be able to if let to their own design. Fuck them.
The very existence of some ideas rooted in demeaning and stifling people will lead to tragedies and death. That’s why negationism, antisemitism, white nationalism, etc. ought to be fought. The sole existence of those ideas is predicated on the repression of groups of people.
So. Ideas have tangible effects. They don’t exist in a vacuum, a marketplace where people can safely pick and choose like apples at a Trader Joe’s on 6th Avenue. Even moreso, the very concept of a marketplace should appear distasteful to most. It means ideas are goods. To be consumed, worn, and thrown away.
Like fashion trends.
Fashion — It’s just a meme, bro
Politics isn’t a cap to wear, or a “vote once and then done for four years” type of deal unless you can racially, culturally, or economically buy a way out of its all-encompassing consequences. A privilege. For everyone else, politics seep down all stratas of society. It hurts. It maims. It strips you down. It kills.
Though I may hate this, the concept of a marketplace might be sometimes apt for ideas. But in the way you might think it is.
Advertisement over the past few decades has followed a remarkable trend where ads have switched away from selling a product, to selling a lifestyle attached to it. The lifestyle comes first, the product is merely an outward symbol of it. Cars, perfume, watches, phones. Cigarettes, alcohol. Ideologies. They’re sold to you as a lifestyle.
Clean your room.
Regain your fitness.
Conquer your masculinity again.
See reality like it is, be different and free. Take the redpill.
Radicalization often comes first from the offer of a lifestyle, the ability to be part of something with a structure, to be different, elevated maybe, but at least part of something that offers a kind of belonging and way to dissociate yourself from the rest: an identity.
But where being a PC person instead of a PS5 person will merely lead you to post memes on reddit, being part of a far-right movement has real-life ramifications. One goes from “them BLM are kinda loud,” to “blue lives matter,” and finally to “there are too many parasites in the US today.” It’s a pipeline. Some will get out at an intersection, but some will go to the end. We saw just that last week.
Radicalization is a slow process that may be brought to you via the guise of self-help, or satire, memes! Often, though, it ends up being more than you bargained for. The lifestyle, the LARP, becomes ideology, and ideology becomes action. Beware making memes the basis of your ideology.
Politics isn’t a fashion trend. It’s not Metal. It’s not baggy clothes. It’s ideas with an agenda, and likely victims at the end. Just don’t enable ideologies where victims are on the platform.
Radicalization starts with making yourself relate.
Empathy is wonderful, that is true, but it can also be harnessed by ill-intended agents. When ProudBoys scream “our street!”, they don’t mean yours. But it might feel like it if you’re white.
And if you still think politics is a fashion statement, well, think about it. You can put that red cap on a rack and leave it there. There’s no real consequences for you at the end. Life will go on. You lost nothing because nobody is out there trying to take something from you because you’re, well, you.
Meanwhile, a black person can’t skin themselves to hope and pass in front of a white nationalist.
Closing Thoughts
Deplatforming the far-right is a matter of life and death for the people the far-right wants to see marginalized if not dead. Authoritarian, nationalist, alt-right ideas, at their core, imply the exclusion of people. If there is a market of ideas, they have long perverted it as their simple existence excludes the marginals, the fringes that are the result of centuries of oppressions. This market is a myth and a lie as ideas are as free as the wealth and privilege put behind them.
Going after the far-right will save lives. Five were lost last week because we were too late.
You may not like to hear that your liberty has never been at stake. But that your politics has played with others’ for a very long time.
My sentiments exactly, RoMS.
Great post, RoMS! Especially the point that yes, there are issues with the surveillance state that are getting exasperated by recent events, but the alt-right is a more immediate issue.
I will say the start of this blog confused me at first.
Very well said.
RoMS, you talk of radicalization, yet you yourself are radicalized to the other side. You mistakenly believe that 'far right' is built upon the exclusion of people, yet you seem to conveniently forget that the opposing side, the left, the democrats in America, anyway, are the party of slavery and segregation. The people that still to this day use politics to divide people based on their ethnicity. Let me tell you something. The right in America today has little to do with racism, prejudice, or exclusion (in fact it really never did). That's just a propaganda talking point of the left, and you parrot it perfectly. You're more intelligent than that, I know you are. Disagreeing with the right's political views is one thing - and that's fine - ignorantly accusing them of the very things the left is guilty of is another.
And I've already made my point about free speech perfectly clear. Dehumanizing a group of people FOR ANY REASON, no matter how despicable you find them, in order to use that as a piss-poor sorry-ass excuse to marginalize them and remove their BASIC HUMAN RIGHT of free speech is just as hateful, bigoted, and ignorant as you accuse others of being. It is hypocrisy in its purest form, and I will not remain silent in the face of it. If you believe freedom of speech is a basic human right as I do, then you must agree that there can be ZERO excuse to remove it from ANYONE. Thus, I implore you to rethink your views on this matter.
Naturally, I understand that all the mindless ignorant sheep reading this will object to anything I have to say that does not fit within their narrowly defined worldview. Unfortunately at this point I am willing to risk my own reputation here to be the one sane voice of reason in the room. Even if it costs me everything, to be honest. I regret it, I really do. I weep for my country and what it has become. I hope you can appreciate that, to some degree. As you post blogs aimed at the left-leaning folks around here (or anyone doing so anywhere in the world, really), you risk relatively little. Anyone on the other side of the coin risks almost everything. And at the end of the day, the left and the right are two legitimate political leanings, and should both be treated with respect, yet there is a massive disparity in how each is currently treated by the general public (as you so graciously called the right an illness). I'd hoped that you would have more decency than that.
The real fascists are the people who don't let fascists openly spread fascism 😔
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There are so many things to unpack it's not funny and I wondered first if I should even reply.
The democrats of today are a far long shot from the despicable platform the namesake had 160 years ago. And that legacy is still being reckoned with today. Openly. There is no convenient forgetfulness. It is contemptible to think such a gotcha (it's not) actually works. It's not. It's just another strawman to cling to to convince oneself the baddies are actually something that is already long gone. The democrats party used to support slavery because it was the party of the South. Now, who is?
NSC, KKK, 6MWE, "Mexicans, they're rapists," Western Chauvins, NSAP, Gavin “Palestinians are stupid. Muslims are stupid. And the only thing they really respect is violence and being tough" & "Transphobia is Perfectly Natural" McInness, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, ethnocentrism, white nationalism, Jared Taylor, Spencer, Vanguard America, Unite The Right, and so on, and so on.
Meanwhile: the Republican party with its anti-abortion attempts, body policing, consistent work on restricting minorities' access to voting, exclusion of non-binary people from some public positions, while redlining, propagating the war on drugs, etc. They sure seem on it for the money.
It's not propaganda if it's real, if they exist, and if they kill.
Freedom of speech is a human right, but you often forget the corollary: freedom from oppression. If that freedom is used to oppress, exclude and kill for such reasons as someone being trans or black, it's not speech. It also becomes violence. You don't turn the cheek to a lad who tells you they want you gone or dead. Freedom of speech is a legal definition. It's not a magic word on a magus grimoire. It's neither an essential property of reality. There is not an atom of freedom of speech in the universe.
Freedom of speech is constructed by the people and political system it is in. It's the result of a balance, a system of law that wobbles between many different aspects and areas. Freedom of speech only exists when everyone can exercise it, and it implies a framework that still still implies some limit to speech (fire in a cinema). The paradox of tolerance is real and it highlights that for everyone to enjoy freedom of speech, you have to beware the fringes before they get out of hand, like they did on the 6th.
Realize that this attitude is a landmark of radicalization: dismissal of everything beforehand. You have your headcanon and nothing can change it. It is set in stone. Everyone else is a sheep, manipulated, groomed.
Oh, we risk a lot. Some left-leaning people on this site have received death threats from 'the right.' That is very real. The FBI was involved in one case of harassment of a left-leaning user on Fimfiction.
People don't owe decency to the ones who would love nothing but to apply a boot or a knee to their neck.
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Oh look, it's more of the "So much for the tolerant left!" straw man BS.
Rather than write an essay of my own, I'll just direct to this article, since it lays things out far better than I could on my own:
Tolerance is not a moral precept
Excerpt:
Emphasis added.
Rights are not absolute, they never can be; that's something the so-called "free speech absolutists" conveniently ignore. (Note, I put that in quotes, because no such person actually exists. Free speech absolutism doesn't exist, it's merely a smokescreen to hide their bad intentions behind.)
Another excerpt, with a particularly appropriate concept:
When fascist white supremacists march through the streets changing "Jews will not replace us," and "Five million is not enough,"; when neo-Nazi leaders get up in front of the cameras calling all Mexicans "rapists", and claiming that Muslims are all paedophiles and trying to impose sharia law; when far-right politicians rant on television about how transpeople are stalking women in public bathrooms; when "influencers" go online and spread conspiracy theories about liberals raping children in pizza restaurants and support police murdering black black people... these people are not "exercising their free speech", they are trying to shut down the free speech and other civil rights for anyone who they believe is too different from themselves.
If you are calling for the disenfranchisement of black and "leftist" people, if you are calling for the violent overthrow of a legally elected government, if you are demanding the marginalization or death of LGBTQ people and Jewish people and Muslim people, you are not engaging in free speech, period, because you are denying the same rights to others. You are not upholding rights, you are using the image of doing so as a front to oppress and destroy other people.
Privately-owned companies deplatforming hate speech and calls for violence is not an attack on free speech, it is a necessary step to uphold the social peace treaty and ensure that everyone has an equal ability to exercise those rights.
"Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose." Your right to spout your worldview ends at the point you use that to advocate for the murder, enslavement, or marginalization of others simply for being different from you.
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This is so apt. Because there is quite a simple example here: as to why free speech is a hollow talking point here. When a bully has beaten up someone enough, they don't need to come to blows anymore. Raising a hand suffice to instigate fear. You don't need to swing a fist, just open your palm and raise it, to scare those who spent a lifetime, heck generations, in fear.
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You’re wasting your breath. People like TheRedBrony and Georg are fascinating and depressing examples of how someone can be an otherwise kind and intelligent individual who somehow completely shits the bed when it comes to politics.
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It's not about convincing people like TheRedBrony, they're lost causes. It's about countering the narrative they're promulgating, deconstructing and debunking their rhetoric; so that anypony else reading this, who might otherwise find it compelling, will see it's flaws and shortcomings (and obvious agenda), and as a result will be less likely to be convinced by it.
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It's interesting, too, because this is most certainly not a right, at least not in the US. This gets brought up in a famous case, as I recall, with the example given of someone belligerently swinging their arms around and making passersby afraid for their safety.
Swinging your fist and stopping JUST SHORT of someone's nose is usually deemed to be some manner of unlawful harassment or even assault (non-contact variety - threats of physical violence are sufficient to be classed as assault.)
The chuddy debatelords once again fail to offer a meaningful critique
May I just have my Pol Pot memes and Aryanne pics not being deleted? That’d be enough.