The Breitbart alt-right just took over the GOP. If Republicans aren’t careful, they’ll soon see true conservatism banished from their party.
This article in interesting on many levels. To me, it’s delusional in the sense that this writer seems to think there is some huge increase in racism and overall bigotry in the GOP, because of Trump, or that “real conservatives” oppose what the Alt-Right stands for. IMO, it’s been THE main rallying cry for “movement conservatives” from Day One — White Nationalism, basically. White fears. White paranoia, used to keep existing hierarchies in place. The “small government,” gun fetishism and the Orwellian “religious freedom” stuff are cover for (or sublimations of) underlying white supremacy and white nationalism inherent in movement conservatism . . . . which, again, is whipped up to keep the ruling class intact. Whipped up by the ruling class, for the ruling class.
That said, the writer, formerly of Breitbart, sees himself and the old guard as under threat from openly racist and xenophobic upstarts, like Trump with the aid of the new Breitbart regime. Trump’s most recent campaign shakeup is a sign of that, for the writer.
An excerpt:
But it wasn’t until March 29 that Breitbart’s full embrace of the alt-right became clear. That’s the day the site featured Yiannopoulos’s lengthy piece glorifying the alt-right. Yiannopoulos had already given interviews in which he stated that “Jews run the banks” and “Jews run the media,” dismissing anti-Semitic memes as merely “mischievous, dissident, trolly.” He wrote, along with co-author Allum Bokhari, this insane sentence: “There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence.”
And this is the cast of characters, and their enablers, to whom Trump has turned. Bannon is known, among other things, for his Sarah Palin documentary, “The Undefeated,” and his relationship with conservative patrons Rebekah and Robert Mercer. But he’s also the guy who ushered along the twisted turn at Breitbart.
If Republicans aren’t careful, he’ll inflict similar damage on their party now that he’s the top man running their standard-bearer’s campaign. If they don’t know it yet, the alt-right surely does. As one of its own, Richard Spencer, explained: “Breitbart has elective affinities with the alt-right, and the alt-right has clearly influenced Breitbart. In this way, Breitbart has acted as a ‘gateway’ to alt-right ideas and writers.” There’s now a path for this same kind of thinking to infiltrate the GOP.
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