If you want to believe something, just say it over and over again until it becomes true. Repeat it until it rings in your ears. Say it to your friends, shout it from the rooftops, and tweet it until your fingers bleed. That’s what Ben Wilkie has done in this week’s issue of the Australian Spectator in an article titled, Our grandads didn’t die for this. His piece is about the rise of the alt-right and the word he repeats over and over again is Nazi.
In a one-page article he uses the word no less than twelve times, although there are a few Adolf Hitlers, evils, and Ku Klux Klans thrown in just for good measure. One gets the impression that Wilkie is attempting to communicate the fact that the alt-right are Nazis. This is curious for a couple of reasons. For a start, we’re not, and as far as I know the Nazis were socialists, which is about as far from the right side of politics as it’s possible to be.
But good old Ben wants us to be Nazis, and so he must repeat this line so very many times. Because apart from his Nazi accusation, which is based on video footage of five or six idiots in Washington DC, he hasn’t got any other information. He has simply decided that the alt-right are Nazis and off he goes. He even gets upset that the left aren’t calling us out. Maybe they haven’t got the message that we’re supposed to be Nazis yet. I think Ben has a little more work to do in attempting to frame his pathetic narrative.
But there are a few points in Ben’s screed that I want to address so that those of you wondering what this is all about may have some clarity.
“Spencer and the so-called alt-right are far from conservative.”
He is correct but not in the way he supposed. The alt-right are far from being conservative in the fact that they are an alternative to conservatism. Wilkie means this as a rebuttal in the sense that the alt-right are not fit to be conservatives, but the truth is that we are not conservatives at all. Conservatives have completely failed at conserving anything, which is why an alternative ideology was required.
“The alt-right is against the free market and cares little for the constitution.”
To quote from Vox Day’s 16 tenets of the alt-right, “The Alt Right rejects international free trade and the free movement of peoples that free trade requires. The benefits of intranational free trade is not evidence for the benefits of international free trade.” To whit, the alt-right is against globalism which is what international free trade represents. As for caring little for the constitution, it’s not the alt-right who are demanding that the electoral college format be changed on the basis that we didn’t like the election result.
Wilkie goes on for some time about Richard Spencer. He calls Spencer the alt-right’s “de-facto leader”. What infuriates those of the hive mind mentality is that the alt-right doesn’t have an identifiable leader on which they can focus their wrath and attention. Discredit one guy and you can discredit the entire movement. But what if there is no leader? Then you’ll just have to make one up, that way you can have yourself your very own “de-facto leader”. So all of Wilkie’s rambling about Spencer is completely nonsensical and irrelevant as it says nothing of consequence about the alt-right. And his poor attempts to paint Spencer with the Nazi brush are ineffective due to the fact that Spencer isn’t the leader for anything.
“(The alt-right are) open about their dedication ‘to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States’.”
Apparently this is a bad thing. Wanting to celebrate your heritage is akin to being a Nazi. Unless of course you’re one of them colored folk and then it’s all okay.
“All right-thinking individuals should denounce neo-Nazi and other white supremacist radicals hoping to co-opt disenchantment with the political establishment. This is not up for debate; they are Nazis.”
Ben Wilkie has declared the truth and then the truth it must then be! Hey, what was all that noise that’s been going on recently about fake news outlets …?
“It is concerning that the likes of Spencer and the alt-right – though they may be small in number – are getting a free run in the international media.”
Ben complains about the international media giving the alt-right air time while giving the alt-right air time in an international media piece.
“At least one trend, which thrives rather than falters in the face of social diversity and difference, has reproduced itself faithfully: the ascendancy of hyper-competitive individualism and its accompanying identity politics.
“An outcome of this – lost among commentaries on the excesses of liberal undergraduate ‘idpol’ (identity politics) – has been the emergence of a class of young, lonely, directionless men who are angry at the world for reasons they struggle to articulate, and who feel the world is angry at them for simply existing.”
This is the only interesting part of his article. Identity politics is indeed now everything, because the left have pushed so hard in this regard and traditional conservatives have done nothing to stand up to them. When Hillary Clinton labelled Trump supporters as deplorables and then proceeded to reach out to every group in America bar one, the battle-lines were set and the people who have endlessly pontificated that they are on the right side of history finally discovered that they are on the wrong side of history.
As for his class of young, lonely, directionless men, he may as well have stuck the adjective white in there for good measure. Young white men have heard their entire lives how their masculinity is toxic and that they are proponents of white privilege. Conservatives have continued to do nothing about these attacks on what should be their core base.
Wilkie desperately wants the alt-right to be Nazis because then he can stuff them away in an identifiable box and he can go back to being at peace with his place in the world.
“Accept, if you will, the anti-establishment sentiment Trump represents – there is much to be disenchanted about – but do not accept fringe-dwelling parasites attempting to drag mainstream conservatives into their rotten world.”
The alt-right has no interest in dragging mainstream conservatives into our warm embrace, because you’re precisely the lot who have done nothing but fail over the last fifty years. Far from being afraid of being dragged into our clutches, the thing you should be most afraid of is that we turn you away when you eventually come begging to be let in.
Because the world has changed, and it’s not just progressives who haven’t picked up on that fact. The alt-right are merely positioning themselves and reacting to the world as it is now. Conservatives still believe that they’re living in the 1950s. That world is gone, sold down the river by the very people who swore to conserve it. Our grandads didn’t die for that either.
This article was originally published on 7/12/2016 at https://pushingrubberdownhill.com where Adam Piggott writes regularly and brilliantly.