The Party That Cried Alt-Right

Over-diagnosis can lead to skepticism that what’s being screened for will ever materialize. Yet, the resulting complacency will inevitably cause real cases to fester, undetected. This is case and point with regard to the alt-right.

The alt-right, which was propelled into prominence during the 2016 election, is a collectivist ideology that is attempting to insinuate itself in place of American conservatism. This group is essentially the mirror image of the modern left, save for the few policies that happen to overlap with conservatism, due to some parallels that they apply to their own hierarchy of victimhood.

Alt-righters believe that Western civilization is synonymous with white Christendom and that anybody who doesn’t fit in the box can never truly be an American. Their belief system is plagued with conspiracy theories that usually go back to Jews who they view as the puppet masters and saboteurs of their erroneous origin theory of Western civilization.

This faction has always been small, but loud. Overflowing comment sections and message boards. Not enough to cause any difference in an election. Though the label has grown and has thus granted cover to its original bearers through the left’s flagrant disregard for truth. Because conservatives must be attacked at all costs.

This started when then candidate Hillary Clinton gave a speech on the alt-right and implied half of Americans who supported then candidate Donald Trump were of this white supremacist breed. This is where the infamous “basket of deplorables” line was born. Clinton took the vile beliefs of a few and smeared it on tens of millions of Trump supporters. Conservatives were rightly offended at this implication. Subsequently, this talking point took off in the media and radical left circles everywhere that wanted to silence basically anybody on the right. That’s how you get to ignoramuses in conjunction with bad faith actors calling Ben Shapiro alt-right, despite being their top target in 2016.

Following this debacle, many conservatives concluded that the label alt- right was becoming meaningless and started to disregard any argument which included the term. This opened a window for that small group of collectivist bigots, the original standard bearers of the term, to rebrand. As of now, many of those actors have deleted many of their racist and antisemitic posts. Some are pretending they were never affiliated with high profile racists, like Richard Spencer. Others have toned down their rhetoric somewhat and have attempted to gaslight passersby, while claiming that the alt-right didn’t mean in 2016, what it does now. These alt-right opportunists have falsely framed their belief system as true conservatism, fighting back a watered down mainstream conservatism.

Sadly, this method has worked in terms of raising the profiles of some of these people and allowing them to draw in supporters (mainly young men who feel ostracized from a leftist culture telling them that they are inherently bad people and having unfair privilege) who won’t believe warnings. These unwitting subscribers think such cautions are nothing more than the equivalent of crying wolf.

Many of these alt-righters also love to use the right’s admirable attempt to create rational dialogue between differing viewpoints to elevate their own commentators. Sometimes people on the right fall for that and don’t understand that the only reason to talk with one of these vile people is to destroy their evil viewpoints or change their minds, though promotion of a greater understanding. Though that is not the case with most of these people, who have no intention of changing their minds, and just want to elevate their message.

Even some more mainstream conservatives, who are not at risk of being brainwashed into believing the alt-right’s racism and antisemitism, are sometimes naive to the existance of legitimate racists. They would rather stay ignorant of the alt-right’s existance than risk blowback in explicitly condemning them. Though when you fail to condemn bad actors, they will begin to feel at home in your audience.

Despite the thankful reality that the alt-right comprises a relatively small number of people, it is imperative that conservatives heed this warning, and expose the tactics of this sector to prevent both leftist abuse of the label and conservative tendancy to give anybody who appears to be fighting the left the benefit of the doubt when there is a contingent that must be purged.