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The Emergence of the Alt-Lite
In my article “The Case for Trump: Communication,” I drew attention to this phenomenon which I have talked about for years offline.
For decades now, the Council of Conservative Citizens, VDARE and American Renaissance have published stories about black crime, multiculturalism, political correctness, illegal immigration and their negative impact on White America. There was a time in the recent past when we didn’t have much competition in this market. When I got started in 2001, you could get banned at Free Republic for posting VDARE content.
Back then, National Review was purging Pat Buchanan and the paleocons for opposing the Iraq War. Movement Conservatism was its own world in the George W. Bush years. It was something foreign and ridiculous to us. We were outsiders who defined ourselves against it. Movement Conservatism was based on FOX News and talk radio and had its own narrative about freedom, spreading democracy, human rights, American exceptionalism, etc. White Nationalists congregated on Stormfront and other online forums and discussed our own narrative of White racial and cultural decline.
From 2006 to 2016, there was a transformation in the nature of the media:
1.) First, there was a big migration from online forums to blogs.
2.) Second, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube emerged.
3.) Third, the smartphone put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket.
4.) Fourth, Gen X’ers and Millennials began relying much more on blogs and social media to keep up with the news, which eliminated the ability of gatekeepers to push and control narratives.
5.) Fifth, clickbait websites became a much larger presence in the media landscape.
While all this was going on, Movement Conservatism was discredited by the end of the George W. Bush presidency. The neocons wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had devolved into an intractable tar baby. The deregulated economy crashed in the 2008 financial crisis. The Republican leadership alienated the conservative base with its pushes for comprehensive immigration reform. All of that begat Barack Obama and Eric “My People” Holder who stoked and inflamed racial divisions to new heights.
Anyway, the growing divide between Movement Conservatism, the Tea Party and the Republican establishment, the racial discord of the Obama presidency, and the changing nature of the media combined to produce something new: elements of Movement Conservatism began to tap into our traditional audience.
I’m not sure exactly when or how it started (was it the flash mobs, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown?), but within the last five years or so, Drudge, Breitbart, Conservative Treehouse, The Daily Caller, WorldNetDaily, UK Daily Mail and all these other tabloid and conservative sites adopted our narrative and began writing stories targeted at our audience. Suddenly, everything we used to write about was … just absorbed.
Personally, I think it was a kind of California Gold Rush of clicks that caused it. These conservative websites discovered that we had steadily built up a huge online audience with an insatiable appetite for racial news. They figured out that they could go full tabloid, throw out the red meat, and monetize it. In the end, it was their pursuit of those sweet lucrative clicks which led these conservatives to erode the taboos around “racism.”
Imagine for a moment what it looks like from our perspective: you write for a pro-White website like the Council of Conservative Citizens, Amren, or VDARE, you have been labeled and stigmatized as a “extremist,” “notorious racist” and a “member of a hate group,” and when you wake up in the morning and look for the subject to write about, say, a refugee rapist, you realize that it is semi-pointless because UK Daily Mail or WorldNetDaily has already covered it. What is there left to do but link to the Breitbart story?
I mean … in a sense, I think it is great. From our perspective, it has been a poison pill for Conservatism, Inc. They’ve been throwing out those hunks of red meat for the base to generate those sweet clicks. They have fed the appetite of the “conservative base” by broadcasting our narrative. It has mutated as a result. It is not as interested in hearing about freedom and tax cuts as it used to be. Just look at the discussions you see on Free Republic these days. What exactly is objectionable about VDARE now?
All of this has led to the emergence and popularization of the “Alt-Lite.” It shouldn’t be confused with the Alt-Right because its origins are different. Whereas the Alt-Right evolved out of White Nationalism, the Alt-Lite is the spawn of the conservative clickbait websites like Breitbart and Daily Caller. These sites have been very selective in what they have picked up and placed in their cart at the Alt-Right shopping mall.
You will find themes like black crime, multiculturalism, terrorism, refugee resettlement, political correctness, illegal immigration, populism, nationalism, ethnostates and protectionism. You won’t find explicit Neo-Nazism, Jewish Question awareness, race realism, eugenics, Neoreaction, Identitarianism, and so on.
The Alt-Lite, which is the ideology of the typical Trump supporter who talks about cucks and globalists, is the new bridge between the Alt-Right and Movement Conservatism. We’re the father of this newborn baby. Movement Conservatism is its mother. Will the little fella grow up to take after its mother or father? That will be the story of the next few years.
Note: See Fash The Nation, Amren, and Radix for more on this.
Source: http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2016/09/02/the-emergence-of-the-alt-lite/
