Rise of the alt-right: How mainstream conservatives obsession with purity fueled a new right-wing r

[applegrove]

Rise of the alt-right: How mainstream conservatives’ obsession with purity fueled a new right-wing radicalism

by Matthew Sheffield at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/rise-of-the-alt-right-how-mainstream-conservatives-empowered-racism-and-engineered-their-own-destruction/

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The bracing critique of the conservative infotainment complex leveled by the dissident right is something to which most conservative elites simply have no answer. For every conservative leader like National Review’s Goldberg or David French who are willing to admit that the right has been fleecing its grassroots with fake medical cures and wild conspiracy theories, there are at least 10 more who are doing that exact thing or renting out their email lists to companies who do.

As more and more average conservatives have come to believe that race is the reason they haven’t seen their impossible dreams realized, mainline conservative media have become contaminated by racism as well. Just within the past few years, many right-leaning publications have become obsessed with race and crime stories. Pretty much any day of the week, you can turn on the radio or TV or visit a major conservative publication and find stories featuring supposed black violent criminals, especially if the stories involve allegations of black-on-white crime. The comments are invariably filled with hundreds of racist remarks.

This trend has not gone unnoticed by the alt-right, as neo-Confederate blogger Brad Griffin observed last month. In a lengthy post, Griffin explained in detail how mainstream conservative sites are picking up alt-right racial agitprop and repackaging it as clickbait for regular Republican readers. In the 20th century, the combination of libertarianism with conservative traditionalism became known as “movement conservatism.” In the 21st century, the melding of Tea Party anger with white nationalism is giving birth to what Griffin and others are calling the “alt-lite.”

They noticed that there was a large audience and growing market for our issues. The top management at these websites must have realized that there was a lot of money to be made by adopting our issues while watering down our Narrative in order to maintain plausible deniability. All these stories about black-on-white crime, illegal aliens, political correctness, anti-white outrages, etc., etc., generated those sweet clicks which allowed them to gain marketshare over rival conservative clickbait websites.

That’s how the alt-lite was conjured into existence. It was basically conservative websites pushing alt-right material in order to generate clicks and revenue. It was their version of crack cocaine. I’ve never listened to talk radio, but I assume they were in on the act as well. After two or three years into second Obama term, all these clickbait stories had produced a hybrid of conservatism and the alt-right.



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