Words matter! This "alt-right" crap needs to stop now! [View all]
Allowing Trump and the media to recast racists and hate groups as something acceptable and mainstream, an alternative choice, is irrational at best and racist at worst. Any reporter, newscaster or talking head that refers to these haters as "alt-right" is aiding and abetting them. Legitimizing these people gives them a type of validity that cannot be allowed. They can and do exist but conferring, and mainstreaming them as something you would want your children to grow up to be is nuts.
Republicans clamor for President Obama to decry terrorists as extreme Islam yet they are silent when KKK groups are called "alt-right" members of Trumps legion. Republican failure to get ahead of this will cost them far more than votes at the poles. The temporary glee they take at framing a group as sick as these racists are in new silky soft terms will lose its luster when they find themselves trying, and failing, to explain that mainstream republicanism is not "alt-right".
Giving these groups the validity they so eagerly desire by reframing their identity as an alternative to the regular right wing is like saying that Charlie Manson's cult is just an "alt-criminal" lifestyle.
It cannot stand that we allow the worst in our society to be defined as something other than what they are. Legitimizing them gives them power beyond the tiny sphere that they inhabit. Calling them something nice rather than what they are conceals the danger that is attendant to the choices they make and the ideology they represent. They will be emboldened and encouraged as they gain "alt-respectability" on the evening news and in the eyes of our children.
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