September 6, 2016 By Arch Kennedy
I came across this kid about a month ago, and I have to say, I never thought I would learn so much from someone half my age!
“The Alt-Right and the Mainstream Left: Two Sides of the Same Totalitarian Coin”, by The Rational Millennial, September 3, 2016:
If you’ve heard the term “Alt-Right” but don’t really know what it is, don’t worry. The Alt-Right movement has only popped up in mainstream politics in the past six months. Even if you, like me, consider yourself an über-conservative, you might have only heard of this “Alt-Right” when Hillary Clinton started attacking it the other night in Nevada. Clinton pegged the Alt-Right movement as one of nationalistic, isolationist, white-supremacist, anti-woman, anti-freedom, anti-semitic Neo-Nazis. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Hillary Clinton is a crony-capitalist white-collar criminal who was only saying any of that to scare her uninformed voter base away from sympathizing with Donald Trump, despite the fact that she herself has referred to Robert Byrd, former Democrat senator and original West Virginia KKK founder, as her mentor. The problem is, despite her evil self-serving crony intentions, Hillary Clinton was right. (*Barf*)
For those of you conservatives who don’t really know what the Alt-Right is but defend it anyway because it has the word “Right” in there, make no mistake: the Alt-Right is not conservatism. It is not fiscal conservatism. It is not Constitutional conservatism. It’s not even religious conservatism. And the funny thing is, it doesn’t even claim to be.
The Alt-Right and its leaders like Milo Yiannopolous and Andrew Anglin refer to “establishment conservatives” who don’t agree with them as “cuckservatives,” which is ideologically no different than the Left calling people who don’t agree with them “racist.” The Alt-Right aren’t supporters of the free market, something quintessential to conservatism. They own up to it too. As Milo and his Alt-Right ally, Allum Bokhari, said, “Alt-Righters describe establishment conservatives who care more about the free market than preserving western culture, and who are happy to endanger the latter with mass immigration where it serves the purposes of big business, as ‘cuckservatives.’” The Alt-Right believes private business interests can sometimes undermine their end goal of racial and cultural homogeneity. That’s the same logic lawmakers once used to impose Jim Crow Laws on private businesses in the South, which defied capitalism and the free market.
The world’s most visited Alt-Right website is the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer. (Think I’m exaggerating? Scroll through the home page, and I bet you’ll spot a swastika in less then ten seconds.) These are the people who believe Martin Luther King Jr. was a “fraud” and a “degenerate.” These are the people behind the social media movements, #ISaluteWhitePeople and #BoycottStarWarsVII (because a black guy having co-starring role in a blockbuster film is the end of the world as we know it)! These are the people who get hundreds of favorites and retweets when they attack anti-Trump Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro with memes like this:
These people are not conservatives.
The Alt-Right is based on the idea that the success of the Western world is not due to the values of freedom outlined in the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but instead is due to the innate superiority of the European race. But no— They’re not racists; they’re “racial realists.”
This morning, I opened up a Breitbart News article by Milo Yiannopoulos, one of the movement’s leaders. I haven’t always agreed with Milo, but for a long time, I’ve respected him. At first, I loved him. That posh British gay guy thing is amusingly charming. Then, after following him for a while, I realized, “Hey, he’s kind of an asshole.” I found him offensive, but I just ignored it and thought, “Oh well, he’s standing up for free speech. He’s a champion for freedom!” But then I realized I was very, very wrong.
One of Milo’s latest articles forced me to grasp a concept I find highly disturbing: the Alt-Right is corrupting the mainstream Right and subsequently, the Republican Party, the only major party in America left that is based in conservatism. The scary part is that because nobody knows what the Alt-Right is, real conservatives aren’t even recognizing its takeover. Then I came to an even scarier revelation: the mainstream Left and its socialist totalitarian ideologies are not actually that different than the Alt-Right’s.
Milo’s argument in the new article is that women’s liberation (the goals of original feminism: women achieving political equality and being able to make the choice to enter the workforce or stay at home) was a mistake because it has “left women unfulfilled and miserable.” He says, “As women become freer, richer, better educated and have more choices, they get progressively more miserable.” Freer is the key word there.
He then goes on about how the “birth control [pill] makes you fat, and as we all know being fat is disgusting and should never be allowed in a civilised society.” He was joking of course (I hope), but that’s not the problem. Offend all the feminists in the world. Say women are inferior to men. Make fat jokes. I don’t care. Be as offensive as you want. Just don’t try to take away their freedom. See, the problem isn’t that he’s being offensive. He has every right to be offensive. The problem is that he argues that the fact that women are free is the problem and that women should not be allowed to make their own choices…for the greater good.
“For the greater good”: A.K.A. the reasoning behind all totalitarian regimes in history.
Milo argues that women will never be happy unless men, who are, according to Milo, superior to women at most tasks in the world besides child-bearing, are telling them what to do. (Still think I’m exaggerating? Read the article here.) This is the same logic that Darwinists once used to argue that black people should be kept under the rule of whites because they were supposedly “less evolved” from their common ancestor than were their white counterparts. According to Milo, women should not be free…wait for it…for their own good. That’s totalitarianism, my friends, not conservatism.
Conservatism is the belief in individual freedoms. Whether or not people are making the right or wrong decisions doesn’t matter. It’s whether or not they have the freedom to make those decisions that matters. You could make the argument that people are happier in Nordic socialist countries, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are not free. If the people aren’t free to choose, they aren’t free to get closer to the truth. If they can’t get closer to the truth, they can’t think critically and can’t eventually choose freely what is right. Freedom is all that matters.
In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston, in trying to figure out the ultimate goal of the Party, remembers that in past totalitarian regimes (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, etc.), the concentration of power in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats was born out of a constant—and might I add, imaginary—battle between liberty and happiness. The Party, on the other hand, does not claim to be benevolent. The Party is one of power, of dominance. The Party, as a collective, believes that the problem of the old totalitarians (socialists and communists) was that they swore that the only way the people would ever be happy was if someone smarter than they were was telling them what to do. The Party’s explanation of the failures of the “old totalitarians” describes classic real world totalitarianism. Pretending that chipping away at liberty is for the greater good is how authoritarians have come to power time and time again throughout history.
Remember it this way,
Nazis (real): big-government racist nationalistic totalitarians.
The Party (fictional): mind-controlling Thought Police totalitarians.
Reading Milo’s article, that’s when it hit me. Despite differing in ideology, the Alt-Right and the mainstream Left have something in common— They’re both ideological fascists. Even though their ideologies differ (i.e. Nazis vs. the Party), they both believe in the same means to enforcing those ideologies: through government compulsion. The Left believes that if you say something or even think something that offends, for example, a transgender person (Thought Crime), the government should put a gun to your head. The Alt-Right believes that if you stomp on the flag or respect the free market, the government should put a gun to your head.
Essentially,
Alt-Right: big-government racist nationalistic totalitarians.
Mainstream Left: mind-controlling Thought Police totalitarians.
It’s no different. The predictive power of 1984 continues to amaze me every day.
The mainstream Left and the Alt-Right are two sides of the same coin. Both are totalitarians, just totalitarians with different opinions on what’s right and wrong. The Alt-Right vs. the Left is the equivalent of Oceania vs. Eurasia. It’s Nazis vs. the Party. We can’t keep fighting a nameless faceless enemy. As Americans, our common enemies are enemies of freedom. We have to fight authoritarianism in whatever form it takes. Even if we agree with the ideals of “the Party,” we must reject the means the Party uses to enforce those ideals.
Before you blindly support the Alt-Right because you’re a conservative and it has the word “Right” in it, understand where its roots lie. Conservatism’s roots lie in the free market and in the individual liberties outlined in the Constitution. The Alt-Right’s roots, however, are in wh
ite-supremacism. The Alt-Right’s roots are in sexism. The Alt-Right’s roots are in anti-semitism. There is correct way to be proud of your country. There is a correct way to be a patriot. There is a correct way to be a conservative. However, Nazi-style nationalism is not it.
To preserve conservatism, the Right has to turn its back on the Alt-Right. Should we fight to ban Milo from the U.S.? No. Absolutely not. Because then, like Milo, we’d be no better than the socialist Leftist monsters we’re fighting. Instead, we have to be champions for the liberty of all individuals—men, women, Jews, blacks, etc.—and all markets. In order to save the only freedom-based major party in America, we must have the courage to say to Milo and people like him, “I respect your right to free speech. I respect your right to be an offensive asshole, but I respectfully disagree with you. Why? Oh yeah, because you’re a totalitarian.”
All I can say is, thank God we have the United States Constitution, or else both the Left and the Right would have swindled away our liberty a long time ago in the name of whatever it is they and their skewed versions of reality consider to be the greater good.
Very interesting reading ! I totally agree with most of it !