Thursday, March 23, 2017

Alt-Whatever

Michael Lumish

I am convinced that the words "alt-right" and "alt-left" - and, my favorite, "CTRL-L Delete" - are essentially alt-meaningless.

Hillary basically conjured the New Fear out of thin air on the campaign trail in order to paint Trump as a racist. Most people never even heard of Breitbart - which, from what I can tell, is not a racist outlet, anyway - until the Clinton campaign sought to shore-up their victory. The Klan is irrelevant in the US, as are Neo-Nazis, and there is no sudden vast re-emergence of white nationalism happening anywhere in the US.

In other words, they have the country on a very dangerous witch-hunt and its mainly the well-educated and sophisticated among us who tend to buy into this politically convenient myth.

I did not advocate for Trump, nor did I vote for him. Nonetheless, I have lost friends for being insufficiently hateful toward the man, as if my lack of hatred toward Trump is partly responsible for the rise of the New American Nazism, which does not exist.

That, for me, represents this political moment.

It is my guess that future historians will note this as a period of near mass-hysteria, something akin to the Red Scares of the 20s and 50s, but this time coming out of the American Left.

6 comments:

  1. Yes. There seems to be little substance in the hysteria but a lot of crybaby petulance at the horror of their totally unexpected loss to the man. Well, that and a lot of contrived "resistance," which appears to backfire on them at every step. The latest 2 backfires are that Nunes has proven him right about the "wiretapping," and the antisemitic nazi base which he created and allowed to scare Jews with bomb scares turned out to be a false flag as he suggested; an 18 year old Israel boy with a brain tumour.

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    1. I beg to differ with you about Nunes proving Trump right on the "wiretapping." Nunes has stated that all recordings of Trump's people were incidental rather than the target of surveillance, and all appears to be legal as far as that goes. Only the leaking of the information was illegal. It's quite a bit different then the President's claim that Obama had him wiretapped. Although I wouldn't put it past Obama, in light of his record, there seems to be no evidence of this.

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    2. Leaking had the same effect as illegal wiretapping so it was illegal wiretapping IMO since the intended result was the same; harming the Trump campaign and eventual presidency with innuendo. Obama should have squashed it all as soon as he knew about it but instead seems to have been complicit by expanding at the last minute the sharing of such info to many more agencies. It de facto amounted to "surveillance," of a political opponent for political advantage when such spying was not related to Russia or any of that stuff. Bad guy stuff by Obama or his team and the buck stops with Obama IMO.

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    3. One certainly doesn't need to convince me that Obama is a devious political creature. There is plenty in the record - you won't see CNN or MSNBC ever discuss it. I'm glad he's gone.

      Republicans today failed at killing Obamacare. Hillary said it's a great day for all Americans. (Obviously Hillary is not on Obamacare. She is, however, irredeemably deplorable.) My sister, a life long Democrat, lives in Arizona, where premiums have doubled. I can almost hear her cursing from here.

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  2. And of course some of them are just plain nuts:

    " Hollywood actress Patricia Arquette, known for winning the best supporting actress Oscar two years ago, revealed she’s a conspiracy theorist last night on Twitter. After an Islamic terrorist killed 4 people and wounded at least 40 others in London Wednesday, the actress claimed it was all a ruse by President Trump to distract us from the FBI investigation into his ties with Russia: (Tweet) So far her tweet hasn’t received that much attention, but Arquette is certainly a media darling."

    http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kristine-marsh/2017/03/23/loony-liberal-actress-claims-london-terror-was-set-trump

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  3. It's really about core values and primary beliefs. I have a set of principals, the inner inviolate few. If you disagree with them or believe something in opposition to them, you're dead to me. It doesn't matter what else you believe, or anything else that we may agree on. But if we're in sync with essentially all or nearly all those inner core beliefs, everything else can be negotiated or at worst, ignored. This is why I am friends with a wide span of utterly different people, from gay Baptists to South African mercenaries, to ex Soviets, to far right wing Israelis. From feminists to anti feminists, from the communists in my own family to the people who would have plotted their deaths at some point, Jews and goyim alike.

    I really don't care what your brand is and I don't believe anyone should worry about brands or labels like that at all. And of course, as others point out, the crazies can just light themselves on fire.

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