RUTHFULLY YOURS

New York Magazine says yes. In April, ran a long, long article on the “Alt-Right,” “Beyond Alt: The extremely reactionary, burn-it-down-radical, newfangled far right,” authored by seventeen contributors (!). The magazine, being one of the leftist persuasion, attempted to cover the whole gamut of what is called the “Alt-Right,” (or the Alternative Right), that is, what are considered by the Left to be “extreme” individuals, publications, and memes that oppose the welfare state and statism and the Progressive path to full-scale socialism. Racists and anti-Semites were stuffed into the same bag, which I think the writers would have been happy to tie and toss into the East River. The Alt-Right carries a lot of unasked-for baggage, to judge by Wikipedia’s discussion of the subject:

The alt-right, or alternative right, is a loose group of people with right to far-right ideologies who reject mainstream conservatism in the United States. White supremacist Richard Spencer appropriated the term in 2010 to define a movement centered on white nationalism, and has been accused by some media publications of doing so to whitewash overt racism, white supremacism, and neo-Nazism. Alt-right beliefs have been described as white supremacist, frequently overlapping with anti-Semitism and Neo-Nazism, nativism and Islamophobia, antifeminism and homophobia, white nationalism, right-wing populism, and the neoreactionary movement. The concept has further been associated with multiple groups from American nationalists, neo-monarchists, men’s rights advocates, and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Quite a grab-bag of groups in an artificial homogeny concocted by the leftwing political world view. The New York Magazine’s article and Wikipedia perform a scatter-shot drive-by shooting intended to discredit and smear legitimate, responsible spokesmen for reason and Western civilization together with the screaming meemies, such as Richard Spenser, Dilbert, and Jack Donovan.

NY Magazine also deigned to quote the National Review, which, as a conservative publication, somehow does not earn its enmity and sarcasm:

In National Review in April 2016, Ian Tuttle wrote,

The Alt-Right has evangelized over the last several months primarily via a racist and anti-Semitic online presence. But for Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right consists of fun-loving provocateurs, valiant defenders of Western civilization, daring intellectuals—and a handful of neo-Nazis keen on a Final Solution 2.0, but there are only a few of them, and nobody likes them anyways.

National Review does a more economical job of painting the Alt-Right in almost psychedelic colors than does New York Magazine.

Curiously, I have not received any solicitations or invitations via email from any of the groups mentioned in either the New York magazine article or in Wikipedia, even though in the ineffable ignorance of Left and Right, my blog columns could easily be labeled one or the other. I am certainly familiar with Milo Yiannopoulos and Paul Joseph Watson, but not at all with Allum Bokhari or many of the people mentioned, such as Rebekah Mercer or Peter Thiel. I have never heard of half the individuals, organizations, and blog sites mentioned by New York Magazine’s authors.

However, as Victor David Hanson points out in one NR column, “You Gotta Lie”:

Red/blue, conservative/liberal, and Republican/Democrat mark traditional American divides. But one fault line is not so 50/50 — that of the contemporary hard progressive movement versus traditional politics, values, and customs.