With Hillary Clinton’s speech accusing Donald Trump of associating with the alternative right on Thursday, the commentariat has worked itself into a foam over what it all means.
Who is Pepe? Are memes real? Is Donald Trump really a time traveler? Why is Harry Potter a Nazi now?
I don’t know. Conventional Republicans feel that the ground has shifted from under them. What caused that?
What Freaked Out the Normies?
When you actually meet the people who live behind the internet masks, you’ll often find ordinary middle-class Americans.
You’ll find professionals, ranking government bureaucrats, lawyers, technologists, and more. While you may find losers peppered in among them, that shouldn’t be that surprising: more Americans are out of the labor force than at any other time in modern history.
These are the ‘normies’ who have become weird. What provoked them? Why didn’t they all get on the Jeb! campaign bus? Hundreds of millions of dollars spent to get people all fired up for Jeb!. And what happens? This happens.
Any attempt at providing a full answer would be inaccurate.
So instead, let’s focus on something important that we can grasp: that the conventional Republican story about America isn’t relevant to ordinary people anymore.
If the alt right — and Donald Trump’s campaign — has a real impetus, it’s in the widespread realization that you can’t assimilate tens or hundreds of millions of foreign immigrants to a host culture that’s in decline.
Further, it’s that the fundamental political rights that Americans have come to expect tend not to be respected by either the political elites in Washington and academia or the reinforcements that they’re importing over the borders by the millions.
The left realizes this. They think it’s great, because they want to crush the skull of the host culture and suck out its brains. This is a rich country with lots of stuff to steal that isn’t nailed down properly. The rules against stealing impede the program.
To the left, immigrants are reinforcements. To Karl Rove, selling the notion that those immigrants may vote GOP some time over the rainbow is a great way to squeeze more cash out of newsletter subscribers.
Why Did White Identity Politics Come Back?
Why has white identity politics suddenly emerged as a nationally important issue?
Well, let’s put forward a little thought experiment. Let’s say that you’ve just started your prison sentence. You have no friends in prison. Maybe you are a little chubby, or you have a squeaky voice. This prison is run by various gangs. These gangs don’t look like Hollywood movie multi-racial rainbow gangs. Most of these gangs take race very seriously and not in an academic way.
Let us say that you check the ‘White’ box on the census. You may want to say that you are part Irish-American with an Italian grandmother, but as far as the prison population is concerned, your options for gang membership are limited.
If you want to avoid being stabbed at the cafeteria, whose table do you go to sit at?
Do you try to join up with the Bloods, or do you join the Aryan Nations? Or do you decide that getting stabbed is preferable to compromising on your principles? Do you go up to the Bloods table and introduce yourself by saying “How do you do, fellow Americans? The potato salad looks absolutely delightful today.”
Now, America isn’t quite an open-air prison. But, in case you haven’t noticed, it is a country in which ethnic conflict is continually provoked by elites in the press and in the government, in which prestigious publications will gleefully incite race riots with no consequences to them other than a few mean tweets.
The GOP establishment is like a negligent prison administration that insists that there is no gang activity in the prison, and that the prisoners should all work together peacefully to meet their license plate production quota or whatever.
Sometimes GOP talking heads use rhetoric that sound like a prison foreman paraphrasing Martin Luther King about why the prisoners should work together more efficiently across racial lines to exceed their license plate production quota by at least 32% this quarter.
“I have a dream… that we stand on the warm threshold of beating our production quota!”
Not that inspirational.
Pepe’s Corporate Prison
Now, back to Pepe’s internet pals.
Most educated Americans of non-color receive years of racial, sexual, and identity politics propaganda.
They then get more steaming bowlfuls of it when they get a real job or if they turn on the TV. Deviating one iota from the diversity orthodoxy results in having your career destroyed, which could mean sinking into the underclass.
If you pressed a FIND + REPLACE hotkey on typical diversity propaganda about Whites with ‘Jews’ or ‘Negroes,’ you would see a ‘racist’ document.
If you sat through a lecture about all the historical crimes of the White race (typical even at prestigious universities) and replaced every mention of ‘White’ with that of another race, you would think you were listening to Hitler’s grand-niece articulating a casus belli to invade Kansas.
The conventional right has done almost nothing about this other than complain. It has not defunded universities. It has not moved to seize university endowments. It has not moved to remove accreditation from universities that participate in it.
Instead, the GOP line has been to embrace it and to amplify it while patting itself on the back for trying to undermine affirmative action at the margins through court cases.
The result has been that the left has taken control over every important economic, political, and cultural institution in the United States including most of the churches.
The right has lost influence over the influential: the educated class that controls the US.
That is what conservatives should worry about: being annihilated.
Anyone who isn’t a leftist is being shoved out of power. Instead of addressing that, many conservatives are frightened of a frog cartoon and scared for their stupid Washington jobs.
Henry Dampier is an editor on hiatus from Social Matter. His articles have been syndicated in many American samizdat publications. His alter ego works in advertising.
