As I write this, Hillary Clinton is speaking in Reno, Nevada about Donald Trump and the Alt-right. I'm watching a YouTube live feed and the chat bar to the right is filled with venom from Alt-righters.
Here are some of the phrases:
”The Bitch” – ”Lock her up” – ”FK Clinton” ”BUILD THE WALL” – ”Nigger” – ”Trump Trump Trump”
They flood the chat screen along with Pepe the frog Nazi memes and at least one swastika. They blur past so fast I have to rush to write down the few I selected here.
So what the hell is going on with the YouTube chat comments?
I can answer that because last night I went on the white supremacist website Stormfront to see what the Nazis were thinking about Hillary's upcoming speech on the Alt-right. I found a thread started by a white supremacist named Tenniel who framed it this way:
Hillary in tomorrow's speech and the Mainstream Media . . . are going to attack Donald Trump because the "Alt Right" (people who say mean TRUTHS on the internet) supports him. How should White Nationalists/Alt Righters deal with this attack? More importantly, how should Donald deal with this attack by Hillary?
A number of posters suggested flooding the internet with their memes and words – hence the white supremacist porn I witnessed on YouTube. This was organized. (Well semi-organized, it’s too stupid to qualify as actually organized).
Other Nazis in last night’s chat room shrugged off Hillary’s speech. A poster named Peace Through Stormfront said this:
Hillary (and by extension her speech writers) are new and inexperienced at this. They are the rankest of rank beginners. They won't be any better than the hundreds and thousands of libtards we have already seen off . . .
whatever she says will be the excited talk of, and have the hagiographic adulation of, the jewsmedia for at most a few days, and then the respective campaigns will move on without ever making any real contact other than the most superficial with those subjects which concern us. We won't have any more trouble in dealing with the few stupidly excited libtards who stop by to argue with us than we usually do.
We are right, they are wrong. We deal with reality, they deal with cultural Marxist bs, sophistry, fantasy, and claptrap. They are purely political and purely liars. My prediction is that in the end, there will be nothing to defend against.
I started watching the Alt-right myself last August when I discovered that reading Breitbart.com was the best indicator of how Trump was going to do in the Republican primaries. Breitbart was one of Donald Trump's biggest media backers and millions of Breitbart readers got on the Trump Train. I didn't know back then what the Alt-right was. And Breitbart didn't embrace the term until this year when they ran a piece called An Establishment Conservative Guide To The Alt-Right co-written by noted Alt-righter Milo Yiannopoulos.
And now the head of Breitbart, Stephen Bannon has become the CEO of Trump’s campaign. Trump and the Alt-right have merged.
So who is the Alt-right? Hillary just referred to them as ”the paranoid fringe”.
She is only partly right. They are certainly paranoid and they should be the fringe and once they just that. But Donald Trump is taking the Alt-right mainstream.
Here’s another picture of what the Alt-right is becoming.
This week The Washington Post reported a sunday "White Lives Matter" demonstration in Houston, Texas outside the NAACP headquarters, which is in the 3rd Ward, an African American neighborhood – its a neighborhood I've visited, so this story hit me personally. The protesters were armed with assault rifles and Confederate flags and the organizer was wearing a "Donald Trump 16" hat.
These are some of the people championing Donald Trump's run for the White House. This is part of the Alt-Right that Breitbart News champions.
Looking at a picture of the demonstration in the Post, I saw one person holding a sign that simply said: "14 words".
"14 words" is a Nazi slogan, it refers to this statement: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children,"
So these are Nazis. Real live nazis trying to take over our country and Trump is helping them.
And as I've been working on this story, I realize I actually have been studying the Alt-right since the 1980s, because that's when I first started doing research into the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations and other Neo-Nazis and something called ”the Order”, an extremely violent offshoot of the Aryan Nations.
One of its members was David Lane. He died in prison in 2007. He was the author of the ”14 words” on that sign in Houston.
The Alt-right is just a fancy word for an amalgamation of white supremacists, Nazis and spoiled little boys pretending to be adults.
This election is no longer just about defeating Donald Trump, although that should be the priority of everyone who thinks America already is pretty great and doesn't want to live in a fascist paradise dedicated to the narcissism of one man.
This election is also about defeating nazis, Alt-righters, white supremacists -- call them what you want. And by the way, its the same group of assholes my daddy and others fought and beat in WWII.
And for those Republicans who might read this – or those who have Republican friends who have not already disavowed Trump, here's the question:
Are these really the kind of people you want to keep as company?