Was Hillary Right? Breaking Down Hillary’s ‘Alt-Right’ Speech.
I have to give credit where credit is due. Hillary Clinton got everything right in her speech in Reno, and it was a speech that America—especially the quickly shrinking part that’s Republican—needed to hear.
If you missed it, I highly recommend you find it on the Internet and listen closely. She gave the speech Thursday night (after Trump snarlingly called her a “bigot” in his own speech that very afternoon). She tore him and his campaign apart and put him back together using his own words and the lunatic ravings that have appeared on a regular basis at the site his new campaign CEO runs, Breitbart News–with a little Alex Jones insanity thrown in for spice.
It’s not a long speech. Unlike Trump, who apparently can’t shut down his logorrheic blather for at least an hour once he takes the stage, Hillary actually makes speeches that have a beginning, a middle, an end, and a coherent point. This speech was laser-focused, deftly striking and incinerating the heart of the altright movement.
In case you haven’t come across them on Twitter yet (oh, you’d know if you had), the bottom-dwelling, anti-Semitic, racist slugs that call themselves the altright are a far-flung, largely disorganized cadre of can’t-get-over-themselves white supremacists. They consider whiteness to be the ultimate marker of greatness and seek to build a nation free of the “uninvited” foreigners, which is basically anyone darker than an unused cotton ball, especially those whose ancestors used to pick them, and those of a slightly lighter hue they expect to pick everything else (and then go home.)
Are they Nazis? Not quite. They have the whole Mein Kampf vibe down, but they don’t have the cool uniforms. They hold academic conferences, and think themselves great scientists. They are particularly keen to share racialist theories of biology and history that haven’t been taken seriously since detectives stopped assessing criminal tendencies by cranial measurements and forehead slope.
Are they anti-Semites? And how! Cross them on Twitter and you can expect to find yourself on the receiving end of a bottomless well of Jew-hating memes, including charming mockups of yourself or your loved ones trapped in an Auschwitz-style oven (sometimes a furnace). They also find great joy in expressing their creativity with Stars of David scattered around images they believe to be associated with Jews—like piles of money, or stacks of gold coins.
They think they are having coherent thoughts and fun arguments, but most of the time anyone past the second grade can tell they’re just regurgitating National Enquirer–level theories of history and culture. They are very very concerned that there are not enough white people…well, anywhere, really–but especially in Western countries. They demand to know who invited all these “mud people” into the nation that the Founders intended solely for the “founding stock” (not kidding; one of them insisted to me that’s what they meant by “to ourselves and our posterity” in the Constitution.)
Moreover, they are incredibly racist, in ways most people haven’t even thought of yet. For example, the normal way people argue about racism goes something like this:
PERSON ONE: (says racist thing)
PERSON TWO: (shocked) Wow, that’s a really racist thing to say!
PERSON ONE: (concerned, frowning) Really? No, I don’t think it is. How?
With alrightists, it’s more like this:
PERSON ONE: (says racist thing)
PERSON TWO: (shocked) Wow, that’s a really racist thing to say!
PERSON ONE: (laughing) What’s wrong with being racist?
The altright—like any weird, insecure cult—has invented some code words—except they’re not really code words, since just about anyone could figure them out without much trouble in about twelve seconds. For example, you might—if you crossed one in such a way that they begin to believe you are black—be called a “Dindu.” This may seem mysterious until you discover that the full expression is “Dindu Nuffin”, and they like to apply it to the same people Black Lives Matter marches are organized to protest about, and/or mourn.
Yeah, they’re charming.
Perhaps the crowning glory of their neologistic impulse is the ugly, clunky word “cuckservative”, often shortened to “cuck.” A portmanteau of “cuckold” and “conservative”, its meaning is fairly clear, but in case you, dear reader, are having one of those “can’t follow a logical thread to save my life” Trump days, I’ll explain it.
A “cuckservative” is basically a conservative that the altright feels has been complicit in the ruination of the nation by standing by and watching as liberals, essentially, raped it. The parallel is to a man who enjoys watching other men have sex with his wife—and in their bizarre fantasy world, for some reason this involves a white man watching a black man.
I told you they were charming.
Prominent cucks despised by the altright include Paul Ryan, John McCain—and, as of 2016, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
Yes, that Ted Cruz.
All this only becomes important beyond the confines of the Twitterverse and to more than just the sad, sick weirdos that slime around there because the (as of now) nominee of the Republican Party features prominently in their fantasies of ethnic cleansing. They, more than almost any other constituency, buy into Trump’s “only I can solve” imperial rhetoric. They expect him to be an ally in the valiant fight to prevent what they call “white genocide”. They expect him to build the Wall, which they want because it will keep out the non-white interlopers who somehow keep finding out about that stupid Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Their Twitter timelines abound with quasi-Teutonic images of Trump charging forward on a horse, soaring through the clouds on the back of an eagle, decked out in some garish (and quite possibly disallowed by flag etiquette) outfit made out of stars and stripes, or sometimes the Confederate flag.
And speaking of nationalism (for all of this is really just populist nationalism with social media accounts), although they are fond of America almost to a point of perversity, they are disdainful of the Constitution. They consider it outmoded and outdated, and they consider those of us who strive to preserve and obey it “parchment fetishists.”
In short, they are arrogant, ignorant, vile, vulgar, mean little dweebs with overinflated egos that are somehow dependent for their stability on the fact that they are white.
And they love Donald Trump.
I hope the Reno speech opened some eyes, and I hope Constitution-loving, God-fearing Americans have the guts to stare them down and watch them march back to the mountain caves they crawled out of. Because no matter who wins in November, the authoritarian impulse to racial supremacism must lose.
Now, excuse me. I feel the need to shower forever. Ick.
Image: photo credit: post-DNC rally via photopin (license); neverbutterfly