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Rights and wrongs of the Alt-Right

A mixed bag that is far from monolithic
Kevin Barrett

The post-9/11 era has witnessed the emergence of a new political phenomenon: the so-called alt-right. In some respects the alt-right is a reaction against the neoconservatives who orchestrated what General Wesley Clark calls the 9/11 “policy coup.” In other ways — especially in the over-the-top Islamophobia that characterizes its sleaziest elements — the alt-right out-neocons the neocons.

The alt-right has been blamed for Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Even before the election, Hillary Clinton was calling it “a basket of deplorables.” So who’s in the basket? Where did these people come from?

As the term “alt” suggests, the alt-right consists of alternative voices: They operate in the internet-based alternative information sphere. Why? Because they are banned from the mainstream. Or at least they were, until big media started shining the spotlight on them after Trump’s election — then an even brighter spotlight following the violent spectacle in Charlottesville.

So which right-wing people and forces have been deemed inadmissible to the mainstream, and why? The first (and worst, in mainstream eyes) are the anti-Zionists. Anyone who strongly opposes the power of Israel in the United States will be silenced, or worse, by the guardians of mainstream discourse. So patriotic American conservatives, horrified by Israel’s death grip on American foreign policy, are forced out of the mainstream and into alternative channels. Shining examples include former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts; former CIA Clandestine Services Officer Robert David Steele; former CIA officer Philip Giraldi; Christian pastor Charles Carlson; bestselling author James Perloff; former State Department diplomat Michael Springmann; journalists Lew Rockwell and Ron Unz among many others (even leftist six-term Congresswoman and Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney saw her #UNRIG project banned from MeetUp.com due to its being labeled “alt-right,” presumably because McKinney is critical of Zionism).

Most of the above-mentioned figures are conservative but far from rabidly right-wing. They are, as conservatives go, a rather thoughtful and moderate bunch. But they are thrown into the “basket of deplorables” and expelled from the mainstream because they patriotically put US interests ahead of Israel’s.

The above-listed “alt-right” conservatives are sometimes lumped with the paleoconservatives, who got their name due to their opposition to the neoconservatives. The paleoconservative movement tends to be nationalistic, opposed to imperial wars, pro-Christianity, and critical of Zionist power in America. Its honorary founding father is former Nixon advisor Pat Buchanan (back in the Nixon era, criticizing Israeli power in America was not yet grounds for being banned from the mainstream, so Buchanan became a well-known TV commentator and bestselling author).

Another element of the alt-right is the libertarians. Their best-known leader is Ron Paul, who — like his left-wing counterpart Bernie Sanders — was defrauded out of a presidential nomination, and a likely presidency, through the rigging of black-box voting machines. Ron Paul is barred from the mainstream (and the presidency) because his anti-imperialist philosophy is a threat to powerful special interests, namely the military-industrial complex and the Zionists. Those who share his outlook, such as the commentators at Antiwar.com, are likewise prevented from participating in mainstream discourse. Forced into the alternative sphere, and considered conservative due to their free-market economic views, libertarians are another principled element in the alt-right “basket of deplorables.”

Starkly contrasting with the decent and rational side of the alt-right are the racialist, xenophobic, and chauvinist elements, some of which are genuinely deplorable. These include the white nationalist Richard Spencer, an atheist for whom racist tribalism serves as a substitute religion (in this, Spencer is not so far from the Western mainstream; modern nationalism is a form of idolatry that emerged from the 19th-century European replacement of God with the ethnic nation-state as an object of worship).

Another sleazy and unprincipled side of the alt-right is on display at Breitbart.com, the rabidly Islamophobic outfit that helped elect Trump. Steve Bannon, who recently stepped down from his post as one of Trump’s closest advisors, is the brains behind Breitbart, which is basically an even more extreme and dumbed-down version of Fox News. Breitbart, created in Israel as a Zionist propaganda operation, shamelessly incites hysterical Islamophobia and xenophobia with absurd “reporting” that would be hilarious if its effects were not so toxic: “Muslim Prayer Rug Found on Arizona Border,” “Inevitable Clashes in Cultures: British ISIS Terrorist Complains About Angry, Rude, Lazy Arabs,” and “Syrian Prof: Arabs Migrate for ‘Sluts’ and Welfare, Attack When They Don’t Get It.”

Some of the best-known figures on the alt-right partake of both its positive and negative aspects. Alex Jones, one of Donald Trump’s favorite broadcasters, is one of these. Jones has done excellent work exposing crimes of the US empire that are rarely if ever reported on by the mainstream. Jones revealed 9/11 as an inside job or coup d’état shortly after it happened, and has continued to report on it with relative honesty ever since. He also discusses the CIA’s orchestration of similar coups in a long list of countries; election fraud; elite pedophilia rings that operate with impunity; CIA drug-dealing and political assassinations; the international bankers’ push to establish a global empire based on riba; and many other issues that the mainstream is not allowed to cover.

But Alex Jones’s work does have a major downside: his manner is bombastic and egotistical, and he cultivates an atmosphere of fear and hysteria. Though he knows and reports that 9/11 was an inside job and the so-called war on terror is a fraud, Jones nonetheless whips up Islamophobia in his audience by pretending that the false-flag “Islamic terror” threat is real. In so doing, Jones and his audience commit intellectual suicide by drinking from the poison chalice of Orwellian doublethink.

Jones’ fearmongering, especially his scapegoating of Muslims and Mexicans, was a major factor in building Donald Trump’s constituency. And his promotion of “Hillary for Prison” merchandise seemed to drive one of Trump’s most popular campaign promises. As Jones put it in August, 2016, “It is surreal to talk about issues here on air, and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later.”

Another Trump-supporting figure the mainstream loves to hate is David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan member, Louisiana state legislator, and presidential candidate. Like Richard Spencer, Duke has elevated white nationalism to the status of a false religion. And like Spencer, Duke distorts reality and history in his quixotic efforts to depict whites as an oppressed group.

But what the mainstream hates most about Duke is not his racialism, but his so-called anti-Semitism: a deceptive code word for Duke’s vociferous opposition to Zionist Jewish supremacism. Indeed, in his opposition to Zionism, Duke is actually an anti-racist; his dissertation is entitled “Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism.” Unlike Alex Jones, David Duke recognizes and speaks out forcefully against the Zionist genocide of the Palestinians, and openly deplores the excesses of Zionist power in America. In 2015 Duke appeared on the Alex Jones Show, debated the pro-Zionist Jones for two hours, and (as even Jones’ fans admitted) won handily. He has not been invited back since.

Since the violent clashes in Charlottesville on August 12, these and other alt-right figures have enjoyed an unprecedented level of notoriety. They have been relentlessly bashed by politicians and the media. A wave of hysteria — “the Confederate Nazis are coming!” — has swept over America.

In the past, this kind of hysteria has always been incited by powerful unseen forces for nefarious ends. Following World War I, it was communists and anarchists who were infiltrated and scapegoated. After World War II, McCarthyist anti-communist hysteria reigned supreme. Domestically, the FBI infiltrated the Communist party and other left-wing groups, and used synthetic terrorism among other techniques to divide and discredit the left. In Europe, the American military high command unleashed Operation Gladio, a NATO program that committed virtually all of the high-profile “left-wing terror attacks” of the Cold War era, murdering thousands of innocent civilians in false flag atrocities.

As the Cold War ended, a phony “radical Islamic threat” was manufactured, and false flag attacks orchestrated to sell it to the public. Today, as the “alt right threat” generates the same kind of hysteria, one wonders whether this, too, might be orchestrated. During the 1950s, the majority of the American Communist Party’s membership consisted of FBI infiltrators. Likewise, 1960s radical groups were all massively infiltrated by the Cointelpro program. Today’s white nationalist groups, and their antifa opposition, are undoubtedly equally infiltrated by the even more powerful post-9/11 police state. That means that many of the people we saw fighting in the streets of Charlottesville must have been police state instigators. The hypothesis that deep state forces orchestrated the Charlottesville violence would explain why heavily militarized police shut down the Alt Right rally, forced the rally-goers to march straight into a larger antifa crowd, and then disappeared just as the violence began.

Is the deep state, and the mainstream media “mighty Wurlitzer” it owns and operates, working overtime to demonize the alt-right? Could this be an attempt to discredit the positive, anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist, pro-working-class, pro-peace-with-Russia element of the alt-right, by “sheep-dipping” the whole movement in racist bigotry and violence?

Dr. Kevin Barrett is a US-based journalist, commentator, and radio broadcaster. He hosts the TruthJihad radio program as well as manages the VeteransToday website.


Article from

Crescent International Vol. 46, No. 8

Muharram 11, 14392017-10-01


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