Posted on August 30, 2016

‘Alt-Right’ Movement Makes Mark on US Presidential Election

Demetri Sevastopulo, Financial Times, August 28, 2016

When Hillary Clinton recently accused Donald Trump of spreading racism by retweeting a post by @WhiteGenocideTM, she was referring to the “alt-right”, a white supremacist movement that backs the Republican candidate.

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“In the so-called ‘home of the free and land of the brave’, there are conclusions about race, immigration and nationality that are completely taboo,” Jared Taylor, a leading member of the alt-right and one of its few public faces, said in an interview. “We are heretics of the state religion, and the state religion is one of relentless egalitarianism.”

While the alt-right reserves its harshest attacks for liberals, it also assails traditional conservatives, who are described as “cuckservatives”–an amalgam of cuckold and conservative–for pushing issues such as globalisation and immigration instead of protecting white culture.

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In her speech, Mrs Clinton accused Mr Trump of taking the opposite path from previous GOP presidential candidates, such as John McCain in 2008, saying that, “the de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for this group. A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican party”.

Mr Taylor says this is “miserable nonsense”, aimed at scaring Republicans into thinking that “their party has been hijacked by people who live under flat rocks”. He says the alt-right supports Mr Trump, and pays close attention to the UK Independence party, whose former leader Nigel Farage recently campaigned with him, because they represent the view that immigration and globalisation are accelerating the demise of white culture in the US and UK.

“It is almost by accident that Donald Trump has proposed policies that are congruent with the thinking of the alt-right,” says Mr Taylor. “I am convinced that he does not think about these things on the basis of some kind of sophisticated understanding of race . . . He seems to just have instincts and his instincts are similar to those Americans who are tired to having to ‘press one for English’ when they are on hold on the telephone.”

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