November 29 and 30, 2016


News and Views


Alt-right Goals


http://www.vox.com/world/2016/11/28/13716038/alt-right-policy-platform-trump

What the alt-right actually wants from President Trump
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Nov 28, 2016, 8:20am EST

Photograph -- Richard Spencer. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Photograph -- They expect Trump to act on his campaign promises about immigration, An angry-looking Trump at a lectern, (Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The KKK newspaper’s endorsement of Trump.



The so-called “alt-right” is a loose online movement made up mostly, though not entirely, of white nationalists. They’ve gotten famous recently for being some of Donald Trump’s earliest and most vocal backers, seeing him as the first presidential candidate in modern history open to their ideas about the need to protect the white race — by reducing the numbers and influence of African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Jews.

At a November 19 conference of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist “think tank,” the organization’s leader, Richard Spencer, saluted Trump’s victory: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Footage of the speech, taken by the Atlantic, is quite chilling.

Most of the coverage of the group has focused on the alt-right’s most blatantly offensive language or, somewhat bizarrely, the fact that Spencer is moderately well-dressed — Mother Jones described him as “an articulate and well-dressed former football player with prom-king good looks and a ‘fashy’ (as in fascism) haircut — long on top, buzzed on the sides.”

But there’s a crucial point missing here: Now that their hero Trump is about to be president, what do they actually want him to do come January?

Turns out they have some pretty clear ideas.

The alt-right’s priority, first and foremost, is preserving America’s status as a white-majority nation. To that end, they want Trump to follow through on the most extreme immigration ideas he’s discussed — such as deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and banning Muslim immigration. These steps, they think, will slow what they call the “dispossession” of America’s whites.

But the alt-right wants Trump to go even further. They want him to slash rates of legal immigration and defund groups that advocate for immigrants, like La Raza. Ultimately, they want Trump to push the boundaries of acceptable opinion to the point where the nakedest of naked racism becomes permissible in mainstream public discourse.

Under President Trump, those goals are plausible, even if unlikely. That means we need to understand the ideology of the alt-right — and the things its members will be working to enshrine in federal law.

The day after the election, I called up Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist website American Renaissance and a leading alt-right thinker. I asked Taylor what he wanted, in policy terms, now that a Trump presidency was no longer hypothetical.

“The policies onto which [Trump] has stumbled, in a kind of innocent, America First way, are ones that will slow the dispossession of whites,” Taylor told me. “I’m very much in favor of him implementing those policies, for whatever reasons.”

The policy that Taylor is most excited about is Trump’s idea of deporting every undocumented immigrant, all 11 million of them. This isn’t quite an official campaign policy — it’s something Trump floated repeatedly in TV interviews but that his campaign has attempted to downplay. Official policy is that they’ll start by deporting the roughly 2 to 3 million with criminal records and then will see how things stand with the rest.

Taylor doesn’t believe Trump will follow through on the full deportation plan, though he says, “If he actually did those things, I’d very much applaud.” Nonetheless, he believes a few high-profile deportation raids on innocent families could go a long way.

He explains why in a 2015 article titled “Is Trump Our Last Chance?”:

The key, however, would be a few well publicized raids on non-criminal illegals. Television images of Mexican families dropped over the border with no more than they could carry would be very powerful. The vast majority of illegals would quickly decide to get their affairs in order and choose their own day of departure rather than wait for ICE to choose it for them.

Even if Trump doesn’t go for mass deportations of families, Taylor thinks there’s a lot to like about Trump’s proposed agenda. A few of the Trump policies Taylor has praised include:

** Tripling the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents
** Ending federal payments to “sanctuary cities,” cities that protect undocumented immigrants from deportation
** Banning immigration from “terror-prone” (read: heavily Muslim) countries
** Cutting off federal benefits, like food stamps, for undocumented immigrants

These aren’t pipe dreams. They’re all policies you can find on Trump’s campaign website or in his speeches. Taylor and other alt-righters are attracted to them because, for them, the first priority is the numbers game: Make sure that whites remain a majority in America for as long as possible. Trump’s policies would both slow the rate of nonwhite immigration and actually make nonwhites leave the country. From the alt-right point of view, this is just what the doctor ordered.

This is why Trump’s border wall is less popular among some alt-righters than you might think. They like it, to be sure — but it’s a less direct way to reshape American demography than deporting people or slowing down immigration.

“We might not even need the wall Mr. Trump plans to build, though it’s certainly a good thing to have,” Taylor writes in his 2015 article.

To make the alt-right happy, then, Trump just needs to do a lot of what he’s already said he’ll do.

Ideally, they want Trump to redefine what’s acceptable in America

In Taylor’s ideal world, Trump’s anti-immigration policies would go even further than his official plan does.

Taylor wants Trump to push for a “pause” in issuing green cards, a step that Trump has gestured at but never fully spelled out. He wants Trump to end federal funding for Latino rights groups like the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). He wants him to use executive authority to limit the number of immigrants admitted for the purpose of family reunification.

“There is no end to the good a president could do if he were really convinced that immigration should benefit us rather than foreigners,” Taylor writes.

But alt-rightists’ ambitions for Trump go beyond mere policy. They want him to rewrite the boundaries of the politically possible.

The alt-right believes, at its core, that the American government has been poisoned. Poisoned, specifically, by the ideology of tolerance and multiculturalism. So long as the United States is officially committed to the idea that all people should be treated equally, regardless of race or creed, then it cannot take the steps necessary to make America a nation for whites.

“There hasn’t been a government on our side for 150 years,” Sam Dickson, an attorney who has represented the Ku Klux Klan, said in a 2011 speech to Spencer’s NPI. “The US government — the system in America — is the greatest enemy our race has for its survival.”

Undoing this means going further than shifting immigration policy, even dramatically. It means shifting the lens through which Americans see politics — ushering in a new, racially polarized discourse in which openly racist arguments once again become acceptable to make.

Trump, with his incendiary rhetoric about virtually every minority group — like calling Mexicans “rapists” and describing black communities as dystopian hellscapes — has helped push discourse in what alt-rightists see as the right direction. Because Trump has gotten away with saying offensive stuff, and seized the highest office in the land while doing it, they think they’ve made progress.

“What are we fighting for is a ‘new normal,’ a moral consensus we insist upon,” Spencer said in his recent NPI address (the “Hail Trump!” one). “Donald Trump is a step towards this new normal.”

Now they want Trump to go even further. They want him to continue using offensive rhetoric, and actually escalate it — to use his Cabinet appointments and the bully pulpit to normalize ideas that mainstream discourse shuns.

Taylor, again, is the clearest on this point.

“A change in tone would be as dramatic as a change in policy because a president and his cabinet have tremendous influence that goes well beyond policy,” he writes in his 2015 piece:

They can put a subject on the national agenda just by talking about it. They can make it respectable just by continuing to talk about it. Actually looking at the pros and cons of immigrants could open the door to looking at the pros and cons of different groups of people. White, high-IQ, English-speaking people obviously assimilate best, and someone in a Trump administration might actually say so. A Trump presidency could completely change what is said about the difference between a crowd and a nation, and what it means to be an American.

You actually are seeing a bit of this already. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, once tweeted that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” His attorney general pick, Jeff Sessions, once said of the KKK that “I used to think they're okay” until he found out that they’re “pot smokers” (Sessions has played this off as a joke). Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, reportedly once said that he didn’t want to send his kids to a school with too many Jews (Bannon denies this).

This kind of rhetoric from top Cabinet officials, in the alt-right’s point of view, doesn't go far enough. They want top-level American officials saying racially aggressive stuff — like discussing the (mythical) connection between race and IQ — to help bring their ideas back into polite conversations. Trump’s Cabinet appointments may indeed help further this goal, though he has made some picks — like South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a child of Indian immigrants, for United Nations ambassador — that the alt-right might not love.

But Trump’s own Twitter account and public appearances will likely be supremely helpful with this too. Trump has a tendency to go off the cuff, and make offensive statements, in tweets, speeches, and interviews. What comes out of his mouth and Twitter account is extremely unpredictable — and, if history is any guide, tends to push the boundaries of acceptable speech in an alt-right direction.

To be clear, Trump did publicly reject the alt-right last week, saying, “I disavow the group.” But the phrasing was very weak, so the alt-right doesn’t see it as too much of a setback. Unless Trump stops saying Trumpy stuff, there’s a very good chance they’ll get at least some of the rhetoric they want.

This is all in service of the creation of a white ethno-state, accomplished through “peaceful ethnic cleansing”

The alt-right’s goals go beyond mere policy, to remaking the very nature of the American state itself.

The ultimate goal of the movement is to rebuild America along ethnic lines, turning it into an “ethno-state” for whites. This is why “white nationalist” is probably the most accurate description of the alt-right: They literally see themselves as giving birth to a new white nation in all or part of the continental US.

“The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent,” Spencer writes at Radix, his online journal. “Our task is to capture the imaginations of our people (or the best of our people) and shock them out of their current assumption of what they think is possible.”

But the movement isn’t especially clear on how this is supposed to happen.

Spencer insists that nonwhites and Jews will be “peacefully” made to leave the country. He rarely gets more specific than that. But given demographic trends in the US — birth patterns mean whites will likely be a minority by 2050 — mass ethnic cleansing is the only way to preserve a white Christian majority. And as history makes abundantly clear, ethnic cleansing is rarely ever accomplished “peacefully.” That’s one reason it is literally a war crime.

The most specific plan I’ve heard for achieving this comes from Dickson’s 2011 NPI address. He thinks the US missed an opportunity to enact a “racial partition” in the 1960s, when it could have taken over Cuba and forcibly transferred African Americans (or “our blacks,” as he refers to them) to Cuba, and moved all white Cubans to an enclave in southern Florida (it’s unclear why he believes this was an option back then and not now):

We would take over Cuba. We would take the remaining white people out of Cuba and settle them in South Florida, and give them a state of their own where they could have their own culture — Cuba Nueva, and rename Miami Havana Nueva.

And we would then settle our blacks in Cuba, in a civilized way. We would build roads, expressways, factories, schools. And we would build a state for them, and the Cuban blacks, and they could then have a state of their own, to express their own cultural needs and aspirations and desires.

This is worth mentioning not because it’s something the Trump administration might feasibly do — it obviously isn’t. Rather, it’s to make it abundantly clear what the alt-right truly stands for in its own words, and why so many people find it troubling they’ve so enthusiastically embraced Trump and his policies.

The alt-right believes that its white ethno-state is only possible if white Americans develop a stronger sense of white identity. Taylor calls it “racial consciousness,” the idea “that white Americans, as whites, have collective interests that are legitimate.”

Racial consciousness, they think, will emerge somewhat naturally — alt-rightists believe, incorrectly, that race is a biological category that will inevitably lead to social division between whites and nonwhites. But they also believe that government policy and statements from leading politicians can strengthen it by pitting the interests of whites against others.

This, ultimately, is the effect that many of Trump’s policies and actions could have — intended or not. Deporting millions of Latinos, banning Muslim immigration, and using the bully pulpit to condemn movements like Black Lives Matter create a sense of conflict between the whites who voted for Trump and the minorities who mostly opposed him. Whether Trump intends to sow racial division with these policies is irrelevant; that’s the inevitable consequence of implementing them.

This is why the alt-right is so excited by Trump’s victory. They believe that by electing Trump, whites have finally put their identities as whites front and center — an “awakening,” as Taylor calls it, of “white consciousness” itself.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_(website)

Vox (website)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Vox.com" redirects here. For the former blogging platform, see Vox (blogging platform).


Vox is an American news and opinion website owned by Vox Media. The website was founded in 2014 by Ezra Klein. Vox is noted for its concept of "explanatory journalism"* and its use of "card stacks"* that define terms and provide context within an article. It has been described as having a liberal or progressive editorial perspective.[3]

[SEE EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM AND CARD STACKS BELOW.]

History[edit]

Ezra Klein left The Washington Post in January 2014 for a position with Vox Media, the publishers of the sports website SB Nation, technology website The Verge, and video gaming website Polygon.[4] The New York Times described Vox Media as "a technology company that produces media" rather than its inverse, associated with "Old Media".[4] Klein expected to "improve the technology of news" and build an online platform better equipped for making news understandable.[4] The new site's 20-person staff was chosen for their expertise in topic areas and included Slate's Matthew Yglesias, Melissa Bell, and Klein's colleagues from The Washington Post.[4][5]

Vox launched in early April 2014 with Klein as its editor-in-chief. His opening editorial essay, "How politics makes us stupid", explained his distress about political polarization in the context of Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan's theories on how people protect themselves from information that conflicts with their core beliefs.[6]

The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2014, Vox took in $60 million in revenue and was profitable.[7]

As of August 2015, Vox Media, which owns Vox, had received funding valuing it at over $1 billion, thus becoming a startup unicorn. Of this amount, $200 million came from NBCUniversal, $100 million from the venture arm of Comcast (NBC Universal's parent company), and $46.8 million from General Atlantic.[7] Other investors included Accel Partners, Allen & Company, Khosla Ventures, and former AOL executive Ted Leonsis.[8]

In June 2016, Vox suspended contributor Emmett Rensin for a series of tweets calling for anti-Trump riots, including one on June 3, 2016 that urged, "If Trump comes to your town, start a riot." The tweets drew attention after violent anti-Trump protests took place in San Jose, California on the day of Rensin's tweet.[9][10][11][12]

Content[edit]

In order to reuse prior journalist work, Vox creates "card stacks" in bright "canary yellow" that provide context and define terms within an article. The cards are perpetually maintained as a form of "wiki page written by one person with a little attitude".[13] As an example, a card about the term "insurance exchange" may be reused on stories about the Affordable Care Act.[13]

The site uses Vox Media's Chorus content management system, which enables journalists to easily create articles with complex visual effects and transitions, such as photos that change as the reader scrolls.[13] Vox Media's properties target educated households with six-figure incomes and a head of house less than 35 years old.[13]

In March 2014, before it had officially launched, Vox was criticized by conservative media commentators, including Erick Erickson.[14]

The website's launch received significant media attention.[15] Websites noted that the launch came around the same time as other data and explainer websites like FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times' The Upshot.[16][17] Vox was described as using "Upworthy" style headlines to enhance shareability and to act as a "Wikipedia for ongoing news stories."[15]


[Please forgive my own “EMBEDDED” INFORMATION IN THIS VOX ARTICLE on yet another almost inexplicable term:
http://www.definitions.net/definition/UPWORTHY,

“Upworthy”

Upworthy is social media with a mission: to make important stuff as viral as a video of some idiot surfing off his roof.”

Numerology

Chaldean Numerology
The numerical value of UPWORTHY in Chaldean Numerology is: 3

Pythagorean Numerology
The numerical value of UPWORTHY in Pythagorean Numerology is: 2”


FOR MORE ON NUMEROLOGY LOOK UP “666.” THE ENDING OF THE VOX ARTICLE IS BELOW.

Shortly after it launched, conservative writer David Harsanyi criticized the site's concept of "explanatory journalism" in an article in The Federalist titled "How Vox makes us stupid", arguing that the website selectively chose facts, and that "explanatory journalism" inherently leaves out opposing viewpoints and different perspectives.[18] Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at The Week argued that the website produced "partisan commentary in question-and-answer disguise" and criticized the site for having a "starting lineup [that] was mostly made up of ideological liberals."[19] The Week's Ryu Spaeth described the site's operations as, "It essentially takes the news (in other words, what is happening in the world at any given moment in time) and frames it in a way that appeals to its young, liberal audience."[3]

The Economist, commenting on Klein's launching essay "How politics makes us stupid," said the website was "bright and promising" and the premise behind the site was "profoundly honourable," and positively compared the site's mission to John Keats's negative capability.*[6]”

In 2016, after Donald Trump was elected US president, Glenn Greenwald criticized media including Vox for "suppressing reporting that reflects negatively on them (the Democratic Party) and instead confines itself to hagiography.*" in the run-up and aftermath of the election.[23]”



EXCERPT -- www.vox.com -- “… Nonetheless, he believes a few high-profile deportation raids on innocent families could go a long way.”

Do you have the stomach for this? Please, as well-intentioned Americans who would like to be on the side of God rather than Satan, force yourself to read the VOX article. The news site vox.com has been characterized as “liberal,” but Beauchamp cites references which can be checked if you want to do it.

I’m not put off by the – to some, apparently insufferable “liberal bias” -- at VOX, however I am considerably annoyed by the use of certain words which are not only highly uncommon among OLDER and more ordinary non-computer-crazy 60 plus readers, who just want to see what the author is discussing on the subject of politics; I have persistently looked them up just to show the writers that I can’t be stymied by some roadblocks in their clever analytical treatises.

Their terms haven’t been easy to find on Google, either, because their ordinary meaning is entirely incorrect given the context. That kind of writing is like those who throw out a liberal quantity of French phrases, in order to make themselves sound like very high-ranking and particularly elegant people. Pardon my simple and “working class” background, but that is truly rude and boorish (to use a good Victorian word.)

FIRST, FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT CATHOLIC, I JUST LOOKED UP HAGIORAPHY ALSO, TO FIND THAT IT MEANS BIOGRAPHY AND OTHER REFERENCES TO THE CATHOLIC SAINTS. FROM THE ABOVE ALT-RIGHT ARTICLE, WHICH IS REALLY IMPORTANT IN ITS’ CONTENT, I FOUND THAT IN ORDER TO FULLY UNDERSTAND IT, ONE NEEDS A STREET LEXICON OF ALL THE NEWEST COMPUTER GADGETS AND APPS THAT ARE THE CURRENT STATUS SYMBOLS OF THE MOMENT.

I PERSONALLY HATE THAT KIND OF THING. IT’S AN OLD, BUT GOOD RULE THAT IF WE USE ANY WORD IN A SPECIALIZED SENSE, WE SHOULD AT LEAST INFORMALLY, DEFINE IT. THAT’S GOOD BASIC INFORMATIONAL WRITING PROCEDURE. IF YOU’RE WRITING POETRY, THAT’S DIFFERENT. BELOW ARE SEVERAL MORE OF THE INSCRUTABLE INGROUP WORDS FROM THE ARTICLE ABOVE THAT ONE LEARNS ONLY ON THE INTERNET, OR AT JUST THE RIGHT COCKTAIL PARTIES:

“EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM,” FROM MY OWN DIGGING FOR EXPLANTIONS ON GOOGLE, IS WHAT Wikipedia and MANY other websites do in order to lead one forward from one possibly unknown term to another. Now that would usually be what I call “in depth reporting.” It’s the kind of thing that makes NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post and such thorough presentations a true treat to me.

IN THE CASE OF VOX, they do it by means of what they call “Cards.” I Googled that, too, and after a while found clear references to the term in APP advertising sites, along with the term “Tinder.” Likewise, the term “CARD STACKS” seems to refer to those images on smart phone touch screens which will move aside when touched and “swiped” to present another one in an established succession on a related topic, as in Wikipedia with its’ neon blue “links.” What has caused those to be called “cards,” is beyond me.

The term “TINDER” is apparently an App that is used by the lovelorn to hook up with somebody fast and uses photos to be chosen on their relative beauty. Being personally out of the “hooking up” generation, I had to look all that up. It’s like a whole new language.

Finally, AS FOR THE TERM “NEGATIVE CAPABILITY,” SEE THE FOLLOWING:

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/john-keats-and-negative-capability

John Keats and ‘negative capability’
Article by:
Stephen Hebron
Theme:
Romanticism

Stephen Hebron explores Keats’s understanding of negative capability, a concept which prizes intuition and uncertainty above reason and knowledge. . . . .”