The alt-right is united less by ideology than by sensibility; a hallmark of that sensibility is a careful attunement to social norms, and a perverse delight in desecrating them. This is easy to do on the Internet, where anyone can say anything. Mike Cernovich, whom I profiled last month, became a prominent vessel of pro-Trump populism by saying unconscionable things on Twitter. “This election was a contest between P.C. culture and free-speech culture,” he told me the day after Trump’s victory. “Most people know what it’s like for some smug, élite asshole to tell them, ‘You can’t say that, it’s racist, it’s bad.’ Well, a vote for Trump meant, ‘Fuck you, you don’t get to tell me what to say.’ ” Cernovich, who grew up working-class in rural Illinois, visited his home town in February. He said, “My parents voted for Obama, but they told me, ‘If it’s Trump versus Hillary, we’ll go with him. He gets us. He talks like us.’ Since then, I never doubted that he’d be President.”



The morning after the election, an influential alt-right blogger who goes by Vox Day wrote, “Donald Trump has a lot to do . . . It is the Alt-Right’s job to move the Overton Window and give him conceptual room to work.” Day and his peers have been doing this job for months. They have flooded the Internet with offensive images and words—cartoon frogs emblazoned with swastikas, theories of racial hierarchy—and then ridiculed anyone who had the temerity to be offended. “Racism and sexism are a) human beliefs, and, b) as legitimately held as any other belief,” Day told me in a recent e-mail. No picture is shocking. No idea is bad. Who gets to define bad, anyway? “Remember that rhetoric is the art of emotional manipulation,” Day added. Last week, on his blog, Day wrote, “There is no more Republican vs. Democrat. It is now whites vs. non-whites and white quislings.”

Like the rest of the mainstream media, Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker is trying to figure out what on Earth is going on in the aftermath of the God-Emperor's ascension It's rather amusing to see a political reporter utilizing rhetoric - and less crudely and ineptly than the average journalist - in order to denounce the use of rhetoric in a political campaign. (It's even funnier to see a presumably secular left-liberal affecting horror over postmodern relativist norms.) You'll notice that because he didn't get anything sufficiently strong enough to provoke the desired emotional reaction from his exchange of emails with me, he had to resort to digging up something from Twitter that would serve his rhetorical purpose.That's legitimate, of course. I'm certainly not complaining about it, and indeed, I only spoke to him because Mike and I both observed that he gave Mike a reasonably fair shake in the bio-piece he'd written about Mike. And what a fantastic title; it's truly better than I would ever have imagined. But then, consider what he chose to use from what I gave him, and then think about how he chose to present it. It should be illuminating for those of you who have read SJWAL. As I did not ask for permission to quote his emails, you'll have to make do with my end of the exchange.What Marantz presented was a fair, but very limited snapshot of an intrinsically complicated subject. And he presented it in a rhetorical manner meant to emotionally manipulate the reader towards disapproval of Trump supporters, the Alt-Right, Chuck Johnson, Mike Cernovich, and me. That's fine, that's in line with his publication's objectives and his responsibilities, and neither Mike nor I was unaware of it. He certainly appears to have remembered the second half of my last sentence, the half he did not quote.Anyhow, I suspect it will be useful for some of you to see how the media process plays out when seen from the other side of the story.

Labels: #AltRight, media