How the News Media Created the Alt-Right

“An endless stream of incendiary drivel will never materialize into a proper political movement without a mascot.”

Donald Trump surrounded by a ton of paid fake supporters (courtesy of ABC News)

What initially seemed destined to be a small blip on the pop culture radar is turning into a potential eight years of hell, and it’s all the media’s fault. From the moment Donald Trump announced his presidency, the news has devolved into a constant cycle of Donald Trump updates and analyses. All this free media coverage has not only empowered Trump but also is responsible for a resurgence and mainstream acceptability of Naz — I mean alt-right—politics.

No matter how many Nazis you manage to punch, you’re never going to kill an idea. But there are ways of isolating ideas, and we’ve done a horrible job of doing that this past year.

The alt-right is different from the Nazis in a few ways, but they ultimately share the same goal of promoting white supremacy and delegitimizing valid forms of criticism through a variety of rhetorical techniques. New slurs like “SJW” (short for social-justice warrior) or “cuck” are thrown around at anyone who challenges their warped view of the world. This isn’t going to change. The alt-right aren’t persuaded by facts; they have “alternative facts,” a term coined by Kellyanne Conway that accurately describes the cultural and ideological space that alt-right supporters inhabit.

No matter how many Nazis you manage to punch, you’re never going to kill an idea. But there are ways of isolating ideas, and we’ve done a horrible job of doing that this past year.

Alt-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulos (courtesy of yiannopoulos.net)

Cancerous ideology is spread by exposure. People like Donald Trump use the corporate media’s need to sensationalize to their advantage. If Trump had just announced that he was running for president, it would have been a fun little novelty that would have lasted in the rapid Internet news cycle for maybe a week, at best. But he decided to up the ante: his shocking statement that many undocumented Mexicans were “rapists” ensured that he would get press coverage while also garnering him a newly emboldened audience of formerly quiet nationalist sympathizers. This cycle of outrage, publication, growth and repeat is what propelled Trump to the White House—well, that, but also I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that so many registered Republicans were willing to overlook Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and association with racists and voted for him anyway in the general election. Depressingly, this suggests that most party-line Republicans don’t really care about racism or white supremacy.

Yiannopoulos will say something that is blatantly false just for the sake of being offensive. When someone challenges his false narrative, he relies on the cliche that liberals are overly sensitive and politically correct. Then he’ll try to steer criticism away from himself because of the fact that he is gay, or Jewish, or that he enjoys sex with black men, as if those identities and sexual preferences are hall passes for hate speech. The same ladder Trump climbed to the White House, Milo climbed to stardom.

Even though the majority of the country found Donald Trump to be despicable, it still gave those who regarded pre-Civil Rights America as an example of American exceptionalism, rather than a national embarrassment of indescribable magnitude, a horse in the presidential race.

Milo Yiannopoulos is another alt-right example of this; like Trump, he is a pure creation of the news media’s desperate need for sensationalist and controversial headlines. Yiannopoulos will say something that is blatantly false just for the sake of being offensive. When someone challenges his false narrative, he relies on the cliche that liberals are overly sensitive and politically correct. Then he’ll try to steer criticism away from himself because of the fact that he is gay, or Jewish, or that he enjoys sex with black men, as if those identities and sexual preferences are hall passes for hate speech. The same ladder Trump climbed to the White House, Milo climbed to stardom.

An endless stream of incendiary online drivel will never materialize into a proper political movement or garner mainstream coverage without a mascot.

Protesters against alt-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley (courtesy of Cirrus Wood)

Shock value has always held a place in American pop culture. Most of the things that come out of Milo’s mouth aren’t original or creative in the slightest. Anyone who’s familiar with the anarchic forum site 4chan is used to seeing comments similar to those grounded in Milo’s ideology all the time. The difference is that on 4chan there is guaranteed anonymity. However, Milo gave the comments a face. And an endless stream of incendiary online drivel will never materialize into a proper political movement or garner mainstream coverage without a mascot. Milo Yiannopoulos gladly filled that role. CNN’s and other news outlets’ constant coverage of alt-right figures (including Trump) did more for white supremacy in one year than websites like Stormfront could have achieved in one hundred.

One of Trump’s many “alternative facts” (Twitter)

Confronting fascism goes beyond protests, riots and other forms of civil disobedience; we need to confront the gatekeepers who allow the disease to spread. It’s better to prevent than to react. We need to hold the major media corporations accountable for their complacency during the rise of Trump, Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer. These men’s speech is protected under the First Amendment. But CNN and Twitter are not government institutions — they are privately owned. Why does Twitter allow Trump to share racist memes created by white-supremacist groups citing inaccurate data from a “crime statistics bureau” in San Francisco that doesn’t actually exist (see the image above)? Why did CNN have to air Donald Trump’s campaign rallies? Which leads me to wonder, if former KKK grand wizard and unrepentant anti-Semite David Duke became a ratings asset, would they have done the same thing? Are there any ethical limits to the pursuit of high ratings?

Who knows? The only way to find out is by watching Trump’s circus act unfold in the next episode of “The Administration.” And like it or not, we’re going to be forced to watch. We can’t turn off the TV anymore — he’s escaped the headlines and catapulted into the real world.