Right-Wing Populism – davidhadwen's website

Murtaza Hussain On Immigrant Politics

Liberals and progressives have very strong faith in their assimilative powers. Elites share the same transnational culture, they are a class unto themselves. There is a parallel between Baathist curation of a diverse elite and the current diversity-represented liberal elite. Immigrants tend to be more socially conservative and religious (examples: Caribbean, South Asia).

Immigrants can also be very patriotic (anecdote of a call centre co-worker who would hum the national anthem to himself every day). In general, immigrants reject “avant-garde” progressivism. Immigrant conservatism makes the democratic coalition untenable. Immigrants show up to the USA and are excepted from black/white racial politics.

The party saying “law and order” sounds good as many immigrants live in poorer and high crime neighbourhoods. Eric Adams, the former cop and mayor of New York, was voted in by black and ethnic votes in Brooklyn. The things that progressives see and assert as obvious are not apparent from a minority/immigrant perspective.

Trump got one third of Muslim votes in 2020. Muslims were triggered by social issues as they have conservative views on sex and family. Trump is a macho guy and some immigrants like a macho leader and want a tough seeming president, the Democrats are “a little limp”. Some successful immigrants have a business-libertarian view and this can also play into machismo.

With American seculars, a huge amount of weight is put into politics. It’s actually good that there isn’t a pure racial divide in politics. Avant-garde liberalism is patronizing, unstructured, diffuse and suffers from purity spirals. Local Republican representatives and officials say “we like you” and apologize for and contextualize Trump.

It isn’t good to teach kids into racial polarization (as avant-garde liberalism does) and imply a racial/moral hierarchy. Avant-garde liberalism is like a religion and its adherents are extremely pious. Which current left-wing figure is funny? The left-wingers used to be the funny ones, Trump filled the vacuum and the left has become even more righteous in response.

London’s Overthrow by China Miéville (review)

This is a pretty good tiny book. The author walks around London pondering social decline and the possibility of chaos. Accompanying amateur-smartphone photos are evocative. You get a taste of London culture, local history and the bleak vibes post-2008. The standard left-wing issues/critique/efforts xylophone is played eloquently. The book came out in 2011 in the aftermath of a decent amount of upheaval (the 2010 student protests and 2011 youth riots) and it occurred to me that the right-wing has dominated UK national politics ever since. How significant was this restive period beyond the well accounted for?

Great vocabulary: scabrous, grimoire, gallimaufry, hecatomb, parlous, cloacal, lachrymosity etc.

Protest Signs At Demonstrations Against Covid-19 Mandate and Restrictions

Pictured are signs people brought to Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto for a Canadian patriot/trucker protest against Covid-19 restrictions and mandates. This post is one in a series documenting the movement’s political expression.

Steve Bannon, gaming and “these rootless white males”

“Bannon made another decision that wasn’t immediately obvious but that would have a significant effect on the size and nature of Breitbart’s audience and eventually on the 2016 presidential campaign. He wanted to attract the online legions of mostly young men he’d run up against several years earlier, believing that the Internet masses could be harnessed to stoke a political revolution. Back in 2007, when he’d taken over Internet Gaming Entertainment, the Hong Kong company that systemized gold farming in World of War craft and other massively multiplayer online games, Bannon had become fascinated by the size and agency of the audiences congregating on MMO message boards such as Wowhead, Allakhazam, and (his favorite) Thottbot. ‘In 2006, 2007, they were doing 1.5 billion page views a month,’ he recalled. ‘Just insane traffic. I thought we could monetize it, but it turned out I couldn’t give the advertising away.’ Instead, the gamers ended up wrecking IGE’s business model by organizing themselves on the message boards and forcing the companies behind World of Warcraft and other MMO games to curb the disruptive practice of gold farming.

IGE’s investors lost millions of dollars. But Bannon gained a perverse appreciation for the gamers who’d done him in. ‘These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,’ he said. ‘It was the pre-reddit. It’s the same guys on Thottbot who were [later] on reddit’ and 4chan-the message boards that became the birth place of the alt-right.

When Bannon took over Breitbart, he wanted to capture this audience. Andrew Breitbart had drawn a portion of it enchanted by his aggressive provocations on issues such as race and political correctness. Bannon took it further. He envisioned a great fusion between the masses of alienated gamers, so powerful in the online world, and the right-wing outsiders drawn to Breitbart by its radical politics and fuck-you attitude. ‘The reality is, Fox News’ audience was geriatric and no one was connecting with this younger group,’ Bannon said. But he needed a way to connect. He found it in Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay British tech blogger and Internet troll nonpareil.
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The purpose of all this incitement, at least in Bannon’s mind, was to entice the online legions into the Breitbart fold. ‘I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away,’ he said. ‘You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.’ In this way, Breitbart became an incubator of alt-right political energy. Although Yiannopoulos was most interested in cultivating his own celebrity -Bannon thought he looked like ‘a gay hooker’- he was more than willing to do his part and make the political connection explicit. ‘How Donald Trump Can Win: With Guns, Cars, Tech Visas, Ethanol… And 4Chan’ read the headline of an October 2015 article he wrote.”