Very nice response by Rabbit to Trump’s idiotic comments on the Alt Left.
There are two Alt Lefts.
The first Alt Left is a fake Alt Left because it is a slur invented by the enemy (the Republican Right) in an attempt to libel the Left by claiming that people who want single payer health care are the same as Nazis! Lately it has been more used against Antifa types, but even there, it is misplaced. When used in this way, it says that anti-Nazis are just as bad as Nazis! Sound right to you? Nah.
Furthermore, the Alt Left moniker is rejected by the very people who it tagged. The entire SJW Left and especially the Antifa completely reject the term Alt Left as a slur. So Alt Left is a term like libtards, Leftards, pinkos, or moonbats used against the Left by the Right. Or when we on the Left refer to the Right as Rethuglicans, Rethugs, Trumpsters, Cum Trumpsters, or wingnuts. All of these terms are unacceptable because they are slurs made up by one side to describe the other side and these terms are rejected by the people they are said to describe.
So there is no Alt Left in the sense that the Right is using the term. Furthermore the use of the term in this way must be rejected by everyone on the Left.
On the other hand, there is indeed a real Alt Left. Just as Richard Spencer and Paul Gottleib coined the term Alt Right and more or less started the movement, I coined the term Alternative Left or Alt Left and also more or less started that movement. There is a post of mine called A Proposal for an Alternative Left a few years back that is, I believe, the first actual mention of the terms Alternative Left or Alt Left.
The movement sort of sat there and floundered for a while, and after a bit, Rabbit signed on board. Ryan England was also an early Alt Leftist as was Lord Keynes, although he split off into a somewhat different movement called the Realist Left. Another early Alt Leftist was an Israeli named Nicholas Kaldor. All of these people are still very important thinkers who are all Alt Left in some way or other. In recent days, Keynes and Kaldor have become more associated with an Alt Left split called the Realist Left. I would argue that the Realist Left is under the Alt Left umbrella.
Since then, quite a few Alt Left groups have appeared on Facebook, and as soon as the movement gained some traction, it quickly split into ~12 different factions at the very least, following the pattern of every leftwing group since Marx. I officially renounced some of them, to not much a avail. There are now still at least 12 factions, and there may be even more than that.
There are all sorts of Alt Left Facebook groups, but I have nothing to do with most of them. Rabbit and I have both almost completely lost control of the movement we helped found, which is quite all right. After, you cannot copyright or patent a movement. Movements often take off in radically different directions than those of their founders. The Alt Left, if it even becomes an actual thing, will develop into and take the positions of whatever those people want it to take. The members of the Alt Left will be the authors of their own movement, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.
I recently visited the largest Alt Left group on Facebook and was appalled at what I saw. I made a post denouncing most all of them and said I was renouncing them and what they stood for. This caused a minor crisis, and I split off to form my own group called The Original Alternative Left. It’s still quite small, and it’s also more or less inactive.
The large group had transitioned into something I no longer recognized. Most of the people in there were Trump supporters and most supported neoliberalism in economics. Right there, I would say they are not part of my movement. You can’t be Alt Left and support Trump except maybe on an accelerationist basis. You can’t support neoliberalism at all. Major dealbreaker, and you need to go away. If that’s how you feel about economics, the DNC is that-a-way. I am sure they can fix you up with a nice cushy job as a pro-corporate liberal .
Pro-corporate liberals have been running the party for some time, and they still do under the DNC leadership of Tom Perez. Although the party is now well split into Sanders and Hillary wings, the Hillary wings are still holding the ball and trying to run out the clock. The Sanders wing is very much playing defense as underdogs.
Rabbit has been a very controversial member of the Alt Left as his split is called “The Left Wing of the Alt Right.” However, that’s pretty much what the original Alt Left was. Like the Alt Light, we were originally aligned with the Alt Right (or at least used to read their websites), but we split with them due too many differences between them and us. Rabbit has some pretty racist feelings at times, and he has written some pretty racist stuff. Most of his recent postings have been racism-free though, and I honestly think he would rather talk about other things ,such as movies for instance. And Rabbit is one excellent movie critic. In my opinion, as much as the rest of the movement rejects him, I still think that Rabbit is one of the most important thinkers in our movement, and furthermore, he’s a fantastic writer to boot!
Further, Rabbit’s racism is attenuated by his liberalism, and Rabbit is absolutely a liberal on most everything but race, which describes quite a few Alt Lefties. Questioned about his racial views, Rabbit said that he did not with to harm non-Whites in the US in any, way, shape or form. Although he is a White Separatist at heart, he doesn’t want to displace or ethnically cleanse anyone. He has stated that he wants to go to some part of the globe where almost nobody lives and set up a white state there. Like Patagonia, Antarctica or even the moon. You might say he’s thinking long-term.
So as you can see, his liberalism attenuates his racism quite a bit. As long as you are a real liberal, your racism is never going to get too extreme and is likely to stay “the White guy next door” variety of soft racism that is almost ubiquitous (and I would say harmless) in US society. Liberalism is like an antivenom for racism. I have racist feelings myself at times of course (How can any White person not?), but I find that as soon as I get going that way, my liberalism starts acting like white blood cells attacking an enemy or antigen, and I can never go far down that road. Further, racist feelings feel like an ill-fitting suit that one is always half-trying to throw off. As real as they might be, they don’t feel very good inside, and I am generally glad when they fade away. It’s not something I want to think about, and it’s not a way I want to feel.
Antiracism is a core belief of liberalism. Liberals who become highly racist (and some do) generally move away from the Left altogether and join the Right. That’s just how it works. Left-wingers who go antisemite (and some do) also tend to leave the Left and migrate over to the Right somewhere where antisemitism has a more friendly home.
Here is an early Alt Left post of mine that has often been called a manifesto of the Alt Left, and that is exactly the way I would describe it. Read it and see what you think of it.
Official Response to Trump’s Remarks on the AltLeft
by Rabbit
Damn, what a freak. Was Kwai Chang Caine really found dead in a closet, with shoelaces around his nuts and his neck. “Yes, grasshopper,” said Po, nodding his head sagely.
I think he got what he deserved. Goddamned perverted old man. No wait, that’s a subset that includes me. At least I don’t hang myself until I pass out and nearly die.
You’d think evolution would have weeded out auto-erotic asphyxiation long ago. Talk about non-adaptive.
" data-orig-size="" data-image-title="Weirdo Kill Bill Actor Dead in Kinky Sex Game in Thailand" data-orig-file="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-3378" data-medium-file="" data-permalink="https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/?p=3378" alt="" data-image-meta="[]" data-large-file="" />As many of you may well know, President Trump conducted a press conference earlier today in which he specifically made disparaging remarks about the AltLeft. Many of these statements were slanderous and well off the mark. No one that I know who is associated with the AltLeft (which by the way has existed for years) would ever support or engage in violence.
As anti-Alpha Male anti-heroes, we don’t care for brodozers and machismo and people who eat chips loudly. We like our testosterone bound to SHBG, not left unchecked where it is free to bind to receptor sites willy nilly or converted into its more potent forms.
I personally don’t even like to attack bugs. In fact, I once had a black widow spider web in my shower and continued to shower next to it for a year, leaving the web completely undisturbed.
Occasionally I would glance over at the spider, its red hour glass glistening through the steamy water droplets, and I would say “Hey bud. how’s it going?”
I have no empirical proof, but to this day I like to think we had an understanding.
The idea that we would attend rallies and assault people could not be further from the truth. I could not harm a fly. Speaking of insects, I was as shocked as anyone when in the 1958 version of the film “The Fly,” Vincent Price and the detective just stood there idly watching as Al Hedison was devoured by the spider. They made absolutely no effort to save him, despite his desperate cries for help. Militants? Violence? Yeah right. To paraphrase Mike Myers in Wayne’s World “I don’t even own a gun, let alone many guns, which would necessitate a gun rack.”
Trump’s comments are a slap in the face to anyone who believes that the less aggro elements of Antifa and the AltRight should combine forces to get Single Payer health care passed and a plan for student debt relief. They could focus their dual energies on dismantling the College Football Industrial Complex. Time to get rid of the obsession with national championships, ditch the needless playoffs and restore conference rivalries. Go back to naming bowl games strictly after fruits, plants and other commodities rather than mega-corporations.
If the AltRight and Antifa groups are to have skirmishes, they should take the form of squirt gun battles, their classic Super Soaker 50’s and translucent squirt guns filled not with bleach but with Hi-C, Tang and Capri Sun. Yeah that’s right, the red pill is for squares.
The AltLeft is all about the Orange Pill. That’s where instead of spending a bunch of your hard earned mooncoin to attend a rally in Podunk USA and get maced by strange-looking subhumans, you simply head on down to the food court at your local dying mall and order up an Orange Julius, quietly(!) slurping it while daydreaming about the cosmos and reminiscing about the Radio Shack you used to buy remote control cars from in the late 80’s, which has now been replaced by some kind of ethnic eyebrow-waxing place (thanks to both globalization and greed-induced corporate imperial overextension.)
Go ahead, call us chic nihilists, fedora nationalists, new suburbanists, retro futurists or snorters of Pixy Stix. We don’t care. Deep down, orange you glad we didn’t take the Black Pill or the Turquoise Pill or the Periwinkle Pill? You know you are.
By the way, as I’ve mentioned many times I’ve always disliked the pill analogy. The Matrix is a terrible movie. The camerawork practically gave me motion sickness, and the whole cheesy “he’s the one” thing made this cynical GenX’er roll his eyes while mentally barfing at the screen of this melodramatic spectacle. It was a total corn muffin, not a sci-fi movie that I cared for, that’s for sure. I hated the digital effects and didn’t even enjoy the overall ambianic aesthetic as much as that of Damnation Alley, which is really saying something.
Trump’s statements are also a violent assault on every intelligent, well-meaning, teal-haired White feminist beauty who works her ass off in retail and reluctantly complains about how Indian customers are disproportionately cheap and constantly demanding discounts and other free shit. Furthermore, Trump’s words betray every Xenu-fearing person who has been stuck in line at Starbucks behind someone who couldn’t just simply place a fucking order without asking questions about every item on the menu…the calories, the ingredients, the special requests, the whole shebang.
When Trump condemns the AltLeft, it’s an insult to every person who recognizes that Vegas Vacation is the superior film in the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise, even though Ethan Embry became kind of an SJW. What is it with former child/teen stars becoming SJW’s anyway? I don’t care about Will Wheaton, as I never got into Star Trek. Tristine Skyler (whom I had a brief childhood crush on after seeing her in the film Kidco and who outshined Christian Slater in one of the best ABC Weekend Specials, The Haunted Mansion Mystery) was a little bit more disappointing. She went to Princeton though, so good for her.
I really don’t understand how any 70’s or 80’s kid could get more than superficially into social justice. Our childhoods were filled with grossly offensive things, (remember Cabbage Patch Preemies? like ewww wtf I love social justice now), and those same childhoods were radically unmatched in their total awesomeness. Anyhow, suffice to say that Trump’s presser was a personal affront to anybody who found Back to the Future III to be a lackluster finale to the trilogy. I’m not sure how many people that works out to be, but it’s more than a few. You know it’s true. What Trump said is mind-boggling for anyone who was inspired by Warren Beatty’s charismatic “Guy Named Porpoise” speech in the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait only to wonder why 40 years later nobody prioritizes these issues.
Trump’s criticism of the behavior of the AltLeft feels like knuckles to the creep to every laid-back Beatnik Fascist that doesn’t care much for blabbing the drab gab but rather chatters hep patter on twatter, if you catch my drift. Not everyone wants to take the long trip to Roman Salutesville, but if we decide to rig ourselves a little shindig vessel, what’s the harm in a few kicks? After all, we’re peace-loving moonboots, and you’re the tabby cat with the codes to the missiles.
Every Left Transhumanist who seeks bionic upgrades, mind uploading, immortality and the resurrection of wooly mammoths should be disturbed by Trump’s pontificatory declarations about the fabric of our being. Like Box in Logan’s Run , we are “more than machine, more than man, more than a fusion of the two. Don’t you agree? Wait for the winds. Then our birds sing. And the deep grottoes whisper our names.” Trump may have “one of the highest IQ’s,” but he’ll be no match for us after we transcend our earthly bags of bones and fuse our collective consciousnesses to refurbished Tandy 1000’s.
People always claim that Trump is playing 4D chess. His moves are so unpredictable and counter-intuitive, and yet you just know the only possible explanation is that it must be because he is 12 moves ahead of you. I know this because I myself have beaten a computer at chess several times on the “very easy” setting. We here on the AltLeft have our own preferred game though. It’s called Hungry Hungry Hippos, and we’re playing for our fair share of all the marbles.