How The Alt-Right Blogosphere Is Destroying Society
At first I was amused.
Then, over time, my amusement gave way to concern.
Now, the political scientist in me is downright worried.
That describes the evolution of my thinking towards the the alt-right blogosphere.
For those unfamiliar, the "alt-right" is a label used to define the loose confederation of nationalists that view conventional conservatism as weak and generally incapable of countering the global shift towards progressive multiculturalism.
One of the alt-right's most rec
Like religion, fake news is bread and butter for uneducated masses. I would have used ‘opium”, but that may have not been understood by those very same people.
I’ve work withed five different universities and their faculties regarding biotech related projects. I’ve been on several of their technical advisory boards and one NASA program technical advisory board, and trust me when I say that the general lack of critical thinking skills in the US are not just limited to the uneducated.
The snow flakes keep falling, now is the winter of their discontent. Winter has come, they can not bare the warmth nor the glow of any distant fire save their own. Seek solace in the ocean of ideas, we all come from there, do not let it freeze.
There has to be a boogie man someone or some thing to blame as it can’t be my fault for my shitty life. The alt-right is the direct result of BS that is accepted as truth and made-up BS that is not held accountable by anyone anymore. Fake news,fake politicians,fake outrage, fake economy, pretty soon we will have fake money. Maybe it already is…
The Honey Badger is a man to be feared. He is relentless when he attacks which is the reason he was selected by Trump. He has no rules other than winning and will do so no matter the cost or the effort expended,
I read your pieces with great interest, but I was surprised that you went for the Alt-Right meme. I happen to be one of the most prolific writers on Breitbart. I suggest we have a Skype call. Here is the roster of my articles: http://www.breitbart.com/author/chriss-w-street/
Hi Chris, feel free to shoot me an e-mail: [email protected]
Chriss’ articles seem to be unnervingly balanced when compared to the rest of Breitbart. Even his comment here was calculated. I’d be curious about why he landed there rather than elsewhere.
I would love to be privy to what was discussed. I bet it was an interesting discussion (if it happened).
He never got back to me
Granting the right is guilty as charged to one degree or another, the left is just as or more deficient in not picking up on real news. That is, aside from sarcastic reference, there has been little reporting of the actual newsworthiness of “for instance” the Pedestal emails by the mainstream left leaning media. All the “news” is about how they got here and nothing about the cynical sometimes illegal content exposed by the release of them. This was not a campaign that deserved to win either. A pox on both houses.
Hey Heisenberg, I followed you here from Seeking Alpha to see some of your political commentary. Just browsing some of your headlines let me know where you are in the spectrum, but I read content from all points of view.
I disagree with your assertion that the alt-right blogosphere is destroying society, for several reasons:
Alt-right websites have a limited readership and probably didn’t reach the millions of critical swing voters who switched from Obama voters to Trump voters. Anyone who voted for Obama is not going to be reading Breitbart articles. People who voted for Trump didn’t need the alt-right sites to convince them.
The tiny number of alt-right websites are greatly overbalanced by extreme left websites like HufPo, MSNBC, Slate, Mother Jones and dozens more. If you add in the broadcast news networks and the newspapers, the left bias of the media is very, very solid.
Fake news based on grains of truth has been the stock in trade of the mainstream media for at least a couple of decades, if not longer. It is nothing new except for the recent appearance of people doing it for profit.
But all this misses the big picture. In my mind, the most serious problem we face right now in relation to the news media is the complete lack of accurate news.
The mainstream (left-leaning) media bitterly hates Trump with every fiber of their intestinal tracts. You can’t blame them, since he made fools of them throughout the whole election process. All their energy is now going into delegitimizing Trump rather than finding real news and reporting it. We can’t trust anything they say for the foreseeable future. Nor can we trust the alt-right web sites or the one right-leaning cable news network.
The media has become so hyperpartisanized that we are really up the proverbial creek when it comes to knowing what is going on in our government. This is a real problem when we are all trying to understand a very unusual new President and figure out how to plan ahead for whatever changes he brings.
I wish you would write about the collapse of the news media as a useful information source.
I’m not entirely sure of the actual impact of the fake news. Millions of people are disfranchised in USA and EU and that not because of some balkan website. The heroin epidemic in idyllic little Vermont village has not been created by breitbart….
”The groundswell of support for populism/nationalism comes at the expense of globalization and multiculturalism, two pillars of societal advancement”
Those two pillar might have forgotten a lot of worker in the last four decade and if fake news become real news the poor will still be poor. The ghetto will still be the ghetto.
The rise of populism as deep root….what website people use for their daily ”recreative indignation” (breitbart, Buzzfeed, Fox, MSNBC etc.) is somewhat irrelevant.
Ditto. My love of country has taken a big hit over the last year, not only from political outcomes but also just from cultural observations and experiences and the evolution of capitalism to its money sucking to the top self.
I’m more radical now — but don’t know how to best express that other than “writing letters” — than I was as a 17 year old pot smoking (pre med cannabis), war protesting “freak” in 1969.
Buying the dips in scales now — the thing that has worked the best for me over the years — feels like I am just feeding the beast. 🙁