Press Alt-Right to Change the Rules

Follow @RPJblog
By Jason Michael

Little did we know that the vulgarity of the right was the key to its popularity, and that its use of the “common” would itself subvert the culture of refinement with which the élite cling to power. This coup has changed the rules to suit the purposes of the right.

Shortly after his June 2015 announcement that he would run for the Republican Party nomination this blog predicted that Donald Trump would win the ticket and that he would go on to win the presidential election. This was, however, wrong on the most important detail of that prediction; that Trump’s victory would trigger an establishment revolt that might result in the repair to the United States’ broken democratic system. It was Dr. David Landy from the Department of Sociology at Trinity College, Dublin, who first suggested to me that a win for Trump was more likely to affect a paradigm shift to the right than bring about remedial change. Doubt your academic supervisor at your peril. Lesson learnt.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/799150569780867072

As it is in the mafia, so it is in the White House. When you are a made man, you are a made man. No sooner had the billionaire buffoon made his inarticulate victory speech, than the wheels of the government and the media started turning to normalise his deeply racist and misogynistic language and behaviour. This I never saw coming. Within days it had become acceptable somehow for “the Donald” to appoint Steve Bannon – an alt-right cum white supremacist anti-Semite – as his chief strategist. Bannon’s ex-wife is on record saying he doesn’t like Jews, that he despised the way Jewish parents raise their children to be “whiney brats,” and that “he didn’t want [his] girls going to a school with Jews.”

Even Snopes – the “rumor has it” website – felt the need to qualify Bannon’s open “white identity” politics as an accusation. Mind you, this was still much further than the rest of the mainstream media was willing to go on its post-election coverage of the Trump train. It seems as though it has become government and media policy to ignore the hints and downplay the obvious when it comes to the serious problem that a Trump presidency promises to be.

Thankfully this process of normalising of the utterly unacceptable would be limited to the weird and wonderful world that is American politics – or so I thought. It makes perfect sense now, after the fact, that even here in Ireland no one will poke their head above the parapet and diss the POTUS. Okay, not sticking it to the new emperor of the world is one thing, but who would have guessed that the Irish media would have taken it to the other extreme. Rather than, you know, keeping a measured silence for a while the state broadcaster made the decision to invite no less a person than Britain’s very own version of Ann Coulter, Katie Hopkins, onto the Late Late Show to speak up for the right.

When asked about the president elect’s disgusting “locker-room” talk, Hopkins leapt in with the comment she “would rather be grabbed by the pussy then have a pussy for president.” Charming! She is on the side of the women when it comes to Marine Len Pen – naturally. “The rise of the right,” she says with that precious smug smile of hers as she pumps her putrid radio show, “is a fantastic thing,” before going on to argue that it’s the lowest form of argument to remind her of the last time the right rose in European history. This truly is the death of reason. Well done RTÉ!

You see, this is the thing: By the very means with which the right has crept back to power and influence in Europe and the United States it has changed the rules that govern ordinary, decent liberal democracy. Our prevailing, cancerous insistence on political correctness – what the right derides as “Cultural Marxism” – has taken from us the weapon we need most; the freedom to deploy honest language to speak truth to this new power. Aware of this fatal weakness the far-right has ridden over us, rough shod, with a “common language” that sells itself all too well to a disgruntled electorate that has grown exhausted with the well-spoken sophistry of a self-serving, careerist political class.

Katie Hopkins thinks the rise of the far right is ‘fantastic’