Is Trump Part of "Alt-Right" Movement?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
Ever since he entered the race to become the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump has been accused of being a bigot, a racist, an anti-Semite, a xenophobe, a nativist, a right-wing populist, and a fascist.

He has been compared to, among others, Benito Mussolini, Juan Peron, Vladimir Putin, even Hitler, as well as notorious Americans of the past such as Huey Long, Father Coughlin and George Wallace.

David Duke, the Louisiana neo-Nazi and one-time Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, expresses approval of Trump’s positions. He told National Public Radio that “nobody will be more supportive of his legislative agenda, his supreme court agenda, than I will.”

The leader of the American Nazi Party, Rocky Suhayda, has asserted that the election of Trump as president would present “a real opportunity for people like white nationalists” to start “acting intelligently.”

This is not good news for Trump, because Hillary Clinton is doing her best to associate him with the so-called “alt-right” movement.

On Aug. 25, in an address in Reno, NV, Clinton accused Trump of submitting to an “emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right.”

“Alt-right” is short for “alternative right,” to distinguish the movement from mainstream conservatism. The movement is largely a rebranding of various white supremacist groups whose essential character is one of strident ethno-nationalism.

It rejects “political correctness,” multiculturalism, diversity, and a globalist philosophy it considers elitist and anti-Western, and it is often associated with efforts to preserve “white identity.” It also opposes feminism, gay rights, and gun control.

It began with a speech the “paleo-conservative” writer Paul Gottfried gave in 2008, following the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.

Gottfried, a retired professor of humanities at Elizabeth College in Elizabethtown, PA., called for an “alternative right” that could defeat “the neoconservative-controlled conservative establishment.”

That idea was soon adopted by the “identitarian” nationalist Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank, and its Radix Journal, founded  in 2012.

Spencer, who went to the Universities of Chicago and Virginia, maintains that white Americans need to “resist our dispossession.” In an interview with the Associated Press at the Republican National Convention last July, he advocated removing Blacks, Hispanics and Jews from the country.

Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State University in Long Beach, CA, and an alt-right theorist, remarked that “white people in America are becoming a minority that is increasingly being victimized, and there’s a cost to multiculturalism and immigration.”

Another alt-right supporter, Jared Taylor, holds degrees from Yale and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and is the founder of the American Renaissance online magazine, which he started in 1990 as part of his New Century Foundation.

He asks, rhetorically, “Do you really believe that a future Afro-Hispanic-Caribbean-Asiatic America will be anything like the America your ancestors built?”

The website Breitbart News Network has become a popular outlet for alt-right views. Stephen Bannon, who has been serving as its executive chairman, was named the Trump campaign’s chief executive on Aug. 17.

It is true that Trump’s “America First” campaign slogan has attracted many on the alt-right, drawn in particular to his pledges to deport the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally and to temporarily bar foreign Muslims from the U.S.

But Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks has responded to charges that Trump has encouraged the movement by stating that he has “never used or condoned that term and continues to disavow any groups or individuals associated with a message of hate.”