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President Trumps surprise decision to launch 59 missiles at a Syrian airfield, and his call for all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, angered some of his staunchest supporters paleo-conservatives, noninterventionist libertarians and the self-identified members of the alt-right nationalist movement.

[U.S. strikes Syrian military airfield in first direct assault on Bashar al-Assads government]

During Trumps presidential bid, the once-isolated antiwar voices on the right often thought theyd found an ally. As a pundit (largely on Twitter), he criticized military intervention, occasionally positing that it was being done to help Barack Obamas presidency in the polls.

As a candidate, Trump won primaries despite denouncing the Iraq War something that seemed outside the bounds of Republican politics. And in the final stretch of the campaign, he embraced an argument popular on the antiwar right, that Hillary Clintons bellicosity would lead to a war and he would prevent one.

Obamas 2013 climb-down on attacking Syria was celebrated by anti-interventionists. And this week, in the first hours after news spread of a chemical weapons attack, anti-interventionists stuck with their notion that Trumps victory over Clinton would mean a less aggressive foreign policy. In a report about Clintons Thursday interview at a Women in the World summit, where she called for airstrikes, Alex Joness InfoWars website told readers that while sarin gas has been suspected in the attack, the actual chemical used has not been confirmed.

[Analysis: Trump loves a conspiracy theory. Now his allies in the fringe media say hes falling for one in Syria.]

Hours later, the Trump administration ordered the airstrikes, and the president gave a statement that could have been uttered by George W. Bush, calling on nations to unite against terrorism. The Twitter account of race- and immigration-focused website VDare, a wellspring of Trump support, suggested that Trump had made a strategic blunder that would benefit terrorists.

Justin Raimondo, the libertarian editor of AntiWar.com, tweeted:

That prompted Daniel McAdams, a director of former U.S. representative Ron Pauls think tank, to chide Raimondo for ever believing Trump was opposed to intervention.

Paul Nehlen, a businessman who ran an unsuccessful, Trump-like primary campaign against House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, suggested that the airstrikes contradicted Trumps America First message.

Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute and the coiner of the alt-right brand, a small, far-right movement that seeks an all-white state, denounced the airstrike tweets. He then recorded a video message, full of worry that Trump had betrayed his voters by signing off on a policy favored by hawks.

Millions of people voted for Donald Trump so we could avoid nonsense on this, Spencer said. Millions of people voted for Donald Trump because we saw an authenticity in his opposition to these kinds of wars.

Jones had a similar response, following up on days of speculation that the chemical attack was a false flag meant to start a war with disbelief that Trump could fall for it.

Its incredibly evil to know that Hillary started it all with Obama, and now weve got to see our media, clearly with a false flag, selling all this, and then Trump about to do it, he said.

But the clamor on the antiwar right was largely drowned out Thursday night by praise from outlets and politicians who normally had little good to say about Trump.

Read more:
Alt-right and anti-intervention libertarians reject Trump missile strike on Syria - Washington Post

A videotape with excerpts from a forum on modern-day fascism has propelled Northern Arizona Universityinto the national debate over campus free speech and intimidation, both online and in the classroom.

Some of the fallout includes a professor who complained to police of fears for her safety after the videotape surfaced on an alt-right website, and the student videographer, who is looking to transfer because she doesn't feel welcome.

Free speech, said the professor, does not include hate speech.

Theres a difference between expressing ideas, which is different from racism and sexism, said Lori Poloni-Staudinger, the Politics and International Affairs department chair at NAU who was attacked online.

But the student, freshman political science major Melissa Miller, feels equally aggrieved.

I am being bullied by professors in their classrooms and in these faculty meetings. It's sick. No matter what your political background there is no business singling out a student publicly with no correct information, or accusing her of things when you don't have the whole story, she wrote in a recent Facebook post.

The video includes an NAU professor calling President Trump the rapist in chief and a lecturer, misidentified as Poloni-Staudinger, comparing todays politics to the conditions that gave rise to the Nazis.

Poloni-Staudinger said the flood of threats started the day after the forum and included comments such as, When are these professors going to understand that theyre going to pay for this with their lives? Theyve become the hunted. And handling things with a 9 mm.

Miller, who took the video and gave the rights to it to the alt-right website, Campus Reform, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that shes been threatened, too. She said she went to the forum because shes a political science major and recorded the event for her notes. (The forum was not sponsored by the department.)

It might have stopped there, she said, if she hadnt learned later that another NAU professor at the forum criticized her after she had stepped out of the room for videotaping lectures and posting them to another alt-right website, Professor Watchlist, for the purpose of intimidation. As a result, she sent the videotape to Campus Reform, which posted an excerpt along with a story based on its contents.

Miller states in a Facebook post that no NAU professors are on the Watchlist and a check of the Watchlist shows that she is correct. However, Campus Reform has posted another video of an NAU political science class and a letter from an NAU English teacher docking a student one point from their paper because they used the word mankind instead of a gender neutral term. In the letter the English teacher gives the student a chance to make up the 11 points they missed on the paper and leave mankind in the paper, but would still dock one point for mankind.

Campus Reform, which bills itself as reporting on conduct and misconduct at universities, is a project of the Leadership Institute, which, according to its website, teaches conservatives of all ages how to succeed in politics, government, and the media.

Campus Reform eventually corrected its error in misidentifying Poloni-Staudinger, but not before the damage had been done. Shes still getting threats and nasty comments, forcing her to shut down her social media accounts.

She also took screen shots of the threats and reported them to NAUs Police Department. She was told the department cant do anything about the threats because theyre too general -- they refer to professors and teachers, but not action against Poloni-Staudinger specifically. The universitys harassment policy also doesnt specifically include online harassment.

"NAU respects the right to free speech of all participants in the educational experience. We also expect that individuals exercise their rights with integrity, honesty, and respect for other participants," NAU Assistant Director of Communications Heidi Toth told The Chronicle, and NAU Director of Communications Kim Ott reiterated to the Arizona Daily Sun.

Poloni-Staudinger said she feels that free speech including the forum -- is open to all on campus and she didnt have any problem with conservative groups being on campus. Shes worked with the Young Republicans and Young Democrats. Her class also had a frank discussion after the November election results came in.

But Miller is still transferring at the end of the semester.

Y'all ruined my life at NAU, she posted to Facebook. People think I'm alt-right and a racist.

See more here:
Video posted to alt-right website sets off firestorm at NAU - Arizona Daily Sun

White supremacist Richard Spencer.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

If the alt-rights core ethos could be reduced to a single maxim, it would be this: to each his own. This is the attitude that undergirds the support for racial and cultural separation and white nationalism that the movement is most closely associated with. It is also the attitude that undergirds the movements less widely discussed isolationism, which was brought into the spotlight Thursday night as President Trump ordered a strike against Bashar al-Assads forces in Syria.

Richard Spencer, whose support for Trump has dimmed as Trumps stances on immigration have, according to Spencers harsh measure, softened, issued what is perhaps his most forceful rebuke of the president so far in a video titled The Trump Betrayal. I have to be brutally honest, he said. I am deeply disappointed in Donald Trump. Im shocked, and Im angry. And I am ready to condemn Donald Trump. He was far from alone. The #AltRight is now totally independent of Trump, and this anti-West, pro-terrorist foreign policy, the white nationalist publication VDare tweeted. Organize, organize, organize. So Trump's first forceful action as President was supposedly to defend the same people that mow down white children with trucks, the Right Stuff founder Mike Enoch wrote disgustedly.

This was a reaction foretold by the alt-rights very origins. The split between the mainstream conservative movement and the paleoconserativesthat is, those fixated on maintaining traditional cultural and religious identity who would become the alt-rights intellectual progenitors in the United Statescame into being over not only racism but also opposition to American intervention in the Middle East, including the Iraq war.

9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted, paleoconservative Pat Buchanan said in a 2002 appearance on Hardball. We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and were supporting Israel and all the rest of it.

This sentiment and the larger divide within the movement was the subject of an essay called Unpatriotic Conservatives, published by the conservative writer David Frum in National Review less than 24 hours before the invasion of Iraq began. In opposing the Iraq war and interventionism, he wrote, paleoconservatives had made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe and included among their ranks some who yearned for the victory of their nations enemies. Peter Brimelow, founder of VDare, responded with a post arguing that defeating terrorism would be a matter of keeping unassimilable would-be terrorists out of the country. Instead, America's establishment is committed to seeking a foreign policy answer to terrorism, of vast ambition and indefinite scope, on the other side of the globe, he wrote. Whatever the merits of this answer, it cannot be denied that a fraction of the resources devoted to it would have sealed the borders and ended the illegal immigration crisis.

Some of the far rights opposition to Middle East intervention was driven by anti-Semitic theories about the role of shadowy Jewish globalists in setting American foreign policy. But overall, the stance of what would become the alt-right on the Iraq war, nation-building, and interventionist foreign policy was motivated by opposition to the idea that Western-style democracy could be delivered by force to people seen as backwardsand also by the desire, voiced by Brimelow, to see resources devoted to making the country whiter and more prosperous. Does anyone want to consider what our aims are in all this? Spencer asked of the Iraq war in 2008. What might actually be accomplished by democratization? If the Baghdad parliament were running efficiently, would anything change?

Those concerns remain Friday with Syria, along with some added panic about the flow of Muslim nonwhite refugees into the West that the conflict has produced. A large and underrated part of the promise the alt-right saw in Trump was his repeated (albeit frequently contradicted) commitment to keeping America out of not only Syria but foreign conflict more broadly. That commitment is now dead and the shockwaves felt in the movement have been huge. No more wag the dog, no more 4D chess, no more decisive leadership, Spencer tweeted Friday afternoon. The Syria strikes must end now.

More:
Why the alt-right hates Trump's Syria strike. - Slate - Slate Magazine (blog)

Left, by Ron Sach/Pool; Right, by Joseph Eid/AFP, both from Getty Images.

The speed with which Donald Trump flipped from promising to leave Bashar al-Assad alone to launching a missile strike against the Syrian dictator sent heads spinning across the globe, turning hawkish critics into his grudging supporters. But no heads spun more than those on the far-right fringe who had spent years blasting Barack Obama for suggesting military action against the Syrian regime, and who'd supported Trump passionately. Trump, they believed, would keep the country out of any unnecessary wars, and the Trump administration promised to do so as recently as last week. The longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people, said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last Thursday on a trip to Turkey. The same day, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley declared that Americas priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.

Reassured by the presence of America-Firsters like Steve Bannon in the West Wing and Trumps own rhetoric on the campaign trail, the alt-right, ignoring the evidence of his waffling about the Iraq war, quickly bought the idea that Trump had drunk their isolationist Kool-Aid.

In fact, Trump imbibed the pro-war Kool-Aid that is the drink of choice in elite circles even faster, to the alt-rights disappointment. When Trump condemned Assads chemical weapons attack on his own people, which killed dozens of children and emergency workers, several of his fringe supporters screamed that he was being duped into a war by a false flag operation. The Syrian gas attack was done by deep state agents, tweeted alt-right agitator and the Trump administrations favorite blogger Mike Cernovich. The fake news media (which works for them) wants you to ignore basic logic and 101-level game theory and strategic thinking to reach an illogical conclusion. Stay vigilant! Infowars, the site run by extreme conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, took it a step further and blamed the attack on Democrat billionaire George Soros.

The Breitbart front page was less frothy-mouthed but ominously hinted its disapproval by noting how Republican Hawksa neologism for the pro-war neoconservatives the site loatheswere praising Trump. Ann Coulter, once the high priestess of Trumpism, slammed Trump for abandoning his campaign principles, suggesting he had only acted because he saw upsetting images on TV.

Coincidentally, the missile strike came only hours after Bannon, the de facto representative of the alt-right in the White House, had been removed from the National Security Council Principals Committee, cutting off his access to military decision-making. His supporters quickly, and not without logic, blamed the Syria situation on the same people they believed were responsible for Bannons ouster and diminishing stature in the West Wing: Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law and the leader of what a White House source described to Politico as the West Wing Democrats. Breitbart Londons editor-in-chief, Raheem Kassam, spent most of his Friday radio show tearing into the Trump administration. Unrest? Im apoplectic! he tweeted angrily to a reporter wondering if there were signs of unrest from the far-right news outlet. Call [Kushner ally] Dina Powell. Ask us why she wants to drag us into a proxy war with Russia.

Read more from the original source:
Alt Right Goes Apoplectic Over Trump's Decision to Bomb Syria - Vanity Fair

To understand how the political sands have shifted since U.S. President Donald Trump ordered Thursday'smilitary strike in Syria, don't just pay attention to therare praise he's getting from Capitol Hill.

Watch the outrage he's stirring up among his former fans in the alt-right, the anti-immigrant fringe movementthat embraceswhite supremacy and isolationism.

While lawmakers best known for challenging the president gushed about his decision-making, prominent white nationalist Kevin MacDonald was at home fuming.

"It's a betrayal," the editor of the "white identity" journal The Occidental Observer said from California on the morning after Trump's decision to launch dozens of Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase.

The alt-righthas beenalienated, MacDonald said in a phone interview.

"I'm concerned now this whole administration is going the way of the neocons. The whole nine yards," he said. "I'm very disappointed; very agitated."

The swift American military offensive was intended to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime for unleashing deadly chemical weapons on scores of women and children earlier in the week. But the U.S. attackoffended the anti-globalist principles of the far-right elements drawn to Trump's "America First" rhetoric.

Some of Trump's staunchest anti-war allies in the libertarian and far-right communities have now spurned him. They say the military intervention in Syria showed Trump was never the true isolationistthey hoped he'd be.

As some alt-right online commentators saw it, their anti-establishment candidate caved to status-quo political pressures.

"That's it. I'm done. Trump is a cuckservative now," wrote one user on the 4chan "Politically incorrect" message board, using the derogatory alt-right epithet for an effete, moderate conservative.

"Trump is a puppet now," another 4chan user wrote on the same thread discussing the missile strike. "Swamp drowned him."

A screengrab from the 4Chan message board's 'Politically Incorrect' forum shows users complaining about Trump's missile strike.

As with MacDonald, who has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "the neo-Nazi movement's favourite academic," some of Trump's most dedicated admirers in the alt-right were stunned by the news. Trump's missile strike aligned with what his former Democratic rival for president, Hillary Clinton, had suggested Thursday, when she told a women's forum she would "take out" Assad's airfields.

The president, MacDonald thought, was supposed to be an "America First" leader focused on a non-interventionist foreign policy.

"That was one of the things we in the alt-right liked," he said.

Richard Spencer, who coined the "alt-right" term, expressed his displeasure in a video he titled "The Trump Betrayal." Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory pedlarand host of InfoWars, said on his show Trump was "disintegrating in my eyes."

And Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor and political agitator who once co-authored a manifesto on the alt-right, wrote on Facebook: "There comes a day in every child's life when his Daddy bitterly disappoints him."

MacDonald said he would consider "jumping off the Trump train," but plans to hang on despite his "faith being on shaky ground."

Beyond the Syrian intervention, MacDonald said the past week has troubled him because ofreports about former Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon being booted from Trump's National Security Council. It sounded to him like a demotion for Bannon, an alt-right godfather of sorts, in favour of Trump's more moderate-leaning son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

"Bannon's being pushed aside a little bit [by] Jared Kushner," MacDonald said, slamming Kushner as "a globalist."

"Meanwhile, Trump kept the neocons out of this administration, but he's being applauded now by the neocons for what he's doing in Syria."

A Syrian child receives treatment at a small hospital in the town of Maaret al-Noman following a suspected toxic gas attack in Khan Sheikhun, a nearby rebel-held town in Syria's northwestern Idlib province, on April 4. (Mohamed Al-Bakour/AFP/Getty Images)

Matthew Lyons, who has researched the origins of the alt-right and co-authored the book Ctrl-Alt-Delete: An Antifascist Report on the Alternative Right, said far-right groups will see Trump's Syria strike as a "dramatic abandonment" of his stated foreign policy doctrine.

"If Trump continues in the same vein, I think it probably will mean a pretty definitive break," Lyons said.

Whatever divisions the Syria development has caused may also just be temporary, suggested Julian Zelizer, a professor of American political history at Princeton University. Military conflict often has the potential"of shaking up entrenched political alignment and alliances," he said.

"So friends become enemies, and vice versa. That's what you're seeing with the far-right getting angry with Trump."

There wascertainly some jarring messaging coming from ordinarily cantankerous senators who have made a habit of criticizing the president. There was a new tone, for instance, from Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain following the strike against Assad's regime.

John McCain, a Republican senator who is often critical of Trump, spoke out in support of his missile strikes against Syria. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

"I was very proud of him," Graham said, before reportedly comparingTrump to a conservative presidential icon.

"I think there's a side to President Trump that's very much like Ronald Reagan," Graham said, according to the Washington Post's Dave Weigel.

Trump "took action" by striking Assad's airfield, McCain said. "For that, he deserves the support of the American people."

Bill Kristol, the conservative editor of The Weekly Standard and an avowed #NeverTrumper, joined the Trump love-in, tweeting that "a growth spurt" in the president's leadership appeared to be underway.

Democrats also endorsed the attack. House minority leader Nancy Pelosidid so publiclybut with a caveat: the use of military force, she argued, should have been authorized first by Congress.

"I'm supportive of the Trump administration's decision to launch airstrikes in response to Assad's assault on his own people," wrote Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader,described the action as "the right thing to do" in his written statement.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said the U.S. attack was 'the right thing to do.' (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

As for Trump's base?

"Wait for the polls. My instincts say they will be delighted," said congressional expertIlonaNickels. She said more moderate Trump conservatives may view himas a "man of action" versus "the cerebral paralysis of Obama," who was criticized in 2013 for apparently pulling back on a decision to launch a military strike against Syria.

Zelizer, the Princeton professor, expects traditional partisan divisions to settle once the battle lines are no longer fresh. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, for example, a period of goodwill and bipartisanship lasted about a month.

"As Congress started to think of key issues and people started thinking about elections, the divisions re-emerged," he said. "The question now is will these divisionscontinue? For how long? And do people go back to where they were before the missile strike?"

Trump takes on 'formidable coalition'0:43

Read more here:
'Friends become enemies': Trump's Syria strike stirs up alt-right outrage as lawmakers praise him - CBC.ca