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President Trumps airstrike against Syria may cause him to lose his alt-right support.

I am ready to condemn Donald Trump, white nationalist Richard Spencer said in a YouTube video to his followers, but stopped just short of doing so. I certainly condemn these actions just taken in Syria.

The video, posted Friday morning, was titled The Trump Betrayal.

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Spencer helped popularize the term alt-right. Amidst constant jockeying for power and authority within the loosely organized and mostly-online alt-right, Spencer has positioned himself as a leader. He speaks for the most white nationalist camp within the fractured movement, with his vision involving the creation of a white ethnostate. Spencers ideological partners include neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin and former Ku Klux Klan head David Duke.

Spencer said that he supported Trump leading up to the election because he was the right way to avoid these kinds of wars and would instead focus on domestic issues.

The #AltRight is against a war in Syria. Period, Spencer tweeted Thursday night. He later added an emoji of the Syrian flag to his Twitter profile.

Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

Original post:
Will The 'Alt-Right' Break Up With Trump Over Syria? The Forward - Forward

A man who just lost the Infobattle.

Donald Trumps rebrand of American conservatism was largely aesthetic. The mogul was far from the first Republican to dress up the one percents agenda in populist garb; or to pin blame for the middle classs decline on a conspiracy between rootless elites and an undeserving minority; or to shore up a fragile sense of national esteem and identity by defining it against an evil, foreign other.

Like most pop-culture phenoms, Trump added a few idiosyncratic touches to a tried-and-true formula, and, thus, generated a sound both reassuringly familiar and thrillingly new. Specifically, the candidate traded the partys decades-old racial dog whistles for foghorns, while revitalizing the genre of right-wing demagoguery by borrowing flourishes from the domains of professional wrestling and reality television.

Still, Trumps innovations werent entirely stylistic. Nor were they all merely amplifications of inherited themes. His anti-trade diatribes were genuinely new for a Republican nominee, at least for the past half-century. And, occasionally, he directed his populist fury past the bureaucrats and cultural elites whom Nixon so reviled, and up to the owners of capital (albeit, strictly the international, implicitly Jewish sort).

But Trumps most radical and persistent break with convention came on foreign policy. No candidate, in either major party, spewed venom more acidic on the subject of the Iraq War. And Trump shot it straight into the face of George W. Bushs brother, in a South Carolina auditorium packed with Jebs well-wishers.

Over 18 months of campaigning, the geriatric demagogue maintained a consistent line on very few things. But the hypocritical horrors of humanitarian intervention was one of them. The Trump doctrine on the Middle East was, in many respects, evil, impractical, and illegal. But it offered coherence, and a cathartic acknowledgment of the oft-ignored trauma of Iraq: If we drop bombs over there, lets do it kill terrorists and their families, or to confiscate natural resources, but not to save a bunch of Muslims from a secular dictator who kills jihadists.

Of course, this posture was not Trumps own invention. It was broadly similar to the brand of isolationism preached by Pat Buchanan and the long-marginalized, paleoconservative wing of the Republican Party. Which made Trumps primary victory its own kind of regime change: The foreign-policy elite was the one segment of the GOP coalition to abandon its standard-bearer in large numbers and loud tones. When Trump won anyway, the neo-paleocons (a.k.a. the alt-right) collected the keys to the kingdom.

Or so they thought.

On Tuesday, heartrending images of children murdered by toxic gas emerged from Syria. Two days later, Trump was excoriating Bashar al-Assad for murdering beautiful babies the very babies he spent his entire campaign vowing to keep out of our country.

No child of God should have to suffer such horror, the president said, shortly after American planes dropped 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airfield.

Less than four years earlier, after an apparent chemical attack by the Assad regime killed 1,400 Syrians, Trump implored the president to save his powder.

Now, following a chemical attack that killed 70 people, Trump had committed an act of war against the secular dictator whose terrorist-killing skills he had previously praised all in the name of human rights. While both he and other members of his administration were already making noises about regime change.

And all this came one day after the Buchananites champion in the West Wing Breitbart mastermind Steve Bannon was evicted from the National Security Councils principals committee, a demotion that his allies attributed to Jared Kushner, the White Houses most powerful Jewish lifelong Democrat.

As of Friday morning, the alt-right was not alright.

Mike Cernovich the reactionary blogger and nootropics evangelist who recently won Donald Trump Jr.s praise for breaking the Susan Rice story started the hashtag #SyriaHoax Thursday afternoon, claiming that the chemical attack was a false-flag operation by jihadist rebels hoping to attract American air support.

When it became clear that Trump did not accept this alternative fact, Cernovich tweeted his grief.

Infowarss Paul Joseph Watson broke with Trump more decisively.

Alt-right Twitter personality, and self-described good Christian boy, Baked Alaska offered similar sentiments:

Ann Coulter, a longtime fixture in far-right media, who has tightly aligned herself with her partys populist-nationalist wing, asked, in so many words, Wont somebody please think of the Christians?

Alex Jones dipped into his emergency stash of dank Voltaire memes.

It seems doubtful that principled isolationists make up a large portion of Trumps voting base. While the mogul did win new voters to his party in a few critical regions, the overwhelming majority of his coalition were the same people who pulled the lever for two terms of Bush, McCain, and Romney. Its quite possible that the president will gain more supporters by diverting focus to a display of American military might than hell lose by betraying the foreign-policy vision he campaigned on.

But if committed opponents of neoconservatism make up a small part of the conservative electorate, they make up a good portion of the audience for niche right-wing media enterprises like Infowars and Breitbart. And both those outlets built their brands, in no small part, by cultivating the paranoid rage of conservatives who felt betrayed by elites in both parties. Trumps win was an enormous boon to these sites, but it was also a challenge. Maintaining an antiestablishment ethos and an adulatory attitude to the president of the United States is no easy task. Ambivalence makes for much weaker copy than unadulterated outrage.

So, alt-right media has something to gain from reassuming its role as the reactionary opposition. But it also has plenty to lose. The far-right fever swamp has never enjoyed such intimate access to the halls of power. And its various news outlets and media personalities have supplemented their core audiences with devotees of the Trump personality cult.

For now, expect most on the alt-right to try to square this circle by blaming the presidents treachery on Jared Kushners nefarious influence and calling on all red-blooded patriots to take their White House back, and make Trump great again.

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The 39-year-old Uzbek man was known to authorities, but was not being actively monitored at the time of the attack.

The new strikes likely came from Syrian or Russian aircrafts, possibly launched from the same base targeted by the U.S. on Thursday.

The globalist wing wants to give Trumps working-class voters subsidized family leave and child care. Bannon tried to kick them off of Medicaid.

League commissioner Adam Silver said its not a done deal, but its his expectation.

U.S. warships fired missiles at a Syrian air base in response to the Assad regimes use of chemical weapons on civilians.

The medias laudatory reaction to Trumps Syria strike teaches our incompetent president that launching wars on gut instinct is cool and good.

The inmates have sued, calling the rapid pace of executions reckless and unconstitutional.

As Trumps infrastructure package struggles for life, California Democrats enacted theirs on a tight schedule with a few timely deals.

Big questions now include Gorsuchs impact on the Court, the fights impact on the Senate, and the possibility Trump will get to fill another vacancy.

Two sources close to Bannon say he argued against the strike, on the grounds it didnt serve Americas interests.

The latest in a line of truck attacks hits the Swedish capital.

You have to see it to believe it.

After predictions of a big month, the official jobs report for March showed growth slowing to 98,000 jobs, though the unemployment rate did drop.

Meanwhile, the battle between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner rages.

Like Andrew Jackson, Trump believes in speedy, incredibly violent force, taken without consultation with Congress, to deter evildoers such as Assad.

I guess Trump wasnt Putins puppet after all, he was just another deep state/Neo-Con puppet.

An arms-control expert looks at how a 2013 U.N. deal failed, and how Trumps missile strike flips the calculus in a complex conflict.

Most over-70 senators join the upper chamber a bit earlier, so Mitt would be the oldest freshman to be popularly elected if he runs and wins in 2018.

With little notice, the candidate who promised to avoid military conflict in the Middle East has become an interventionist.

In his first public appearance since being fired, he mocked Trump and disappointed those who wanted him to seek higher office.

See the article here:
After Trump's Syria Air Strikes, Alt-Right Is Not Alright - New York Magazine

Is Jane Austen an icon of Americas white-supremacist alliance? That was the startling assertion made in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Nicole Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado. Wright noted that Austens name had popped up in several alt-right websites, leading her to surmise that these groups were enamored of the rectorsbrilliant spinster daughter, because to them she was a symbol of sexual purity and standard-bearer of a vanished white traditional culture.

Essentially, white nationalists see Austens pastoral, white, Christian world with its parsons, picnics, debutantes, and redcoats as a validation of their ideology of a racially pure ethno-state where women know their place and immigrants arent welcome. They want to Make America Austen Again, never mind that it never was.

The whole connection seems belabored, and the Austen references Wright cites from alt-right websites are too random to sustain any substantial commentary on Austen and her reactionary readers. Nevertheless, the mere idea of the boys at Breitbart palling with Austen was enough to give liberal Janeites an attack of the vapors.

But hold those smelling saltsand the outrage. This is not the first time that reactionaries have sung hosannas to Austen, nor will it be the last. Who can forget that one of her most famous admirers was the arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling? Glory, love, and honor unto Englands Jane! he wrote, in a verse aglow with warm national pride.

Kipling, of course, is far too complex, compassionate, and protean a writer to be reduced to an alt-rightist. But there can be no doubt that his imperialist and racial views shaded in that direction. Kiplings name and poems pop up on alt-right forums with far more frequency than Austens. Which is unsurprising given that his lifelong cri de coeur was the White Mans civilizing mission, a cause he continued to stubbornly champion long after it had become embarrassingly unfashionable to do so. After the First World War, as his reputation declined thanks to his deranged anti-Hun propagandahe demanded that Germans be referred to as it and not he or theyhe became the target of liberal lampoon and was disparaged as a bitter reactionary out of touch with the changing times.

How ironic, then, that it was during this most illiberal phase of his life that this jingo imperialist, to use Orwells phrase, wrote a short story that popularized the term Janeite, coined by his friend, the revered critic George Saintsbury, as a handy label for what he called the sect of Jane Austen fans. Saintsbury, a brilliant scholar and vinophile, was a high Anglican and arch-conservative who categorically railed against progressive political reforms, from universal franchise to Catholic Emancipation to pay raises for window cleaners. Orwell remarked of his belligerence that it takes a lot of guts to be openly such a skunk as that. But since Saintsbury invented the term Janeite and Kipling magnified it, every Austen fan who embracesthe moniker todayowes these two mena debt of gratitude.

Indeed, it was Kiplings short story The Janeites, a tour de force of comic pathos, that came to mind when I read Wrights article; or, rather, when I saw the waggish illustration accompanying it, of Austen sporting an improbable bonnet: a red Make America Great Again baseball cap. (The cap on its own, without the slogan, is an especially fitting accessory, since Austen actually mentions base-ball in Northanger Abbey as one of the games played by her tomboy heroine Catherine Moreland.) Kiplings titular Janeites are an equally improbable bunch: a group of hard-talking soldiers hunkered down in the muddy, rodent-infested trenches of World War I. There are five Janeites in all, most of whom arent particularly respectful of, or well-disposed to, women. Today, theyd almost certainly be called misogynists. The only woman whom they say a good word for, says the newbie Janeite, Humberstall, is this Jane.

The simple-minded Humberstall, who works as a mess waiter in the trenches, is the protagonist of the story and a quintessential Kipling hero: a conscientious, brave, and unsophisticated English soldier with a spit-and-polish work ethic, a patriot ready to die for flag and comrade. As it turns out, he is the only Janeite to survive; the other four are killed in a massive bombardment that destroys the Battery. We meet Humberstall after the war, when he has returned to his civilian job as a London hairdresser. Strong as an ox but with his mental faculties impaired by the war, he is an enormous man with bewildered eyes. It is Humberstall who relates, in thick and often impenetrable cockneyKipling was infuriatingly fond of idiolecthow, despite his low rank, he had been inducted into a secret society of Janeites comprising his senior officers. In actuality there was no secret society (just a group of ardent Austen aficionados), but Humberstall was conned into believing one existed. They even had a password, he says: Tilniz an trapdoors, which Janeites will recognize as Tilneys and trap-doors from Northanger Abbey. Being part of this select fellowship was a source of immense pride to him and the highpoint of his war experience. It was a appy little Group. I wouldnt a changed with any other, he says, invoking the happy ghost of Henry Vs band of brothers at the Battle of Agincourt.

With the war over, he finds himself returning nostalgically to all her six books now for pleasure. But, he grouses, becoming a Janeite wasnt easy. He had to read all her novelsno easy task for someone like him. Initially, he found it difficult to understand why these officers were obsessed by a little old maid ood written alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago. Even worse, her quiet novels werent adventurous, nor smutty, nor what youd call even interestin. Nor were her characters particularly exciting.

Humberstall cant spell (Lady Catherine de Bugg) or remember the names of characters or novel titles. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth of Persuasion are Miss Whats-her Name and Captain Tother Bloke, and Northanger Abbey is some Abbey or other. When one of the Janeites declares that Austen didnt die barren but produced a lawful issue named Enery James, he believes the novelist is her son. But Austen could not have asked for a more perceptive and loyal reader. He unwittingly pays her a tremendous compliment when he observes that her unexciting characters from a hundred years ago are just like people he comes across every day. The oily Reverend Collins from Pride and Prejudice, always on the make an lookin to marry money, reminds him of the troop-leader from his Boy Scout years. He could swear that the wholesale grocers imperious wife is the duplicate of Lady Catherine de Bugg. And as for his chatterbox aunt, shes about as vapid as Miss Bates from Emma, an old maid runnin about like a hen with er ead cut off, an her tongue loose at both ends.

As Humberstall continues to read Jane (the name by which he always refers to her), she gets under his skin and he goes from being an on-the-make Janeite to a true Janeite. In the wake of the bombardment, he is sneaked onto an overcrowded hospital train by a bony nurse who is so delighted to learn that he, too, is an Austen fan that she declares shed happily kill a brigadier to make room for him. It is with great feeling, therefore, that he bestows on Jane the soldiers highest accolade: Theres no one to touch Jane when youre in a tight place. Gawd bless er, whoever she was.

This gauche cart-horse of a man, who lives with his mother and has never had a relationship with a woman, is an unlikely Janeite. With his working-class roots and cockney accent, he would be a misfit among the trendy, tea-drinking, Bath-visiting, costume-wearing, Regency-fetishizing Janeites of today. We dont know what his politics are but it doesnt really matterand that is Kiplings whole point. There is no one kind of Janeite; no one owns her.

Theres nothing new about trying to appropriate Austen politically. As Freya Johnston wrote recently in the Prospect, Austen has been repackaged down the years as a radical, a prude and a saucepot, pro- and anti-colonial, a feminist and a downright bitch. Did she acquiesce to the slave trade by not denouncing it in Mansfield Park, where the titular estate is owned by a sugar plantation owner? Or was she a covert abolitionist for naming it after the reformist judge Lord Mansfield who described slavery as so odious? One cant be sure, and these debates will go on forever. There will always be those on the far left and far righthe alt-right includedand others on the make who will try to refashion Austen in their own ideological image, but as Humberstall would no doubt assure us, the old maid doesnt need protecting. Shed certainly scorn anything as fatuous as a safe space.

It should be a truth universally acknowledged that anyone at any point on the political spectrum can derive pleasure and laughter and wisdom from Austens sharp and beautiful prose, her moral plots, her sly humor, and her lethal insight into human nature. Take that one devastating line from Emma that so thoroughly exposes societal hypocrisy: The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed. As Humberstall says wonderingly, someow Jane put it down all so naked it made you ashamed.

Published in 1924, Kiplings ode to Englands Jane was rendered all the more poignant by the tragic circumstances it had grown out of. In September 1915, after Kiplings beloved son John went missing in action and was presumed dead, it was Austens novels that brought the grieving family some small measure of comfort. On those long and unbearable war evenings, after the slow drawing down of blinds, Kipling read aloud to his wife Carrie and their daughter, bringing them, in Carries words great delight. Austen saw them through their tight place just as she would see Humberstall through his.

America is in a bit of a tight place of its own today. What better time to return to Jane Austen?

Nina Martyris is a freelance journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.

Read this article:
Alt-Right Austen? - The American Conservative

Yes, I am now a globalist cuck. No questions. Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Last night, left-of-center Twitter was mostly aghast at Donald Trumps decision to launch air strikes on a Syrian air base. It is, after all, scary how quickly his administration did a complete 180 on the question of intervention in Syria perhaps the most dramatic data point yet suggesting that the White House is inhabited by someone who should have never been entrusted with these sorts of life-and-death experiences.

One silver lining, though, came from watching alt-right personality after alt-right personality theatrically renounce Trump for having taken an action thats very much in line with the entrenched Washington ideology of, well, cuck globalism that the alt-right hates so passionately reckless foreign-policy engagement largely driven by a desire to do whatever Israel wants.

It felt like all the big names were coming out to slag Trump:

There was a lot of gleeful liberal and #NeverTrump conservative retweeting, a lot of, See? These idiots have been bamboozled (I may have partaken). There was even a video:

But all of this should be seen not as a shocking parting of ways, but as a sensible move for the media personalities of the alt-right. Renouncing Trump, and eventually abandoning him, might actually be the most advantageous play for alt-right celebrities trying to maintain their peculiar online kingdoms, while handling the weird ramifications of having won.

The incentives for the alt-right, of course, differ from the incentives for the mainstream right. In the days to come, it is very unlikely that Fox News will be devoting much airtime to criticism of Trumps decision. Rather, the most likely narrative will be that Trump has replaced Obamas weakness with strength, that finally someone has punished Bashar al-Assad for his brutal inhumanity (left unmentioned will be the fact that until early yesterday, the Trump administration had taken a very similar line to the Obama administration).

So while its popular to conflate the alt-right and the mainstream right say, the core GOP base they really are two different beasts. The mainstream right will continue to support Trump because it is vested in the future of the GOP, and Trump is a GOP president. The alt-right, on the other hand, has different goals and allegiances in mind. Here are three main reasons its tactically smart for the alt-rights big names to renounce Trump, if not ditch him entirely.

1. It gets them attention. One thing all the biggest alt-right accounts have in common is that they view virality as the most important goal. They are constantly growing their brands, growing their followers, and trying to poke their way into every conversation. Figures like Mike Cernovich and MicroChip openly acknowledge that theyre not concerned with whether what they tweet is true they just want those retweets and likes. Suffice it to say, it is hard for them to resist tweeting opinions that will be widely shared not just by fellow alt-righters, but by mainstream journalists who are scratching their heads and saying, Hmm, there is a mutiny afoot.

2. It allows them to stay in the opposition. Those on the alt-right are, like Trump, not particularly sophisticated policy thinkers. Theyre more into resentful grunts about how immigrants are bad, migration is a cancer on Western (read: white) society, and how cucks control everything. From this stance, it is much easier to criticize powerful politicians than to support them.

This angle is particularly relevant when it comes to foreign policy, because its simply laughable for anyone to have thought Trump wasnt going to engage in foreign misadventures.

Trump not only treated the entire Muslim world as potential enemies of the U.S., he also openly called for the murder of terrorists families. Its very hard to hold these stances while also being an isolationist. The alt-right simply ignored this during the campaign, aggressively painting Trump as a noninterventionist alternative to a hawkish Hillary Clinton. So from the point of view of the alt-right, supporting Trump during the campaign but renouncing him now that hes in office allows them to maintain a stance of general disdain for, again, those globalist cucks who run foreign policy a stance that is vital for their brand.

3. More specifically, denouncing Trump allows the alt-right to continue fueling conspiracy theories about how globalists (read: Jews) control everything. Anti-Semitism is a cornerstone of the alt-rights beliefs, particularly on foreign policy. Sometimes, this is explicit, as in the case of Baked Alaska tweeting openly about the Jewish question. Other times, it is ever-so-thinly veiled in the form of the alt-rights obsession with the globalists and neocons who ostensibly control everything behind the scenes. Now, there are obviously legitimate critiques to be made of neoconservatism and its disastrous legacy, but it simply doesnt take much time mucking about in the alt-right swamplands to see that there is a lot of coded anti-Semitism going on there.

If youre the sort of person who wants to believe that a cabal of Jews control the U.S. military arsenal, or for whom its brand-convenient to spread those beliefs, Trumps decision to attack Syria is great news. It can be quite effectively framed as, Well, we wanted to believe Trump was a true reformer, but unfortunately the (((foreign-policy establishment))) got to him, too. It allows you to enjoy the benefits of being a provocateur who supported Trump when it appeared unlikely he would win, and then who criticized Trump once he was in power all despite the fact that there was never any reason to think Trump had any interest in a Ron Paulian foreign policy.

In fact, versions of this are already popping up:

The outsiderism really is key here. Remember that despite the noxious anti-Semitism and racism of the alt-right, the movement has always tried to maintain a pranky, anti-establishment feel. Its much more difficult to retain that feel when your man is in charge, running everything and bombing other countries. Much as the GOP itself learned that in certain ways its less fun to hold power than to criticize power, the alt-right, in its own way, seems to be internalizing the same lesson.

Dude Goes on Vacation With 9 Strangers Because Their Friend With the Same Name Bailed

She wrongly referred to the meme as her favorite GIF.

Hes working on driverless cars.

The driver filmed the passenger yelling and kicking his back seat via a dashboard camera.

The alt-right benefits greatly from adopting the stance of an outsider. Trump is no longer an outsider, as his Syria decision helps to demonstrate.

Its the software that matters most.

When one Joe McGrath couldnt go to Spain, his friends found a Joe McGrath 2.0 on Facebook to replace him.

Thirty-something developers looking to build the next big thing are consulting high-school and college students to learn what works.

In 2013, Trump warned the United States not to attack Syria.

The text-to-caption feature is pretty good, though.

One of the alt government accounts seems to have touched a nerve.

The stunt comes one day after Pepsi pulled its tone-deaf ad.

Why all the electronic stuff in your life are suddenly so desperate to start up a conversation.

Just pinch.

A new meme has sprung up, mocking Facebook for copying Snapchats Stories feature.

The most satisfying way to rid your computer of crumbs.

Once an image is removed, Facebook will use new photo-matching technology to keep it from getting re-posted.

A new social network offers a respite from online toxicity, mostly because few are on it.

A new story about one of the leading pro-Trump Twitter figures shows that its hard work being a #MAGA troll.

Twitter had plenty to say about Kendall Jenner handing a can of Pepsi to a police officer at a protest.

See the rest here:
It Makes Sense for the Alt-Right to Start Abandoning Trump - New York Magazine

Is Jane Austen an icon of Americas white-supremacist alliance? That was the startling assertion made in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Nicole Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado. Wright noted that Austens name had popped up in several alt-right websites, leading her to surmise that these groups were enamored of the rectorsbrilliant spinster daughter, because to them she was a symbol of sexual purity and standard-bearer of a vanished white traditional culture.

Essentially, white nationalists see Austens pastoral, white, Christian world with its parsons, picnics, debutantes, and redcoats as a validation of their ideology of a racially pure ethno-state where women know their place and immigrants arent welcome. They want to Make America Austen Again, never mind that it never was.

The whole connection seems belabored, and the Austen references Wright cites from alt-right websites are too random to sustain any substantial commentary on Austen and her reactionary readers. Nevertheless, the mere idea of the boys at Breitbart palling with Austen was enough to give liberal Janeites an attack of the vapors.

But hold those smelling saltsand the outrage. This is not the first time that reactionaries have sung hosannas to Austen, nor will it be the last. Who can forget that one of her most famous admirers was the arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling? Glory, love, and honor unto Englands Jane! he wrote, in a verse aglow with warm national pride.

Kipling, of course, is far too complex, compassionate, and protean a writer to be reduced to an alt-rightist. But there can be no doubt that his imperialist and racial views shaded in that direction. Kiplings name and poems pop up on alt-right forums with far more frequency than Austens. Which is unsurprising given that his lifelong cri de coeur was the White Mans civilizing mission, a cause he continued to stubbornly champion long after it had become embarrassingly unfashionable to do so. After the First World War, as his reputation declined thanks to his deranged anti-Hun propagandahe demanded that Germans be referred to as it and not he or theyhe became the target of liberal lampoon and was disparaged as a bitter reactionary out of touch with the changing times.

How ironic, then, that it was during this most illiberal phase of his life that this jingo imperialist, to use Orwells phrase, wrote a short story that popularized the term Janeite, coined by his friend, the revered critic George Saintsbury, as a handy label for what he called the sect of Jane Austen fans. Saintsbury, a brilliant scholar and vinophile, was a high Anglican and arch-conservative who categorically railed against progressive political reforms, from universal franchise to Catholic Emancipation to pay raises for window cleaners. Orwell remarked of his belligerence that it takes a lot of guts to be openly such a skunk as that. But since Saintsbury invented the term Janeite and Kipling magnified it, every Austen fan who embracesthe moniker todayowes these two mena debt of gratitude.

Indeed, it was Kiplings short story The Janeites, a tour de force of comic pathos, that came to mind when I read Wrights article; or, rather, when I saw the waggish illustration accompanying it, of Austen sporting an improbable bonnet: a red Make America Great Again baseball cap. (The cap on its own, without the slogan, is an especially fitting accessory, since Austen actually mentions base-ball in Northanger Abbey as one of the games played by her tomboy heroine Catherine Moreland.) Kiplings titular Janeites are an equally improbable bunch: a group of hard-talking soldiers hunkered down in the muddy, rodent-infested trenches of World War I. There are five Janeites in all, most of whom arent particularly respectful of, or well-disposed to, women. Today, theyd almost certainly be called misogynists. The only woman whom they say a good word for, says the newbie Janeite, Humberstall, is this Jane.

The simple-minded Humberstall, who works as a mess waiter in the trenches, is the protagonist of the story and a quintessential Kipling hero: a conscientious, brave, and unsophisticated English soldier with a spit-and-polish work ethic, a patriot ready to die for flag and comrade. As it turns out, he is the only Janeite to survive; the other four are killed in a massive bombardment that destroys the Battery. We meet Humberstall after the war, when he has returned to his civilian job as a London hairdresser. Strong as an ox but with his mental faculties impaired by the war, he is an enormous man with bewildered eyes. It is Humberstall who relates, in thick and often impenetrable cockneyKipling was infuriatingly fond of idiolecthow, despite his low rank, he had been inducted into a secret society of Janeites comprising his senior officers. In actuality there was no secret society (just a group of ardent Austen aficionados), but Humberstall was conned into believing one existed. They even had a password, he says: Tilniz an trapdoors, which Janeites will recognize as Tilneys and trap-doors from Northanger Abbey. Being part of this select fellowship was a source of immense pride to him and the highpoint of his war experience. It was a appy little Group. I wouldnt a changed with any other, he says, invoking the happy ghost of Henry Vs band of brothers at the Battle of Agincourt.

With the war over, he finds himself returning nostalgically to all her six books now for pleasure. But, he grouses, becoming a Janeite wasnt easy. He had to read all her novelsno easy task for someone like him. Initially, he found it difficult to understand why these officers were obsessed by a little old maid ood written alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago. Even worse, her quiet novels werent adventurous, nor smutty, nor what youd call even interestin. Nor were her characters particularly exciting.

Humberstall cant spell (Lady Catherine de Bugg) or remember the names of characters or novel titles. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth of Persuasion are Miss Whats-her Name and Captain Tother Bloke, and Northanger Abbey is some Abbey or other. When one of the Janeites declares that Austen didnt die barren but produced a lawful issue named Enery James, he believes the novelist is her son. But Austen could not have asked for a more perceptive and loyal reader. He unwittingly pays her a tremendous compliment when he observes that her unexciting characters from a hundred years ago are just like people he comes across every day. The oily Reverend Collins from Pride and Prejudice, always on the make an lookin to marry money, reminds him of the troop-leader from his Boy Scout years. He could swear that the wholesale grocers imperious wife is the duplicate of Lady Catherine de Bugg. And as for his chatterbox aunt, shes about as vapid as Miss Bates from Emma, an old maid runnin about like a hen with er ead cut off, an her tongue loose at both ends.

As Humberstall continues to read Jane (the name by which he always refers to her), she gets under his skin and he goes from being an on-the-make Janeite to a true Janeite. In the wake of the bombardment, he is sneaked onto an overcrowded hospital train by a bony nurse who is so delighted to learn that he, too, is an Austen fan that she declares shed happily kill a brigadier to make room for him. It is with great feeling, therefore, that he bestows on Jane the soldiers highest accolade: Theres no one to touch Jane when youre in a tight place. Gawd bless er, whoever she was.

This gauche cart-horse of a man, who lives with his mother and has never had a relationship with a woman, is an unlikely Janeite. With his working-class roots and cockney accent, he would be a misfit among the trendy, tea-drinking, Bath-visiting, costume-wearing, Regency-fetishizing Janeites of today. We dont know what his politics are but it doesnt really matterand that is Kiplings whole point. There is no one kind of Janeite; no one owns her.

Theres nothing new about trying to appropriate Austen politically. As Freya Johnston wrote recently in the Prospect, Austen has been repackaged down the years as a radical, a prude and a saucepot, pro- and anti-colonial, a feminist and a downright bitch. Did she acquiesce to the slave trade by not denouncing it in Mansfield Park, where the titular estate is owned by a sugar plantation owner? Or was she a covert abolitionist for naming it after the reformist judge Lord Mansfield who described slavery as so odious? One cant be sure, and these debates will go on forever. There will always be those on the far left and far righthe alt-right includedand others on the make who will try to refashion Austen in their own ideological image, but as Humberstall would no doubt assure us, the old maid doesnt need protecting. Shed certainly scorn anything as fatuous as a safe space.

It should be a truth universally acknowledged that anyone at any point on the political spectrum can derive pleasure and laughter and wisdom from Austens sharp and beautiful prose, her moral plots, her sly humor, and her lethal insight into human nature. Take that one devastating line from Emma that so thoroughly exposes societal hypocrisy: The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed. As Humberstall says wonderingly, someow Jane put it down all so naked it made you ashamed.

Published in 1924, Kiplings ode to Englands Jane was rendered all the more poignant by the tragic circumstances it had grown out of. In September 1915, after Kiplings beloved son John went missing in action and was presumed dead, it was Austens novels that brought the grieving family some small measure of comfort. On those long and unbearable war evenings, after the slow drawing down of blinds, Kipling read aloud to his wife Carrie and their daughter, bringing them, in Carries words great delight. Austen saw them through their tight place just as she would see Humberstall through his.

America is in a bit of a tight place of its own today. What better time to return to Jane Austen?

Nina Martyris is a freelance journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.

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