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Some members of alt-right movement are hoisting up Jane Austen as an icon hoping to equate their vision of white nationalism with a beloved literary icon.

By comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cozy England of Austen a much-beloved author with a centuries-long fandom and an unebbing academic following the alt-right normalizes itself in the eyes of ordinary people, writes Nicole M. Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, in a March 12 Chronicle of Higher Education article.

Wright noticed the trend after right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos referenced the famous first line of Pride and Prejudice, turning it into a dig at ugly feminists.

As a Victorian novelist might have put it, it is a truth universally acknowledged that an ugly woman is far more likely to be a feminist than a hot one, Yiannopoulos wrote.

Some alt-right writers use Austen as shorthand for defiance of the sexual revolution, according to Wright.

Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, evoked Austen while praising Taylor Swift and criticizing Miley Cyrus. Anglin dubbed Taylor Swift an Aryan goddess.

Its incredible really that shes surrounded by these filthy, perverted Jews, and yet she remains capable of exuding 1950s purity, femininity, and innocence, said Anglin. She is the anti-Miley. While Miley is out having gang-bangs with colored gentlemen, she is at home with her cat reading Jane Austen.

Reporting on the phenomenon, a New York Times writer observed, Austens work has been cited before in political debates.

In this case, some alt-right admirers who want to associate their ideology with a household name celebrate Austens novels as depicting a lost white world.

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

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Jane Austen 'Alt-Right' Icon? The Forward - Forward

The "alt-right" - a movement of internet-savvy, far-right nationalists in the United States - likes to provoke. Its members gather online, exchanging extremist views on blogging platforms and message boards, sharing racist memes and trolling their ideological opponents on social media.

The latest alt-right controversy follows the group's apparent appropriation of the works of one of England's best loved novelists - Jane Austen.

Educated racists

Why the sudden neo-Nazi interest in literary classics, you might ask. It could have something to do with the fact that, in a bid to distinguish themselves from their white supremacist "skinhead" cousins, alt-righters likes to profess intellectual superiority.

"Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred," Milo Yiannopoulos, former editor for alt-right platform Breitbart News, wrote in 2016. "The alternative right are a much smarter group of people - which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They're dangerously bright."

Milo Yiannopoulos described alt-right members as "dangerously bright"

The far-right's recently acquired taste for Austen was brought to light by Nicole M. Wright, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado. Her curiosity was piqued after hearing Yanniopoulos referencethe 18th-century author. When she then "ventured into the mire" of alt-right online hangouts, she found that Yiannopoulos was not alone in linking Austen's English idyll to a white supremacist utopia.

"To my surprise, invocations of Austen popped up in many alt-right online venues," Wright wrote in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. "I found that there are several variations of alt-right Jane Austen: 1) symbol of sexual purity; 2) standard-bearer of a vanished white traditional culture; and 3) exception that proves the rule of female inferiority."

One blogger wrote of the return to an "Austen-like" world with "traditional marriage la P&P [Pride and Prejudice]" being imposed in an "ethnostate."

Reading between the lines?

Devoney Looser, a professor of English at Arizona State University, believes it is possible to "misread" Austen's novels as being supportive of "traditional values"when it comes to politics and marriage.

"I suppose you could imagine her fiction as offering a form of escapism to a fantastical, supposedly uncomplicated past, when men were men, women were women, and everyone stayed in his own social class," Looser told DW.

"The reason I think that is a misreading of her fiction is that it completely ignores the ways in which she's a social critic who uses irony to expose the abuses by those in power."

Keira Knightley in the 2005 film adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice"

Members of the alt-right understand the importance of marketing. Why scare away potential sympathizers by quoting known Nazi ideologues, when they can point to the whitewashed, class-bound world of Austen's novels and say: See how things were in the good old days?

As Wright points out, with this kind of approach the alt-right can "normalize itself in the eyes of ordinary people."

Jane Austen's politics

Of course, how Austen herself intended her texts to be read is another question.

"Conservatives and progressives have been fighting over how to read Austen's fiction for a century and a half," saidLooser, who has been researching Austen's connection to politics for her upcoming book, "The Making of Jane Austen."

"Suffragettes were marching through the streets of London in support of women's rights, carrying a Jane Austen banner, and at the same time elite men in private clubs were arguing that her genius was in her describing a limited world that celebrated women's confinement to the domestic sphere. That's quite a political contrast."

Looser addsthat the earliest reference she has found to a "directly political fight over Austen" took place in 1872. "Members of the British parliament invoked Austen's name on opposite sides of the question of expanding women's right to vote," she explained.

"A conservative MP suggested Austen would never have wanted any such thing, because she was firmly on the side of traditional gender roles, but a liberal MP said surely Austen would be on the side of their era's learned women who sought to expand the franchise."

Austen was invoked by both sides of the women's suffrage debate

As Looser explains, there is also a "robust debate" surrounding Austen's fiction and its treatment of colonialism and slavery. "There I see more evidence of her as a liberal critic of those practices and institutions, not as a conservative apologist for them," she added.

Classics out of context

Of course, Austen is not the first author to be posthumously dragged into modern debates on race and gender. Classic works of literatureare regularly re-examined through a contemporary political lens, decades or even centuries after the era in which they werewritten.

Looser also points out that Austen wrote "fiction, not treatises."

"Even if this means the implications of her fiction are more politically slippery, I'm grateful for that," she added. "It's far more interesting to read fiction that provokes us to think about how and why we might think and feel, rather than telling us what we must think and feel."

"One mistake a few people make is in reading Austen's brilliant 'It is a truth universally acknowledged' line as a moral dictum," saidLooser. "It's not. It's a trenchant piece of social commentary and social criticism, when read in the context of the novel as a whole."

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White pride and prejudice: Why the alt-right has adopted Jane Austen - Deutsche Welle

Various journalists have helped form a narrative of sorts about the identity of this shadowy, boisterous alt-right movement. The alt-right is childish and vicious, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing other than the message-board histrionics of aggrieved young men in their parents basement.

From what I can see, this narrative does apply to a degree. Where various alt-right voices have articulated ethnocentrism, outright racism, misogyny, decadence, and a kind of juvenile hatred, among other vile stances, we should offer condemnation in no uncertain terms.

I do wonder, however, if the media has missed at least one true thing regarding the alt-right. The movement (if we can call it that) may often prove inchoate and even inarticulate, but behind the memes and coded language, there seems to be a massed sentiment. It is this: men feel left behind.

America is divided today on this matter and its import. Many folks, particularly those of a more progressive bent, see men as whining over lost cultural capital. Once, men had it good; now theyre forced to compete in an even playing field, and theyre falling on their faces. Sorry for the stacked deck, guyshow does it feel, losers?

Others see men struggling, observe them falling precipitously behind in earning college degrees and other achievements such as earnings for unmarrieds, watch them leaving their wives and children then violently lashing out, and begin to wonder if men need something besides elaborate gender theory or a dismissive long-form hot-take. Maybe men, particularly young men, need help.

This second group does not wish to cut men a blank check for their ill behavior. Actually, this groupa diverse and motley crew of religious groups, libertarians, and people who care about the future of civilizationwishes to hold men to a high standard. In other words, this is the group that most wants to hold men to account, that most takes their failings seriously. It is the group that dismisses mens concerns with gentle remonstrance, that accommodates men by dumbing things down for them, that unwittingly ends up doing them terrific harm.

Because it is not friendly to them, many men do not like postmodern society. They have been taught they have no innate call to leadership of home and church, and accordingly have lost the script for their lives. They have been encouraged to step back from being a breadwinner, and do not know what they are supposed to do with their lives.

They have been told that they talk too loudly and spread their legs too wide, and thus do not fit in with a feminized society. They may be the product of a divorced home, and may have grown up without an engaged father, so possess both pent-up rage and a disappearing instinct. They did nothing to choose their biological manliness, but are instructed to attend sensitivity training by virtue of it. They recognizerightlythat politically correct culture constrains free thought and free speech, and so they opt out from it.

But here is where the common narrative of the alt-right and related groups makes a major mistake. Men are disappearing, but they are not vanishing. They are moving out of the mainstream, and into the shadows.

Many men do not want this. Many men do not want to fall back. Many men want a challenge. They want to work. It is not in their nature to sit back; men on average have 1,000 percent more testosterone than women. Men know they are not superheroes, but they watch superhero movies because they wish in the quietness of their own lives to be a hero to someone, even just one wife and a few children. Men have a glory hunger that is unique and in many cases undeniable. For the right cause, men are not only willing to sacrifice, and even die, for the right cause they are glad to die.

But such discussion is not the lingua franca of our day. Young men have these desires coursing through their blood, but very few outlets in normal American life help them to understand such hard-wired drives. Those voices who do offer such a view face tremendous pushback and retributive hostility.

As a result, many younger men today do not know how to voice their instincts. This is at least partly why so many have adopted ironic signifiers for their frustrated ambitions and impolitic viewsfrogs, memes, and catchwords like fail. What young men cannot say in plain speech they say through an ironic graphic.

It is easy, and right, to identify where aspects of the alt-right are plainly misogynistic. But tying an entire people group to its worst excesses allows for the full-scale dismissal of a diverse array of concerns and experiences. This has happened with Donald Trumps voters, for example; according to many journalists, theyre all either racist or angry about the loss of the halcyon days. The media executes the same lazy move with the angry young men of the alt-right: theyre idiotic little boys. We have nothing to hear from them, nothing to learn, nothing to consider.

This is a foolish instinct. But it is not only that: it is a dangerous one. It leaves you susceptible to groundswells that sweep over a culture seemingly without warningthe Tea Party, Brexit, Trump. Many folks on the progressive side assume that because they have won the college campus and now dominate the urban centers of power that the cultural game is over.

But what looks like a fortress-grade progressive order is really an unstable element, as we have seen several times over. The ideological insurgency will never have Ivy League degrees to award, coveted Beltway bylines to dole out, or global-power conference invites to issue. But the insurgency is finding its audience, and the audience is destabilizing and even remaking the public-square, and all without central coordination or control of leading cultural institutions.

You thought Bane was a movie character; turns out hes a political avatar.

I do not write this analysis as one who supports these developments generally or the alt-right specifically. As with every shadow venture of young and aimless men, they trouble me deeply. Where young men lurk in corners and whisper in the dark, we should always be concerned, whether its in your leafy suburban neighborhood or on a deep-web message-board.

We can debate the extent to which the perceptions of angry young men are reality. What we cannot debateif we care about them, that isis that many men are angry, flailing, and dangerously volatile today.

We will not find an easy solution to this troubled situation. The public square is roiled and shows no signs of calming down soon. True, restoring the family will greatly aid in the nurture and care of young men. Sure, strengthening the economy and putting men to work will help. Yes, tabling the speech codes and thought codes of the secular academy will bring some men back to the table.

But men need a deeper solution than this. They need something more than a message-board movement to join. They need a call to maturity, to repentance, to greatness, to leadership, to courage, to self-sacrifice on behalf of women and children. They need a hero: not a political performance-artist, but a true hero, a savior who, unlike a fallen culture, leaves no repentant manor womanbehind.

Owen Strachan is the author of The Colson Way: Loving Your Neighbor and Living with Faith in a Hostile World (Thomas Nelson). He is a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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The Alt-Right Is What Happens When Society Marginalizes Men - The Federalist

It's a shitty time to have any kind of identification with the prefix "alt." Richard Spencer and other Nazi-types started using "alt-right" in 2010 to refer to their racist, misogynist bullshit. And instead of ignoring their hate, it became apotheosized in the election of Donald Trump, and we were subjected to endless features about Spencer and the alt-right.

Now there's been a spate of stories talking about the "alt-left" and even the "alt-center."

Though some right-wing trolls have been trying to use "alt-left" as an online insult for a while now, James Wolcott's Vanity Fair story "Why the Alt-Left is a Problem, Too" made the term stick.

Wolcott's piece lumped a wide variety of Twitter-types as "alt-left" in a way that felt somewhat refreshing. (Who hasn't been super annoyed by Michael Tracy and recent Glenn Greenwald being hyper skeptical about Russia but almost nothing else?)

But it was also annoying. My writing regularly runs in a number of papers that have been called "alt-weeklies" or the "alternative press" for decades. I was the arts editor and then managing editor (and now editor at large) at Baltimore City Paper, an alt that was founded in 1977.

Wolcott knows all of this. A great writer, he got his start when he left Baltimore in 1972the year I was bornto try to turn a letter from Norman Mailer into a job. When the Village Voice finally hired Wolcotthe just hung around the office for a long timehe did a lot to invent the kind of cultural criticism that would come to define alts.

So I was interested if he thought about that history as he wrote this piece for the far-slicker pages of VF. I wrote him on Twitter and then sent him a couple emails. Eventually, he responded to my questions.

"'Alt' is shorthand for alternative, and has become a euphemistic prefix'alt-right' sounds a lot more innocuous than a white supremacist, misogynist dudebro movement, and takes up way less space and breath," Wolcott said. "The 'alt-left' is more of a hodge-podge of die-hard socialists, embittered Berniebros, Occupy nostalgists and grad-school Guevaras. What links them is a loathing of liberals in general, Hillary in particular and a mystic dread of the Deep State."

There is a lot to unpack in that and I'll come back to it in a minute. But I was curious if he saw any connection between what he and Mailer did at the Voice with his use of "alt" in this piece. Like, one of the reasons people started papers like that was a sort of hatred of the liberal establishment.

"Mailer was keeping his hand in and blowing off steam in his White Negro phase and I was writing about pop culture, which I had grown up and Mailer hadn't," Wolcott responded.

OK, so I wasn't gonna get anywhere with that.

I should say I also tried to contact Richard Spencer numerous times. I told him I did not subscribe to the view of journalism that required me to hide my feelings and I would be honest and tell him I despise everything he stands for and he will despise me. But I also had to admit he had taken this prefix that I'd had some attachment to and hijacked, if not destroyed, it.

But he didn't respond. Still, in what I got from Wolcott, there is something that illuminates the alt-right as well. When he defines the alt-left through an aversion to the establishment liberals and the "Deep State," he hits on the thing that defines "alt" at the moment. And it fits in with the thinking of Aleksandr Dugin, the arch-nationalist, ultra-right philosopher sometimes called "Putin's Rasputin"think Bannon with a beard, if Bannon actually wrote books.

In the Fourth Political Theory, Dugin argues that liberalism is the first political theory of modernism. Communism was the second and fascism the third. But once fascism and communism fell, liberalism changed, becoming not only one ideology but the only ideology, the "end of history" as Francis Fukuyama put it, postliberalism as Dugin has it, and neoliberalism to the rest of us.

"It is impossible to determine where the Right and the Left are located in relation to postliberalism," he writes. "There are only two positions: compliance (the centre) and dissent (the periphery)."

Dude is scary as fuck, but that does offer a pretty good explanation of what is meant right now by "alt" whether on the right or the left (as well as the crossover between Bernie Bros and Trump Trolls).

And there, in this idea of dissent, we also have the "alt" of the alt-weeklies.

"Since our origin as the underground press, alt-weeklies have been just thatthe dissidents that would feel right at home in the Island of Misfit Toys; the truth seekers that never treat a press release as gospel; and the story tellers that perpetually go against the grain and are never afraid to pull back the curtain and hold those pulling the strings accountable," City Weekly Editor Enrique Limn says.

But the fact that neither Wolcott nor Spencer or any of the other people talking about alts of any sort don't acknowledge the existence of the alternative press is part of the problemthey are all still simply striving to be at the center, away from the periphery, as Wolcott did when he moved from Baltimore to New York.

After the election, pundits lamented the fact that reporters for the mainstream media are located in three or four cities and missed everything happening in what they allegedly term "flyover country." Like these pundits, I too lament the death of the small daily. But I also acknowledge that those papers, like the mainstream media in general, have a lot of problems. We have always been an alternative to what is now dubbed the MSM (mainstream media).

I decided to write to some of my colleagues in the alternative press and see how they defined alt.

As an alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader has always positioned itself as an antidote to the daily papers, one that questions the accepted narratives around all manner of issues, whether it be police shootings or public housing, Editor Jake Malooley said. Chris Faraone, of DigBoston, writes alt-media means covering stuff that no one is covering and/or covering stuff correctly that other people are covering wrong.

Its not using alternative facts, like Kellyanne Conway, but rather digging up facts that the mainstream might ignore. Or thinking about them differently. Topics the dailies dont touch; takes and perspectives the dailies dont have, Kevin Allman, of New Orleans Gambit, replied.

For Judy Davidoff, editor of Isthmus in Madison, part of what others get wrong is in the very framing of the debate in terms competing opinions, he said/ she said, instead of looking for what is actually true. If sources on either side of an issue offer two versions of events, we try to figure out what is true. So I think what we are seeing in mainstream media nowi.e. reporters calling out false statements as falseis something we've tried to do for a while.

Katherine Coplen, editor of Nuvo in Indianapolis, agrees. For us, an alt-weekly represents an alternative way of annotating the status quothe truest way, the shine-a-light way, the way that speaks truth to power, she said.

I often tell people being an alternative news journalist means I strive to report the truthnot balancewith no concern about what might impact my economic and popularity status, Mark Sabbatini, editor of Icepeople, wrote.

But James Allen of Random Length News, spells out the problem for the alts. Weve always been going against the dailies and the cable newsnow, since they are under attack by Trump, we are in the tricky position of defending them.

It's hard to argue that the MSM doesn't have a bias in reporting, as we in the alternative press have maintained for decades, and now defend them as being the trusted purveyors of the real news, he wrote.

For Matthew Steele, of Iowa City's Little Village, it is a willingness to take a standand be transparent about it, that defines alt-media, which, he says, is "not just recording what's happening in our community, but actively working to change it to move the moral center forward in accordance with the values we transparently espouse and advocate for."

That transparency is important. Writers at alt-weeklies often reject the "view from nowhere," instead choosing to connect with their cities. When Baltimore City Paper was bought by the daily a couple years ago, I noted: "An alt-weekly has a staff of paid reporters and editors whose jobs are not only to know the city, but to love it, to hate it and to be an integral part of it, cajoling, ridiculing, praising and skewering city officials, artists and entrepreneurs alike."

Perhaps we need to take the formula of these papersthere are more than 100 in the Association of Alternative Newsmediaand apply it not just to the city, but to the country.

If we're really looking for an alternative to the mainstream media, we'd do a hell of a lot better if we listened more to alt-weekly reporters and less to people like Richard Spencer and even James Wolcott.

Send feedback to comments@cityweekly.net.

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The Kids Are Alt-Right - Salt Lake City Weekly - Salt Lake City Weekly

The Augusta-based Community Foundation for the Central Savannah River Area severed ties with an organization tied to a white nationalist in 2015 after discovering the groups mission and purpose, the nonprofits President and CEO Shell K. Berry said in a statement.

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that the foundation was the largest single donor to the National Policy Institute after white nationalist Richard Spencer provided the groups recent tax returns to the newspaper.

Established in 1995, the Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that administers over 200 funds of several different types, such as scholarship funds to memorialize a loved one and designated funds for specific organizations such as churches, or specific causes.

The foundation sent a grand total of $25,000 over three years to the National Policy Institute, which has become well-known among the alt-right, a phrase Spencer popularized, and hosted a November event where attendees were shown on video raising their right arms in a Nazi salute as Spencer spoke of America as a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity.

The groups Augusta ties date to at least 2006, when Augusta real estate investor Louis R. Andrews, who died in 2011, registered the National Policy Institute, Inc., at his Washington Road address with the Georgia Secretary of State. Funding to the organization were made at the direction of a single individual and other foundation money did not go Spencers group, Berry said. She would not name the donor.

Berry said the foundations involvement with the directed funds to the National Policy Institute ended with the final donation of $10,169 the foundation reported on its 2015 tax return, according to Berrys statement.

That year, management became aware that one of its funds was recommending grants in support of the National Policy Institute, she said.

Upon discovery of the mission and purpose of the NPI, Foundation management took immediate action to disassociate with NPI and as of July 2015, this donor-advised fund no longer exists at the Community Foundation for the CSRA, Berry said.

Independent of that one donor, any individual, organization or corporation that contributed to the (Foundation) can be assured that no additional monies given to the (Foundation) were granted to the (National Policy Institute), she said Tuesday when questioned about the donation.

The Foundation went on that year (2015) to modify policies to prevent any grantmaking that is inconsistent with our organization, she said.

As a public charity, the Foundation is required to report much of its giving, but allows donors to remain confidential and create anonymous funds, according to its web site. The LA Times article names the Masters Tournament as one of the foundations donors.

The Augusta Chronicle reported in December a Foundation endowment created by the tournament and Augusta National Golf Club was worth almost $15 million and had funded $7.5 million in in grants over the last 20 years.

Other local organizations that have established Foundation funds through which they award grants include Women In Philanthropy of the CSRA and the Border Bash Foundation, according to prior Chronicle reports.

The Foundations 2015 tax return shows millions in charitable contributions through its unrestricted grants fund, which allows not-for-profit organizations to compete for grants, and through its donor-advised funds, which allow donors to specify where the funds go, and through other types of funds.

The years more than 100 recipients ranged from Americas Warrior Partnership, which received $2.9 million in donor-advised fund grants to groups such as Augusta Locally Grown, Boys and Girls Club of the CSRA, Savannah Riverkeeper and the Salvation Army, which received unrestricted grants fund grants.

Reach Susan McCord at (706) 823-3215 or susan.mccord@augustachronicle.com.

Originally posted here:
Foundation stopped giving to 'alt-right' movement leader in 2015 ... - The Augusta Chronicle