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NEW YORK Back in 1971, the father of the American War on Drugs drew a connection between Jews and cannabis.

You know its a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish, president Richard Nixon said. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them? I suppose its because most of them are psychiatrists.

Most Jews are not psychiatrists, of course, just as most marijuana law reform activists are not Jewish. Nixon, however, wasnt alone in calling Jews out for their involvement in cannabis policy.

An anti-Semitic article published by alt-right website The Daily Stormer in late November entitled Weed Kikes Attacking Jeff Sessions! denigrates a number of Jewish activists by name for opposing President Donald Trumps nomination of Jeff Sessions for US Attorney General, a position that directs federal drug law enforcement.

The Jews come at you from every angle. Here they are coming at you from the weed lmao [sic] angle, the article says. The marijuana legalization agenda is entirely Jew.

The Daily Stormer, recently ranked the USs top hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), took its name from Der Strmer, a Nazi newspaper started by Julius Streicher, who was later hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg. SPLC calls the website a malignant presence in the real world.

Andrew Anglin, who runs the Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, wearing a pro-Donald Trump hat after endorsing the Republican frontrunner. (Wikipedia/BFG101/CC BY SA-4.0)

The Daily Stormer article, one of many displays of anti-Semitism that seem to be gaining traction in America, doesnt merely attack Jews for being Jewish: The pretense of this article is that association with Jews is inherently a smear against the drug reform movement.

It sets a dangerous precedent, though its argument itself isnt very strong. The story names a prominent Jewish cannabis activist, Adam Eidinger from Washington, DC, who led protests against Sessions nomination, and later goes on to describe a cannabis-themed seder that took place in Portland, Oregon last year.

Perhaps the articles strongest or most accurate point is acknowledging a Jew group that considers legalizing drugs as part of the Jew agenda of Tikkun olam (fixing the world).

There are indeed many Jewish cannabis activists (and many Jewish psychiatrists). Including those interviewed for this article, many of these activists propose that drug policy reform really does align with Jewish values like tikkun olam and standing up against oppression.

The alt-right may be using anti-Semitism to discredit marijuana law reform and clearly the marijuana legalization agenda is not entirely Jew, as the article states, but Jewish morality does play a role for some of the Jewish activists who are motivated by social justice.

Sessions, who was recently confirmed as US attorney general, has been hostile toward cannabis and thinks marijuana law reform is a tragic mistake. He has said that good people dont smoke marijuana. According to 1986 Senate committee testimony, the former Alabama senator once said he thought the Ku Klux Klan were okay until learning that they smoked pot.

Sessions has also criticized former president Barack Obamas administration for not enforcing federal prohibition in the now 28 states that legalized medical or recreational marijuana.

Sen. Jeff Sessions arrives to testify at his confirmation hearing to be attorney general of the US before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 10, 2017, in Washington, DC. (AFP/Molly Riley)

With Sessions confirmation, drug policy reformers are worried he will undermine Americas fast-growing cannabis industry and progressive trend toward more lenient state policies.

Anti-Semitic slurs against Jewish people for being drug policy reformers is an attempt to delegitimize drug policy reform through anti-Semitism

To throw anti-Semitic slurs against Jewish people for being drug policy reformers is an attempt to delegitimize drug policy reform through anti-Semitism, says Eidinger, founder of DCMJ.org, which helped legalize cannabis in the city of Washington, DC. The Daily Stormer article features a photo of Eidinger holding a bong.

It gets scary when the most die-hard Trump partisans, who happen to be neo-Nazis, are coming after you, Eidinger says.

Customers buy products at the Harvest Medical Marijuana Dispensary in San Francisco, California, April 20, 2016. (AP/Haven Daley)

Jewish Manhattan Assembly member Richard Gottfried, who originally proposed New York States medical marijuana program, says tikkun olam inspired him to advocate for reform. He now fears medical marijuana patients will suffer if Sessions attacks state policies.

I have definitely noticed in my unscientific sampling that Jews tend to enjoy their ganja

My views on marijuana and all public issues have been strongly influenced by my upbringing, which included Jewish values focusing on justice and personal responsibility for promoting a better world for all, says Gottfried. Of course, Judaism is not alone in upholding the value of healing the world.

When, for example, African Americans are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for pot, despite comparable rates of use with the rest of the US, marijuana law reform often falls under the greater social justice umbrella.

Marijuana buds drying at a pot farm in Northern California. Recreational marijuana use is legal in eight states. (Madison Margolin/Times of Israel)

I think its interesting that many of us who work in drug policy reform are Jewish, and I have definitely noticed in my unscientific sampling that Jews tend to enjoy their ganja, says Natalie Ginsberg, policy and advocacy manager at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

Jews who are impacted by generations of trauma or who suffer from anxiety may gravitate towards cannabis as medicine, Ginsberg says.

Also, personally, both cannabis and Judaism have empowered me to question things and see the greater context, so I can see why neo-Nazis would feel especially threatened by the combination, says Ginsberg.

In a political atmosphere that marginalizes Muslims, Mexicans, and other minorities, Jews are acutely sensitive to being scapegoated, and drugs are a scapegoat for all sorts of problems, says Rick Doblin, executive director of MAPS.

When you have a whole cultural system built on throwing people in jail for drug use that in many cases is not harmful, but beneficial, you have a massive scapegoating problem going on, says Dobin.

The seder plate at LeOrs inaugural Cannabis Seder included a marijuana leaf. (photo credit: Alain Sylvestre Media)

Roy Kaufman, co-host of a cannabis seder in Portland, Oregon, and mentioned in the Daily Stormer article, finds common ground between Jewish tradition and drug policy. The Passover story is one of bondage to freedom, he says, just as ending prohibition takes people out of bondage and into personal freedom, to choose whats best for their health.

Meanwhile, Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), a nonprofit advocating for reform, draws a connection between prohibition and Nazi Germany, where his grandfather had perished.

Any time the majority thinks that it needs to impose its particular morality on the minority, not just for our sake but their sake, thats trouble, Nadelmann says in an interview.

While many American Jews are not as directly impacted by the War on Drugs as people of color, many nonetheless feel a responsibility to act on behalf of those who are, says Amanda Reiman, DPAs former marijuana law and policy manager.

What we need is a proliferation of people who are willing to fight and defend the rights of people, even if theyre not directly affected by [the War on Drugs], and thats whats under attack in that article, she says. The reason were involved in drug policy is because of tikkun olam.

Protesters wearing white sheets shout at Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) as he arrives for his confirmation hearing to be the US attorney general on January 10, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP)

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Alt-right website tries to weed out Jews from drug reform - The Times of Israel

Aftonbladet/ZUMA Press/NewscomPewDiePie, the biggest Youtube star you've probably never heard of (especially if you're older than 30), just lost his Disney contracta source of millions of dollars in revenueover allegations of anti-Semitism.

It's an easy, even obvious, storyline for this season of Life as We Know It Right Now, given increasing awareness of the alt-right movement and its penchant for overt pro-Nazi displays. The kids are not alrightthey're flocking to their computers to share Pepe the frog memes and tell jokes about sending Jewish writers to the gas chambers. And on and on.

For many, PewDiePie's downfall will probably feel gratifying: yes, there are limits to how far this sort of behavior can progress. For others, his belated comeuppance is insufficient, and does nothing to address the toxicity of teenage (particularly white) male online culture. In a lengthy essay for BuzzFeed, writer Jacob Clifton laments "that 'edgelords,' the boys and men who group together online for the explicit proliferation of hate speech and misogyny, will almost inevitably keep pushing the line until they end up in a truly dark place."

"This is about understanding what lies beneath this dark side of the internet, and how to stop it," writes Clifton.

But Clifton's essay makes little effort to understand the phenomenon he's describing. And he offers absolutely no advice for how to stop it. Here's how his article ends:

PewDiePie is a symptom of a majority illness, but because he accidentally got rich, we seem content to let the buck stop with him. His downfall feels anti-capitalist, it feels nonconformist, it makes us feel all the things we love to feel when trying to prove we're better than. But the truth is that the soil this stuff grows in is the reality of our country and world, and we will go on encouraging this behavior, and these thoughts, until they bear their fruit.

The reason for that is terrible, and quite simple: because the whiny self-importance and self-indulgence of white male rage from Gamergate to Anonymous, WikiLeaks to the Fappening, all the proliferating forms of alt-right confusion and rage you couldn't possibly discern from that of even the least radical right is so repugnant that it's nearly impossible to see through. But we won't heal, and they won't heal, if we don't try. Their pain is pathetic, but watch how it spreads.

The reason Clifton doesn't actually offer a solution to this problem is probably because there isn't one: it's just so much broader, and more permanent, than Clifton notes here. Young men have always acted out in unpredictable and frustrating ways: the alt-right is just the current manifestation of "white male rage."

That's not an excuseI'm not saying boys will be boys as if it isn't a problem, because sometimes it is. Rather, I'm saying that boys doing stupid, irksome things has always been a problem. We don't really have any evidence that the problem is getting more substantialand I'd have a hard time believing that the average white male between the ages of 15 and 25 is worse behaved now than he was 50 years ago, given the decline in violence and crime in generalbut we're paying more attention to it now because it's chosen the form of an easy political narrative: ahhh, look at all the Nazi kids who love Trump!

When I was in high school, other boys loved to draw penises on everything. It's a weird fact, but there it is. If you left your notebook unsupervised, even for a moment, you would soon find it covered in dicks. Why a bunch of teenage boysall of whom insisted, loudly and frequently, that they weren't gaywould enjoy drawing pictures of the male reproductive organ mystified me at the time, as it still does today.

Teenage boys are probably still drawing dicks, but they're also writing #MAGA and Build the Wall and creating Pepe memes. Teachers call it the Trump effect, as if young men were perfectly well-behaved until Trump came along. Again, we don't know that bullying has gotten worse, and to the extent we can measure it, schoolyard bullying seems to be falling over time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

It's true that a certain kind of bullyingthe anti-Semitic, pro-Trump, alt-right kindis more noticeable than it was before. We probably shouldn't discount the possible political implications of this. It would be wrong, of course, to pretend that white nationalism isn't making any sort of comeback. But we also shouldn't pretend that the kids are doomed because they currently prefer a different kind of sick humor than they used to. Again, teenagers were always laughing at incredibly inappropriate thingsthat thing just happens to be PewDiePie's awful jokes, at the moment.

This was, essentially, the defense offered by PewDiePiereal name Felix Kjellberg, who made $15 million last year saying dumb things on the internet. Kjellberg is a blond-haired blue-eyed Swede, but as far as I can tell, he's not actually an anti-Semite, Trump supporter, alt-right, member, or Breitbart contributor. He landed himself in hot water because, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, he made as many as nine anti-Semitic jokes in his videos.

The following example is illustrative. There are online services that allow you to pay random people halfway around the world to do or say whatever you want. PewDiePie decided to test one of these services outlong story short, two tribal-looking fellows unfurled a banner that read "Death to All Jews" as PewDiePie exclaims "I didn't think they would actually do it." He recorded both thingsthe incident, and his own reactionand posted in on Youtube.

Funny? Not really. Offensive? Sure. Evidence of deep-seated anti-Semitic animus? Well, that might be a stretch. Here's how PewDiePie defended himself:

Mr. Kjellberg defended himself from criticism in a Jan. 17 video, saying "I think there's a difference between a joke and actual like... death to all Jews. If I made a video saying"Mr. Kjellberg then quickly cuts to a close-up of his face illuminated brightly"Hey guys, PewDiePie here. Death to all Jews, I want you to say after me: Death to all Jews. And, you know, Hitler was right. I really opened my eyes to white power. And I think it is time we did something about this." The video then zooms back out and he adds: "That is how they're essentially reporting this, as if that's what I was saying."

One gathers, if you believe PewDiePie's explanation, that he could have used any edgy statement, like "Bush did 9/11." Why can't anyone take a joke anymore? is the underlying theme.

I'm reminded of the most recent season of South Park (spoilers to follow). One of its main plots involved Gerald Broflovski being unmasked as an internet troll. He enjoys shrieking at people online, telling them to kill themselves, and photoshopping penises over their faces. Why? Because it's funny, he claims. Later, when other trolls try to recruit him into their group, he insists he isn't one of them. What they do to people is horrible and stupidhe's not like them at all. What Gerald does is funny, he claims. Still later, when the villain of the season attempts to troll the entire U.S., Gerald challenges him. Join me, the villain offers Gerald, and together we will troll the world. But Gerald is horrified by the villain's plans and kills him. "Fuck you," Gerald says. "What I do is fucking funny, bitch."

This gagGerald insisting that his actions are fundamentally different because his horrible trolling is funnyperfectly encapsulates the teenage male attitude, and PewDiePie's humor. Stupid, random, shitty things are selectively funny to kids, and always have been. There's no ideology here beyond typical teen nastiness.

Disney, of course, is well within its rights to can PewDiePie for any reasonand not wanting to be associated with Nazi humor is a reason I support. It is not censorship when one private actor refuses to endorse or fund the speech of another private actor. It's just business. We shouldn't treat Kjellberg like a victimof political correctness, or of anything else. Even without Disney and Youtube, he's still a 28-year-old millionaire with a sizeable audience. He can clean up his act and try again.

Nor should we forget the fact that the White House is currently occupied by someone whose foremost advisor was the boss of an online media hub that deliberately and successfully catered to an alt-right audience. I share some of Clifton's concern that "the whiny self-importance and self-indulgence of white male rage" has taken a particularly pernicious form at the moment. But I wouldn't be surprised if it fizzles out on its own and the kids go back to drawing dicks.

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PewDiePie: Alt-Right Nazi, Victim of Political Correctness, or Just an Idiot? - Reason (blog)

Diesel, once hailed as a relatively clean, environmentally friendly alternative to petrol, is increasingly being recognised as a threat to public health. After decades of support and the promotion of the widespread belief that diesel releases less CO2 when burnt than petrol, sales of diesel vehicle in the UK have increased steadily. However, the truth is that some old diesel cars emit other pollutants by up to 20 times as much as their petrol equivalents, especially on congested city streets. To fix this, four capital cities Paris, Athens, Madrid, and Mexico City have agreed to remove diesel vehicles from their centres by 2025. Now, there arecalls to ban them from London too.

The white skiesin Paris over the winter break did not signal snow. Rather, drivers facedtwo daysof mayhem after concern over an unsettlingly low and dense layer of smog caused the authorities to restrict traffic in the city by banning vehicles with odd license-plates one day, and even ones the next. In return, public transport in Paris was free for those two days. Comparatively, when the pollution in London reaches terribly unhealthy levels, Plume Labs (who monitor air quality in London) advise Londoners to avoid all physical activities outside. There is something ironic about being advised to shun life-prolonging activities in order to prolong your life.

A recent study by the Kings College, London, Environmental Research Group for Transport for London and the Greater London Authority investigated the health impacts of poor air quality in the capital. They estimated that, in 2010, approximately 140,743 years were shaved off peoples lives as a result of air pollution in the city the equivalent of 9,416 (normal length) lives lost. Diesel exhaust, which contains harmful gases (such as nitrogen dioxide), fine particulates, and soot, is a major cause of reduction in air quality.

Doctors Against Dieselare taking a stand to change this. Last December, hundreds of medical professionals and environmental campaigners amassed along Euston Road, reportedly one of Londons most polluted thoroughfares. The group gathered to call on the citys mayor, Sadiq Khan, to impose a ban on diesel in the city centre and to gradually curb its use in the suburbs. Prof. Jonathan Grigg, who is both a consultant paediatrician at the Royal London Hospital and a researcher into the effects of pollution on children at Queen Mary University of London, toldThe Guardianthat if youre going to design something that would effectively deliver a toxic substance into the lungs, you couldnt do better than the diesel soot particle.

This is a popular sentiment progressive UK think-tank,the Institute for Public Policy Research, has stated that it is likely that diesel cars will have to be completely phased out on Londons roads over the next decade in order to reach compliance with safe and legal levels of air pollution. Diesel has been in the headlines since last September, when the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) accused Volkswagen of having knowingly installed defeat devices in 482,000 Volkswagen and Audi diesel engines in the US alone since 2008, to devastating effect. The software allowed the cars to pass the required emissions testing in laboratories, but in the real world they released harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) at 40 times more pollution than emissions standards allow.

In London, Sadiq Khan responded to Dieselgate by demanding that Volkswagen replace the 2.5 million that the city would have accrued in Congestion Charge returns. Now hes gone two steps further imposing an extra 10 toxicity charge for the most polluting vehicles in the city centre, and recommending the development of a detailed proposal for a national diesel scrappage scheme for Government to implement, as well as declaring that, from 2018, London will obtain no new pure diesel buses. Khan also unveiled his contribution to the anti-diesel effort, which takes the form of the first hydrogen fuel-cell-powered double-decker bus, and promised that future single-decker buses will be zero emission.

While these measures are promising, London still has a long way to go before its air is fit to breathe. Some 90% of NO2emissions from road transport in central London are the result of diesel engines and, warned Helena Molin Valds, head of the United Nations climate and clean air coalition, soot from diesel vehicles is among the big contributors to ill health and global warming. However, Transport for London recently sought public consultation on what they should do to improve air quality, and their website notes that people are twice as likely to die from lung diseases if they live in deprived vs. affluent areas of London, both signs that this problem is too complex to be solved by a blanket ban on diesel cars. Their current plan is to formulate more detailed proposals from the opinions collected during the consultation, particularly regarding the creation of an Ultra Low Emission Zone and whether it should come into force in 2019 or 2020. Ultimately, the Mayor will make this decision, but his choices must be based on the responses received during the three consultation stages that TfL plans to complete this year.

Less than a week into 2017, a monitor on Brixton Road had noted that NO2 concentration levels had surpassed 200 micrograms per cubic metre, which European Law dictates must not occur more than 18 times per year. Last year, ClientEarth, a non-profit activist organisation that specialises in environmental law, won a High Court ruling against the government over its failure to adequately handle the issue of the UKs air pollution by citing an EU directive that allowed them to push the government to prosecute people who drive old diesel vehicles in urban zones. Mr. Justice Garnham stated that ministers were aware that pollution modelling was being based on the deceptive results of faulty lab tests instead of recorded road emissions. Although the government denied that it would appeal the decision, at Prime Ministers Questions Theresa May claimed, We have taken action, there is more to do and we will do it.

Alan Andrews, one of ClientEarths lawyers, spoke to a Commons Select Committee, and conceded that a blanket ban on diesel cars would ignore the nuance of the situation. Instead, he supported Khans proposal for a government-backed range of measures to disincentivise diesel, including a scrappage scheme and changes to vehicle exise duty. Khan has also called for new legislation that updates the Clean Air Act to reflect the dangers posed by diesel in the 21stcentury. The last Clean Air Act, passed in 1956, came about as a result of the Pea Souper otherwise known as the Great Smog of London. As viewers of Netflixs popular series,The Crown, will tell you, though, there was nothing great about the air pollution plague.

There are fears that leaving the EU will allow the UK to repeal the emissions laws that hold the government accountable for increases in air pollution particularly due to diesel exhausts. However, with the recent court cases and public scrutiny due to the dangerously low air quality in London, it seems probable that the government will support almost any means necessary to make cities less hazy. Although this does not mean the immediate implementation of a diesel ban, it is likely alternative fuel sources will be phased in alongside actions such as the rollout of an Ultra Low Emissions Zone. While this in itself will not eradicate the issue of air pollution in the capital as diesel vehicles are not the only sources of pollutants, the effects of such legislation will not be insignificant and, combined with other green policies, are a step in the right direction towards a cleaner future.

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Pepe Le Pen: Can the alt-right really "meme" Marine Le Pen to victory? - New Statesman

What explains the strange pathologies of the alt-right?

It was announced this week that Milo Yiannapoulos will appear on Bill Mahers Real Time. The conjunction of two prominent Islamophobes mugging for the camera under the unblinking eyes of studio light announces the alt-rights planet is now bathed in the full, flagrant glare of our new Orange Sun. The signs are everywhere. Alt-right leader Richard Spencer, even after being humiliated by crowds at Berkeley, is still abroad in the land, peddling his story.

According to an article in The Algemeiner, Spencer,

who garnered national attention with his controversial appearance at Texas A&M University last December, plans to sow his white nationalism on college campuses across the country in 2017. Known for using phrases like Hail victory (the literal translation of the Nazi phrase Sieg Heil) and mimicking the Nazi salute, Spencer traffics in far-right ideas that center around the preservation of the white race and Western civilization. He peddles his message through a think tank known as the National Policy Institute, an online publication called Radix and, now, a planned college speaking tour.

These are fat times for the nationalist set, and even if you strike out Milo as a wagon-hopping unbeliever, the talking headsof the Trump front are doing fairly well for themselves. Not in the sense of being successful; more in the sense that a man with two arms and no legs is doing better than a man with a single leg and no arms.

Which raises a question. There have always been bizarre cranks in any political ecosystem. But a resentful river of victimology runs the length of the alt-rights belief structure, and is hardly attributable to their social statusmiddle classor their privileged demographic position in the world. Where does it come from?

HOW THE ALT-RIGHT IS DIFFERENT FROM CONSERVATISM

The alt-right claims to be the inheritors of a movement which they style the natural conservative coalition. Even allowing for conservatisms tendency to play dog-whistle politics, the two are very different. Cathy Young, writing for The Federalist, notes that Indeed, the irony is that Trump is almost certainly the least socially conservative candidate to come within reach of the Republican nomination in recent years. If the Trumpian rebels were disaffected traditionalists, theyd have flocked to Rick Santorum.

What is demonstrably not happening is a huge popular upsurge in alt-right beliefs. Trump got roughly the same number of votes as Romney. Therefore, if the alt-right cannot offer strength, numbers, or continuity, what can it give to its believers?

Let us consider its founder. Arguably, Spencers greatest contribution to modern political discourse was getting clocked in the face. This innovation was his, and his alone. It made him famous. If he could trademark the many remixes of him being punched which are now spread on the intra-webs, he would never have to call collect to Pinochets old generals again.

However, Spencers second greatest contribution was to name the movement he is a leader of. Per the Southern Poverty Law Center, the phrase alt-right refers to

a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that white identity is under attack by multicultural forces using political correctness and social justice to undermine white people and their civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes, Alt-Righters eschew establishment conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethno-nationalism as a fundamental value. In 2010, Spencer, who had done stints as an editor of The American Conservative and Takis Magazine, launched the Alternative Right blog, where he worked to refine the movements ideological tenets.

What this actually means is a bunch of weird dudesand they are almost all dudeswho hang out online. If I have a complaint about the Law Centers description, it is the phrase heavy use of social media, which implies the alt-right is a real-world movement which uses a lot of social media. This is backwards: it is an online movement which occasionally appears in the real world. Where it gets punched.

In truth, the alt-right is wholly a creature of the Internet. Older journalists, who grew up with a more sedate view of politics, see the rancor of Spencers followers online and imagine they possess a genius for bile. But this is the character of the Net. If you were born in the late eighties or afterwards, youve never known a world without all-caps comments. Were all part of this magic circle. The alt-right is born from, and of, this online world.

CALAMITY SONG

The Net explains much (but not all) of Spencerism. The major difference between the alt-right and old conservatism is one of temperament.

Most conservatives know how the game is played, and will muddle through this Orange Presidency, taking what they can, bargaining when they will, dealing with the Presidential train-wreck, staring winsomely at pictures of Lincoln and Reagan. George Wills squad knows how to sigh. The conservative worldview makes its peace with tragedy. This may explain why so many of their intellectual class are fond of the Lord of the Rings: the series is about an autumnal land, where everyone is sort of bungling through lapsed days. Conservatives generally see the same world as everyone else. As a group, they are typically dissatisfied with the Earth, but satisfied with themselves. You can easily imagine a happy conservative.

By contrast, nothing pleases the alt-right. They treat this Earth as an alien prison, full of people engaged in actions they dont understand. Their effect on the world is grotesque, but their pathologies are consistent, and priceless from a clinical point of view.

For instance, what are we to make of the alt-right and their insistence on this term, virtue-signaling? They seem to seriously believe that people commit good acts only because others are watching. They dont understand how being nice works. They are befuddled at why Meryl Streepwould throw shade at the President for making fun of handicapped people. It is a mystery to them why anyone famous would cast scorn on the powerful for oppressing the weak. It confuses them that the rich would ever, in a million years, have a care for the poor.

In the world of the alt-right, an intellectually lazy place, the culturewhich does not agree with them and never willassumes a monstrous, shadowy shape. To them, Streep isnt a successful character actor and Vassar grad who decided to sympathize with a reporter on her own dime; she must be the spear point of a gigantic Soros ploy.

Charlton Heston was wrong when it came to firearms, but few of us doubted that he was sincere. Hollywoodis a collection of theater kids and business-people. Some of them are noble, some are clueless, some generous, some greedy, some selfless, some outlandish, some boring. Knowing this, what conclusions can we make? About the only thing that connects them is that they want to be seen by the public. Show-people lean left, just as bankers tilt conservative. None of this is surprising.

How could the alt-right get it so wrong? The answer is simple.

They believe in the world of the tribe. It explains everything about them. Like most shut-ins, they are convinced the outside universe is obsessed with them. This may account for their insistence that anything they do is aimed at trolling liberals and traditional conservatives. Which is precious. The alt-right is trolling us in the same way a lonely sophomore doing basement bong rips on Prom Night is trolling everyone with a date.

They are incapable of seeing the world in a non-tribal way. Every person only exists as an extension of an identity. Yes, this is the absurd extension of the identity politics they pretend to despise. Which is why they can label a billion Muslims as part of a terror network; why they can look at Mexicans and see them as a plot to invade America; why they burble out anti-Semitic screeds. The alt-right doesnt see the world, they see their idea of the world. They gaze through spectacles which are tinted.

Most prejudiced persons who distrust Muslims will still admit there are good ones. Not so with our friends on the alt-right. By their lights, one cannot be a Muslim or a Mexican who is the exception; by being part of that group, ones complicity in the group is unbreakable. All politics is sinister, coordinated, tribal politics. This also explains why conspiracy theories have such a truck with them. If you already believe in massive inside-group coordination, then whats a few 9/11s or Pearl Harbors or Pizzagates?

How do I put it gently? The tragedy of the alt-right is that their beliefs are not merely incorrect or mean, but castrating. Their philosophy isnt just offensive and based on bad data: its a humiliating set of positions to hold. It disappoints them not merely on the level of rationality and effectiveness, but on taste. It succeeds nowhere: there is no evidence for it; it cannot secure a majority for Trump; it only offends the most anxiety-ridden of the liberals; it will not win allies among conservatives; it is not beautiful in itself; its principles are question-begging and scientifically hollow.

The alt-right is like a guy who wears a belt made of spikes that dig into his flesh, and shouts out that everyone else is offended to see his blood. Yes, its gross. So what? Imagine a man who is convinced his ugliness offends everyone, when all it does is make them pity him.

The poor alt-right. How very sad it must be, to be deluded into seeing the world as a patchwork of armed camps, and knowing in the very same instant, deep in your soul, where no trolling success can ever reach, that you will never be a chosen people, of any kind. Feels bad, man.

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Milo & POTUS: What Exactly is Wrong With the Alt-Right? - Paste Magazine

Attendees of an alt-right conference in Washington, D.C., perform the Nazi salute to celebrate Trump's election

DONALD TRUMP likes to think that he has not only won an election, but "built a movement." And to judge by his first week in the White House, he has--just not in the way he thinks.

One day after the smallest public attendance at a presidential inauguration that anyone can remember, roughly a half million people turned out for the Women's March on Washington to denounce Trump's agenda of immigrant-bashing, misogyny and attacks on reproductive rights. It was perhaps the largest protest since the antiwar rallies during George W. Bush's second term, and a number of speakers expressed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement against racist police violence. On the same day as the march, hundreds of "sister" events were held at the same time in cities throughout the U.S. and around the world (including Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt) with estimates of up to 3 million participants in total.

In short, Donald Trump may well be on the way to inspiring a new mass radicalization on a scale that American leftists have only dreamt of in recent decades. In 2016, millions of first-time voters came out in support of Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Party candidate who identifies himself as a socialist and has called for "political revolution"--a concept left vaguely defined, to be sure, but one that resonates with a generation that has grown up with no reason to think that either the world's economy or its environment can take much more of capitalism's "invisible hand."

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JUST TWO months ago, the movement most associated with Trump's name was the so-called "alt-right" of extreme reactionaries, including the neo-fascists who joined Richard Spencer in chanting "Hail Trump!" during a meeting of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist "think tank." Another leading alt-right figure, Trump's campaign manager Steve Bannon, now serves as the president's chief strategist and senior counselor, and has undoubtedly been the adviser urging Trump to think of his electoral success as proof that he is at the leader of a mass movement.

It is something Trump himself quite desperately wants to believe. Anyone paying attention to his campaign could see how deeply he craved the adulation of crowds that laughed, cheered and expressed rage in time to his moods. Someone once called politics "show business for ugly people." By that standard, Trump is a star ne plus ultra.

But he is far from knowledgeable about affairs of state, much less about the complex ideological terrain of American conservatism. He enters office with a Congress dominated by a Republican Party that--as one of its leading strategists put it--only needs the president to have enough fingers to sign the legislation it gives him. Trump qualifies in that regard, so the Republican establishment thinks it can work with him. They can all agree on dismantling Obama's health-care reform, cutting taxes, privatizing public education, restricting the rights of women and LGBT people and removing or preventing government regulation of the economy (especially of anything based on a recognition of man-made climate change), for example.

Most of this has been central to the Republican agenda for decades, along with support for military spending and an aggressive imperialist foreign policy. Carefully avoided, for the most part, is any explicit reference to race. The late Lee Atwater, an influential Republican figure, once explained that the old-fashioned race-baiting had become unpopular and ineffective, so the trick was to be more subtle. "So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff," he told a political scientist, "and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites...'We want to cut this' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"

Trump's political ascent began with a variant on this tactic: he promoted the idea that Barack Obama could not prove that he was actually a U.S. citizen. But his campaign rhetoric against Mexican and Muslim immigrants was less "abstract" (to borrow Atwater's term) about appealing to racist sentiments. This proved embarrassing to Republican leaders, but they were hardly in the position of taking a principled stand against it. At the same time, a tension within the American right had intensified under the impact of the world economic crisis: Republican propaganda might celebrate the wealthy as "job creators," proclaim the virtues of small business ownership, and declare rural towns to be "the real America." But the policies they actually advanced (and that the Democratic party under Clinton and Obama largely supported) have heightened economic uncertainty and inequality to extremes not seen since the Great Depression.

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SPENCER, BANNON and other alt-rightists understand their role as building up mechanisms of political and social authority over a population that will only grow more ethnically and cultural heterogeneous in the next two decades--while also being unlikely to recover its standard of living through the pure magic of the free market. They reject both neoliberalism and Atwater-style coyness about channeling racial hostilities.

Insofar as the conservative establishment has a body of ideas to shore it up, the influences come from a blend of Ayn Rand's celebration of "the virtue of selfishness" with a belief that God dictated the Constitution, or at least had a hand in the outline. By contrast, the more sophisticated of the alt-right strategists are acquainted with Alain de Benoist's ethnic communitarianism and Carl Schmitt's understanding of politics as defined by the sovereign's combat with an enemy. And they see most of the Republican leadership as being an enemy.

Donald Trump is no doubt entirely innocent of such esoteric concepts. He spent his first week in a simmering rage over slights by the media and fuming from an awareness that he entered office with the lowest level of public confidence of any incoming president (only to lose another three points since then). But he sits astride the fault line between members of Congress who see themselves as Ronald Reagan's political heirs, on the one side, and those who share Bannon's aspiration to destroy the Republican Party and replace it with something more vicious and brutal.

It is, in other words, a precarious and unstable conjuncture and one that can only grow more volatile as far-right campaigns mobilize elsewhere in the world. One thing that Marxists bring to the situation is an understanding that capitalism's crises are always international--throwing down to us the challenge of finding ways to learn from and unify the forces from below that resist them. Millions of people in the United States are thinking about how to shut down Trump's assaults on vulnerable segments of the population. And seeing millions more around the world take to the street in solidarity can only help as we relearn the truth of the old Wobbly slogan: An Injury to One is an Injury to All.

First published in German at Marx21 and in English at New Politics.

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Trump and the alt-right - Socialist Worker Online