Stop Using the Term “Alt-Right’!
... The term itself ... was allegedly coined by Richard B. Spencer, who founded the website Alternative Right in 2010.
... The term “alt-right” is nothing more than a clever marketing tool by a white supremacist activist, who knows that his ideology is considered unacceptable in today’s society. Hence, he came up with a term that sounds acceptable to the conservative mainstream. For years it had little to no effect until uncritical and uninformed journalists did what he never could: mainstream his term.
And this:
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS pic.twitter.com/17yKfrIPE9
— joe goulcher (@goulcher) August 26, 2016
But we don't need to worry, especially after yesterday. A large percentage of Americans just learned about the alt-right this week -- and what they learned, from Hillary Clinton's speech and from the many media attempts to explain the term, was that alt-rightists are hate-spewing racist scum. And alt-rightists themselves aren't even trying to pretend otherwise, because they're under the impression that if they proclaim to the world that they believe whites are superior to non-whites and all good things on earth flow from ethnic Europeans, while festooning their online communications with allusions to gas chambers and attacks on non-whites as subhumans, the world, or at least the white world, will beat a path to their door.
No one is using the term "alt-right" and saying, "No, these people are just conventional conservatives who believe in small government and constitutionalism." The link between racism and the alt-right is made every time the term is used. So that's how it's imprinting itself on our brains.
I'm reminded of the Fox News campaign to replace the term "suicide bomber" with "homicide bomber." What was the point? Stories about suicide bombers tell us what suicide bombers do, and it's horrifying. We don't need a stronger term. If you're exposed to such stories\, in your mind the term "suicide bomber" will always stand for something appalling.
The same thing is happening with "alt-right." It's not a benign term -- not given what we know about alt-rightists, and what they proudly tell us about themselves.
