Sunday, August 6, 2017

The Fight to Unite the Right

From the cartoon froggy swamps of the new Right comes a Unite the Right rally scheduled to take place this coming Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, a 'do-over' of this Spring's hairdo-fascist rally to prevent a statue of traitor Robert E. Lee from being removed from a park.

In the runup to the rally, which even organizers (not gonna link) only expect under a thousand emo-boy Nazis to attend, the alt-right is beset by bickering. In late June, there were two opposed 'right-wing' rallies in DC, neither of which was attended by more than one-hundred righties... the 'alt-right' contingent disparages the insufficiently anti-semitic contigent as 'alt-lite'.

Last week, one of the leading loons of the 'alt-lite', in a sort of 'Brokeback Bro' moment, decided that he was going to give up Trump in order to pursue his 'MRA' grift. Another alt-lite figure, one of the participants in the stupid Shakespeare fauxtrage, claimed that her old, rotten tire had been slashed, drew derision from wags both left and right, including some extremely anti-semitic abuse from the Anime-Nazi crowd.

The broader right-wing coalition is pretty much done, even if it ever truly existed. I believe that a sizable subset of the Trump coalition is merely motivated by trolling, and that the three percenters and the 4channers don't mix well. I don't see the upcoming rally as something which will go well for the righties. I guess we'll see what sort of shitstorm results next Saturday.


1 comment:

mikey said...

Nope. Hopeful, wishful thinking. There is a lot of bickering among various factions on the far right, and they have a huge problem agreeing on policies and legislation - mean, but not TOO mean - but they are strongly united by their bigotry and their hatred.

They almost ALL hate African-Americans, but there's also Latinos and Jews and Muslims and gay/trans people, and oh don't forget women who don't know their place.

So even if they can't agree on exactly WHO they hate - or at least where to rank various groups on their hate-scale - as long as the right-wing leadership exploits their generalized hate, welcoming every single bigot under the big tent of white supremacy, they will ultimately be united when it counts most.

You can't confuse the arguments among bigots with the dysfunction of the Trump administration itself. The functional and operational failings of the far-right political leadership is a special feature of the current president. The fact that he was the first one to go that far in courting the bigots and lunatics does NOT mean he has any skills as an actual political leader.

Which, I suppose, explains all these campaign rallies mere weeks after his inauguration....