Were Ron Paul's presidential campaigns a breeding ground for angry young white men who became...
THURSDAY, AUG 24, 2017 08:23 AM EDT
Now the libertarians have known sin: Reckoning with the rise of the alt-right
Were Ron Paul's presidential campaigns a breeding ground for angry young white men who became the alt-right?
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Last December as the smoke was clearing from the electoral explosion and many of us were still shell-shocked and wandering around blindly searching for emotional shelter, Salon’s Matthew Sheffield wrote a series of articles about the rise of the “alt-right.” The movement had been discussed during the campaign, of course. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton even gave a big speech about it. Trump’s campaign strategist and chief consigliere, Steve Bannon — the once and future executive editor of Breitbart News — had even bragged that his operation was the “platform” of the alt-right just a few months earlier. But after the election there was more interest than ever in this emerging political movement.
It’s an interesting story about a group of non-interventionist right-wingers who came together in the middle of the last decade in search of solidarity in their antipathy toward the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a motley group of conservatives, white nationalists and libertarians that broke apart almost as soon as they came together. The more clever among them saw the potential for this new “brand” and began to market themselves as the “alt-right” and it eventually morphed into what it is today. The series is a good read and explains that the alt-right really was a discrete new movement within the far right wing and not simply a clever renaming of racist and Nazi groups.
This week conservative writer Matt Lewis of the Daily Beast, a Trump critic, wrote a piece about the libertarian influence on the alt-right and suggested that libertarians work harder to distance themselves from this now-infamous movement. He points out that former Rep. Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns were a nexus of what became alt-right activism. Sheffield had written about that too:
Pretty much all of the top personalities at the Right Stuff, a neo-Nazi troll mecca, started off as conventional libertarians and Paul supporters, according to the site’s creator, an anonymous man who goes by the name “Mike Enoch.”
“We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this,” he said on an alt-right podcast last month.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/08/24/now-the-libertarians-have-known-sin-reckoning-with-the-rise-of-the-alt-right/
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