Annotating the news - "What the Alt-Right Really Means"

Occasionally I read an article where the author struggles with conveying reality. I've provided some annotations below. 

From "What the Alt-Right Really Means" by Christopher Caldwell in today's NYT:

Not even those most depressed about Donald J. Trump’s election and what it might portend could have envisioned the scene that took place just before Thanksgiving in a meeting room a few blocks from the White House. The white nationalist Richard B. Spencer was rallying about 200 kindred spirits.

 "White nationalists" are people who believe nonwhite people are less human than white people. If that doesn't qualify as racism, the term has no meaning.

“We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace,” he said.

 Given your expressed views, you should. 

“We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet.” When Mr. Spencer shouted, “Hail, Trump! Hail, our people! Hail, victory!” a scattered half-dozen men stood and raised their arms in Nazi salutes.

We've seen how this play ends. The people who first used the Nazi salute 1)lost and 2) ranked among history's greatest villains.  

Mr. Spencer, however you describe him, calls himself a part of the “alt-right” — a new term for an informal and ill-defined collection of internet-based radicals.

Mr. Spencer is accurately described as a racist. "Alt-right" is not merely a new term -- it is a euphemism for people who believe that nonwhite people are inherently the lesser. "Radicals" is an imprecise term in this context; a more accurate term is racist -- those who believe that a human is inherently lesser based on his or her race.

As such, he poses a complication for the incoming president. Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, whom Mr. Trump has picked as his chief White House strategist, told an interviewer in July that he considered Breitbart a “platform for the alt-right.” Perhaps we should not make too much of this.

No, we should make a lot of this.  

Mr. Bannon may have meant something quite different by the term.

Prove it. He's done nothing to deserve the benefit of the doubt. 

Last summer “alt-right,” though it carried overtones of extremism, was not an outright synonym for ideologies like Mr. Spencer’s. But in late August, Hillary Clinton devoted a speech to the alt-right, calling it simply a new label for an old kind of white supremacy that Mr. Trump was shamelessly exploiting.

 Mrs. Clinton's description of the racists and Mr. Trump's shamelessness is accurate and has been repeatedly proven by word and deed of both. 

Mr. Spencer, 38, directs the National Policy Institute, which sponsored the Washington meeting. Despite its name, the institute has little to say about policy, although it has called for a 50-year moratorium on immigration.

Because it is a racist organization. 

What it mostly does is seek to unite people around the proposition that, as Mr. Spencer put it, “Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity.”

A racist organization that is seeking to attract more racists. 

 There are many such groups, varying along a spectrum of couth and intellect.

All such groups believe that some people should be considered the lesser based on race. This is an uncouth view in any context and is also the belief of fools. 

Mr. Spencer, who dropped out of a doctoral program at Duke...

Plenty of people who are capable of scoring highly on the GRE are also terrible people.

The eloquent Yale-educated author Jared Taylor, who hosts the American Renaissance website and magazine, was at the conference, too.

Translated into plain English: Mr. Taylor is able to spout his repugnant lies without using the most unsavory slurs. 

The standard for determining eloquence should be higher than that.

Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology professor whose trilogy on Jewish influence is a touchstone for the movement, also came.

"Trilogy on Jewish influence" = extensive regurgitation of anti-Semitic lies. 

There were cheers from the crowd at the mention of Andrew Anglin, who runs a neo-Nazi website called The Daily Stormer, but he was not there. Neither was Greg Johnson, whose online review Counter-Currents translates right-wing writings from various European languages. Some of these groups sprouted on the internet. Others have been around since before it existed.

Finding groups of white Christians who subscribe to a belief that nonwhite, non-Christian people are inherently inferior does, in fact, date before the development of the Internet. See the Crusades, for instance. Or these guys. 

There is no obvious catchall word for them.

Yes, there is. 

The word “racist” has been stretched to cover an attitude toward biology, a disposition to hate, and a varying set of policy preferences, from stop-and-frisk policing to repatriating illegal immigrants.

1) Race is social construct, not a biological one.
2) Yes, racist implies hatred. Accurately, in this case.
3) Federal judges and numerous academics found stop-and-frisk policing to disproportionately impact nonwhite people while failing to meaningfully achieve legitimate law enforcement goals. The technical term is "structurally racist" but "racist" can also accurately describe the policy.
4) "Repatriating illegal immigrants" is used so broadly here that I'm left with the conclusion that the author is being deliberately obtuse.

While everyone in this set of groups is racist in at least one of these senses, many are not racist in others.

This is an example of the logical fallacy "distinction without a difference." 

Not many of the attendees at the Washington gathering favored the term “white supremacist.” The word implies a claim to superiority — something few insisted on.

They are white supremacists. Literature is extensive on this.  

“White nationalist” is closer to the mark...

Again,"distinction without a difference." 

...most people in this part of the alt-right think whites either ought to have a nation or constitute one already. But they feel that almost all words tend to misdescribe or stigmatize them.

They have views deserving of stigmatization. 

Mr. Trump disavowed the alt-righters once the excesses of Mr. Spencer’s conference went viral. But as a candidate, Mr. Trump called the government corrupt, assailed the Republican establishment, flouted almost every rule of political etiquette, racial and otherwise, and did so in a way that made the alt-righters trust his instincts.

He made racist statements. Racists noted that these were racist statement. They agreed with him. 

“I don’t think that Trump is a rabid white nationalist,” the alt-right blogger Millennial Woes said at a speech in Seattle days after the election.

Just regular ol' white nationalist will do, I suppose.

“I think that he just wants to restore America to what he knew as a young man, as a child. And I think he probably does know at some level that the way to do it is to get more white people here and fewer brown people.”

Racism, in other words. 

Mr. Spencer speaks of Mr. Trump’s campaign as a “body without a head” and considers many of his policies “half-baked.” But for him, that is not the point. “Donald Trump is the first step towards identity politics for European-Americans in the United States,” he said. There is no good evidence that Mr. Trump or Mr. Bannon think in terms like these. 

1) Substantial numbers of white people have voted on race since the founding of the Republic. We even fought a civil war to decide whether black people were humans or property. The rubicon of white identity politics was crossed the first time a settler handed a smallpox-infested blanket to a Native American.

2) There is no evidence Trump or Bannon are racists once one excludes what they have done, written, or said in public. 

***

The rest of the article continues with similar drivel. At one point, the reader learns that many of the men who spend their free time attending conferences where people earnestly give a Nazi salute also have trouble finding a date. 

In reading an article where the author goes to great effort to not call something what it plainly is, it's obvious that for many people, being called racist is worse than the many actual effects of racism. Even people who unabashedly claim racist views don't wish to be called racist.

In normal times, I'd snicker at the irony. But Trump, Bannon, and their ilk are the folks who will be running the country. 

That entrusts them with enormous power. 

Redefining the English language so their views and actions can't be accurately characterized shouldn't be one of them.