Ezra Klein Show: How Far Right Extremism Invaded Mainstream Politics

I wasted an hour of my time listening to this.

I’m also interested in this question: why does it seem like our ideas are spreading more rapidly than ever before while the organized movement is facing more state repression, lawfare and censorship than ever before? Shouldn’t “far right extremism” be losing traction in the Joe Biden era?

Kathleen Belew has a BA from the University of Washington and a doctorate from Yale University. She is the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America and A Field Guide To White Supremacy. She has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered and was featured in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline). She is an “expert” on the White Power movement in America and an assistant professor at the University of Chicago where she teaches about “white supremacy.”

Kathleen Belew, of course, is the type of person who progressives instinctively turn to for answers about our recent success: a White woman with a post-grad degree from an Ivy League university back East who is firmly ensconsced in the bubble of institutional liberalism in a big city.

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New York Times:

Why has “far right extremism” invaded mainstream politics?

Kathleen Belew is all over the map. It seems highly implausible that it has anything to do with violent actions by “far right extremists.” It has nothing to do with William Pierce and The Turner Diaries, The Order and Fort Smith Trial, McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, Ruby Ridge, Charlottesville and so on. It has nothing to do with Dylann Roof, Glenn Miller or Patrick Crusius. It is not people like Roof or Crusius who shoot up a black church or a Wal-Mart who attract people to our cause and make our ideas more popular. If anything is true, those people are a deterrent and an albatross for our messaging.

It certainly isn’t due to “far right” activism. The Alt-Right imploded and the organized movement has become significantly less active since Charlottesville. There was virtually no participation by anyone associated with the movement in the George Floyd riots or the Capitol Siege on January 6th. It was a bunch of normies who stormed the Capitol, not us. The Alt-Lite model of holding provocative free speech rallies in progressive enclaves like Berkeley or Charlottesville to “trigger” and “own the libs” is a tactic that we abandoned years ago. In fact, there is a broad consensus now that we are better off staying out of the public spotlight, especially at volatile public events where anyone with their own agenda can show up. Insofar as there are still rallies going on, it is vetted flash rallies by groups like Patriot Front.

It is not due to being on social media. We have been completely wiped off social media since Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Trump himself has been banned from social media along with countless numbers of his supporters. The ADL has censored everyone from MILO to Stefan Molyneux who it considers a “gateway” to “far right extremism.” The slippery slope of censorship and deplatforming has steadily become more severe. We have been wiped out on Facebook and YouTube.

It has been relatively quiet this year, hasn’t it? Donald Trump isn’t dominating the national conversation. There are no big rallies like Charlottesville or Berkeley where White Nationalists are fighting with Antifa. There hasn’t been a single vanguardist mass shooter since Joe Biden became president. Those people occasionally lash out in violent outbursts, but those kinds of shootings have ebbed since El Paso. Overall, the organized movement has been less active in the streets, less violent, less present on social media, but our ideas have been spreading at a much faster pace over the past two years or so.

The crucial thing that is absent from this conversation is progressives. We’re not persuading our natural base. They are the ones who are doing it for us. They are extreme and alienate ordinary people whenever they have the public spotlight all to themselves. It also helps that we are less active and less visible because lots of people in the movement are extreme and alienate people and are not very good at communicating our ideas to the public. The biggest factor by far is that Trump lost the 2020 election and Joe Biden is the president and has adopted all this woke nonsense and has applied it to every aspect of public policy.

Trump and the GOP have benefited from Trump being deplatformed from social media because he was so omnipresent and drove the news cycle for so long that he annoyed millions of swing voters. The media has tried to force the “January 6th insurrection” narrative, but Trump is no longer dominating the national conversation. It is just the media and progressive activists incessantly talking about Trump and “racism” and “white supremacy.” No one from our side participated in the George Floyd riots and Antifa and BLM was given the national spotlight all to themselves. We weren’t in the same frame with them.

Here’s the way this works: 1.) we create potent critiques, memes, caricatures and narratives on small websites like this one, 2.) we stay out of the public spotlight and avoid stepping all over our message, 3.) progressives wield power in draconian ways that alienate White people who do not live in deep blue urban enclaves like Brooklyn, 4.) this confirms the critiques and narratives which originate here and are picked up by the rightwing media ecosystem. Democrats, for example, can’t decide whether the Great Replacement is a far right conspiracy theory or something to celebrate as social justice. Is using the term “anti-White” a racist dog whistle, or, should we actually embrace putting down White people as a positive good?

In the eyes of progressives like Kathleen Belew, we are the “extremists.” They have zero awareness of their own extremism. They are far more out of touch with the average White American and this is particularly true of those who live in rural areas, small towns and working class suburbs – the demographic base of the American Right – who didn’t go to an Ivy League university in a coastal Eastern state where they learned all of this jargon which is alien to White people outside of their insular social class. Whether it is draconian censorship, the vaccine mandates, the anti-White propaganda in schools, the War Against the Police or the weaponization of the “intelligence community,” they are unable to perceive their actions as others see them. They are increasingly comfortable with trampling on White working class people and bossing them around. They are arrogant, overbearing, annoying, condescending, etc.

If only we could get out of our own way, we could politically benefit from this. Fortunately, we have done so for a variety of reasons, not least of which was their help with all the censorship. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election when Andrew Anglin and Weev were flooding social media with Nazi gas chamber memes and racial epithets. The propaganda and messaging that comes out today is much more polished, sophisticated, plausible and palatable and pours out through FOX News. Trump himself was also a coarse messenger and sounds like a moron and his personality turns off lots of people.

I think this imbalance that was created in the Trump years to repress the “far right” is a big part of the reason why our ideas are spreading faster these days. Joe Biden has the public spotlight all to himself because Trump has been censored by Silicon Valley and can’t suck up all the oxygen in the room and annoy swing voters. The woke crowd who are repulsive to Republicans, Independents and most Democrats are omnipresent these days in the media and have become gatekeepers of social media.

Note: If the comrades at the 2019 DSA Convention seized control of all of America’s liberal institutions, how would Americans react? Would they be alienated or impressed?

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
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28 Comments

  1. Another plant. We get told how things are, by their messengers. I doubt she even knows what “right wing” even means. Usually these “experts” are so removed from every day life for most people, that they have no idea.

    • @ Pilot, yep, you are so right, but they have the bully pulpit, that’s how they do their damage, their lie’s are louder than our truth.

  2. It’s all fake and gay. The republican party will never care about whites. Much like their democrat counterparts, they love jews and negros and hate whites. We’re at the apex of civic nationalism on the right today, and it’s all about “Based blacks” “and trump latinos”, it’s so extremely cringe. I miss the pre-trump years.

  3. This idea of what constitutes “extremism” in our society has fascinated me for some time. Of course since our enemies own and control the media in this country, they feel entitled to issue definitive definitions of what is, and is what is not “extremism.” A group of Trump supporters taking selfies in the capitol building is “extremism” while Antifa and BLM burning down a police station is “social justice.”

    When I was a kid (I’m an old geezer now) police departments had height and weight requirements for police recruits and they did not hire women as patrol officers or detectives. The idea, was that police officers needed to fight and subdue suspects when arresting. PDs wanted big, heavy “tough guys” or what George Orwell called, “rough men” due to the nature of the job and the violence that officers had to deploy in order to make an arrest.

    Was that “extremism?” Was it morally wrong or “biased” or “sexist” to ensure that only big, tough men were hired by PDs in the 1950s? Are you an “extremist” if you only want MEN: big, tough, armed men patrolling your neighborhood looking for burglars and criminals? How did this become an “extremist” position, when it was commonsense thinking in the 30s, 40s, and 50s?

    “Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night, because rough, violent men stand at the ready to do violence on their behalf in order to keep them safe.” George Orwell.

  4. What did you expect to happen? They won WWII, so this is their world now. Its all scripted & rigged, as they surreptitiously control & maneuver all these ‘nations’ of the world, behind their various visible puppets like Putin, Biden, Johnson, Lukashenko, Jinping etc. The white gentiles of the world had a great chance to dethrone them with Hitler, but millions of white Allied morons sided with the Zionist-Communist bankers instead…
    http://www.chuckmaultsby.net

  5. Part of it is that they have been calling normal people “Nazis” and “White supremacists” long enough that those marginalizing epithets have lost their sting. If they ever understood the implication of arguments by analogy, then they have forgotten it. When you call normal people “Nazis,” then you’re also calling Nazis normal people. That’s how analogies work. They have stretched the definition of “racism,” so far in order to over exploit the slur’s power, that it has lost its potency.

    • Oh yeah.. and where exactly has the accusation of one being a ‘racist’ lost its power in jewish clown world??

      • @James Bell – My thoughts exactly! Everytime I hear someone in “Der” movement utter that sentiment, I sigh with disgust.

    • The average white conservative hates nazism, so they just call their political enemies nazis and portray democrats as fascists. Conservatives won’t even name the jews, the obvious leaders of wokeism, transgenderism, black lives matter, etc. Those flag waving dunces probably view nazism as being worse than communism, because fox news, breitbart, and dennis prager told them so.

  6. @ The satanic left, caught white, normie america, with their pants down, like a deer in the middle of the road, with the head lights on it, their antifa, blm shock troops got into their comfort zone, the boomers are old and compromised, they have families dependent on them, they have things they have worked for they don’t want too lose, a lot of boomers , would like to go too war, but they haven’t been pressed to that point yet, a lot of white people, detect strength and authentic resistance in this movement, there are voices in this movement that make more sense, than any one else out there, like the host of this site, that’s why the seeds that have been planted live, they found fertile ground.

  7. The DSA has really gone kookie over the last 40 or so years.

    At one time the DSA was a pro-labor organization with mildly socialist views. The joke was were they Nazis? Since then they have gone hard left, somewhere to the left of the old time Stalinists, and into Trotsky world. Did the DSA and the Trotskyites merge? Seriously.

  8. “…why does it seem like our ideas are spreading more rapidly than ever before while the organized movement is facing more state repression, lawfare and censorship than ever before? They’re just using it for their ‘fear factor’ effect. Like the fear generated by the Covid bioweapon is being used to take away citizens’ rights.

  9. >Ezra Klein

    A beta Jew bugman.

    >Kathleen Belew

    When people on the Right say white women are a problem, they are talking about women like her; she could be cited as ‘Exhibit A’ — anyone who says men on the Right are misogynist for mentioning this obvious, problematic phenomenon, are simply wrong.

    She has her own website: Kathleen Belew — on the ‘Speaking’ page (link), there is a foto of her standing at a lectern in front of a crowd at something called Westminster Town Hall Forum, 2019 — the crowd appears to be made up entirely of middle-aged and older white people, who’ve been fed a steady rhetorical diet of anti-racism for decades, and are apparently so brainwashed and cucked on race that they unhesitatingly showed up to be harangued about ‘white supremacy’ — it’s like they’re receiving a sacrament at a religious service (note the stained glass windows).

    It turns out the Westminster in Westminster Town Hall Forum, 2019 refers to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, MN — the forum also has its own website: Westminster Town Hall Forum — there the same foto of Kathleen Belew speaking is prominently displayed — the current director is a guy named Tane Danger — he also has his own website, Tane Danger, featuring fotos of him wearing a bowtie (your gaydar should be going off) — yes he is gay (link), and thinks homosexual men ought to be allowed to donate blood.

    So we have a Jew, race cucked white women and boomers, and a faggot.

  10. It also has to do with the fact that the threshold for “extremism” has moved so drastically. Obama’s 2008 campaign would be considered far right extremism today.

  11. Memes and social media are what built the movement, which goes way beyond the Alt-Right, to the Alt-Light, MAGA, America First, Nationalists, Christians, etc.

    Small websites like these will never be more than a holding-pen, in the absence of a strong social media. I recall as recently as 2008, on the cusp of social media dominance, an alternative, Left paper was mentioning that after 13 years of the internet, the vast majority of people were going to CNN and other corporate outlets for news. (The Left had the creativity and dissentful mantra then.)

    What changed is social media. The lumpen proletariat, too fat and allergic to intellectualism, will animate to truth and justice, when they are tricked into interacting with the public and ideas–show boating on Facebook was the carrot, Trump was the result, something considered impossible since the beginning of the Republic.

  12. The goal was simply to create a moral panic, and then be so over the top that all the grifters fled.
    All moral panics end with the subject people panicking over becoming normalized, and with no grifters (or leaders) for the panicking to focus on, they will be forced to focus on (banning) the arguments. If you ban arguments, you end up banning normal people, and once banned, normal people become radicalized.

    Even Styx Hexenhammer talked about this, so it wasn’t a big secret only known by a few memers.

  13. Race traitor Kathleen Belew will get her comeuppance from the feral and sociopathic North American Urban Pavement Apes that prey upon Whites in the cultural Marxist jewish and gentile shitlib Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicongo where the University of Chicago is located.

  14. This Belew nag is going to learn the hard way if she spend her time at the University of Chicago, that area is in the news as the newest hunting ground of those young black superpredators types like her are so insistent don’t really exist.

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