National Review’s Jonah Goldberg joined The Hugh Hewitt Show for an interview on Wednesday to discuss the “alt-right” movement.
Goldberg explained the core of “alt-right” politics:
“[The alt-right believes] we need to organize this society on the assumption that white people are genetically superior, or that white culture is inherently superior, and that we should have either state-imposed or culturally-imposed segregation between the races, no race mixing with the lower brown people.”
On descriptions of Breitbart as an “alt-right” news outlet, Goldberg cast the site as “friendly” to the racial nationalist movement:
“I would say that in the same way that the Nation wasn’t a communist magazine in the 1960s, it was just extremely communist friendly.
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And I think what Breitbart has been doing, first of all, it breaks my heart, because it’s nothing Andrew would ever touch.
They play footsie with the alt right. They get praise from the alt right.
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And there’s some people, and there are some people who are click-bait whores. And they love to just stew up controversy for its own sake. They want to destroy, Bannon believes in his heart that the GOP needs to be destroyed. And that kind of radicalism is an open invitation to have fellow travelers, because that’s what alt righters believe, too. I don’t think that Bannon is a white identitarian who believes in, you know, the genetic supremacy or superiority of white people, although he might. I just don’t know. I think he is a nationalist. He’s not a conservative. Nationalism and conservatism are different things.”
For the uninitiated, the “alt-right” is a rebranding of American Protestant white nationalism. The foundational principle of the movement is racial determinism, that is, a belief that one’s race is highly impactful of one’s development.
Racial nationalists of all flavors view racial fault lines of humanity as primally important. They want societies, and by extension public policy, to be structured around these differences. Individuals, say racial nationalists, naturally prefer to be around persons of the same race.
Given the continuum of race, and how the human history involves countless genetic mixes of varying persons, racial nationalists are unable to cleanly delineate where one race begins and another ends.
Nationalism is an ideology broadly defined as prioritizing the welfare of the nation. How the nation is defined, however, is where various nationalists diverge from one another. Racial nationalists view race as integral to nationhood, whereas conventional nationalists subscribe to a national identity predicated on values and culture.
Adopting a Hitlerian view of racial struggle as the natural order of the human condition, “alt-right” adherents often view competing political ideologies as smoke and mirrors conceived by Jews to confuse and manipulate the masses.
Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, a self-described “race realist,” joined NPR on Monday to exposit on the “alt-right,” “race realism,” and his view of a race-based American nationalism:
“Well, this has to do with the central element that does unite the alt-right. Among the many positions held by the alt-right, we reject the notion that race is some sort of sociological optical illusion. Race is a biological fact, whether we wish to recognize that or not, and we completely reject the idea that all races are exactly equal and equivalent and in effect interchangeable.
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It’s obvious that if a nation goes through substantial racial demographic change, many aspects of it will change, and a majority has the right to remain a majority. This is taken for granted in all non-white countries. You would never expect the Japanese or the Nigerians or the Mexicans to countenance some kind of immigration or other program that reduced them to a minority within a period of decades. They would laugh at it.
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We have not suspended the laws of human nature in the United States of America. We are a nation like any other, and the extent to which we lose any kind of cultural, racial homogeneity, the extent that we become a multi-culti mishmash, we will become an ungovernable place.”
Asked if Donald Trump has any connection to the “alt-right,” Taylor said, “I don’t think Donald Trump knows the first thing about the alternative right. I don’t think also that he has, in any way, attempted to court the alternative right.”
Taylor described the “alt-right” as “one-issue voters.” “We would vote for any candidate who would stop the dispossession of the white majority in the United States,” said Taylor.
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