On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” the host discusses how the Left’s attempt to label any conservative as “alt-right” — as The Economist recently tried to do to Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, one of the most strident critics of the alt-right — has watered-down the term and is making it impossible to root out actual alt-right activists. Transcript and video below.
This is why I actually don’t use that phrase anymore. I did a PragerU video when the alternative right was being brought up as a new topic of discussion, just to make clear what the alternative right is, why it’s wrong, and why we should move on. Then the left took that term and they watered it down to mean nothing, so now I don’t use the term and I try to be much more precise. I don’t use the term racist too frequently because what does it mean — it had a meaning, and then the left robbed it of meaning. Now I try to be more specific — I’ll say racially bigoted. Bigotry at least has not been robbed of its meaning. This is what the Left does.
The term alt-right has been robbed of its meaning, and it’s too bad because there is an ideology that term once described. An alternative to conservative thought and what it was really specifically being used by its biggest proponents is a politics that essentially boils down to race and ethnicity, without much regard on one hand to values or traditional civic nationalism — that’s one side of it.
But where I really object is it’s without regard to culture and religion and God. You’re taking all the trappings of Christendom but you’re robbing it of the Christ — so what is that? That’s a sick perversion. That’s why I reject it as I explained in my PragerU video. Now that term has been robbed of any meaning.
I don’t use it because I’m not going to give the Left any opportunity. I hear this everywhere from left-wing commentators, they’ll use it in passing conversation, to dummies on the street. They’ll say, this is alt-right. But you don’t know what that is and don’t know what that means, and they do it all the time.
During the Bush years, they did this with the term neocon. All you would hear during the Bush years was “neocon, he’s a neocon!” Neoconservative once had a meaning. It was a movement popularized by Irving Kristol, and it was described as liberals and socialists who were mugged by reality. This turn during the 1960s of people who would have called themselves liberal, some who were really far-left, to see the realities of communism and international socialism to become more conservative, at least with the approach to foreign policy, and many of them came along with a conservative approach to domestic policy as well.
This was robbed of meaning during the Bush years and now the term is useless. To call someone a neocon what does that even mean anymore? Now, when they use the phrase, they mean bigoted war-mongers, people who want to bomb brown people. What does the term alt-right mean? It means anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is a racist bigot.
And this brings us to the best week ever for the Right, the worst week ever for the Left, and the last thing they can possibly do, which is to call everybody a bigot. In conversations you’ll say, I think we should lower the top marginal tax rate, bring it down a little because I think that’ll be good for the economy, that’ll help everybody. They’ll say well but — and once they finally run out of arguments, they’ll say, “Well the reason you want to do that is because you’re a racist.” Well, I think we should modify our environmental policy and I don’t think we should over-regulate businesses too much.
Their response is but you’re a racist. That’s always the bottom of the argument and that’s what you’re seeing here. You’re not just seeing it from The Economist, which can’t argue with Ben, because you can’t argue with the book. Instead, they just call him a bigot. You see this with Eric Holder, former Attorney General, came out and was doing an interview on MSNBC and they were talking about the Mueller probe, the Russia investigation, and DOJ more broadly. He couldn’t defend his legacy. He can’t defend two years of ridiculous hoax narrative on the so-called Russian collusion. So, what does he do? He accuses everybody of racism