“Alt-right” synonymous with “bigot?”

It is the new phrase that came out of the 2016 election cycle; “alt-right.” As in not the standard issue conservative who leans toward the Republican party, but an alternate version.
 

TRUMP: Election opened nasty can of worms

Of course, what makes them alternative is that their racial hang-ups are a little more intense. In fact, they are the base of these people having anything resembling a political philosophy.

IF WE WANTED to be purely honest, we’d simply say they’re bigots. But the “alt-right” term comes from those people who want to legitimize any sense that one’s racial sentiments ought to be permitted to be a basis for government policy.

And also don’t want anything resembling use of the term “cracker” to refer to themselves.

Now I know there are some people who are getting upset these days with the perception that the Republican Party has been overtaken by bigots. They want to think there’s some moralistic overtone to the conservative thought process by which they have become the political party for white people.

They want to argue that not every person who cast a vote for Donald Trump’s presidential bid did so for racial reasons. In short, they’re willing to talk a lot of smack to avoid the very real fact of modern-day politics.

PEOPLE WHO VOTED for Trump either really do have the ridiculous notion that white people are being discriminated against because they’re no longer permitted to discriminate against people not like themselves. Or, they’re more than willing to look the other way when it comes to being around the bigots of our society.

Perhaps to them the notion of being around non-white people with some authority is more offensive than being around white people who are willing to use physical force to maintain their sense of place in the world.

I have one person I knew back in college who, on Facebook recently, said we ought to refuse to use the term “alt-right” and replace it with “all white.” It would be more accurate, she says, if we didn’t try to make the term “alt-white” sound respectable.

How far will alt-right rewrite history?

Yet this is going to be the very focus of much of the rhetoric we’re going to hear in coming years. There are people who must take seriously notion expressed by author George Orwell (as in “1984”) that “history is written by the winners.”

THEY PROBABLY THINK this past election cycle was a “war” in which they’re trying to take back the country from all of society’s undesirables – as in the ones whom the deplorables think are truly disgusting because of their repulsive sensibilities about life!

In that context, “alt-right” is merely a part of rewriting history. And not seeing the incredibly obvious in that photograph playing big on the Internet these days with Vice President-elect Mike Pence in front and a whole slew of white people filling the room.

It is a way where we can go back to the old way of thinking of things, in which a “Martin Luther King, Jr.” was a borderline-Communist agitator for spouting out nonsense about equality and non-violence who tried falsely to portray himself as a Christian.

Let’s not forget that some people do have a twisted sense of their Christian religious faith – I still remember once covering a Ku Klux Klan rally outside the Statehouse in Springfield, Ill., where their “pastor” led everybody in a prayer for God to strike the Earth with a plague that would wipe out all the non-white people.

NOT EXACTLY IN line with any serious religious teachings I have ever heard.

Yet these are the individuals who are being given some credence. Who are being treated as though they have something essential for our society to hear. And whose hostile rhetoric somehow bears a legitimacy to what else is being said.

So how should we truly think of these people? What terms should we use to describe them with a sense of honesty?

There are times when I watch the old “All in the Family” reruns on television and think that actor Carroll O’Connor’s “Archie Bunker” character bears relevance to what is happening today. Which makes me wonder if actor Sherman Hemsley’s “George Jefferson” is who many of us will turn to for the proper retort!

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