Alt-America. David Neiwert
people are the primary targets of oppression by an elite that shames them with “political correctness” whenever they object to the rising tide of brown faces—especially foreign-language-speaking Muslims and Latinos—in their midst.
•Minorities, especially blacks and illegal immigrants, are busily sucking up taxpayer dollars through welfare programs while homeless veterans go hungry. Organizations like Black Lives Matter are just another chapter in minorities’ claims to victimhood, while their adherents shoulder no responsibility themselves.
•Illegal immigrants, especially Latinos, are part of a conspiracy by liberals and Democrats to overwhelm the country with welfare-dependent parasites who eagerly vote for the liberal agenda in order to sustain their lifestyle.
The longer you dwell in this universe, the more likely you are to absorb some of its more exotic beliefs, such as the theory that chemtrails left by jet airliners are actually part of a New World Order plot to slowly poison the populace or spread mind-control drugs, or that federal emergency-management plans are in reality a cover for a plot to begin rounding up Americans and forcing them into concentration camps.
Once Alt-Americans start to believe some of these kooky ideas, it becomes a simple matter to persuade them of the reality of other kooky ideas, new threats, new conspiracies against them and the nation. When Donald Trump informs his followers that there’s a massive media and establishment conspiracy to “rig the election” and deny him the presidency, they not only eagerly embrace the claim but begin talking about a “revolution” to overthrow or even assassinate Hillary Clinton.
Established facts supported by concrete real-world evidence are inconsequential to people inside the Alt-America universe—indeed, those facts are instead interpreted as further evidence of the conspiracy and its efforts to hide “the truth.” Never mind that President Obama is a practicing, churchgoing Christian who was born in Hawaii and has produced both versions of his birth certificate to prove that. And if he really is sympathetic to Islamic radicalism and the installment of sharia law, he certainly has an odd way of showing it, having ordered the killing of the Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) leaders Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Hafiz Sayed Khan.
Never mind that the New World Order conspiracy has long been recognized as the product of the fevered dreams of the extremist Patriot movement and John Birch Society elements of the American right that have been claiming since the 1950s that society is on the brink of mass roundups and enslavement that have never materialized—ideas that keep finding fresh life under new guises.
It doesn’t matter to Alt-Americans that a consensus of the world’s climate scientists agrees that global climate change is a reality that is already upon us, nor that the world’s ice caps and glaciers are measurably shrinking at an alarming rate, and that sea levels around the world have already begun rising, already begun inundating low-lying American states such as Louisiana.
You can try explaining to someone from this universe that, even though a number of liberals and Democrats have proposed minor regulatory measures in response to the epidemic of gun violence that costs 33,000 Americans their lives every year, no one has proposed any kind of mass gun-confiscation measures or any other law that might violate the Second Amendment. You might even point out that gun-rights advocates have been warning for eight years that President Obama planned such tyrannical measures in the imminent future—steps that never even came close to materializing. It won’t matter to them.
You can explain to them that the Federal Reserve is a heavily regulated entity that mostly watches over interest rates and the monetary supply. You might even try explaining that abandoning the gold standard in 1971 ensured the value of the dollar, but far-right conspiracists still claim that it resulted from a one-world-government plot. You can try, but they will dismiss you.
And so it goes for the rest of the universe inside of Alt-America. In more than a few respects its strange reversal of realities resembles that of Planet Bizarro, the square planet sometimes visited by Superman. Planet Bizarro almost always appeared purely for its humorous effect; likewise the notions promulgated by Alt-Americans are ripe fodder for people who want to make fun of them.
The beating heart of Alt-America, however, is the ancient drumbeat of white identity politics, a fear of nonwhite people who speak foreign languages and follow alien creeds. These people embody the Other: non- or sub-human beings whose presence is felt as a form of degradation. Good Alt-Americans loathe and fear this Other. That may be partly because race in this universe is essentially a zero-sum proposition: if one race gains in status or power, then another must lose concomitantly.
So when confronted with a discomfiting civil-rights movement like Black Lives Matter, they do not hear the message its name communicates clearly: “Black lives matter, and white people must stop acting as if they did not.” What racists hear instead is a zero-sum assertion: “Only black lives matter, and no one else’s.” Their reality is distorted by their inability to comprehend other people or have empathy for them.
The Alt-Americans view any attempts at parity in the value of a life as a direct threat to their own privileged position. And privileged they are: Even though whites are losing their long-standing ethnic dominance of American demographics, they have, through a combination of factors, maintained their powerfully privileged positions economically, politically, culturally, and especially within the law-enforcement and justice systems.
They are similarly impervious to the factual realities regarding immigration. You can demonstrate to them how immigrants actually pay large sums into the federal income-tax and Social Security systems through their paycheck deductions (while receiving few of the benefits of those taxes, since by law they are precluded from participating in most federal “welfare” programs), and in the end pay substantially more in taxes than they receive in benefits. You can explain to them that the primary reason there are so many undocumented immigrants outside the system is that the American economy generates hundreds of thousands of unskilled-labor jobs every year that businesses have difficulty filling because of their often difficult and unpleasant natures, and yet our immigration system, still awaiting comprehensive reform, only issues around 5,000 green cards annually to cover that labor. You can show them crime statistics proving that immigrants commit crime at a substantially lower rate than the general population, the white populace included.
Such information doesn’t make a dent. Alt-Americans will continue to believe that immigrants suck away their taxpaying dollars and bring crime and disease to the country and that we must erect a big wall to keep them out. They will continue to insist that Americans not only can fill those jobs, they need them. Latinos are displacing American workers, Alt-Americans believe, and the border is a national security risk—so immigration “reform” must wait until the border is secure. Immigration experts understand that this places the cart before the horse—that the border will never be secure until a sane policy that encourages legal immigration is in place.
Alt-America is largely the creation of an increasingly entrenched conspiracy industry that generates one theory after another about the truth that lies behind the public narrative generated in the mainstream media. These theories’ influence now reaches broadly into the mainstream itself. This conspiracism industry is composed mainly of a network of radio hosts and Internet entrepreneurs, who churn out a steady stream of New World Order plots and predictably Alt-American interpretations of daily news events. Alex Jones and his Infowars website are the best known of this group. Jones claims that a variety of global events, including the Boston Marathon bombing and the November 2014 Paris massacres, were in reality false flag operations carried out by agents of the New World Order.
It’s a self-contained universe. While this network often differs on the precise details of the conspiracies that populate Alt-America—sometimes resulting in vicious internecine bickering and “purity tests”—the overarching story and general nature of The Enemy is always the same: namely, some variation on the New World Order, or “globalists,” or any other term used to name the secretive cabal they believe is conspiring to rule mankind. This Alt-America universe has come to reflect most closely the far-right ideology of the Patriot-constitutionalist-militia movement.
The material this industry produces