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The Trump-Loving Alt Right Turns to Guns to Provoke and Offend
Emerging from the Internet's shadows amid the roiling Republican nomination race, a movement embraces firearms for their power to upset.
The punditry’s dissection of the origins of the Donald Trump juggernaut has lately been joined by exhaustive analysis of a corollary phenomenon: the rise of the self-described “alt right.” The alt right is a confrontational strain of conservative thought that has recently crept out of the shadowy online precincts where it was born to assert its influence on the 2016 campaign. Right-wing news website Breitbart recently added the latest entry to the burgeoning genre with an essay titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” The article ran more than 5,000 words and was co-authored by the loosely affiliated movement’s most prominent figurehead, a British writer named Milo Yiannopoulos.
For those looking to understand the alt-right phenomenon, an examination of Yiannopoulos and his online persona is a good place to start. He presents a stark alternative to the staid Heritage Foundation set. Openly gay, sporting a shock of blond hair and boasting nearly 200,000 Twitter followers, Yiannopoulos has sworn allegiance to Trump, whom he calls “Daddy.” He has also taken to posing with semi-automatic weapons. Recently, he circulated a photo of himself holding an AK-47 and a Louis Vuitton handbag, while wearing a suit and a camouflage “Make America Great Again” hat.
If the alt right has a coherent credo, it’s to wage war on what it sees as politically correct speech and thought. The movement’s members seem to latch onto certain ideas and images due to the outrage they cause across the political spectrum. This explains how Trump, who embraced the politics of divisiveness long before the Internet even existed, has become an alt-right folk hero. It also accounts for the alt right’s embrace of guns and gun imagery.
Yiannopoulos seems to relish the iconography of firearms for the reasons that drive much of his public life: They are fraught symbols with the power to piss off other people. The alt right’s adherents don’t often invoke the “first freedom” talking point, the heritage of sportsmen, or the need for self-defense — the rhetoric used by groups like the National Rifle Association. For Yiannopoulos and much of the rest of the alt right, guns are a locus of symbolic conflict, yet another means of provocation.
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/04/trump-alt-right-guns-milo-yiannopoulos/
The punditry’s dissection of the origins of the Donald Trump juggernaut has lately been joined by exhaustive analysis of a corollary phenomenon: the rise of the self-described “alt right.” The alt right is a confrontational strain of conservative thought that has recently crept out of the shadowy online precincts where it was born to assert its influence on the 2016 campaign. Right-wing news website Breitbart recently added the latest entry to the burgeoning genre with an essay titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” The article ran more than 5,000 words and was co-authored by the loosely affiliated movement’s most prominent figurehead, a British writer named Milo Yiannopoulos.
For those looking to understand the alt-right phenomenon, an examination of Yiannopoulos and his online persona is a good place to start. He presents a stark alternative to the staid Heritage Foundation set. Openly gay, sporting a shock of blond hair and boasting nearly 200,000 Twitter followers, Yiannopoulos has sworn allegiance to Trump, whom he calls “Daddy.” He has also taken to posing with semi-automatic weapons. Recently, he circulated a photo of himself holding an AK-47 and a Louis Vuitton handbag, while wearing a suit and a camouflage “Make America Great Again” hat.
If the alt right has a coherent credo, it’s to wage war on what it sees as politically correct speech and thought. The movement’s members seem to latch onto certain ideas and images due to the outrage they cause across the political spectrum. This explains how Trump, who embraced the politics of divisiveness long before the Internet even existed, has become an alt-right folk hero. It also accounts for the alt right’s embrace of guns and gun imagery.
Yiannopoulos seems to relish the iconography of firearms for the reasons that drive much of his public life: They are fraught symbols with the power to piss off other people. The alt right’s adherents don’t often invoke the “first freedom” talking point, the heritage of sportsmen, or the need for self-defense — the rhetoric used by groups like the National Rifle Association. For Yiannopoulos and much of the rest of the alt right, guns are a locus of symbolic conflict, yet another means of provocation.
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/04/trump-alt-right-guns-milo-yiannopoulos/
This bears repeating: "Yiannopoulos seems to relish the iconography of firearms for the reasons that drive much of his public life: They are fraught symbols with the power to piss off other people."
This appears to be the goal of most of the "cold dead hands" right-wing gun lobby screamers: to piss off other people by waving their guns around in public and trying to look tough. In reality, they are craven cowards, racists, bigots, and antisocial misfits. They are the epitome of the need for sensible gun control in this country.
These are the armed assholes who voted for Trump and are spouting hatred in our communities around the country.
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