Peter Brimelow: Donald Trump and Steve Bannon are not alt-right people

Quoted here in The New York Times in an article which calls to mind, as usual, nothing so much as a bucket full of eels:

“Trump and Steve Bannon are not alt-right people,” Mr. Brimelow said, adding that they had opportunistically seized on two issues that the alt-right cares most about — stopping immigration and fighting political correctness — and used them to mobilize white voters. 

To The Times racism defines not just the alt-right but conservatism generally, such as believing in Obama's foreign provenance and therefore his illegitimacy to be president, or thinking Black Lives Matter is itself a racist movement, or advocating something more than birth within our borders is necessary to be a citizen, none of which could possibly be legitimate topics of debate because The Times believes they are settled matters and any other view means one must be a racist.

To question what is settled is unacceptable to The Times, and that is best dealt with by slathering on the racism charge.

Never argue the substance.

We're old right, not alt-right, in case you were wondering, because we have faith in God and fear him and they don't

And they will end badly, if they can even manage to end at all.

Alt-righter John Derbyshire, formerly welcome at National Review where he was a better and even somewhat beloved writer, explains the difference here: 

"As has often been noted, state ideologies, like the Cultural Marxism that currently holds sway in the West, key to the same social and psychological receptors as religions. Recall the late Larry Auster’s observation that blacks are sacred objects, criticism of which is received just as blasphemy used to be in the Age of Faith, and still is in places like Pakistan.

"Alt-Right types — all of them, though in many different ways — are reacting against this state ideology.

"What characterizes the Alt-Right is the rejection of Cultural Marxism; but while it characterizes us, it doesn’t unify us. That’s because we haven’t fled from the CultMarx pseudo-religion to some other, unifying faith. We don’t do faith." 

Substituting the truth with a lie doesn't make the truth a lie.