Originally published at: The alt-right recruiting from the crunchy end of the counterculture | Boing Boing
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Alex Jones and Gwyneth Paltrow both sell the same “wellness” woo products. It’s literally a matter of different labels and packaging.
The extreme right knows how easy it is to shift a mark from one grift to another on this basis. This is why anti-vaxxers and eco-fascists are often “crunchy” types who were re-branded when they discovered their “allies” waiting for them on the far right.
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You can go back further than that. Hitler famously avoided smoking & alcohol consumption, and the Nazis has various public fitness programs.
I only hope that this doesn’t become some kind of dumb tribal identifier where non alt-right people start to worry that eating organic food will link them to odious causes.
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And further still.
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So it all goes back to a very real need to dismantle whiteness as a social category then… As long as people identify as white, they’ll be able to be subsumed into the violent/eliminationist end of white supremacy…
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Extremists and cult leaders love controlling what people eat and avoiding foods and products. Hell all these things are parts of mainstream religions too, leading to a lot of complicated feelings and situations for people.
From my perspective the flow goes the other way and consumer anxiety, guilt, underlying compulsions about cleanliness and purity, shame, control, fear etc etc that more moderate white suburbanites and also those that might be perceived as “liberal” already have serve as an inroad for extremism which has rules about controlling consumption pre-fab and also has a sense of place/identity/kinship at the ready.
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Significant portions of the Völkisch movement that formed a lot of the root stock for Nazism were about living off the land, health and personal purity.
The New Age Movement/scene kinda starts with Helena Blavatsky who was racist as fuck.
The more modern connections shouldn’t really be a surprise either. Militia movement, Christian separatist and right wing survivalists all have a big ole live off the land, fear chemicals streak. With the anti-vax movement becoming more and more embedded on the right as the entire alt-med scene becomes more and more tied to right wing politics.
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“Moral foundation theory argues that there are five basic moral
foundations: (1) harm/care, (2) fairness/reciprocity, (3) ingroup/loyalty,
(4) authority/respect, and (5) purity/sanctity”
So, this just aligns with “purity”.
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And this has to do with the alt-right recruit from the crunchy crowd… what exactly?
In other words?
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The way that the idea of purity can assume both bodily health-pure foods, “clean living”; and social ideas-pure bloodlines and “clean society”. How easy it is to sideslip from wanting organic produce to seeing segregation as purity. That people can assume behaviors that are at once seen as “counterculture” and thus, anti authoritarian, and be white separatists.
The linkage is where both groups are looking for ways to free themselves from contact with society.
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His point is not clear to me.
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It sounds sociopathic, in other words.
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Using purity and cleanliness to attack minority groups has a long history on the right.
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One place you can find the weird overlap in action is in the mountains around Santa Cruz, California. For decades the people who live there have largely been a strange mix of hippie communes and white nationalist compounds, both attracted to the area for similar reasons (i.e. finding a place where they can live off the grid and create a semiautonomous community without being hassled by The Man.)
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I often think that Madame Blavatsky’s influence on the history of the 20th century is far too underestimated.
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One of the weird things is that the hippies of the '60s got popularly seen as left-wing, but they generally weren’t. There was some overlap with the left, but the hippie movement itself was apolitical. So it’s not really so surprising that there would also be overlap with right-wingers.
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Pshaw! Discerning consumers know, if you want the highest quality you get your vaginal steam baths from Paltrow and your taint wipes from Jones.
/S
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Nah, those taint wipes didn’t work on him, I’m out.
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The trouble with that framework is that it splits the polis. There’s no point in even trying for some sense of consensus, because 50% of the populace is wired up to believe one thing, and 50 percent the opposite.
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