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Newsweek published this story under the headline of Citizen Trump on September 28, 1987. Newsweek is republishing the story.

Donald Trump, America's brash billionaire, wants the land Harry Stein's restaurant-equipment store stands on, and he wants it badly. It's behind Trump Plaza, a hotel and casino in Atlantic City that on a good day drops roughly $ 2 million into its owner's pocket. Where the Steins' store now stands, Trump wants to build a huge wall and turn it into a waterfalla $ 4 million touch. If he can buy out Harry Stein and knock down the building, the waterfall will look better. The Stein family has been in business in Atlantic City for more than 90 years; Harry and his son Bill sit alone with Trump in a windowless casino office. No lawyers, no bankers, no aides.

"I don't really need your land," Trump says, calmly and politely, "and, as you know, land prices aren't nearly what they were a few years ago. And I'll put up the wall anyway. Once we decide to build the wall, I will have zero interest in your building. So give me a number. All I want to know is if we have a deal."

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The Steins fidget. "We were looking for $ 200 a square foot."

"Three years ago I'd have given it to you."

"It will cost us $ 1.5 million to move."

"But you'll save a fortune in taxes. The price you're asking is far above what I paid others. The alternative I have is to preclude you forever. Once I don't buy it, I don't believe the property will have any value. The gravy train is leaving the station."

Trump tells the Steins to call his New York office in a week. He shakes hands and leaves. "You wait," he says later, "they'll come around. They always do."

A huge black helicopter with red letteringTRUMPflutters above the southern tip of Manhattan. The French-made military chopper can travel 180 miles per hour; at $ 2 million, the price Trump paid Warner Communications for it, it was a steal. He is flying to Atlantic City to promote an upcoming heavyweight fight that his casino is sponsoring. With him is Don King, the bombastic boxing promoter and heavyweight champ of hair. It is a cloudless morning, and before banking to the southwest the pilot hangs the copter directly above the gleaming twin towers of the World Trade Center for half a minute. Neither Trump nor King pays much attention to the staggering view. A reporter is present, and it's showtime. Trump, after a long soliloquy detailing his problems with his current archenemy, Ed Koch, the mayor of New York, turns the floor over to King.

"Donald Trump is a man of vision," King bellows. "New York City needs a man like Donald Trump. I have come up with a word to describe him: 'telesynergistic.' That means, 'progress ingeniously planned by geometric progressionthe capability of transforming dreams into living reality, in minimal time, at megaprofits.'"

"Go on Don, I kinda like this," Trump says sarcastically.

"Now, I believe the rift between Donald and Mayor Koch must be healed. We must get it behind us. New York needs Donald Trump's energy and his vision. That's why I am offering my services as an intermediary. To act as a peacemaker, to do anything I can to help bring them together."

"Don," replies Trump, stroking his chin thoughtfully, "I'm not interested in peace. I'm interested in competence."

Donald Trump sits in his office in the midtown Manhattan building that bears his name"the most luxurious building in the world," he calls it. All week he has been lampooned in Gary Trudeau's comic strip, "Doonesbury." In one of the series, Trudeau had Trump in front of a press conference, protesting that his alleged presidential ambitions are nothing more than "a billionaire developer exercising his right to float trial balloons."

"'Doonesbury,' 'Doonesbury,' everybody's asking me to respond to 'Doonesbury'," Trump says, a bit exasperated. A day earlier he had said he was only vaguely aware of the comic strip and had dismissed the barbs with a wave of his hand: "People tell me I should be flattered." Now he will lay the political rumors to rest. "I'm not running for president," he says, "but if I did . . . I'd win. There, I said it. I didn't think I would, but I did."

Donald John Trumpreal estate developer, casino operator, corporate raider and perhaps future politicianis a symbol of an era. He is the man with the Midas fist. For better or worse, in the 1980s it is OK to be fiercely ambitious, staggeringly rich and utterly at ease in bragging about it. He is the latest of a breed unique to the decade: the businessman who becomes larger than life, like a star athlete or popular actor. Trump has made it into that rarefied group as fast as anyone, and he revels in his high celebrity status as few have before him. "There is no one my age who has accomplished more," he boasts openly.

Trump has created one of the most profitable private empires in the most public of fashions. His high profile, in fact, has been central to his success. "The aura of the Trump name," as one of his attorneys puts it, "is a big asset." For the new rich, says a New York real-estate broker, the name is synonymous with "status." So Trump plasters it on practically every building he builds or casino he operatesand he promotes them brilliantly. "The P. T. Barnum of real estate," a friend once called him. He has become so wealthy in the process, he concedes, that life has become something of "a game" for him. The ultimate scoreboard, he says, "is the unfortunate, obvious one: money." Trump, who at 41 has amassed an empire whose assets are worth more than $ 3 billion, agrees with an assessment that others might find less than flattering. Asked if he's the ultimate Yuppie, he replies, "Yeah, maybe."

The ambition may be pure '80s, but the Trump lifestyle is roaring '20s. He owns three homes, and the word opulent does them no justice: 110 rooms at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the former mansion of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post; a huge triplex apartment in Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue skyscraper he built four years ago, and a 10-acre, 45-room weekend estate in Greenwich, Conn.

He also owns a Boeing 727, the Darth Vader helicopter, and now he's negotiating to buy a yacht owned by Saudi arms broker Adnan Khashoggi that's about six times the size of the average Manhattan apartment. ("Not many people life a life like Khashoggi," he says, and then adds with a grain, "but I'm coming damn close.") Town & Country, an upper-crust print version of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," recently ran a 12-page cover spread featuring Trump's wife, Ivana, a beautiful ex-model from Czechoslovakia. A friend of Trump's younger brother, Robert, an executive vice president in the family-owned company, says Robert once left a Manhattan dinner party early, joking that he "had to go home and watch 'Dynasty' to learn how to act."

Star struck: Trump makes no apologies for his lifestyle. He is obsessive about surrounding himself with what he calls "the best" of everything. Walk with him through one of his casinos and he shows off "the best high roller's suite ever built," one replete with all "the best" touchesfrom the hot tub overlooking the ocean to the marble on the bathroom floor.

Trump believes he is in tune with times. "The man in the street, the little guy,digsthe limo, the helicopter, the 727." (In the final "Doonesbury" strip last week, a reporter asks what experience noncandidate Trump has with "people of modest means." Plenty, Trump relies, "evicting them.") Trump can hardly wall the streets of his native New York anymore without being hounded by autograph seekers, most of whom seem star struck.

Clearly, neither New York nor Atlantic City is big enough for Trump's ambition. In the last year he has thrust himself, his money and his ego onto the national stage. As a businessman sitting atop an empire worth $ 3 billion, Trump in the last year joined the richest army in the worldthe growing legion of corporate raiders. Three separate times he made millions of dollars after buying up big chunks of publicly traded companies and then selling after rumors of a possible acquisition drove the share prices up. It was all pretty easy, he says, easier than real estate.

Open pleas: Maybe too easy for a man who seems as attracted to power as he is to wealth. Last month Trump paid $ 94,801 to run a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He wasn't hawking luxury condos or the upcoming fight in Atlantic City. In an "open letter," Trump thumped U.S. foreign policy, saying, "The world is laughing at America's politicians" for protecting "ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need destined for allies who won't help." Trump has agreed to an October speaking engagement in New Hampshire, where a lone political activist without any ties to the noncandidate is running around trying to organize a draft-Trump movement. Since the ad ran, Trump has denied presidential ambitions on several occasions; but since he does not intend to cancel the New Hampshire trip, talk of his political ambitions probably won't stop anytime soon.

To Trump's enemiesand he has enemies galorehis flirtations with politics confirm their worst suspicions: they view him as Citizen Kane sprung to life, an arrogant tycoon whose insatiable ambition leads him to seek political power. John Moore is an attorney who led a tenant group into bitter battle with Trump after he bought their rent-controlled building and announced he wanted to tear it down. "He is a dangerous man," Moore says. As a political leader, he's "the type who'd make the trains run on time."

Trump is undoubtedly enjoying the hype associated with his recent political forays. He has long recognized the benefits of publicity. The equation is simple: if more people know your name and your reputation, more people will buy your flashy condominiums, dump quarters into your slot machines or pick up a copy of your new book. Trump feeds the hype machine because nothing matters more to him than success. At times, say people close to him, it seems it's all he cares about. Says his sister Maryanne Trump-Barry, a federal district judge in New Jersey, "success brings success, which brings more success. The more he gets, the more he wants."

Ice show: How successful a promoter is Trump? Though he is now the largest casino operator in Atlantic City, he's still known in his hometown mainly as a real-estate developer. Several developers have had a bigger impact on the New York skyline recently than Donald Trump. Yet only one building constructed in New York during the last 10 years has become a tourist attractionTrump Tower. The difference is, the other developers don't build buildings with soaring waterfalls, lobbies made of pink marble and astonishingly opulent apartments that sell for more than $ 2 million. Most also don't name buildings after themselves. Few would humiliate the city's mayor by reconstructing a public skating rink in four months after the city had spent seven years trying to do it. And absolutely no one else would proceed to insult the mayor at every turn thereafter.

Trump has managed to thrive flamboyantly in two scandal-ridden industriescasinos and New York real-estate developmentand he's done it without a taint of corruption. A high-level law-enforcement official in New York says, "There aren't even rumors" about the Trump organization in the construction industry. In Atlantic City, the gaming-enforcement division several years ago asked Trump to sever his ties to a convicted felon who had worked for him in New York. He did so, and has had little trouble with the state since. He has also managed to avoid conflicts with unions in both industries, primarily because he pays union workers relatively well.

No one, not even people who loathe Donald Trump, denies his talent as a businessman. Born in Queens, the fourth of five intensely competitive children, he is the son of a successful New York real-estate developer,FredTrump, and his wife, Mary. As a teenager, Donald worked for his father's company, prowling around construction sites in Brooklyn and Queens in his spare time. After graduating with an undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, Trump worked for his father full time. At 28, he set off on his own and moved into Manhattan. AsFredTrumpgot older he turned over most of his assets to Donald. Trump "very much wanted to match his father's success," says Trump-Barry.

Trump became the consummate dealmaker, possessing what seems to be an intuitive knack for acquiring attractive assets cheaply. He is smart, tough and as tenacious as anyone in getting what he wants. Those traits, combined with his ability to attract customers to casinos or condos"I do know how to sell," he saysmade Trump very rich, very quickly.

Trump laid the cornerstone of his New York empire in 1975, when he took on a project no other developer would. With the city practically broke, he cut a deal: he offered to rehabilitate a crumbling old hotel next to Grand Central Terminala block then in seemingly irreversible decline. In return, the city agreed to grant Trump a tax break worth $ 120 million to him.

The deal was vintage Trump. "Nobody believed I could pull it off," he recalls. But after getting the subsidy, he persuaded lenders to give him $ 70 million, and Trump constructed what is now the hugely profitable Grand Hyatt Hotel. Though the tax break was controversial then, few in New York today doubt its wisdom. "The project triggered a tremendous amount of investment when that end of 42nd Street could have fallen into dereliction," says Richard Kahan, a former state official.

Trump learned a lesson in the Grand Hyatt deal: it was important to have government officials on his side, particularly in New York, where a thicket of regulations makes it extremely difficult to build anything. He became, in the words of one major developer, "the ultimate inside player." When other developers made relatively small campaign contributions to government officials, "Trump was giving $ 50,000and bragging about it," says a former government official. He also hired key government people after they left public service because he wanted their intimate knowledge of the bureaucracy.

Screwing back: Whether that tack has actually helped him much is questionable. When he tried to get another major tax subsidy for Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the city fought him. He finally won in court, but only after a long delay. Then he tried to get tenants evicted from a building he wanted to tear down next to Central Park. The tenants fought back and eventually won a favorable settlement from Trump.

Now he has alienated Koch by demanding a $ 1 billion subsidy for a quintessential Trump project: a 150-story buildingthe world's tallestthat he wants to build on a piece of land he bought for $ 92 million three years ago. The land sits against the Hudson River on Manhattan's West Side and, thanks to a real-estate boom in New York, is already worth much more than what Trump paid for it. In addition to the 150-story tower, Trump wants to build 11 other skyscrapers, all 45 stories high.

He calls the project Television City, because he wants his new buildings to house the National Broadcasting Co. NBC's parent company, General Electric, has been threatening to move the network out of New York. Trump says Koch should grant him tax relief so he, in turn, can offer NBC subsidized office space and keep it in New York. Though publicly cast as a struggle to keep the network in the city, the issue in fact has become a test of wills between Koch and Trump.

Even some city officials privately say they'd bet on Trump. Those who have sat across the table from him say his negotiating style is infuriating, but effective. A rival developer says Trump "does business through intimidation. It's bravado and shock. Intimidate until they collapse. Ask for the moon and you will get something." Trump doesn't necessarily disagree with all of that. He just characterizes it differently. "If people are fair to me, I'm fair to them," he says. "If people screw me, I screw back in spades."

Felling trees: That combativeness applies to anyone, anywhere. At Trump Tower he told Irving Fischer, chairman of HRH Construction Corp., for years the Trump family's main contractor, to get rid of a bunch of trees that had been installed in the building's lobby. It had been an ordeal getting the tall trees into the building to begin with, and Fischer was unclear as to how Trump though they could them out. "Ever hear of a chain saw?" he snapped. It cost Trump $ 100,000 more, but he got rid of the trees he didn't want.

Does toughness necessarily translate into more money for Trump? Ask Eric Silverstein. His sign-painting company had been working overtime to get ready for the opening of Trump Plaza, one of Trump's Atlantic City casinos. Silverstein was a minor contractor on a huge project. But for him, the $ 800,000 fee was enormous.

No choice: Trump kept asking for small improvements in his work, Silverstein says, and delayed payment until they were completed. Then, he claims, Robert Trump, who managed the project for Donald, called Silverstein to a meeting he swears took place in one of the hotel's men's rooms. Trump, Silverstein says, had a new offer. He would give him 50 cents on the dollar to settle the contract. If he didn't like it, he claims he was told, he could sue. Silverstein says he had little choice. A suit would take years, and he simply couldn't afford the legal fees.

Robert Trump says Silverstein's company got paid less than what he contracted for because it did "shoddy work and was late in finishing it, besides." Silverstein disputes those claims, but Robert Trump says, "Anything he got paid was too much." Donald says he is unaware of the incident, but adds, "If a contractor does a great job, he gets full payment on the first of every month. Sometimes even earlier. If a contractor does less of a good job, I will try to renegotiate. If a contractor has done a bad job, he will go through hell."

To Trump, that's simply good business. And outside time spent with his wife and three children, business consumes him. He recently bought a Florida condominium project in a poor locationan atypical move for Trump. He did it, he says, because when he stays at Mar-a-Lago, he needs something to do. "Now," he says, "I have someplace to go" on weekends.

Such ambition leaves little time for friendships. "Friendship is not part of his agenda," a business associate says, and Trump concedes as much. "I hate to have to rely on friends," he says. "I'm not a trusting guy. I want to rely on myself." His only "real friends," he says, are family members.

Where his ambition will take him is by no means clear. Trump believes one of his "strengths lies in my unpredictability." He could, without question, become one of the most feared corporate raiders around. Trump has cash and almost unlimited borrowing capability. He could go after almost any company he wants. Recently he took over Resorts International, a rival casino operator, the first time Trump had acquired a public company. In the last 12 months he has made more than $ 122 million buying large chunks of stock in three different companiesAllegis (formerly United Airlines), Holiday Corp. (owner of the Holiday Inns hotel chain) and Bally's. In each case news of his stake triggered takeover speculation that drove the stock price up.

But Harvey Freeman, one of Trump's closest advisers, says his boss isn't necessarily the next T. Boone Pickens. "He's not going to go after companies for the hell of it," says Freeman. "Each one of those deals this year were situations we had looked at closely, in businesses related to ours. Donald will just continue to pick his spots."

The political talk is probably also overdone. Even if Trump were serious about a career in public life, it would be difficult for a casino operator, no matter how well known, to get elected to anything. Nor is it at all clear that he is serious. Trump admits that he has only a glancing familiarity with important issues, and intimates say that he would hate running for office. "He'd love to be president, but only if he were appointed," says one friend.

In fact, Trump may have no grand strategic plan. His colleagues say he focuses on what's in front of him. The project at hand completely consumes his energy. For now, that's apt to be Television City and his casinos. A few years from now it may be something else; he just doesn't yet know what. He will simply pursue success obsessively in everything he does, time and time again. "No achievement can satisfy what he wants," believes one friend. "What he wants still is acceptance from his father. He is playing out his insecurities on an incredibly large canvas."

'Correct today':FredTrump, 83, still goes to work every day at his modest office in Brooklyn. He got rich years ago building thousands of brick, pillbox-size homes for the emerging middle class in Brooklyn and Queens. Fred talks to his son nearly every day and says he is "awed" by what Donald's done. His son is still very much a product of the Brooklyn office. His vernacular is neither that of an aristocrat nor of a polished executive. That may be why today, despite the outrageous trappings of his wealth and the unyielding ambition, Donald Trump remains a rather familiar figure.

In David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Glengarry Glen Ross," a slick, street-smart real-estate salesman named Ricky Roma talks of ambition and money and what they mean. Forget Roma, for the moment, and substitute Trump.

"I do those things which seem correct to metoday.I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that whichtodayI think will make me secure. And every day I do that, and when that dayarrivesthat I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) thetruereserve that I have is the strength that I have ofacting each daywithout fear. According to the dictates of my mind. Stocks, bonds, objects of art, real estate. Now: What are they? An opportunity. To what? To make money? Perhaps. Tolosemoney? Perhaps. To 'indulge' and to 'learn' about ourselves? Perhaps. So f---ingwhat?Whatisn't?They're anopportunity.That's all. They're anevent.A guy comes up to you, you make a call, you send in a brochure, it doesn't matter. 'There're thesepropertiesI'd like for you to see.' What does it mean? What youwantit to mean . . ."

For Trump, it can only mean more money, more power andwhat his $ 1 billion ego seems to covet mostmore attention.

Trump: On the Record

On Ed Koch:He's a bully, and you know what you do with a bully? You hit him between the eyes.On his enemies:If people screw me, I screw back in spades.

On Michael Dukakis and other Democratic presidential candidates:Americans are tired of the Seven Dwarfs. On his own political prospects:I'm not running for president, but if I did, I'd win. On Leona Helmsley:I feel sorry for Harry. On Trump:There is no one my age who has accomplished more . . . Everyone can't be the best.

Read more here:
Donald Trump Has Never Had Any Friends, Likes to Speak to His Family Every Day - Newsweek

You probably have a good idea of who the so-called alt-right are: a group of white supremacists and nationalists, bound up by a fiery loathing of political correctness, cultural Marxism, and those pesky social-justice warriors. You might have also seen the articles that tell us to stop using that term and call them out for the fascist, neo-Nazis they are. In the wake of the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville last weekend, these calls have only become more urgent. The phrase has become a catch-all for people like Richard Spencer, the head of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the online troll and provocateur who recently fell from mainstream conservative grace. But theres a lot more people it catches in its (inter)net.

The alt-right isnt one group. They dont have one coherent identity. Rather, theyre a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, mens rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, theyre beginning to form a cohesive group identity. And I have the data to prove it.

The_Donald is a Reddit community with over 450,000 subscribers. Its the breeding ground for the alt-right, and the fermenting vat in which this identity is being formed. According to data analysis by FiveThirtyEight, its US president Donald Trumps most rabid online following, and Reddit itself now claims it is the fourth most visited site in the US, behind only Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

As part of the Alt-Right Open Intelligence Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, Ive been working to understand the language of the alt-right and what it can tell us about its members. Working with the UK Home Offices Extremism Analysis Unit, I used Googles BigQuery tool, which lets you trawl through massive datasets in seconds, to interrogate a collection of every Reddit comment ever madeall 3 billion of them.

Focusing on The_Donald, I used a script that lets you see which words are most likely to occur in the same comment. Combining this with a tool that allows you to look at the overlap in commenters between different parts of Reddit, I found that the alt-right isnt just one voice: Its made up by distinct constituencies that share different opinions and ways to express them, identifiable by the language they use and the other communities they post in.

In other words, theres a taxonomy of trolls. So who are they, and what language do they use?

The 4chan shitposters. These men and boys (and they are almost exclusively male) come from 4chan, an image board in the deepest bowels of the internet. Youre most likely to see them deliberately provoking offense and outrage, often using the most extreme racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic slurs, but without necessarily fully buying into racist ideology. Theyre the people you cant argue with, because any attempt to engage them in a serious conversation will provoke an only joking! plea. Other users of The_Donald affectionately refer to them as weaponized autists, named for the orchestration of numerous hacks and leaks through the hacker collective Anonymous. Youll see them talking about memes such as Pepe the Frog, Kekistan, and the normies they despise. Elsewhere on Reddit, youre most likely to find them on /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, /r/CringeAnarchy, or any other deliberately offensive subreddit.

Anti-progressive gamers. Closely related to the above, these trolls were radicalized over the course of the #GamerGate hate movement. They really like video games, and they really hate social-justice warriors, gay people, and feminists, all of whom theyre pretty sure major movie and game studios are pandering to with things like all-female screenings of Wonder Woman. Youre likely to see them talking about the trans community a lot (and repeating the words there are only two genders constantly). Elsewhere on Reddit, youll find them in gaming subreddits, or /r/KotakuinAction, which was the home of GamerGate.

Mens rights activists. This group consists of those who explicitly campaign for mens rights (custody battles and workplace deaths are their favorite talking points) and also includes anti-feminists and misogynists of all stripes. Youll find them at /r/Incels (short for involuntary celibates, who want to have sex or find a partner but cantand blame women for this), /r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way, who believe that they can only find true liberation in a female-dominated world by refusing to interact with women completely), the infamous /r/TheRedPill, and a few less popular Manosphere subreddits as well as misogynistic sites like Return of Kings. Youll find them referring to women as females, and men they perceive as weak as cucks (more on that later).

Anti-globalists. These people like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Sean Hannity, and conspiracy theoriesand they talk about them an awful lot. They are far less enamored (yet still mildly obsessed) with George Soros, who funds everyone they hate, as well as Emmanuel Macron, John McCain, and Paul Ryan. Elsewhere, they can be seen on /r/uncensorednews (primarily news about bad things perpetrated by members of minority groups and left-wing people), and /r/conspiracy. Their hyperbolic conspiratorial language might sound absurd, but its become an increasingly coherent and important part of The_Donald since the subreddit began.

White supremacists. It might seem surprising, but the language of white supremacy is actually quite uncommon in The_Donald. Thats because explicit racism is banned. Implicit or coded racism is very common, for example displaying Islamophobic sentiment and passing it off as criticizing Islamism, or claiming Islam is not compatible with Western culture. They also populate other subreddits like the now-banned /r/CoonTown and /r/GreatApes, as well as sites like Stormfront and the now defunct The Daily Stormer.

For a long time, these people would have very limited reason to interact with one another. There wasnt much in common between meme aficionados, gamers, sexists, conspiracy theorists, and racists. Because the very nature of Reddit is to subdivide and find your own specific corner of the internet, these communities didnt tend to run into each other all that much. But thats now changed.

Over the last year and a half, these types of trolls have formed a central identity around Trumpism and have started to coalesce. Bored teenagers and gamers are becoming indoctrinated into hard-line anti-globalism, conspiracy theories, and Islamophobia, and its happening right before our eyes, on a publicly accessible forum.

The_Donald contains all of these different groups, marked out by their overlapping community memberships and the words that they (and only they) use. Theyve created an in-group language consisting of words like MAGA (Make America Great Again) and based, a word appropriated from rap culture. The latter is taken to mean being yourself and originated in the crack era. Then there is centipede (usually shortened to pede), a self-referential term originating from the viral video series Cant Stump the Trump, which was popularized when the linked video was tweeted by Trump himself.

But the keystone of this vernacular is cuck. A shortening of cuckold, an old word used to refer to men who allow their partners to sleep with other men (and often find sexual gratification in the humiliation of it), its use has become the sine qua non of alt-right group membership.

The word cuck is everywhere, and its story can tell us a lot about the different groups described above.Youll find cuck used in multiple senses. First, theres cuckservative, used against conservatives who are seen as being too soft and allowing their countries (primarily European) to be invaded by Islam and Muslims. The racial connotations of the word were attached during a period when the word was incredibly popular in the now-banned /r/CoonTown, an explicitly racist subreddit.

Then, theres the use of cuck in a more patriarchal sense. The GamerGate movement popularized the word on Reddit when they were banned from 4chan and migrated over to /r/KotakuInAction. They used it first to describe the jilted ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, a games developer they ran a hate campaign against, before turning it against Christopher moot Poole, the administrator of 4chan, when he kicked them off his site.

Thirdly, you have what might now be the most standard usage of the word, which is to refer to those seen as liberal. You can see this in the popularization of words like libcuck, cuckbook, starcucks, and cuck Schumer in The_Donald. In the wider digital world, you might see it in below-the-line comments of articles on Facebook.

This leads us to the final type of usage, which is when anyone who isnt the alt-right uses it to mock those who do use it, flipping its meaning entirely. As a result, its everywhere, and its story can tell us a lot about the different groups described above.

The_Donald and other alt-right spaces are acting as meeting places for disaffected white men from all walks of life to share a communal hatred. They start out in different corners of the internet with different interests and different lexicons. They remain separate when theyre outside of The_Donald, but the more time they spend in there, the more pernicious views of the world they are likely to pick up by osmosis. They are forming a coherent group identity, represented in the language they have begun to speak, which coalesces around their common hatred of liberalism and their love of Donald Trump.

Were witnessing the radicalization of young white men through the medium of frog memes. In order to see it, all you need to do is look at the words coming out of their mouths. The alt-right isnt yet united, but it soon will be.

Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Linguistic data analysis of 3 billion Reddit comments shows the alt-right is getting stronger - Quartz

Demonstrators in New York march against the Charlottesville nationalist protests. Photograph: ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock

The left-right spectrum of political speech is getting increasingly crowded. The rise of Donald Trump has popularised the term alt-right, which sounds more indie and cool than far right. Meanwhile, those on the alt-right have recently begun to describe their opponents as the alt-left a coinage that, asymmetrically, seems to be an attempt to rhetorically downgrade them to a fringe group of eccentrics, rather than a broad coalition of people who dont like racism much. What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Trump asked, Solomonically, after the clashes in Charlottesville. Do they have any semblance of guilt?

Some of the people who actually protest against alt-right protesters in the US are from a group called Antifa, short for anti-fascist. Their opponents happily adopt the term, aiming to paint any and all anti-racist liberals as a small militant conspiracy, but their acquiescence in such language seems a bit peculiar when you think about it. American shock-babbler Ann Coulter, for example, tweeted that she hoped Trump would denounce the violent left-wing Antifa that shut down my Berkeley speech! IfCoulter agrees to call her opponents Antifa, does it logically follow that she is happy to identify as a fascist?

Fascist, of course, has long been a term of abuse on the left that has not, historically, been restricted to actual fascists, but applied liberally to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush and many others before Trump. As Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, wrote in 2004: Fascism unlike communism, socialism, capitalism, or conservatism is a smear word more often used to brand ones foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them. We may suspect that the same is increasingly true of almost all political descriptors applied to other groups these days.

If Coulter agrees to call her opponents Antifa, does it logically follow that she is happy to identify as a fascist?

The angry white men who congregated in Charlottesville were widely described as Nazis, a usage for which there are arguments both for and against. On the one hand, these people love swastikas, chant things like blood and soil, and hate Jews and black people, which definitely seems pretty Nazi. On the other hand, tocall them Nazis is a convenient othering that refuses to acknowledge their identity as Americans, standing in the USs own proud tradition of violent racism. The first of the three groups calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan formed in the mid-19th century, after all, and US eugenics and investigations into the science of racial cleansing in the early 20th century were themselves taken as inspiration for the Nazis murderous programme.

To resist calling them Nazis is not somehow to make excuses for savage paranoiacs who claim that liberal policies amount to genocide of their group. A similar point can be made about the term neo-Nazi, which was already in use in the 1940s when actual Nazis were still around, and probably ought to be limited to groups that explicitly want to reconstitute something very like the National Socialist German Workers Party. The unfortunate truth is that nazism does not exhaust the scope of possible human evil.

What, then, about white nationalists or white supremacists? Such terms certainly seem more coolly analytical than fascists or Nazis, though it might be seen as a problem that they both contain the word white, and so implicitly acquiesce in the underlying idea that skin colour is really important. And white supremacist itself (from 1896) was formed from the earlier phrase white supremacy (1824), and thus carries within it the exact noxious ideology that opponents wish to denounce. It might seem that the simple term racists would suffice, were it not for the unfortunate fact that there are so many racists in the world that its just not specific enough to pick out this particular rump of morons.

If you are not a Nazi or a fascist or on the alt-right, but not a paid up member of Antifa or really feeling the Bern either, what are you? You may be a member of the roundly despised group of centrists. That is now a term of outright contempt among fans of Jeremy Corbyn, for example, but the very first citation of the word in the OED is hardly complimentary either: in 1872, the Daily News reported on a group of French parliamentarians: That weak-kneed congregation who sit in the middle of the House, and call themselves Centrists. To employ the term centrist as abuse, of course, is to imply a Manichean worldview in which everything is pure good or pure evil, and politics boils down to a simple binary choice. Its a fantasy world in which complicated decisions are easy, and you can be sure the Nazis would agree.

Here is the original post:
'Alt-right', 'alt-left' the rhetoric of hate after Charlottesville - The Guardian

Last Friday night, the white nationalists who marched on Charlottesvilles Emancipation Park all looked strikingly similar. They were almost exclusively white, of course. But they were also relatively young. And with a handful of exceptions, they were men.

The Unite the Right rally brought together white nationalists of all stripes, including traditional white supremacists like Neo-Nazis and the KKK, and other racist groups that have united under the banner of the new, internet-oriented alt-right. The rally was violent and bloodyone of the white supremacist attendees is being charged with deliberately ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others.

Bannon's Exit Leaves Trump Untethered

Its hard to determine just how many women identify with the alt-right, because many of the movements members keep a low profile. George Hawley, author of Making Sense of the Alt-Right, estimates that 20 percent of alt-right supporters are women. But in Charlottesville, a far smaller portion of the crowd was female. All 10 speakers at the rally were men.

There has been a lot of theorizing on why the white nationalism of the alt-right is more popular among men than women. The prevailing theory is that women are turned off by its stark anti-women rhetoric. But their lack of presence at the rally shouldnt be read as an absence of women in the white nationalist movement overall.

There are a lot of white women who buy into this movement, theyre just doing it in private, said Kelly Baker, an author who specializes in gender and white extremist groups. Theyre not vocal, but they are supporters of the men in their lives who are.

I talked to a few alt-right supporters after the Charlottesville rally. All of them gave the same explanation for the protests missing women: biology. There is no official alt-right platformmembers are generally anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and see themselves as defenders of the white race. Most also maintain that there are certain characteristics inherent to each gender. Men are risk-takers, multiple alt-right supporters told me. Women are nurturers. Risk-takers belong at nationally televised protests. Nurturers dont.

By and large, alt-right men dont seem to be forcing these traditional gender roles on the women of their movementthe alt-right women are doing it themselves. The women share a profound disdain for the feminist movement, and are eager to claim the supportive, behind-the-scenes roles.

As for female empowerment, theres nothing that has made me feel more empowered in my life than supporting and being supported by a strong man, Claudia Davenport, an alt-right activist, said in an interview with The Economist. I think that men and women are better off when we stop fighting nature and allow our distinct identities to shine through.

In our conversations, multiple alt-right supporters referred to the movements men as protectors.

Its not the role of women to protect the borders, the nation, or the family. So we do not expect this of women, nor do we find it strange that they are less represented in something that we view as an innately male occupation: guarding territory, said Tara McCarthy, a female alt-right blogger.

White supremacy movements have used the language of protection since the height of the KKK in the 1920s. The KKK rallied to defend white supremacy from the forces it perceived as threateningnamely immigrants and recently enfranchised African Americans.

The KKK made it its mission to defend the spaces it saw as its own: white women, the home, the schools, the nation. They thought, This is our job as knights, protection is what we do, said Baker.

Unlike the alt-right, however, Klanswomen were on the front lines of the movement. There were fewer of themat the Klans peak, half a million, compared to four million menbut they didnt confine themselves to supporting roles. The vast majority wore robes, marched in parades, and participated in highly visible picnics. They were involved in the fight for female suffrage, arguing that only white women should get the vote.

So why are todays white nationalist women less visible than the 1920s Klanswomen? Today, visibility entails significantly more risk. When the KKK marched in the early 20th century, it was powerful and influential in the South. When the white nationalists marched through Charlottesville, they knew they would face social media backlash and counter-protests across the country.

In this way, white-nationalist protestand protectionhas become a more traditionally masculine act in the view of its proponents. Its more dangerous, and requires more risk, than it did 100 years ago.

The alt-right is divided on how visibleand vocalthey want women to be. On one hand, there are organizations like Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), a gender separatist group that cautions men against relationships with women, that bar women from membership. On the other, there is a growing contingent of alt-right men who encourage the women in their community to speak out and become leaders themselves.

Many alt-right men like it when they have women who are contributing content, recording podcasts, making YouTube channels. Thats because women in this movement have an easier time amassing followers, said Hawley.

According to Hawley, outspoken women on the alt-right are particularly effective mechanisms for recruitment. Because there arent many of them, a female alt-right blogger, YouTube star, or Twitter enthusiast attracts more attention than a young white man who fits the alt-right stereotype. Women make the movement seem more normal, Hawley said.

There are only a few alt-right women interested in claiming leadership roles within the movement. As the alt-right develops, these women will likely continue to be a source of tension. During a live-streamed video chat in 2015, Colin Robertson, a popular Scottish alt-right blogger, discussed U.S. politics, among other things, with two of the most prominent female personalities on the alt-right, Lana Lokteff and Ayla Stewart. As soon as Robertson opened the conversation up to the audience , misogynistic comments started rolling in. One viewer wrote, These women are the same old tainted, fucked-up strong womyn, using a spelling of women some feminists use to mock Lokteff and Stewart as feminists in disguise.

To fit into the movement, alt-right women must be visible in the right way. They have to prove they arent threatening traditional gender roles: both through what they say, and how they look. The majority of well-known, female alt-right personalities are young, attractive women.

When women do appear in alt-right journals or online discussions, its as objects of attraction, said Baker. They need to appear as victims or passive objects of male desire.

Above all, women on the alt-right must accept the movements dogma on biology: the idea that men are meant for certain roles, and women are meant for others.

See the article here:
The Women Behind the 'Alt-Right' - The Atlantic

Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesnt necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact.

The greatest Nazi-killer of the 20th century was Josef Stalin. He also killed millions of his own people and terrorized, oppressed, enslaved, or brutalized tens of millions more. The fact that he killed Nazis during the Second World War (out of self-preservation, not principle) doesnt dilute his evil one bit.

This should settle the issue as far as Im concerned. Nazism was evil. Soviet Communism was evil. Its fine to believe that Nazism was more evil than Communism. That doesnt make Communism good.

Alas, it doesnt settle the issue. Confusion on this point poisoned politics in America and abroad for generations.

Part of the problem is psychological. Theres a natural tendency to think that when people, or movements, hate each other, it must be because theyre opposites. This assumption overlooks the fact that many indeed, most of the great conflicts and hatreds in human history are derived from what Sigmund Freud called the narcissism of minor differences.

Most tribal hatreds are between very similar groups. The European wars of religion were between peoples who often shared the same language and culture but differed on the correct way to practice the Christian faith. The SunniShia split in the Muslim world is the source of great animosity between very similar peoples.

The young Communists and fascists fighting for power in the streets of 1920s Germany had far more in common with each other than they had with decent liberals or conservatives, as we understand those terms today. Thats always true of violent radicals and would-be totalitarians.

The second part of the problem wasnt innocent confusion, but sinister propaganda. As Hitler solidified power and effectively outlawed the Communist Party of Germany, The Communist International (Comintern) abandoned its position that socialist and progressive groups that were disloyal to Moscow were fascist and instead encouraged Communists everywhere to build popular fronts against the common enemy of Nazism.

These alliances of convenience with social democrats and other progressives were a great propaganda victory for Communists around the world because they bolstered the myth that Communists were just members of the Left coalition in the fight against Hitler, bigotry, fascism, etc.

This obscured the fact that whenever the Communists had a chance to seize power, they did so. And often, the first people they killed, jailed, or exiled were their former allies. Thats what happened in Eastern Europe, Cuba and other places where Communists succeeded in taking over the government.

If you havent figured it out yet, this seemingly ancient history is relevant today because of the depressingly idiotic argument about whether its okay to equate antifa anti-fascist left-wing radicals with the neo-Nazi and white-supremacist rabble that recently descended on Charlottesville, Va. The president wants to claim that there were very fine people on both sides of the protest and that the anti-fascist radicals are equally blameworthy. He borrowed from Fox News Channels Sean Hannity the bogus term alt-left to describe the antifa radicals.

The term is bogus for the simple reason that, unlike the alt-right, nobody calls themselves the alt-left. And thats too bad. One of the only nice things about the alt-right is that its leaders are honest about the fact that they want nothing to do with traditional American conservatism. Like the original Nazis, they seek to replace the traditional Right with their racial hogwash.

The antifa crowd has a very similar agenda with regard to traditional American liberalism. These goons and thugs oppose free speech, celebrate violence, despise dissent, and have little use for anything else in the American political tradition. But many liberals, particularly in the media, are victims of the same kind of confusion that vexed so much of American liberalism in the 20th century. Because antifa suddenly has the (alt-)right enemies, they must be the good guys. Theyre not.

And thats why this debate is so toxically stupid. Fine, antifa isnt as bad as the KKK. Who cares? Since when is being less bad than the Klan a major moral accomplishment?

In these tribal times, the impulse to support anyone who shares your enemies is powerful. But it is a morally stunted reflex. This is America. Youre free to denounce totalitarians wherever you find them even if they might hate the right people.

READ MORE: The Fascists Were Using Antifa against Conservatives What Identity Politics Hath Wrought Rebuilding the Public Square after Charlottesville

Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. You can write to him in care of this newspaper or by e-mail at [emailprotected], or via Twitter @JonahNRO.

Link:
Alt-Right & Antifa -- Both Bad Groups & Ideology | National Review - National Review