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Paul Joseph Watson might look like a Millet's in Runcorn is missing ashelf stacker, but he claims to be the coolest man since the sixtiesended. As provocateur-in-chief for conspiracy news site Infowars, he's a high profile spokesman of the #AltRight, and a rumour monger for fake news stories like #Pizzagate.

But Watson wants to be so much more. Forget Beyonc. Forget Colin Kaepernick. Todays real icon of cool, according to authorities including himself, is an angry YouTube star. Watson wants you to believe that Conservatism Is The NEW Counter Cultureand that he is it's Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Tom Wolfe all rolled into one.

When youre done dying of laughter, its worth reflecting on the seed of truth that fake news exploits to get its hooks into the minds of the ignorant. Its true that liberalism is facing a shift change. The counterculture energy that fuelled the civil rights movement, the liberal ninetiesof Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama, is no longer a counterculture. Its the culture.

But it does not follow that the youth of today are ready to toss away their freedoms and go back to enjoying bible readings, polite tea dances and no sex before marriage. Some will. But then the great victory of liberalism is that you can choose the lifestyle that suits you. Even if its a lifestyle your grandparents struggled to escape.

In fact all evidence suggests that millennials and Generation Z are so liberal they will make the sixtiescounterculture look like a Mormon fun day. Todays twentysomethings arent just against Brexit theyre living as digital nomads all over the world.Polyamory is now so commonplace that marriage is starting to look like a minority activity.

Even if you can find some young people who identify as conservative, it often turns out they spend weekends dressing in furry animal costumes for kicks. We all know conservatives get up to all kinds in private, but I think were some way from Reince Priebus and Mike Pence embracing furry fandom in public.

Andrew Sullivan: Journalists need to question Trump's mental health

Paul Joseph Watson is like anageing rocker telling you metal is back because he saw some hipster kid wearing a Black Sabbath tee. Its hilarious and also disturbing to see that cultural myopia played out en masse, because while Watsons claims are laughable, the anger fuelling them is serious.

Its the same anger that manifests as outrage at female leads or a black actor in Star Wars. The anger of those who once lucked in to a dominant status over culture, but now have to compete on fair terms within it. Its the anger of racism and bigotry that has found some resurgence in the era of Trumpism.

There will never be another counterculture, because there is no longer a mainstream culture for it to counter. Culture today is a sea of sub-cultures, some smaller and some larger, but none dominant. Hollywood is learning that lesson slowly, but its going to take throwbacks like Watson a long time to learn they arent the hero of every story any more.

In the place of a counterculture, our generation is living in the midst the greatest cultural renaissance in history. Today we can taste the food, music, art, and storytelling of every culture in the world. And with the help of the internet, creators can combine parts of all our cultures to make something new. The decades ahead will be a cultural wonder we cant begin to imagine.

Conservatives can stay scared of this for as long as they want, or they can step out of their shells and join in the fun.

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There's a very simple reason why the alt-right is not the new counterculture - The Independent

Email a copy of "Richard Spencer: Alt-Right Hero Embarking on College Lecture Tour" to a friend

Richard Spencer speaking at the National Policy Institute conference on Nov. 19. Photo: YouTube/Screenshot.

Alt-right leader Richard Spencer, who garnered national attention with his controversial appearance at Texas A&M University lastDecember, plans tosow his white nationalism on college campuses across the country in 2017.

Known for using phrases like Hail victory (the literal translation of the Nazi phraseSieg Heil) and mimicking the Nazi salute, Spencer traffics in far-right ideas that center around the preservation of the white race and Western civilization. He peddles his message through a think tank known as the National Policy Institute, an online publication called Radixand, now, a planned college speaking tour.

Spencer, who initially built momentum through his websites and online comments, is increasingly shifting his attention to live audiences. Prior to his Texas A&M appearance, Spencerand other white nationalists set up a safe space on the University of California-Berkeley campus to discuss how race affects people of European heritage.

February 16, 2017 2:34 pm

Spencer sees collegeaudiences as fertile ground for his message of discontent. I think you need to get them while they are young, Spencer told a reporter in December. People in college are at this point in their lives where they areactually open to alternative perspectives.

This yearsWhite House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day has given Spencer even more fodder for horrendous statements.

President Trumps Holocaust message neglected to mention Jews, antisemitism or the Nazi campaign of genocide that claimed sixmillion Jewish victims. Most Jewish organizations were highly critical of this omission.

Yet Spencer found no fault with these omissions; rather, on the websitealtright.com, he criticized the activist Jewish community for commandeering the Holocaust narrative.

It is all about their meta-narrative of suffering, and it shall undergird their peculiar position in American society, and theirs alone, Spencer wrote. When viewed from the perspective of Jewish activists, Trumps statement becomes outrageous, as it dethrones Jews from a special position in the universe.

In his statement, Spenceremploys a favorite trope of Holocaust-distorters and antisemites: the claim that the enormity of the Holocaust is exaggerated by Jews, who manipulate World War II-era history for their own political purposes. The antisemitic stereotypes that frame Spencers brand of Holocaust denial are the same themes that were invoked by the Nazis.

Holocaust denial not only clouds our understanding of history, but it also minimizes the grave threat posed to the contemporary Jewish community by rising antisemitism. Moreover, it harms Israels security by diminishing what was once a bedrock understanding of the crucial need for the existence of a Jewish state: the Jewish people have already been targeted for total annihilation, and without a firm safe haven in the ancestral Jewish homeland, Jews will always remain vulnerable.

Spencer has already announced his intention to spread his bigotry and false version of history to American college students. For the young men and women born at the end of the 20th century, the Holocaust is merely a distant historical episode; for them, its lessons are faded, if not altogether bygone. Unfortunately, their minds areripe for exploitation by a hate monger and Holocaust denier like Richard Spencer.

Eric Fusfield is the Bnai Brith International Director of Legislative Affairs and Deputy Director of the Bnai Brith International Center for Human Rights and Public Policy

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Richard Spencer: Alt-Right Hero Embarking on College Lecture Tour - Algemeiner

Who is Milo Yiannopoulos? This is both a journalistic and a philosophical question. The first answer is that he is an editor of the fringe right-wing website Breitbart formerly led by Donald Trumps chief strategist, Steve Bannon whowas banned from Twitter for his involvement in the harassment of an actor in the Ghostbusters reboot. When he was booked to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, on 1 February, a demonstration against him ledto smashed windows and to Donald Trump tweeting: If UC Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence [sic] on innocent people with a different point of view NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

Publicity such as this is nectar to Yiannopoulos. His forthcoming book, Dangerous, has done brisk business as a result of the tweet and is now at the top of Amazons political humour chart.

Yiannopoulos has emerged as the alt-right movements thirstiest self-promoter, carefully flirting with bigotry for clicks. When Gamergate began, he appointed himself the king of an online vigilante army, defending video games from feminists who wanted plausible storylines and better underwiring for female characters. This was despite hisfrank admission that he didnt play them himself. There was, however, some mysterious quality that made him more of a gamer than women who had spent their whole career in the industry. (My mistake: it wasnt a mysterious quality. It was the ownership of a penis.)

Getting the attention of Trump to whom he refers as Daddy was probably the highlight of Yiannopouloss life. The Gamergate episode shows just how well adapted he is for success in our media ecosystem. To paraphrase theUS journalist Matt Taibbi, he is a vampire squid, relentlessly jamming his blood-funnel into anything that smells of notoriety.

He is also unhindered by principles, shame or the desire to be consistent. He has said almost uncountable appalling things, then insisted either that he did not mean them or that some aspect of his identity made them OK. For example, he once wrote about how preening poofs in public life made it harder for regular young gay people. But he is gay, so whats the harm?

Similarly, when a blogger suggested that he was anti-Semitic, he referred to being Jewish himself. (He has also claimed to be Catholic.) He has been the subject of magazine profiles mixing the ostensible condemnation of his views with the titillation of being so close to a bad boy. Hes the easiest baddie that a journalist will ever nail because he plays up to it, revelling in his pantomime villain persona. Before it was suspended, his Twitter handle was @nero (he also maintained a secret account, @caligula). And why not? All this calculated offensiveness brings in more money, more fame, more armies of fans. Critics get wrapped up in whether he means what he says, when it doesnt matter: the effect does.

However, there is a reason why Yiannopoulos educated at the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury, Kent until he was expelled isnow plying his trade in the US. A large number of British journalists remember his previous incarnation. Before he was a provocateur, he was a failed tech blogger with a vindictive streak and a poor record with money.

Yiannopoulos got his first break as Bianca Jaggers speechwriter and was part of the Telegraph blogs squad put together by Damian Thompson, now the editorial director of the Catholic Herald, which also included James Delingpole and Dan Hodges.

He is an adept chameleon and has had three names already. Born Milo Hanrahan, he briefly traded under Milo Andreas Wagner before settling on a surname taken from his Greek grandmother. (As Wagner, he wrote a 2007 book of poetry called Eskimo Papoose, featuring lines such as I shall not be your passive victim/Buggering my way to freedom/On white linen wings. He now describes it as a work of satire. Of what, its hard to say.)

His reputation in Britain was sustained by pettiness. When the tech site that he founded, the Kernel, racked up thousands of pounds in unpaid bills, he told one contributor that she was behaving like a common prostitute in wanting to be paid. Another, Jason Hesse, won a high court order for unpaid wages in 2013. (After the Kernel was sold to German investors, others were also paid.) And when the Guardians Charles Arthur complained that the Kernel was using hisphoto without permission, Yiannopoulos sent over an intern with 60 in pennies.

After that incident, James Ball now at BuzzFeed wrote, People in both tech and the media are frightened of Milo: hes a man they discuss in DMs [direct messages], not open Twitter (or open anything). That is still true. Everyone who criticises him knows that they risk a backlash from his fans, and that oh-so-postmodern ironic harassment feels just like the real thing.

So perhaps its time to say: sorry, America. We gave you the Beatles, but not all of our exports can work out.

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Milo Yiannopoulos: the chameleon who enthralled the alt right - New Statesman

In the era of President Donald J. Trump, a strange warped reality has enveloped us into a world of terrifying executive orders, fictive events touted as fact and a flow of scandals that just dont seem to stop. The first few weeks of the administration have been both exhausting and horrifying for all of us who are subject to U.S. governmentprocesses, like the court system, being challenged by an administration simply in favor of legitimizing its own power and voice. The processes that sanctify and solidify the U.S. secular, liberal hegemony are being penetrated by an alt-right. The alt-right consolidation of power is not a visible movement that people can pinpoint on the streets. While its no longer in the form of a KKK rally, the alt-right has consolidated its power through what seems convincingly similar to a passive revolution.

In Neo-Gramscian terms, Cihan Ziya Tugal, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, classifies the passive revolution as an incorporation of revolutionary movements (the alt-right) in existing systems (U.S. liberal democracy). This transformation mainly consisted of bourgeois empowerment without popular participation and economic loss of privilege for the aristocracy without its total extinction." A passive revolution is distinct because in this case, the conservative right from the Tea Party to the pro-life movement have expanded their networks in civil society. The proliferation of organizations and social networks that regulate everyday life, or civil society, has generated the means for a formidable and politically organized base. Trumps process of delegitimization of the liberal order made up of institutions, to which people consent, exercises a reinforcement of his own domination. If we consider civil society as an arena of organizational networks that can be mobilized by political society and ultimately the state, the president's close ties with alt-right organizers, like Bannon, engenders the links between civil society and the state. His rise to power elicits an unlinking of liberal forces and the state and relinks the state with the alt-right political movement, is in line with the traits of a passive revolution. Trump's presidency has affirmed the conservative right as a whole, particularly in its efforts for generating and supporting organizations that regulate American's relationships with the economy, society and the state, all in-line with conservative thought. What this entails is a difficult environment for access to abortions and contraceptives, and the expansion of undocumented peoples rights, among other civil liberties.

The passive revolution is not yet complete though we see the process of it unfolding before our eyes. The left must not only learn how to better read the signals and headlines of the minutebut read it in unison. With every "so-called judge" comment or executive order that circumvents Congress follows the political impetus for establishing an alt-right hegemony. In interpreting Trumps rise to power as a state that is day by day becoming more entrenched in the alt-right power bloc, those who oppose must find the common ground to fight its messaging. The mass protests in airports and on the streets becomeincreasingly necessary. Shows like "Saturday Night Live" (SNL) have become an increasingly important stage that not only undermines the administrations authority through skits and humorbut on a certain level displays its horror. "SNL" has been able to cut through and represent the absurdity of the administration in a way that the mainstream media has failed in communicating to the public. In our increasingly dystopian reality, the inverse result has manifested in comedians providing a more apt critique of current politics than the "so called" critics in the newsroom.

The "so called" prefix that renders the institution or position in question as fake requires the overwhelming response provoked, whichcalls into question the "so-called" presidents authority. I am not unable to admit that the alt-right is indeed a well-organized political movement with clear messaging, unity and social activity in its base. What they are able to do that is so extremely fundamental for the left to appropriate is the movements convincing promise to offer those living in precarity with a vision for a better future. The movement is not made up of one class of people, but Trump was able to mobilize the movement to its current height of influence by outlining a class struggle and offering the impoverished what the left failed to deliver to people in 2008. On the left, we must find a way to focus on an uplifting class message, one that can unify and offer an alternative to the fascism served daily. Perhaps this is in the form of organizing to reinvigorate the labor movement in solidarity with a myriad of race, sexuality and documented status issues, or perhaps it requires something new. Whatever this possibility entails, it is clear that it needs to happen faster than the alt-rights not-so-passive passive revolution.

Meryem Uzumcu is a School of Arts and Sciences senior majoring in planning and public policy, Middle Eastern studies and womens and gender studies. Her column, Fahrenheit 250, runs on alternate Tuesdays.

YOUR VOICE|The Daily Targum welcomes submissions from all readers. Due to space limitations in our print newspaper, letters to the editor must not exceed 500 words. Guest columns and commentaries must be between 700 and 850 words. All authors must include their name, phone number, class year and college affiliation or department to be considered for publication. Please submit via email to oped@dailytargum.com by 4 p.m. to be considered for the following days publication. Columns, cartoons and letters do not necessarily reflect the views of the Targum Publishing Company or its staff.

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UZUMCU: Alt-right's passive revolution is upon us - RU Daily Targum

Former Collingwood star Dane Swan: more comfortable with a Sherrin in his hand than he is in the company of Steve Price and alligators. Photograph: Michael Dodge/Getty Images

Those who derived a measure of schadenfreude from Collingwoods bumpy transition between the coaching reigns of Mick Malthouse and Nathan Buckley might also have appreciated the recent appearances on the Ten networks Im a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (Sun-Thurs, 7:30pm) of Pies premiership star Dane Swan. If not, weve been watching it so you dont have to.

Free of the draconian strictures of professional sport, last week the former midfield ace sat blind-folded with two alligators snapping at his heels. The metaphorical properties of Swans time in the jungle have dwindled since, but last week we were genuinely absorbed by his role of go-between as radio shock jock Steve Price and the prone, slightly incomprehensible American actor Tom Arnold debated the topic of same sex marriage. There is a sentence you didnt expect to read in 2017.

Who would not vote for gay marriage? asked an exasperated Swan, somehow not knocked off his stride by Prices concerted effort to loosen the belt on his trousers at the precise moment the serious debate kicked off. I couldnt give a hoot. Its their lives, not anyone elses business. Its ridiculous in this day and age that two people cant get married to each other.

Swan spent so long bringing Australian rules football into disrepute that its hard not to find this unfolding scenario somewhat miraculous; somehow Ten have actually brought the footy hellraiser into repute. How the rest of us are meant to cope with the loss of one of lifes iron-clad certainties is anyones guess, but you suppose itll involve dung beetles or rhinoceros faeces. It always does on Im a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

With no bare skin left for tattoos, nor a football to kick about, Swans first foray into reality TV has mostly left him to sit and think possibly not his natural habitat and weve been impressed by the results. Perhaps the key to his newfound appeal, as opposed to the football panel shows in which his sarcastic shtick came across a bit charmless, is relative; hes literally sitting in a pile of dirt with a bunch of z-list celebrities who are just far more desperate and deranged than the millionaire footballer.

Thankfully, Tom Arnold and his ever-twitching mug were the first of the bunch voted off. Thatll happen when you hate even more stuff than Steve Price does. Elsewhere, and as ever with this show, the definition of celebrity has been given a far greater stretch than either of Swans hamstrings at any point of his former career.

The Brownlow medallist is the current favourite to win as per the success of sporting entrants Brendan Fevola and Freddie Flintoff in previous years. Next best bets: one-time Water Rats actor Jay Lagaaia and former Im-not-quite-sure-what Kris Smith. If you have the faintest idea who Smith is, even greater shame on you than me.

One thing we hope is that Im a Celebrity keeps providing some of the better sports-related headlines of the year. Our favourite so far: Dane Swan unsurprisingly is not well versed on alt-right politics, as told by the Daily Mail. Perhaps he was worried it was a reference to some new and incomprehensible zone defence system.

The poor bloke couldnt have looked more baffled as third man up in a contest between Price and Tziporah Malkah (formerly known as Kate Fisher). I was sittin on the edge of that log like Steve the Stooge, Swan later explained. I had no idea what they were talking about.

But ignorance can be bliss. Malkahs appraisal of the far-right political movement: They say things that everybody else is thinking. Like Pauline Hanson in a way. So youll see what Im getting at when I tell you, honest-to-god, Swan is the most likeable person on screen at all times. They said 2016 couldnt be topped as a year of sporting miracles. Were no longer so sure.

Sticking with, err, footy, tonight on Fox Footy (7:30pm), the AFL pre-season treadmill fires into action as Swans former Collingwood team-mates take on Essendon in the opening encounter of the AFL pre-season.

Renamed the JLT community series this year, its likely to answer time-old debates like: What is Scott Pendlebury doing with his hair this year? and Who is this new rookie lister on whom I will project all the frustrations of my life? Its a bit of a step down from Lady Gaga jumping off a stadium roof to Colin Garland taking the kick-outs on Casey Fields, but well be watching regardless.

Meanwhile, the A-League season is hurtling towards a rather one-sided finish. Last week Sydney FC sprinted away with a 3-0 win over Wellington to stretch their undefeated run to 19 games and this Saturday, in their Sydney derby against the Wanderers at ANZ Stadium (Fox Sports, 7:50pm), the Sky Blues task is unlikely to be much more onerous, with only two points separating their opponents from ninth-placed Central Coast Mariners.

One thing were not dead keen on is this idea of calling Graham Arnolds side The Invincibles, a moniker synonymous in Australia with Don Bradmans 1948 Ashes winners. Unless one of Arnolds men reveals himself an exponent of deck quoits to rival Loxton, Hassett or Lindwall, we think they can get their own label. Australian football has created a sub-committee for everything else, so there may as well be one for nicknames.

Rounding out the major sporting action on both Friday and Sunday, Australias cricketers play the first two of their three T20Is against Sri Lanka (Nine, 7:30pm), a slightly awkward scenario given the country is also about to undertake a Test tour of India. Overlapping commitments call for makeshift line-ups. Unlike Im a Celebrity, the misfortune here is when youre voted in.

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The box seat: Dane Swan's alt-right education and Sydney FC's Invincibles - The Guardian