The Alt-Left
How We Got The New Movement That Won't Vote Blue No Matter Who
from Reuters
To look at how we got the largest US youth protest movement since the ‘60s, we need to look at a few things: voting trends and media trends.
In 1968, Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. The New Left hated LBJ, but they really hated Nixon and never felt redeemed until he resigned. But for the past 55 years, the dogmatic creed was etched into stone: vote blue, no matter who. It really did not need to be mentioned again until 2000, when Ralph Nader ran for the Green Party. With a contested election, celebrities and pundits got out the message: a third party vote is a wasted vote. After 1968 and 2000, you really didn’t hear VBNMW until 2016, the first Most Important Election Ever between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
2016 is when the gestation of the alt-left began. When the DNC railroaded Bernie Sanders to put Clinton on the ballot, some on the left were disillusioned. Bernie Sanders supporters were called Bernie Bros, the first of many ugly bad-faith campaigns to damn anybody who didn’t support the comically unlikable Hillary Clinton. Some of those Bernie Bros started podcasts like Chapo Trap House and Cum Town, leading to the dirtbag left, an Internet micromovement of sarcastic socialists with a crude sense of humor that bristled at identity politics.
This movement got overshadowed by the alt-right, who were running an unstoppable online campaign of shitposting, meme magic, trolling, offensive humor and schizoposting Twitter anonymous accounts in support of The Donald. Many dirtbag leftists and alt-right people made strange bedfellows. Most dramatically, after COVID, Red Scare, which originally skewed socialist, moved more rightward. Both sides shared an affinity with pushing sensitive idpol shitlibs buttons on Twitter and Tumblr.
Twitter and Tumblr were the perfect breeding ground for the woke mob because both platforms were — and still are — centered around written words. The hyper-inflation of words in the attention economy led to many earnest Obama supporters being trained in the language police tactics used by academics since the ‘80s almost as thoroughly as Cop City officers have been trained by the IDF.
As mentioned on here numerous times before, the mainstream media had a love affair with the Twitter left and Twitter was to journalists what Tinder was to fuckboys: a place to get easy action, no matter how shallow, frivolous or self-serving.
From 2016 till COVID, most dirtbag leftists just seethed as the love affair went on. By 2020, angry essential workers, along with work-from-home people that wondered if life was too precious to waste returning to the office, started the anti-work subreddit. Unions sprouted up. Even Gen Zers that were employed were quiet quitting, stealing time from their employers for the money stolen from them.
All of this was gaining momentum amid a Twitter echo chamber of smug MSM journalists that kept all this off the front page. But this June 3rd 2022 New York article, in which Choire Sicha lays out how TikTok influencers affected public opinion of the Depp trial in a way the mainstream media couldn’t because it moved too slow to course correct, was a portent of how TikTok youths would blindside Twitter-brained reporters.
As mentioned before, the horrific TikTok footage of the carnage in Gaza was the flash point for the alt-left. Woke TikTokers from the BLM and LGBT side joined forces with angry socialists, saying things about Biden, Netenyahu, capitalism and the war machine that you would have previously have heard mentioned in dirtbag left circles. In 2020, the refrain rang throughout the nation again: vote blue, no matter who. In a year when the BLM black square took over Instagram, this was just par for the performative, symbolism over substance course. With the horrifying images seared into youths brains from TikTok, though, Joe Biden got the damning nickname Genocide Joe.
Class issues have been flawlessly sewn into the lining of the movement as well. Besides the numerous boycotts, Motaz and Bisan, two of the biggest online reporters from Gaza, called for a general strike.
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Successful or not, no one can say that it got pushed aside for woke word games. Indeed, those woke word games have been getting tricky as of late, specifically for some of the biggest power players in the game. Many of the pro-Palestine crowd are dismayed that Liz Magill resigned after her disastrous testimony. They shouldn’t be. For the past decade, the left has wasted so much time policing each others words and thoughts. Wrong pronoun, bad Halloween costume, the like. Getting rid of Magill — someone who was president of a university that made money off these types of charades — will only help. I mean when’s the last time you heard someone complain that Willy Wonka is not a Pacific Islander? When your tax dollars are funding what you believe is a genocide, your priorities shift.
Speaking of shift, unlike the alt-right that grew in the dark corners of 4Chan and Reddit before striking in 2016, the alt-left have been growing up in public.
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Not only do the alt-left feel like they are not represented by their elected officials. They feel disconnected to all celebrities now. No relevant celebrity speaks to them now the way Dylan did the New Left in the ‘60s. But this was precisely why Bob Dylan had the impact he did as the voice of his generation; no one articulated what they felt so well before him. And that’s how he arrived on the scene; by giving voice to a new consciousness. The voice of the alt-left cannot come from what came before. The current celebrities took too long to press the buzzer. New artists will be needed. New musicians. New movies. Anything but a fucking new Willy Wonka.