There’s an interesting moment in Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign when two obscure Democrat operatives who involved in her presidential debate-prep sessions, Karen Dunn and Ron Klain, “stressed that Trump, contrary to popular opinion, had actually put forth a lot of policy ideas.” (VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow had the same perception). President Trump just done it again. In his August 15 press conference, he very reasonably asked the Main Stream Media/ Opposition Party, in the context of their Charlottesville Fake News, “What about the Alt-Left that came charging at the, as you say, the Alt Right?” And in his August 23 Phoenix speech, as Leftists rioted in the streets and the MSM covered for them, he called out “AntiFa” by name. [Donald Trump Calls Out Antifa for Violence, Breitbart, August 23, 2017]

Neither of these concepts are welcome to our Ruling Class. An ADL analyst sniffs “the word was made up to create a false equivalence between the far-right and ‘anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like’  “.[‘No such thing as the alt-left:’ Donald Trump’s phrase for counter-protesters dismissed by extremism experts, by Liam Stack, UK Independent, August 16, 2017]

This tells us, of course, that the terms are both useful and capture something essential about this movement. The Alt Left is an explicitly Cultural Marxist and overtly totalitarian movement with nothing in common with the classical liberalism which once defined the Left and, for much of its history, the Democratic Party. AntiFa is its communist paramilitary wing, completely without parallel on the Right. [ “They have no allegiance to liberal democracy”: an expert on antifa explains the group, by Sean Illing, Vox.com, August 25, 2017] This Alt Left, along with race-based identity politics, have now completely captured the party of Jefferson and Jackson (and are in fact evicting them).

The term is “Alt Left” not totally new. It was used in two main forms before Charlottesville:

• First, “Alt Left” was used by centrist liberals to criticize socialist critics who were opposing Hillary Clinton from the left.

Instead of the neoliberal economics, fashionable identity politics and foreign interventionism which characterizes Clinton Democrats, the Alt Left was more forthrightly socialist, discussed class politics instead of championing homosexual CEOs and displayed at least some skepticism about the theory that Russia was single-handedly funding all opposition to the Democratic Party. Significantly, it was Sanders supporters who shut down Trump’s Chicago rally, a clear harbinger subsequent epidemic anti-Trump violence. But most MSM outlets, conventionally Leftist and hungry for electoral victory, were hostile to these voices [Why The Alt-Left Is A Problem Too, by James Wolcott, Vanity Fair, March 2017]. Even after Charlottesville, Markos Moulitas of the once-influential Daily Kos website was complaining about the term “Alt-Left” to refer to these progressives.

While this conception of the Alt-Left was poorly defined, at least it referred, however vaguely, to something which actually existed.

• Second, after the Alt Right came to MSM attention after to Hillary Clinton’s clumsy speech, Conservative Inc. types began using “Alt Left” in attempt at political jujitsu similar to their silly debating point that “Democrats Are The Real Racists.”

This, Joseph Farah of WND claimed the “Alt Left” as a catch all term for a “racist” Leftist Establishment that “supports population control, eugenics and repression of minorities.” However, Farah also noted how “Alt Left” Democrats pay no price for “real associations with groups like the Communist Party USA, which has supported them without reservation for election cycle after election cycle.” [Let’s take a look at the ‘Alt Left,’ August 28, 2016].

(This may have been the first use of the term “Alt Left” among normie conservatives).

Fox TV personality Sean Hannity has been using the term “Alt Left” to refer vaguely to anti-Trump protesters, especially since the 2016 election, apparently just a general insult. [What is the Alt-Left? 5 Fast Facts You Need To Know, by Daniel Levine, Heavy, August 17, 2017]

And Dan Ganior at CNSNews has used the headline “Alt Left Insanity” in every one of his columns since President Trump’s election [Dan Gainor Archive, CNSNews]

In this sense, the “Alt” of “Alt Left” is being used by Conservativism Inc. mouthpieces to simply mean “bad” or “extreme” liberals—reminiscent of how SNL mocked the Alt Right by having Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne Conway declare of President Trump’s Cabinet picks, “They aren’t bad, they’re Alt-Good” . [They’re Not Bad; They’re Alt-Good’: ‘SNL Takes On Trump Cabinet Picks,’ San Diego 7, December 12, 2016]

On the surface, “Antifa” themselves would be outraged by this. While MSM reporters are eager to write fawning profiles of “Antifa,” “Liberals get the bullet too,” as Antifa graffiti declared following the February riots at Berkeley against Milo Yiannopoulos . [Slate Offers Defense Of Antifa, by John Sexton, Hot Air, August 22, 2017].

And Leftists sympathetic to Antifa are hoping the opposition to “white nationalism” will lead to a growth in overly socialist and communist movements, not Clintonian crony capitalism.

Author Angela Nagle, who wrote a rushed and sloppy hatchet job on the Alt Right shrieking about how the movement should be shut down, says the Left must champion Bernie Sanders-style socialist policies in order to avoid “a purely oppositional politics to the far right.” However, Nagle does credit the Alt Right with at least trying to articulate some kind of meaning in opposition to “the nightmarish Silicon Valley model of modernity” . [Goodbye Pepe, The Baffler, August 15, 2017]

Yet it’s precisely Silicon Valley which is shutting down the Alt Right. Our own PayPal account has been terminated by the company, despite VDARE.com’s complete noninvolvement in the Charlottesville rally. The Daily Stormer, which may be neo-Nazi but eschews violence, unlike the AntiFa, lost both its CloudFire protection against hacking and has been stripped of its URL. (As of this writing, it’s viewable here; Andrew Anglin has a blog here). Sites including the National Policy Institute and Radix Journal have also been terminated. As a result, even mainstream sites like Breitbart sounding the alarm for freedom of speech [Cloudflare CEO: I Woke Up ‘In A Bad Mood’ And ‘Decided To Ban Daily Stormer’, by Charlie Nash, Breitbart, August 16, 2017].

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has protested this:

“Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare’s CEO: “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.”

We agree.” [ Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression, By Jeremy Malcolm, Cindy Cohn, and Danny O'Brien, EFF.org, August 17, 2017]

MSM journalists, the greatest enemies to political liberty and freedom of speech in the West, are cheering on the campaign, gleefully tracking groups which have survived the purge. [Tech companies are rushing to ban hate groups, but plenty remain, by Russell Brandom, The Verge, August 17, 2017] As the Left noted, corporations have now become the arbiters of “public morality” a.k.a. Political Correctness. [Are corporations becoming the new arbiters of public morality?, by Tara Isabella Burton, Vox, August 17, 2017]

Needless to say, Leftists need have no fear of being inconvenienced by CEOs. The so-called #Resistance, which usually takes the form of retweeting whatever corporate media Leftists like John Oliver or Stephen Colbert has said the night before, is not a militant street movement, but a coalition of SWPL scolds. And the “Antifa,” far from leading a workers’ movement, is in effect serving as the irregular troops of leftist CEOs—the smelly successors of the Pinkerton Detectives. Even (perhaps especially) overt Communists have long since abandoned appealing to actual Western workers—as Antifa now focus its efforts on trying to get workers fired for having the wrong opinions.

This paradoxical coalition of Communists, capitalists and Establishment Democrats all opposed to free speech for American nationalists also includes some Republicans. Cultural Marxism, of course, has already infected the moribund "conservative movement" by default, given its complete absence of intellectual defenses.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, having failed to accomplish anything of importance despite President Trump supporting his agenda, has now moved on to openly defending Antifa and puffing his chest out about the supposed Far Right: “We will not tolerate this hateful ideology in our society” [Paul Ryan on Charlottesville, by Penny Starr, Breitbart, August 21, 2017] Incredibly, Ryan also suggested, in the context of Charlottesville, that people “suspected of terrorism” (meaning everyone the MSM/ Ruling Class doesn’t like) should not be allowed to purchase guns [Speaker Ryan Talks Gun Control Following Charlottesville Car Attack, by Awr Hawkins, Breitbart, August 22, 2017]. The Second Amendment may soon join those lost liberties Americans could once take for granted—such as freedom of speech or the long vanished freedom of association.

Ultimately, the “Antifa” and the “Alt Left” are only a symptom of the real threat. They are simply carrying out the agenda of the powerful—what Paul Gottfried calls “the Managerial State.” The Establishment Liberals, the extreme Leftists, the Beltway cuckservatives, the supposedly neutral MSM, have all joined forces to push through a monstrous agenda of repression against anyone who believes that the Historic American Nation should have any kind of political expression.

The real threat from the “Alt Left” isn’t its willingness to ally with violence. We’re used to that. The real threat is these masked radicals waving Communist flags aren’t an “alternative” to the Establishment at all. Consciously or unconsciously, they are serving as the militant wing of the System.

And that System is now openly totalitarian.

James Kirkpatrick [Email him] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc.