There's a very powerful and brave post at VOX today (April 4): I’m a PhD student, and I can’t wait to vote for Donald Trump, by [NAME REDACTED BECAUSE I TURNED OUT TO BE RIGHT--pb, 3/18/2019], who actually is (or was as of this morning—I don't share his cheerful optimism) a Ph.D. student at the University of Indiana. It should be read in full because it makes many significant points, but this passage particularly warmed our hearts here at VDARE.com:
As I see it, the two most obvious causes of wage stagnation, particularly at the lower ends of income, are outsourcing and flooding the market with labor. In this case, labor that by virtue of being illegal circumvents minimum wage laws and virtually all worker protection laws. Not to mention the absurdity of essentially placing American workers in a position of having to live eight to a shipping container and only being able to afford fast food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if they "want to compete on a global level."The only thought-terminating cliché more infuriating than "doing the jobs Americans won't" is "that's not who we are." Anytime you hear a politician say immigrants are "doing the jobs Americans won't," replace it in your mind with the truth: "doing the jobs we don't want to pay Americans a living wage to do."
By no means is this limited to the unskilled and semi-skilled labor markets. The H-1B visa program is nothing more than a massive loophole big business exploits to import cheap labor — little more than modern indentured servants — to replace more expensive domestic skilled labor. This election cycle has been very bizarre, and one of the most bizarre elements in it is seeing the left — which still deludes itself that it is on the side of working families — argue on the same side as big business on the issue of cheap labor.
These are all arguments VDARE.com has been making for, well, ever and it's great to see them finally surfacing in the MSM.
[NAME REDACTED] also makes another particularly interesting comment about his own intellectual development:
I have always been right of center, though I never felt much affinity for the GOP. I have never registered as a Republican (or Democrat for that matter). I had meandered in my political identification, adopting various labels to shorten conversations with others but never really feeling as if they reflected my true sensibilities."Libertarian" was an effective catchall term for a while. It connoted as succinctly as possible to others, "Well, he's not a Republican, but he sure isn't a Democrat either," even if I wasn't drinking the Ayn Rand Kool-Aid and thinking magic dirt will transform everyone on the planet into prosperous, intelligent, self-reliant types who would all enjoy a standard of living beyond anything we could presently imagine and respect each other's rights if only that dang government weren't in the way...
It wasn't until the recent popularization of a term — the alternative right, or alt-right — that things started to fall into place. Largely defined in opposition to mainstream conservatism and encompassing a wide spectrum of beliefs, some not even close to what would be understood as conservatism in the present day, the alt-right nonetheless started to feel like home, even if it was an umbrella term itself. We knew we had made it when conservative pundit Rick Wilson said we masturbate to anime on an appearance he made on MSNBC.
Trump and the alt-right have much in common: right-wing anti-globalism, nationalist populism, border controls, trade policy that works in the interest of the domestic working class and not against it, taxation of the obscenely wealthy, and, yes, a rather confrontational attitude about it all.
"Magic dirt" link added—I'll bet the VOX editors didn't understand what [NAME REDACTED] was saying.
The emergence of the term ""Alt-Right" (which currently has 187 million cites on Google) is a great triumph for Radix Journal's Richard B. Spencer. I was quite happy being a paleoconservative until Richard explained the term was too 1990s. All of these descriptors tend to get overidentified with their particular originators, of course. John Derbyshire has argued for the more generic "Dissident Right," and I even put in a word for "Right Opposition," a product of my close, unloving study of Student Marxists in college. But Richard has plainly prevailed.
VDARE.com makes a cameo appearance in a much-discussed recent explanation of the Alt-Right: An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right
