Harvard/MIT Study: ‘Breitbart Is NOT Alt-Right’, by Tony Lee.
An extensive study that professors and data scientists at Harvard and M.I.T. conducted has concluded that Breitbart News does not represent the “alt-right,” undercutting the legitimacy of left-wing activists, Democrats, reporters in the legacy media, Never Trumpers, and establishment Republican bobbing heads and mouthpieces who rushed after Charlottesville to reflexively smear, malign, and defame Breitbart News as an “alt-right” outlet associated with white supremacists and Nazis.
In a New York Times magazine cover story explaining how there is “no real precursor for Breitbart” of an outlet that has so quickly emerged to “dominate the political conversation in a pivotal election,” renowned essayist Wil S. Hylton spoke to Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who has studied the “rise and influence” of Breitbart News in addition to the news media ecosystem with colleagues at Harvard and M.I.T. with a “colossal database.” Their Media Cloud database has at least ten years worth of articles and websites that enables them to study how information and news travel. …
The original meaning of “alt-right”:
Bannon’s “alt-right” comment indicates he apparently thought it consisted mainly of computer gamers and blue-collar voters who hated the GOP brand associated with George W. Bush’s brand of “conservatism” or “Bushism” that sought nation-building adventures abroad while allowing crony capitalism to fester in D.C.
And as he explained to the Wall Street Journal in 2016, Bannon explicitly rejected and disavowed “ethno-nationalism” and “white supremacism.”
“I’m an economic nationalist. I am an America first guy. And I have admired nationalist movements throughout the world, have said repeatedly strong nations make great neighbors,” he said. “I’ve also said repeatedly that the ethno-nationalist movement, prominent in Europe, will change over time. I’ve never been a supporter of ethno-nationalism.”
Bannon’s definition of “nationalist” has been inclusive and shorthand for “America-first” economic nationalism. U.S.-born Americans and legal immigrants of all backgrounds can be “nationalists” whose interests are often sold out by card-carrying members in Bannon’s so-called “Party of Davos” who always put the interests of the global elite—who want to see no borders and view workers, especially blue-collar ones, as mere commodities—ahead of what is best for the United States of America.
In a Facebook post that may be even more relevant now about the various definitions of “alt-right,” YouTube star Paul Joseph Watson wrote in November of 2016 that the media like to obsess over a “tiny fringe minority” who had “no impact on the election” and just “likes to fester in dark corners of sub-reddits and obsess about jews, racial superiority and Adolf Hitler.”
Watson tried to inform the media that the so-called “alt-right” that helped Trump win the White House, as Breitbart News reported, can be “more accurately described as the New Right.”
“These people like to wear MAGA hats, create memes, and have fun,” Watson explained. “They include whites, blacks, Asians, latinos, gays and everyone else. These are the people who helped Trump win the election.”
