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The Atlantic: The Alt-Right Curriculum

The Atlantic has published an article about how Jewish public school students in Boston are being taught about Richard Spencer and the Alt-Right:

“Dropping a handout with a photo on each student’s desk, the teacher Kathryn Leslie asked the teens to study the picture of Richard Spencer, the leader of the “alt-right” movement who advocates for a homeland just for whites. There was Spencer, the image of confidence, smiling in a suit coat and open-collared shirt as he leaned against a brick wall.

Does Spencer, Leslie asked her Brookline High School students, fit the stereotype of a white nationalist? Spencer had no visible tattoos advertising white pride or hate against non-whites or non-Christians. He also had graduated from college. …

Asked to react to the podcast, nearly every student raised a hand to offer an opinion. While many could understand how white nationalism might increase as a reaction to the country’s changing demographics, some were shocked to hear that Spencer would want whites to live in a separate country. Others said little surprised them, given personal experience with racism in Brookline, a town known for its liberal-progressive bent. …”

Can you believe Richard Spencer graduated from college? Wow. Just wow.

In 2017, The Atlantic is edited by Jeffrey Goldberg and David Frum. Since this is about a class on White identity, I think I will share an article from the February 1901 edition of The Atlantic by Hilary A. Herbert called “The Conditions of the Reconstruction Problem”:

“The dispensing of supplies without price to able-bodied persons must always tend to produce idleness: this tendency of its own work it was the especial duty of the Freedman’s Bureau to correct. The greatest crisis that ever occurred in the lives of four million people had arrived. Slavery had lifted the Southern negro to a plane of civilization never before attained by any large body of his race – had taught him to be law-abiding and industrious. If the guardians of this man, who was bewildered by his new surroundings, and who was clay, though unwashed clay, in the hands of the potter, had shown him the absolute necessity of continued industry the negro would have had at this critical moment the best chance of thrift that was ever to come to him. But, unluckily, this was not to be. Instead of being properly directed, the credulous freedman was in many instances encouraged in idleness, while he was deluded by false hopes …”

Hilary A. Herbert was a Secretary of the Navy under the Grover Cleveland administration. He fought for the Confederate Army and was a congressman from Alabama.

The moral of the story is that racial discourse is a product of its time and place. Richard Spencer’s racial views are milder than what The Atlantic was publishing in 1901. At the turn of the 20th century, the Alt-Right would have been well within the “mainstream” whereas Ta-Nehisi Coates would have been the “extremist.” Whiteness was something to be proud of at the time.

The great moral panic over “racism” was still several decades away. It was a product of the Second World War and Cold War. The legislation and cultural attitudes that came out of that era reflected a moment of hubris in American history when the United States was at the apex of its power.

Hunter Wallace
the authorHunter Wallace
Hunter Wallace is the founder and editor of OccidentalDissent.com

13 Comments

  • The Atlantic is as valid a website has Salon is. Bolshevik, anti-white propaganda, fit only to use as toilet paper, nothing more.

  • The spiritually broken people posting comments on that article kept calling us uneducated.

    You mean like The Atlantic‘s writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who dropped out of a black college, reads comic books and admitted in an interview a few years ago that he had never heard of St. Augustine?

    • “Liberals” – for lack of a better word – are pining for the days of George W. Bush and the religious right. It was easy then. The purpose of reading The Atlantic is to signal class – their audience is consuming the product to prove that they are upper middle class, have an appropriate education, and know the correct opinions to pretend to hold. Thus it’s very important to be paternalistic towards non-whites. To complain about illegal immigrants is to put yourself in competition with illegal immigrants, thus marking yourself as low class. I mean, they are not at all subtle about this, it’s a constant refrain, “if you are so stupid you have to compete with a poor Mexican cleaning toilets,” etc.
      But since many of the “liberals” who read the Atlantic are not particularly economically stable – who is in the modern economy – it’s even more important to distance yourself from the “bad kind of whites” – Trump voters, the working class, flyover country, Christians like Pence.

      I joked that if Pence had just said he and his wife had some sort of “master slave” type relationships with a “slave contract,” they would be hailed as some sort of sexually liberated examples to the benighted. But since it’s in the context of a traditional Christian marriage, they pretend to look down on it.

      Anti-white whites are completely, 100% insincere. That is why “politically incorrect” comics like Daniel Tosh and Louis C. K. get away with racist jokes that would make David Duke blush – comedy is all about breaking a taboo by saying the obvious you’re not supposed to say, so these comics get rich off of letting these anti-white white “liberals” laugh at their completely insincere “liberalism” and their extreme, off the charts racism.

  • Is there a staff Writer for the Atlantic who isn’t of the Tribe, other than the token Mormon Mckay Coppins?

  • Good. I’m glad kiddos are learning about Dick Spencer in school. No doubt some of them will go home, read up on Spencer, watch his Youtube videos, and be recruited to the Alt Right. Thanks shitlib Public School teachers!

      • Doesn’t matter. Being told something is bad makes it more appealing to some young people. That’s why DARE education failed in the 80s and 90s. Having 13 year olds read up on the effects of drugs just made some kids experiment with drugs.

        • yeah, but the rebelliousness is being beaten out of them.. the demoralization was part of the whole project.. did you ever read Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s tell-all book, if so, you’d know Ronnie Reagan was a schmo

          • Doesn’t matter. We live in an age where a kid can instantly look up Spencer and the Alt Right for themselves on their phones. That’s why Alt Right meme magic should begin with appeals to kids as early as middle school.

            The days of public schools brainwashing everyone into believing nonsense like the Civil Rights Movement and the Holocaust are over.

          • Its better not to deceive yourself on the importance of Richard Spencer and meme magic..

          • Not overconfident about Dick Spencer and meme magic, I just know we don’t live in 1955 or even 1985 when a teacher’s word carried a lot more authority and weight. Kids can just look things up for themselves on their phones.

          • I look forward to the day where teachers no longer subject their white students to propaganda like The Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird.

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