TO THE EDITOR:
In response to the Feb. 13 letter-to-the-editor titled “The Alternative Right Exists on our Campus,” a group of graduate students and recent Ph.D. graduates in the Department of History, informed by the methods of our discipline, have come together to challenge the basic premises presented by its author. We come from working class and professional backgrounds, from many regions of the United States and the world and with a variety of expertise.
We do not wish to make sweeping generalizations about President Trump’s supporters. The 64 million individuals who voted for Trump did so for diverse reasons, and the alt-right represents only one part of that coalition. The alt-right itself is not a monolith, but we can better understand its goals by considering its leadership.
Over the past month, some have taken to invoking alt-right figureheads like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos as objects of sympathy. From the letter, one might assume these men are the unfairly maligned opponents of outsourcing. What do their words and actions tell us about their vision for our country? And what does history tell us about their claims?
Milo Yiannopoulos believes women are biologically inferior to men and supports Saudi Arabia’s ban on female drivers. He once described immigrants from the Middle East as “[hordes] of homophobic Muslims...being imported to the west so they can shoot up gay nightclubs.” Despite being gay himself, Yiannopoulos is no friend to the LGBTQ community. He refers to immigration advocates as “whiny gay leftists” and prefers not to hire gay employees. Last December, Yiannopoulos verbally harassed a transgender student at UW-Milwaukee after she challenged his presence on campus, saying “he needs to man up” and “[the] way that you know he’s failing is I’d almost still bang him.”
Because the author of the Daily Tar Heel letter paraphrased Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is worth noting that Richard Spencer has called the civil rights leader a “degenerate.” Spencer’s ultimate goal is to create "a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence." Spencer supports “peaceful ethnic cleansing," as if forcibly removing other races from the country is not itself a form of violence.
Fascism is still a slippery term to define, and this is not a claim we attempt to substantiate here. But it is clear that alt-right leaders believe in the superiority of whiteness, straightness and cisgender-ness. And their dream society values these characteristics at the expense of all others. Alt-right leaders promote these values without any regard for demonstrable evidence. Instead, they treat their conclusions as self-evident.
The author paints those who challenge the alt-right as opponents of free speech. Yet subjecting a claim to critique and analysis is not the same as telling someone “to sit down and shut up.” Historical scholarship requires us to interrogate all claims and to challenge any opinion that relies on empty rhetoric, stereotypes or assumptions.
The alt-right regularly and seriously misrepresents the American past and present. The author suggested that to fight for social justice is to undermine “240 years of blood, sweat and tears.” Yet he neglected to specify who shed them. The historical evidence shows that oppressed communities, those that lead the fight for social justice, have shed much of the blood, sweat and tears. This is clear even on our own campus.
