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Caselist.CitesClass[31]

Cites

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1		-K
2		-Calling the movement the “alt right” legitimizes the movement and concedes it’s authority which is an independent case turn
3		-O’Connor 16: Brendan O’Connor, November 21st, 2016. “Stop Calling Them “the alt-right””. Jezebel News. http://jezebel.com/stop-calling-them-the-alt-right-1789231922. RW
4		-This weekend, members of the so-called “alt-right” movement gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate Donald Trump’s electoral victory and their ascendance as the “intellectual vanguard” of the Trumpist movement. Media coverage of the event has largely focused on their appearance and struggled to find the vocabulary to accurately describe, at least in short hand, who these people are and what they believe. Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute and coiner of the term “alt-right,” is described in a recent Mother Jones profileas “an articulate and well-dressed former football player with prom-king good looks and a ‘fashy’ (as in fascism) haircut.” His aim, the piece describes, is to “make racism cool again.” Attendees at this weekend’s NPI-hosted conference, the Los Angeles Times reported, “more resembled Washington lobbyists than the robed Ku Klux Klansmen or skinhead toughs that often represent white supremacists, though they share many familiar views.” The alt-right movement, according to POLITICO, “has been associated with racism and anti-Semitism.” This last is something of an understatement: The “alt-right” movement, which has gleefully embraced Hillary Clinton’s ill-advised “deplorables” epithet, is a reactionary coalition of white supremacists, neo-monarchists, radical misogynists, and outright fascists. Senior White House advisor Steve Bannon has described his website, Breitbart News, as a “platform for the alt-right.” It is an Internet ideology of resentment that has wound its way from the world of pick-up artistry to Gamergate to, now, the White House. (Jezebel has used the term “alt-right” to refer to this loose conglomerate, among other monikers. Going forward, however, we resolve to be as specific as possible in naming their beliefs.) It can be difficult and confusing to know how to talk about a phenomenon like this, especially because the movement’s explicit intent is to operate outside—for now, at least—of the political vocabulary and system of values most people in the United States have, in the past 50 years, consciously or unconsciously come to accept. “Donald Trump has a lot to do,” alt-right blogger Vox Day wrote on his website immediately following the election. “It is the Alt-Right’s job to move the Overton Window and give him conceptual room to work.” (The ‘Overton Window’ is a theory that there is a range of acceptable ideas in the public’s political imagination, and that anything outside of that is impossible for most people to even begin to articulate.) For Day and his ilk, moving the Overton Window, as the New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz notes, has meant overwhelming the Internet with misinformation, inscrutable memes, neologisms, and pseudo-scientific racial theories. Any attempt to engage with these ideas and their adherents is crazy-making: They are cunning and devious sophists. Given the movement’s composition, however, one might reasonably feel reluctant to turn its labeling over to its adherents. “This is how you sneak these ideas into the mainstream,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich told the Los Angeles Times after this weekend’s conference. “The guys in the suits are the ones we have to worry about.” A taxonomy of right-wing extremism is necessary and important (the Left’s propensity to descend into semantic navel-gazing notwithstanding). But to allow the “alt-right” to dictate the terms of the conversation is to cede ground that we simply cannot afford to surrender. n part, the term “alt-right” rankles because it is so non-specific, the “alt” gesturing more obviously to “alt rock,” than, say, white supremacy. But is calling them white supremacists any more fruitful? Perhaps not, to the extent that it does not account for their misogyny as well as their racism. There is, too, a subtle distinction to be made between ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white nationalism.’ From the New York Times: Members of the movement have described to me their support for white separatism, as well—basically, a reinstatement of the doctrine that the races should be “separate but equal.” This idea, articulated in the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson, was overturned by the Court in 1954, with Brown vs. the Board of Education. Meanwhile, to call the movement a neo-Nazi one—cathartic, certainly—is only correct to the extent that some of its members (and maybe even a substantial number) consciously ascribe to that specific iteration of white supremacy. Still, it’s not unfounded: Attendees at this weekend’s conference, the New York Times reports, met the conclusion of Richard Spencer’s address with Nazi salutes and shouts of “Heil the people! Heil victory!” They’re not alone, either: In Sweden, the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement held the largest rally in its history (some 600 people) last weekend to herald Trump’s victory. Thousands of anti-fascists held a counter-demonstration, throwing snowballs and fireworks at the Nazis, TheLocal.se reported. (Right-wing extremists the world over—including ISIS!—are very concerned with the negative impact of “political correctness.” And, as The Ringer’s K. Austin Collins pointed out on Twitter, dubbing a broadly reactionary movement as Nazism almost exoticizes the phenomenon, implying that the ideology is somehow foreign. This implication elides the appeal of both white supremacy generally and Nazism specifically in the United States.) So. If we are to deny this movement its chosen moniker—and thereby dent, hopefully, its claim to legitimacy and respectability—what should we call them instead? Perhaps they deserve mockery and nothing more, although any short-hand descriptor at all risks failing to adequately yoke the individuals to the consequences of their stated beliefs and values. (See: “Drumpf.”) In any case, Marantz is correct: This movement is not monolithic—but ideology does not require orthodoxy or strict, universal adherence to its tenets. It doesrequire a broad alignment of interests and a willingness to work together. Ultimately this leads to a distinction without a difference—who cares what the man whose boot is on your neck actually believes?—but to the extent that we must know our enemy before we can fight him it seems worthwhile to acknowledge that not all of our enemies are precisely the same, even if we must treat them all as antagonists.
5		-The alternative is to tell it as it is: just call them white supremacists, racists, and white nationalists, and remove any significance to the movement
6		-Blades 16: Lincoln Blades, August 26th, 2016. Rolling Stone. “Call the Alt-Right Movement for what it is: Racist as hell.” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/call-the-alt-right-movement-what-it-is-racist-as-hell-w436363. RW
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8		-To live in modern-day America is to live in a country undeniably affected by racism – mysteriously, without any racists. For instance, even after calling Mexicans rapists, retweeting memes from white-supremacist message boards and saying Muslims should be banned from entering the country, Donald Trump says he's not racist. Former KKK leader David Duke – an authority on this subject, if there ever was one – agrees. Many of the Republican nominee's other fellow party members have also enforced the idea that he's not racist, even if they must contradict themselves in doing so: We live in a society in which damn near nothing can pass the bar for racism. At the same time the Republican Party has ushered in an era of socially regressive leaders like Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Carly Fiorina, we're increasingly finding ourselves stuck in debates over whether statements or people are "really" racist. At her Reno, Nevada, rally Thursday, Hillary Clinton aimed to put an end to that pointless train of thought by attaching Trump to a movement that's clearly and unrepentantly racist. Before Clinton took the Reno stage to calmly and thoughtfully dissect the so-called "Alt-Right" movement, it's fair to say much of America had never heard of it. Though the Alt-Right sounds like an innocuous keyboard shortcut, the movement is actually a collection of ultra-conservatives who lurk in dark corners of the Internet, like 4Chan and Reddit threads, where they often anonymously spew their hatred. But what may be most important to understand about this clique is that they are so far removed from the already troubling "establishment" conservatives that they consider themselves an alternative to those who find coded racism, misogyny and xenophobia to be too weak and passive. Their war isn't simply on Democrats, or on multiculturalism, or on women – it's on other Republicans, especially those unwilling to embrace their prejudicial megaphones. They repeatedly refer to members of their own party as "cucks" – short for cuckold – because they believe establishment Republicans gain pleasure in sitting back and watching their country "get fucked." This past spring, as Trump was racking up wins in primary states around the country, Breitbart published an extensive explanation of who makes up the Alt-Right. The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos – the same Milo who, in a review of the new Ghostbustersmovie, launched an all-out misogynoir attack on actor Leslie Jones that resulted in her being so viciously harassed by Milo and his 750,000 followers that Twitter banned him from the service for life. (A month later, Jones' personal website was hacked and nude photos of her were stolen.) Recently, Trump made his ties to the Alt-Right movement much more explicit by hiring Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart – a longtime safe space for white-supremacist ideology – as campaign CEO. The Alt-Right movement's rise to prominence, by way of the Republican nominee's campaign, is why the movement matters, and why we can't afford to frame its members as anything less than a band of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, white-nationalist xenophobes who spew dangerous bullshit while hiding behind their keyboards. The Alt-Right crowd is an ensemble of bigots who want us to understand their affinity for intolerance. Case in point: The Alt-Right group American Renaissance responded to Hillary Clinton's speech by writing, "There is a very broad overlap between the races, but they differ in average levels of intelligence and in other traits." Now that the Trump campaign has put these people center stage in our national politics, the worst thing we can do is dither on about whether they – and he – pass the "officially" racist test. The Alt-right crowd believes in and endorses a racist ideology, and they have a presidential nominee who does the same. Calling these people anything less than vile racists would be morally reprehensible and intellectually fraudulent.
9		-This is a voting issue—debaters should be held responsible for in-round discourse—anything else legitimizes antiblackness
10		-Vincent 13: Christopher J. Vincent, October 26th, 2013. http://www.vbriefly.com/2013/10/26/201310re-conceptualizing-our-performances-accountability-in-lincoln-douglas-debate/. RW
11		-It is becoming increasingly more apparent in Lincoln Douglas debate that students of color are being held to a higher threshold of proving why racism is bad, than white students are in being forced to justify their actions and in round discourse. The abstractness of philosophical texts being used in LD and the willingness of judges and coaches alike to endorse that abstractness has fostered a climate in which students are allowed to be divorced from the discourse they are producing. Debate should first and foremost be viewed as a performance. Every action taken, every word said, and every speech given reflects a performance of the body. This drowns out the perspectives of students of color that are historically excluded from the conversation. Normativity becomes a privilege that historically students of color do not get to access because of the way we discuss things. These same philosophical texts have served as a cornerstone in Lincoln Douglas and in turn have been used to justify exclusion. That is why it is easy for a white student to make claims that we do not know whether racism is bad, or even question whether oppression is bad, since after all it is just another argument on the flow. They never have to deal with the practical implications of their discourse. These become manifestations of privilege in the debate space because for many students of color, who have to go back to their communities, they still have to deal with the daily acts of racism and violence inflicted upon their homes, communities, and cultures. To question or even make a starting point question for the debate to be about justifying why racism is bad ignores the reality of the bodies present in the room. Our justification of western philosophy has allowed us to remain disconnected from reality. Philosophy, as Mills argues, justifies particular way of knowing under free and rational thought, through a universal way of knowing, believing, and discussing. We have embedded white ways of knowing as normative without ever challenging how it replicates oppressive structures. The question then becomes how does our discourse justify what we believe? For many debaters it is the gaming aspect of debate that allows us to assume that our speech can be disconnected from the speech act. The speech can be defined as the arguments that are placed on the flow, and is evaluated in the context of what is the most logical and rational argument to win the round. The critical distinction is the speech act, which is the performance of that discourse. It’s not what you say, but what you justify. Understanding the speech act requires critically assessing the ramifications of the debaters discourse. Debate is in and of itself a performance. To claim that it is not is to be divorced from the reality of what we do. We must evaluate what a debaters performance does and justifies. For white debaters it is easy to view the discourse as detached from the body. For those with privilege in debate, they are never forced to have their performance attached to them but instead their arguments are viewed as words on paper. They are taught to separate themselves from any ideologies and beliefs, and feel that there is no consequence to what they say. It becomes the way in which they justify what is deemed as “rational” and “logical” thought. The argument sounds like it will be competitive so it is read but it is deemed as just an argument. Judges evaluate this as just a speech. This becomes what I deem as a performance by the body, rather than a performance of the body. Performances by the body allow debaters to not be held accountable to the words they say. Again for debaters of color, their performance is always attached to their body which is why it is important that the performance be viewed in relation to the speech act. If a judge is comfortable enough to vote for discourse that is racist, sexist, or homophobic, they must also be prepared to defend their actions. We as a community do not live in a vacuum and do not live isolated from the larger society. That means that judges must defend their actions to the debaters, their coaches, and to the other judges in the room if it is a panel. Students of color should not have the burden of articulating why racist discourse must be rejected, but should have the assurance that the educator with the ballot will protect them in those moments. Until we re-conceptualize the speech and the speech act, and until judges are comfortable enough to vote down debaters for a performance that perpetuates violence in the debate space, debaters and coaches alike will remain complacent in their privilege. As educators we must begin to shift the paradigm and be comfortable doing this. As a community we should stop looking at ourselves as isolated in a vacuum and recognize that the discourse and knowledge we produce in debate has real implications for how we think when we leave this space. Our performances must be viewed as of the body instead of just by it. As long as we continue to operate in a world where our performances are merely by bodies, we will continue to foster a climate of hostility and violence towards students of color, and in turn destroy the transformative potential this community could have.

EntryDate

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1		-2017-01-28 15:00:25.0

Judge

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1		-Nadia Hussein

Opponent

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1		-Kinkaid JY

ParentRound

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1		-15

Round

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1		-3

Team

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1		-Lexington Weiler Neg

Title

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1		-JANFEB- K- Alt Right Discourse

Tournament

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1		-Emory