alt right | Pandaemonium

WHY DEBATE BANNON?

September 10, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the controversy over Steve Bannon’s invitation to the New Yorker festival,, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the Swedish elections). It was published in the Observer, 9 September 2018, under the headline ‘Condemning all debate with Bannon amounts to giving up on politics’. Two memes have become central to much contemporary political debate. The first is that we need to break out of our echo chambers. The second is […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Politics • Tags: alt right, david remnick, donald trump, far right, free speech, new yorker, steve bannon

LESS A DEBATE THAN POLITICAL TROLLING

December 3, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of an article published in the Observer, 3 December2017, under the headline ‘When crude tweets set the global agenda we are surely in a new age of politics’. The most powerful leader in the world tweets like a teenage Nazi on 4chan whose sole aim is to create outrage. Three retweets of anti-Muslim hatred first tweeted by the deputy leader of a British neo-Nazi group do indeed cause global outrage. British politics becomes consumed by […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Politics • Tags: alt right, anti-muslim hatred, donald trump, far right, islamophobia, muslims, racism, twitter, usa

NOT POST-TRUTH AS TOO MANY ‘TRUTHS’

February 5, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Fake news. Alternative facts. Post-truth politics. Three issues that dominate much current discussion, all connected to new anxieties about how we can distinguish truth and falsity, and all seemingly linked to the election of Donald Trump as US President. Trump’s election victory was, for many, fuelled by a wave of fake news. His proclivity to lie, for instance about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, has been reframed by his advisor Kellyanne Conway as the acceptance of ‘alternative […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: alain de benoist, alt right, alternative facts, donald trump, enlightenment, fake news, far right, identitarian movement, identity politics, left, post-truth, postmodernism, relativism, truth, universalism