The Lost Boys of the Alt-Right or as they are called "The Brotherhood of Losers".
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...-losers/544158/
The sudden emergence of the so-called alt-right from the dark recesses of the internet into the American mainstream was at first more baffling than shocking. The young people sharing strange, coded frog memes and declaring their commitment to white identity politics on obscure websites remained in the realm of the unserious—or at least the unknowable and weird.
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Then, last November, The Atlantic published footage of a prominent alt-right provocateur, Richard Spencer, raising a glass to Donald Trump’s election at a conference in Washington, D.C. “Hail Trump!” he shouted, and in response, audience members saluted in unmistakably Nazi style. The incident made waves—here were young men behaving, in public, like fascists. But Spencer laughed it off, claiming that the gestures were “ironic.” The methods and meaning of the alt-right were as yet elusive.
It wasn’t until the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August that the alt-right took on a form that most Americans could finally grasp as a real, and unambiguous, political movement. A disciplined, torch-lit procession snaked through a college town, with white men shouting explicitly white-nationalist slogans in chorus. A true believer drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters and was charged with killing a woman named Heather Heyer. Could it be that these “ironic” young men had meant what they were saying all along?
To answer this question—and to comprehend the powerful and unexpected effect Charlottesville is having on the alt-right itself—we need to understand what the movement is, and what it is not. Unlike old-fashioned, monolithic political movements, the alt-right is a fractious, fluid coalition comprising bloggers and vloggers, gamers, social-media personalities, and charismatic ringleaders like Spencer, who share an antiestablishment, anti-left politics and an enthusiasm for the political career of Donald Trump. Older theorists who predate the 2016 election—men such as Jared Taylor of the “white advocacy” organization American Renaissance and the neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the name Mencius Moldbug—exert influence. But what is new, and unusual, about today’s far right is the large number of young people, most of them men, who have been drawn into its orbit—or, as they would put it, “red pilled.” The metaphor comes from The Matrix, the dystopian science-fiction movie in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered a red pill that allows him to see through society’s illusions and view the world in its true, ugly reality.
For eight years, I have been closely observing an array of rightist forums as they have followed a strange and marked evolution. Initially, at least, taking the red pill was more closely associated with antifeminist and men’s-rights forums like Reddit’s /r/TheRedPill, which launched in 2012, than with the nativist or racist corners of the online right. TheRedPill was infamous for its mix of virulent misogyny and retrograde dating advice. The young men who frequented it obsessed over the male pecking order, evolutionary sexual psychology, and the decline of Western men, who had become too meek to stand up to their women. It also played a significant role in popularizing terms now associated with the racial politics of the alt-right, including cuck, a derivative of cuckold first used to describe an emasculated man and later adapted to brand conservatives who were seen as weak on immigration, or just weak.
Over time, this online “manosphere” would embrace an increasingly hard-line antifeminism, one that began to shade into broader critiques of a fraying social order. Daryush Valizadeh, known as “Roosh V,” launched his writing career with the Bang series of books, many of them essentially travel guides for pick-up artists. His site, Return of Kings, was at first dedicated to crude misogyny and pick-up advice. But by 2015, he was ranging further afield in his search for the source of male woe, writing pieces like “The Damaging Effects of Jewish Intellectualism and Activism on Western Culture,” a positive review of an anti-Semitic conspiracy text popular among the alt-right. The Proud Boys, a group founded by the former Vice impresario Gavin McInnes to fight the forces of emasculation (in part through a renunciation of masturbation), also blended sexism and creeping nativism. While some adherents were attracted by the campaign against self-abuse, or the fraternity-like initiation rituals, membership also entailed support for closed borders and what McInnes called, in a clever stroke of euphemism, “western chauvinism.”
The anonymous forum 4chan provided another portal into the nascent movement. Some of the young geeks who populated the site were interested in transgression for transgression’s sake—the fun of trolling what they saw as an increasingly politically correct culture. One running joke, captured by the phrase the current year, mocked Baby Boomer liberalism for constantly undermining those who refused to keep pace with its progressive pieties, its cries of “You can’t still think that—it’s 2017!”
Posters in these online forums became adept at using offbeat humor and new media to wrong-foot the establishment. Anyone caught fretting about the right’s online youth movement was met with the contention that the entire thing was a joke—and anyone taking it at face value was a clueless outsider. Last winter, for instance, an elaborate hoax originated on 4chan. “Operation O-KKK” called for pranksters to flood social media with claims that the “okay” hand gesture was a symbol of white supremacy. “Leftists have dug so deep down into their lunacy,” wrote the original poster of the hoax plan. “We must force [them] to dig more, until the rest of society ain’t going anywhere near that shit.” In April, when the pro-Trump writers Mike Cernovich and Cassandra Fairbanks were photographed in the White House press-briefing room making “okay” signs, Emma Roller, a reporter at Fusion, wrote on Twitter that the writers were “doing a white power hand gesture.” Fairbanks sued Roller for defamation.
At a moment in history when the right seemed to have died of terminal uncoolness, this strategy of making the left seem puritanical and humorless represented no small cultural revolution. Ever since the 1960s, the right, holding fast to stuffy tradition, had struggled to compete with the youthful vibrancy of the left. But the earnestness and fervor of contemporary progressives, particularly on college campuses, opened the left up to mockery.
One of the most successful propaganda weapons the alt-right produced was its caricature of the Social-Justice Warrior. Rightists flooded YouTube with “cringe compilations” depicting liberal vloggers, protesters, and college students—mostly young women—screaming at opponents, calling out their racism, sexism, and hate speech. In an interview, Richard Spencer described these figures as a gift from the left to the alt-right. “I love Social-Justice Warriors,” he said. “I might donate money to them or something. I want them to become even more, just, ridiculous.” Andrew Anglin, who runs the alt-right site The Daily Stormer (and is profiled in this issue), wrote, “Right now, a divide is happening. And there are only going to be two sides. Either you are with the SJWs or you are with the Fascists.”
Stefan Glerum
Watching YouTube videos of college-age liberals decrying microaggressions and demanding safe spaces, the young men of the alt-right may have cheered Anglin as he threw down this gauntlet. Then Charlottesville happened, and it became clear what, exactly, it meant to be “with the Fascists.” The useful idiots of the less extreme “alt-lite” tier of the new right had successfully deployed irony to confound the alt-right’s critics. But they had also given cover to its most radical elements. The rally brought into the open the movement’s racist core—not the winking shit-posters and fuzzy-faced geeks wearing obscure-internet-joke T-shirts, but a small army of unapologetic white nationalists. Anyone who flirted with the alt-right now understood what they were pledging allegiance to.
Charlottesville splintered the alt-right, though along fault lines that had appeared well before the violence there. The rally had been dubbed Unite the Right, but it proved to be the culmination of a vicious period of internecine squabbling. In June, the alt-right and the alt-lite had held rival free-speech rallies in Washington, D.C., with Spencer whipping up the hard-liners at the Lincoln Memorial while Cernovich hosted a tamer group outside the White House. Spencer accused the alt-lite of being “cucks.” Cernovich said the alt-right’s “big tent” had folded after “Hail-gate.” After Charlottesville, he disparagingly called its members “Nazi boys.”
I recognise these chaps.
Frog memes, SJW, complete ****ing geeks. Casual Racism dismissed as free speech. The "red pill". Thoughts about these divvy ****wits?