Hate will bring us together, again..

During a university panel discussion on critical theory I attended in 2016, a fellow student asked why we didn’t study any right-wing theory to which the tutor leading the panel simply said: “You can’t think and be right-wing”. While we all laughed at this tongue-in-cheek response, our collective refusal to ever think seriously about right-wing thought now seems embarrassingly naïve. Indeed, since the early 2000s there had been a growing group of bloggers, vloggers, and think tanks on the far right taking itself very seriously (though often appearing not to), forming and disseminating an ideology that merged the most extreme fascism with irreverent internet culture. This group is now broadly known as the Alt-Right and by late 2016 they were already celebrating what they perceived to be their greatest achievement to date: the election of Donald Trump. In retrospect, we in the humanities should have been trying to get a handle on this group as, regardless of how delusional what its leaders were saying was, for some reason, people were listening. Thankfully, academia is beginning to catch up, as is shown by two books on the subject: Kill all Normies by philosopher Angela Nagle and, more recently, The International Alt-Right written by researchers from the ‘HOPE not Hate’ group.

The Alt-Right (or ‘Alternative Right’) is a difficult group to define, but The International Alt-Right sums it up as:

“An international set of groups and individuals, operating primarily online […] whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack from pro-multicultural liberal elites”.

From this starting point is formulated an anti-democratic, racist, anti-feminist worldview which at its most extreme results in a desire for a complete purging of Western society and the creation of a ‘white ethnostate’. Nagle’s Kill all Normies (Normies) attempts to understand how these extreme views, many not voiced so publicly since the 1930s, ever became part of the political discourse again. Her focus is on the ‘culture wars’ that played out online between the ‘cultural liberals’ associated with campus politics and websites like Tumblr and the trolls who emerged from anonymous message boards like 4Chan.

She traces how in the years preceding Trump’s election, minor news events like ‘Harambe the Gorilla’ could easily spiral into firestorms of liberal internet outrage with social media users desperate to cash in on the social capital of appearing sufficiently virtuous and woke. Nagle suggests that instances like ‘Harambe’ were symptomatic of a broader culture of over-sensitivity on issues of political correctness which rewarded people with ‘likes’ for correctly signalling their virtue and punished and called-out those who didn’t comply. Harambe “soon became the perfect parody of Western liberal performative politics”. It was this dominant, oppressive online culture, she argues, that provided perfect fertile ground for its antithesis (that is, anti-PC to the most extreme ends) to be framed as something transgressive; just as in the 1960s Christian conservatism gave birth to a left-wing, ‘free love’ counter-culture, in the 21st century ‘cultural liberalism’ resulted in a counter-culture that revelled in open racism and misogyny.

It is this reversal that Nagle suggests is key to understanding the emergence of the Alt-Right, as it helped make views that had been consigned to paranoid fringes of society attractive to a younger audience again; all of a sudden it was ‘edgy’ and ‘radical’ to praise the Holocaust, send rape threats to women and advocate cleansing a country of people of colour. Of course, the trolls posting these comments and sending these messages always had the recourse that it was just a joke, but even if it was initially, it could quickly become a stepping stone to belief and with it a sort of group identity, as a quote from Mike Peinovich (founder of the Alt-Right media network The Right Stuff) elucidates:

“Literally, we wanted to bother liberals […] We loved to trigger them […] and through this sort of opposition to that we actually developed some kind of coherent worldview” (qtd in. TIAR).

Moreover, more than triggering liberals, what this broadcasting of extreme views achieved was an entire shifting of the political discourse to the right: while a politically unaffiliated observer of these vitriolic online battles might not support a white ethnostate, they might be amenable to what appears in the context a ‘sensible middle ground’ and instead start to support controls on non-white immigration or vote for a reactionary measure like Brexit.

While Nagle’s exploration of these culture wars is enlightening, rather than a thorough analysis of the far-right, Normies is really more a critique of the contemporary left, of the “intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings”. In doing so, Nagle has a bad habit of dismissing important contemporary thinkers by unfairly conflating them with the social media users who namedrop them. For instance, to illustrate identity politics reaching parodic levels, she cites the “limitless choice of genders” available to users on Tumblr and calls it “the fruition of Judith Butler’s ideas”. While it’s key to Butler’s thought that gender is socially constructed, the notion that individuals can simply make up their own gender goes against the Butlerian idea that gender is made up of a lifetime of performative acts in a society structured mostly around two genders. That said, Nagel's general point – that, in the years leading up to Trump, the far-right managed to re-brand itself as something 'cool' and 'transgressive', and that the conditions for this were partly created by a cultural left pre-occupied with dominating social media rather than addressing economic inequalities – is valuable, though definitely not the full story in understanding the rise of the Alt-Right. Normies was written around 2017 during a high point for the Alt-Right; just when they were entering mainstream consciousness through their association with Trump, yet before the disastrous Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right Rally’ in August 2017. Consequently, Nagle’s account creates an impression of this group as a novel, dangerous, and unified force: “thousands of the most unhinged and angry people on the Internet” ready to mobilise against online opposition.

A more measured and contextualised account of the Alt-Right is given by The International Alt-Right (TIAR) a collection of academic essays on everything from the group’s cultural reference points to their international links to similar movements in Russia and Japan, published in February 2020. Though not denying the significance of the group, TIAR views the AltRight more as a “conglomeration of existing political and social movements”. This results in the Alt-Right seeming less like some kind of underground army than a patchwork of far-right factions and philosophies that are held in a makeshift online alliance. Indeed, any alienated teenager flirting with far-right memes should be given this book where they will be inundated with specialist language like ‘paleolibertarian’, ‘neo-reactionary’, and ‘Identitarian’, and realise that far-right politics is as dull and jargon-filled as all politics can be. This political theory that the Alt-Right makes use of is especially dull to read about as you always know its end point. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an ‘Identitarian’ and want to “preserve racial, ethnic, and cultural identity”; an ‘accelerationist Neo-Reactionary’ and desire the freedom to form “racially homogenous” states; or a ‘Traditionalist’ who wants to restore the “Hyperborean Aryan” race to its mythical former glory – the end point of all these labels is always to justify some combination of racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-feminism (or all the above). As a result, by patiently unpacking this jargon TIAR effectively shows how these ‘theories’ are just a pseudo-academic veneer for the Alt-Right’s irrational prejudices rather than any kind of intelligible base for them.

As well showing the emptiness and inherent contradictions of its jargon, TIAR breaks down many of the myths that have inflated the power of the Alt-Right in the popular imagination. For instance, the Alt-Right are often lauded as dark-sorcerers of the web who can ingeniously manipulate social media to spread their ideology. While TIAR doesn’t deny that the Alt-Right is more tech savvy than previous right-wing groups, it also reveals how part of the Alt-Right’s success in this area is simply due the fact that extremist ideology and social media run on the same currency – attention. Consequently, algorithms programmed to keep users’ eyes glued to the screen inevitably recommend controversial content like the Alt-Right’s. This attention is oxygen to a movement that needs to reach “as many eyes and ears as possible in order to shift values and radicalise”. TIAR ultimately shows how much the Alt-Right is at the mercy of Silicon Valley, drawing attention to how badly the group has been hit post-Charlottesville by the bans placed by Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon on prominent figures. Though the Alt-Right has its own alternative platforms like Gab, BitChute, and the appealingly named Hatreon, these are fundamentally inadequate for a movement that needs a wider community of normies to both rile and recruit from.

This ultimately begs the question of who makes up the, largely anonymous, membership of Alt-Right. One can easily reel off a list of who they oppose: Jewish people, liberals, progressive women, people of colour, transgender people, big business globalists, moral Christian conservatives etc. TIAR also explores how the Alt-Right’s tolerance of male homosexuality, formerly one of its key selling points and once epitomised by the Alt-Light figure Milo Yiannapoulos, has begun to peel away in recent years, instead morphing into a ‘homohysteria’ within the movement; evidenced by Alt-Right writer Gabriel Chaput who has advocated a “total shunning of anyone homosexual” (qtd. in TIAR). A similar internal persecution appears to have happened to women in the Alt-Right such as YouTuber Tara McCarthy who has complained that “Women in the Alt-Right are constantly harassed by low status anonymous trolls trying to put us in our place” (qtd. in TIAR). With these additional exclusions, the Alt-Right appears to be narrowed to white, Western, cisgendered, heterosexual men. Added to this is a further refinement of there being a general “sense of economic failure or despair” in the group.

However, this leaves one to wonder how such a seemingly extensive fascist movement can rest on such a narrow demographic. An answer is hinted at by TIAR which suggests a likely possibility that many users of anonymous Alt-Right online spaces “choose to hide facets of their identity which are precisely those being excluded and attacked". This is given further credence by 4chan’s own claim that approximately 30% of its users are female. If these claims are true, then it is both fascinating and sad as it suggests that a great number of people who give online support to the Alt-Right have identities that the group specifically targets. While this seems improbable, it would appear an inevitable situation that, in a group which places transcendental, mythical power in slippery, culturally mediated concepts like race, gender, and sexuality, members often find themselves in their own firing line. Moreover, rather than any fixed, common identity (racial, cultural, or otherwise) it would appear what’s holding the Alt-Right together are feelings of hate and the urge to troll, trigger, abuse, and threaten other people.

It’s tempting to think that the Alt-Right might just end up trolling itself out of existence as it tries to continually purge its ranks of undesirables. Indeed, the extremist Alt-Right figure Richard Spencer’s remark that in the Alt-Right “all infighting derives from gays, scorned women, incel nerds and gay nerds” (qtd. in TIAR) shows an, already exclusionary, movement becoming even more insular and shutting itself off from groups it had previously tolerated and embraced. While the Alt-Right imploding is an attractive thought, it probably won’t bear out as it underestimates the aforementioned power of hatred that has managed to keep people coming to the movement so far. What is needed is a more thorough analysis of what causes such hatred. After all, just because the Alt-Right is philosophically trapped in its own racist, sexist, anti-Semitic delusions, doesn’t mean that some of the underlying grievances do not deserve attention. Unequally felt effects of globalisation, an elite political class, hyper-individualism, and the superficiality of much mainstream culture are all among the societal ills that the Alt-Right claim its fascist politics will cure. Mainstream political parties should begin addressing these underlying issues before the Alt-Right mushrooms out again, especially now that the pandemic has meant people are spending more time immersed in the murky waters of social media where the Alt-Right thrives.

Following on, it seems that the most effective short-term resistance for individuals is to avoid getting to lured into social media comment battles with people espousing Alt-Right views (which only boosts the reach of those views) and instead to continue to put pressure on social media companies to shut down key Alt-Right accounts. What both Kill all Normies and The International Alt-Right ultimately demonstrate is the value in engaging seriously with unsavoury topics rather than hysterically decrying them or smugly laughing at them. Indeed, while learning about a group as dangerous as the Alt-Right doesn’t make them any less dangerous, it does make them less scary and ultimately helps one resist them more effectively. I hope university tutors and educators remember that when drawing up their courses for next year.

Works Cited:

Angela Nagle. Kill all Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-right and Trump. Zero Books, 2017.

Patrik Hermansson, et al. The International Alt-right: Fascism for the 21st Century? Routledge, 2020.

Fred Warren is a writer, filmmaker, and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions who graduated from the University of Exeter with a degree in English.