Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

Introduction: From Hope To Harambe

• What changed between the elections of 2008 and 2016?
• How did the same status markers that earned Barack Obama genuine praise and admiration earn Hillary Clinton online mockery?
• Trace the period from 2008 to 2016 from the perspective of online cultures and subcultures
• Trace the new culture wars
  • Don't involve young people rebelling against an older cohort
  • Alliances are much more jumbled
  • Much more difficult to discern participants' true political views
• Death of the mainstream liberal mass culture
  • The only thing that seems to unite all online activists (whether right or left) is their hatred of "mainstream"
  • Many average voters hold the mainstream media in contempt
• This new online culture of memes and in-jokes is the result of the further democratization of speech and publishing by the Internet
  • However, this is not what many online pioneers had hoped would result as a result of this democratization
  • Instead of more long-form pieces and investigative journalism, we got Twitter and dank memes
• We can trace the beginnings of this new online culture to Kony 2012
  • The first activist viral video
  • Sought to draw attention to war crimes being perpetrated by Joseph Kony in Uganda
  • Was reshared numerous times on Facebook and Twitter by young, mainly liberal people engaging in virtue signalling
  • Backlash
    • "Slactivism"/"clicktivism" - people thought that merely resharing the video would help stop Kony from perpetrating his war crimes
    • Video was criticized for oversimplifying and containing inaccuracies
    • Criticism for focus on filmmaker rather than Kony's victims
  • Then the filmmaker has a nervous breakdown, itself caught on video, adding another layer to the media frenzy
  • Kony 2012 sets the template for many of the memes and fads that follow
    • Earnest idealistic content shared online
    • Content becomes "viral"; is reshared many times on social media
    • Increasing popularity causes people to dig deeper, and they find out that the cause isn't as idealistic as it appears on the surface
    • This leads to a backlash of cynicism and irony, leading to the public humiliation of the person who originally created or shared that content
• Repeated iterations of this cycle lead to the formation of a deep reservoir of cynicism and ironic detachment
• This is brought into focus by the reaction to the death of Harambe
  • Harambe was a gorilla that was killed by zookeepers after he dragged a child who had fallen into his enclosure
  • The death of Harambe started the normal social media activism cycle, with many petitioning to have the parents held responsible for the death of the gorilla
  • However, this led to a nigh-instant backlash against the social media spectacle
  • Using Harambe as a joke became a way fro those who where tired with ultra-serious left-wing self-righteous social media sentimentality to poke fun at it
  • The blizzard of Harambe memes became a way for those with actually racist views to compare black celebrities to Harambe, while appearing to take part in poking fun at the faux-hysterics of liberal social media culture
• Online culture wars form an ironic in-joke-y maze of meanings where every new event, identity and subcultural behavior can be understood as a response to something else
• People posting Trump memes are motivated to make their memes more edgy and toxic because they're entertained by the reactions of genderqueer "otherkin" on Tumblr
• This leads to more earnest responses about how "mainstream heteronormative culture" continues to "oppress" online subcultures, which leads to further escalation
• This escalation leads to the creation of "call-out culture" on social media, where people are afraid to share their political or social views for fear of being labeled "problematic"
• Because the online ultra-left labeled everything that wasn't 100% aligned with them as "racist" and "white-supremacist", their warnings about people with actual racist and white-supremacist views went unheeded
• As a result Trump was able to get away with not responding to many of the criticisms of his campaign simply because the people making the criticisms had lost their credibility with large parts of the voting public

Chapter 1: The Leaderless Digital Counter-revolution

• In the early 2010s, there was a new wave of cyber-utopianism
  • Arab Spring
  • Occupy
  • Anonymous hacktivism
  • Wikileaks
• New leaderless forms of digital cyber-revolution
• However, these revolutions either failed or turned ugly
  • Arab Spring leads to the rise of Islamist movements
  • Occupy Wall Street never develops a political ideology and is forced out, encampment by encampment
  • Ukraine - protests quickly turn violent
• Moreover, there is nothing suggesting that these leaderless cyber-movements have to support liberal causes
• The alt-right starts as an overtly segregationist and white-nationalist movement, intent on creating an "alternative" to the traditional conservative establishment
• In order to justify these values, the alt-right gains deeper intellectual justification from "neoreactionary" writers like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land who question Enlightenment values
  • Argue that social progress is orthogonal to material progress/progress in the hard sciences
  • Argue that social values have, in fact, been regressing since the Enlightenment
  • Advocate a return to pre-Enlightenment social values while maintaining scientific and material progress
• The key nexus between the reactionary right and online trolls was GamerGate
  • What was GamerGate
    • Started out with reviews of Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest
      • Depression Quest was not a very good game
      • Embodied some of the worst tropes of online hyper-leftism
    • Attacks on Zoe Quinn's game quickly escalated into attacks on Zoe Quinn herself
    • Online trolls joined with right-wing anti-feminists to defend the culture of video games against do-gooder liberals who sought to make the gaming subculture more like the mainstream
  • GamerGate proves to be the link that allows alt-right ideology to influence the heretofore inchoate politics of online trolls
  • Much of the online alt-right aligned media known as the alt-light is a result of GamerGate
• Things could have gone differently
  • Prior to GamerGate, most online anarchism was vaguely leftist
    • EFF, GNU and many other institutions advocating for cyber-libertarianism have vaguely leftist ideology
    • Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace hearkens to left-wing antecedents
  • Instead, online trolling becomes preoccupied with the perceived emasculation of western culture by liberalism in general and feminism in particular
• Eventually trolls start to turn their online words into offline action
  • Attacks on women
  • Attacks on minorities
  • Attacks preceded by specific warnings on 4Chan and other anonymous spaces
• The left assumed that it was inevitable that the new online leaderless protest movements of the 21st century would espouse liberal values and was not prepared to defend these values when that turned out not to be the case

Chapter 2: The Online Politics of Transgression

• Transgression has been a liberal virtue in the West since the '60s
• This virtue has now been embraced by the right
• Use of swastikas initially had more to do with "punk" culture and giving deliberate shock or offense to conventional moral sensibilities than it did with actual Nazi sympathies
• Online culture venerated transgressive protagonists like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho or Tyler Durden from Fight Club
• Draws inspiration from mid-20^th century counterculture, which viewed insanity as a rejection of social norms and a source of creative inspiration
• An early example of the online culture of transgressivism comes from the phrase an hero and 4Chan's attitudes towards suicide
  • The phrase an hero comes from a grammatical error left by a commenter on Mitchell Henderson's Facebook page
  • Mitchell Henderson was a schoolboy who committed suicide
  • The combination of the extremely earnest, heartfelt sentiment and grammatical error was hilarious to 4Chan
  • The phrase "an hero" became a meme, and was used to mock those expressing suicidal tendencies online
  • 4Chan rejects the mainstream sentimentality around suicide and instead replaces it with "its own dark spectacle, where pity is replaced with cruelty"
• Online transgressivism has its roots in Nietzsche's morality, which emphasized the discarding of traditional norms and which characterized Christianity as "slave morality"
• Online transgression can be seen as an expression of the Romantic critique of everyday life - everyday ennui and boredom requires a counterforce of extreme transgression
• 4Chan embodies the "carnivalesque grotesque as a critique of mainstream ideology"
  • However, the mainstream ideology when 4Chan developed its politics was left-wing, so its critiques tend to be right-wing
  • Un-PC poor taste, rudeness, shock, trolling
• In the first iteration of the culture wars, the transgressives were on the left, and their critics were on the right
• Now, it's the transgressives on the right and their critics on the left
• Transgressivism, as a style, isn't necessarily associated with any particular ideology
• Ideologies which once embraced transgression (i.e. feminism) now reject it, since it's their values that are being transgressed upon
  • Feminism embraced transgression in the '60s, but was rejecting it by the '80s
• Chan culture embraces the values of de Sade, rebelling against conventional moral and sexual norms
• The emergence of the online right is the apotheosis of the transgressivist movement pioneered by the counterculture of the '60s

Chapter 3: Gramscians of the Alt-Light

• The chief apologists for the alt-right, initially, were Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari
• Wrote An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right
• Flattering portrayal of the alt-right that traced its roots to a number of paleoconservative thinkers:
  • Oswald Spengler - The Decline of the West
  • H.L. Mencken
  • Julius Evola
  • Samuel Francis
  • French "new-Right" (Gramscians of the right)
• French new-Right adopted Anthony Gramsci's phrase "political change follows social change", or as Breitbart put it, "politics is downstream of culture"
  • This is also something we see a lot in Moldbug's writings re: "The Cathedral"
  • Prior to 1968, the Right took for granted that the populace was inherently conservative ("silent majority") and all that was required was to get politicians that accurately reflected this inherent conservatism
  • Gramscians were the first to acknowledge that the culture had become more liberal, and thus politicians that accurately reflected the culture would also be liberal
  • Gramscians thus focused on cultural change, and felt that political change would follow naturally after the culture had been changed
  • Andrew Hartman - The War for the Soul of America
  • The rise of the New Left and the disorder of 1968 signaled that the entire culture would have to be retaken before political change could be effected
  • Thus, the New Right set about changing the culture, rather than engaging in political advocacy as a faction of traditionally conservative parties
• Today, the heirs to that New Right tradition is the "alt-light"
  • Bridge between mainstream Trumpism and the alt-right
  • Movement entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton Window
• "Alt-light" bypasses traditional media and creates its own media ecosystem online
• How was it that a right-wing candidate like Donald Trump could get elected, despite the majority of the mainstream media being against him at one point or another when he was a candidate?
• During the beginning of the Obama years, millennial liberals began to carve out their own online media spaces to take the place of the declining mainstream media
  • Outlets like Jezebel, Everyday Feminism, and Salon deliver a mixture of radical left-wing ideology, sentimentalism and ultra-sensitivity
  • The turning point comes with the vilification of Bernie Sanders supporters
    • Sites like Jezebel and Salon push a meme of Bernie Sanders supporters being misogynistic white privileged males ("Berniebros")
    • This was similar to how establishment leftist media vilified Jeremy Corbyn in the UK
    • This vilification led to a backlash, where new left-wing media outlets (both online and print) began to criticize Hillary Clinton
      • The Young Turks
      • Jacobin Magazine
      • Novara Media
      • Chapo Trap House
      • Current Affairs
• While the online left was fragmenting the alt-light was building up an alternative multi-layered media ecosystem
  • Ranged from white-nationalist fringe bloggers to more mainstream-palatable figures like Milo Yiannopoulos
  • Began to gain popularity by highlighting the absurdities of extreme social justice viewpoints
  • Quickly gained popularity with 4Chan, who became a "reserve" that could be called on to swarm and harass opposition
  • Key institutions and personalities
    • Rebel Media
      • Gavin McInnes and Laura Southern
      • YouTube-exclusive media company focusing on gotcha-style interviews with social justice activists
      • Uses the same interview tactics used by liberal media to make Tea Party activists look stupid
      • Gavin McInnes is a former media editor at Vice, characterized as one of the primary architects of hipsterdom before his turn to the alt-right
      • Laura Southern was famous for disrupting social justice and feminist protests with right-wing slogans and activism
    • Breitbart
      • Initially founded as conservative website by Andrew Breitbart
      • Was taken over by Steve Bannon after Breitbart's death
      • Bannon pushed Breitbart towards the alt-right
      • Breitbart has been the launchpad for a number of other alt-right celebrities, most notably Milo Yiannopoulos
      • In addition to running Breitbart, Bannon is a celebrity in his own right
      • Comes across as a darkly fascinating figure willing to challenge the multicultural orthodoxy of the left and the free-market orthodoxy of the right
      • Buzzfeed tried to discredit him by posting an interview that he gave with the Vatican, where he explored some of his more controversial viewpoints
      • Rather than discredit him, that interview only made him more popular
      • As Bannon has pushed Breitbart closer to the alt-right, he's lost his allies on the traditional right
        • Ben Shapiro, Cathy Young and Reason magazine have all cut ties with Breitbart over his association with alt-right figures
    • Milo Yiannopoulos
      • Gay conservative columnist and commentator
      • Initially gained fame for his sympathetic coverage of GamerGate
      • Dangerous Faggot Tour - tour of college campuses promoting alt-right ideas and values
        • Efforts to censor and de-platform were used as promotional material
        • Twitter ban - led to increased fame
      • Was fired after an interview surfaced where he defended pederasty - too controversial even for Breitbart
    • Mike Cernovich
      • Publishes popular guides to alt-right politics and male assertiveness
      • Danger And Play - references Nietzsche quote referring to women as "dangerous playthings"
    • Alex Jones
      • Infowars
      • Claims that there is a new world order being created by a globalist conspiracy
      • Believes the moon landing was faked and that 9/11 and Oklahoma City were staged by the US government
      • Believes that school shootings are faked in order to drive anti-gun sentiment
    • Richard Spencer
      • One of the only white-nationalist figures to rival "alt-light" figures in terms of popularity
      • Believes that the US should undergo "peaceful ethnic cleansing"
      • Dapper, well-spoken style defies stereotypes about white nationalists
      • Wants "blood-and-soil" conservatism in the style of European far-right parties
      • Believes that alt-right views will continue to infiltrate mainstream politics through culture
      • Most explicit Gramscian of the the alt-right figures
      • Believes that Trump is both a sign of and a catalyst for the collapse of the multicultural liberal order
• While the alt-light was united (don't punch to the right) while it was in opposition, divisions have started to appear now that they're in power
  • Mike Cernovich broke publicly with Richard Spencer after Spencer was filmed making a Nazi salute and shouting "Hail Trump"
• The success of the above figures shows that the right has caught up to and surpassed the left in its appreciation for and application of leftist ideas about media and culture

Chapter 4: Conservative Culture Wars from Buchanan to Yiannopoulos

• Where does the alt-right fit in with historical conservatism?
• Over the past half-century, politics has been hollowed out - become more about culture than policy
• Trump is merely the apotheosis of this trend
• Trump is also exceptional in that he's the first conservative to win by exploiting this trend
• Milo Yiannopoulos likes to compare Trump to Pat Buchanan
  • Says that Trump is the first "purely cultural" candidate since Pat Buchanan
  • But how much do the alt-right have in common with Buchanan's culture-warriors?
• Pat Buchanan led the "paleoconservatives"
  • Death of the West
  • Defined by opposition to the "globalist, interventionist, open-borders" neoconservative agenda
  • Buchanan sought to define American conservatism as more than anti-Communism
  • Pushed back against the cultural left on issues such as abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, evolution, family values, feminism, pornography, etc.
  • Buchanan called for conservatives to engage in a larger cultural struggle
• Milo's style combines the politics of conservatism with the taboo-busting culture of online trolls
  • According to his detractors on the right, Milo's actual policies are little more than traditional liberalism
  • Far removed from the buttoned-down family values style associated with the term "conservative"
  • Milo's rise represents the triumph of the '60s-left counterculture tactics of transgression
  • Identity politics tactics now used by both the right and the left
  • The alt-right today is characterized by the libertinism, postmodernism and nihilism that characterized the left in the '60s
  • Embodies the non-conformist ideals once advocated by the New Left
• The alt-right can also be defined by its opposition to traditional conservatism as well as liberalism
  • Traditional conservatives are called "cuckservatives"
  • Seen as a cuckolded husband to the "rapacious non-white enemy"
  • Reserve particular scorn for neoconservatives
  • Neoconservative emphasis on economic policies that hurt lower-class workers and relative silence on social norms is exactly the opposite of alt-right beliefs
• The alt-right represents one of the periodic realignments of the American political system
  • In the 20th century class-politics and social liberalism were the domain of the left
  • Free-market economics and social conservatism were the domain of the right
  • However, there is no rule by which these values have to be paired up in this way
  • The alt-right combines class politics and social conservatism in the manner of William Jennings Bryan
  • This rearrangement was foreseen by Herbert Marcuse, who said that as conditions improved for the proletariat, they ceased being revolutionary and instead became reactionary in order to protect what they already had
  • The alt-right has also co-opted the postmodernist left's use of irony and cultural references in its writing
• The alt-right and paleoconservatives are unified in their hatred of feminism
  • However, paleoconservatives are also opposed to gay rights, whereas the alt-right is neutral-to-friendly on that score
  • The alt-right and the paleoconservatives also differ on their views of pornography and free-speech
  • The alt-right is united more by its desire to destroy progressive cultural institutions than it is by any particular vision of conservative society to fall back to
• While many paleoconservatives did eventually back Trump, Trump's rise is not evidence for a reprise of paleoconservatism
• The support of paleoconservatives is tactical - they see the alt-right as the best way to advance (some of) their ideas
• The rise of the alt-right is evidence of the total victory of the politics of irreverence, non-conformism and identity that began in the '60s

Chapter 5: From Tumblr to the Campus Wars: Creating Scarcity in an Online Economy of Virtue

• One explanation for the emergence of this new right-wing sensibility is that it emerged in opposition to left-wing identity politics seen on platforms like Tumblr
  • Users on these platforms tried to shut down right-wing speech while simultaneously moving the Overton window left on issues of race and gender
  • Normalize anti-male, anti-white, anti-cis rhetoric on the left
  • Hypersensitive, in contrast to the the willful offensiveness of chan culture, but equally subcultural and transgressive in its own way
• Trump's election exposed divisions in the left
  • Liberal left vs. materialist left
  • People who supported the left on economic issues hit back at the "woke" identity politics that they thought led to Hillary's defeat
• This division on the left became apparent in 2014
  • Facebook starts offering 50 gender options
  • Campus wars over "safe spaces", "trigger warnings" and gendered pronouns
  • The main preoccupation of this new online leftist culture was gender fluidity
  • Also explored mental health, physical disability, race and cultural identity
  • Brought terms like "privilege" and "intersectionality" out of academic literature and into mainstream political discourse
• While this new identity politics has many sources, a key nexus for its discussion and development is Tumblr
  • Couples political and aesthetic sensibility
  • Apotheosis of recognition of diversity over economic inequality
• Tumblr puts into practice Judith Butler's theories that sex, gender, and sexuality are cultural constructions created by bodily acts, which together combine to create a "core" gender
  • List of genders found on Tumblr
• Tumblr's gender fluidity is closely related to its notion of "otherkin" - people who identify as non-human in some way
  • Otherkin identify as creature from fantasy or popular culture
  • While the more extreme examples of identifying as otherkin on Tumblr are explicitly performative, their existence shows an underlying thread of fluid identity among Tumblr users
• While it's fair to question the right's motivation in fixating on these relatively small subcultures, liberalism similarly fixates on relatively small subcultures in the right
• Professor Adolph Reed Jr - "Liberals don't believe in politics any more, only bearing witness to suffering"
  • Suffering, weakness and vulnerability are central to online liberalism
  • This is especially true on Tumblr
  • Combination of gender fluidity and open admission of mental and physical disabilities
  • However, some disabilities are psychological in origin or are unrecognized by modern medicine
• "Spoonies"
  • People became emotionally attached to spoon theory
  • Spoon theory is a metaphor to describe disabilities without outward appearances
    • You have a finite number of "spoons"
    • Every time you complete an activity, you lose a spoon
    • When you're out of spoons, you're completely exhausted and you can't do anything
  • Spoonies prominently displayed spoon-themed jewelry or tattoos and lashed out at anyone who didn't react appropriately to their undiagnosed or undiagnosable illnesses
• Another core characteristic of the online left is self-flagellation
  • Checking one's "privilege" - shorthand term to acknowledge and apologize for the unearned privileges that one has as a consequence of their race, gender, etc
• However, despite the explicit humility and self-flagellation, the online left is as vicious in its own way as the online right
  • The schism between more "traditional" leftists and the new identitarian leftist ideology of Tumblr was brought into focus by Mark Fisher's essay, Exiting The Vampire Castle
  • Essay led to years of mass abuse, accusations of misogyny and racism
  • Fisher was the victim of a "call-out" culture, consisting of performative vulnerability, self-righteous wokeness and bullying
  • The purpose of call-out culture is to create scarcity in a social sphere where virtue is currency
• The other major social media network shaping online liberalism was Twitter
  • Minor celebrities quickly realized that they could gain more followers and attention by snarkily pointing out racism or sexism than through more traditional media channels
  • However, when everyone is trying to point out their own virtue, the value of the signal drops
  • Therefore, there was a cultural shift to try to purge those who were "faking" or being insincere, which led to the current call-out culture
  • This explains why leftists are more targeted by call-outs - they're the ones with "virtue" to lose
  • This effort to preserve the scarcity of virtue was especially prominent in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting
    • Even though the coverage was sympathetic to Hispanic community and the gay community, people on Twitter still found objections
    • Use of "Latino/Latina" rather than "Latinx"
    • Some claimed that it was the shooter's mental illness rather than his allegiance to radical Islam that caused the shooting
    • Others on the left countered by saying that suggesting that mental illness had anything to do with the shooter's motivations was "ableist"
• The initial spillover from the online fringe onto offline culture was over the phenomenon of trigger-warnings
  • Trigger warnings (content warnings) started out as warnings on blog posts or Tumblr posts that discussed potentially distressing material
  • However, offline, people started requesting trigger warnings on anything distressing, including the expression of non-mainstream liberal opinions like, "There are only two genders"
• Germain Greer
  • Feminist activist
  • Was scheduled to give a speech at Cardiff University regarding women and power
  • However the talk was canceled after people claimed that Greer was against transgender people
  • Claimed that Greer was a TERF: Trans-exclusionary radical feminist
  • Greer had not published any remarks on transgenderism in 15 years and claimed that it wasn't her issue
• Peter Tatchell
  • Was scheduled to speak alongside Fran Cowling at Canterbury Christ Church University
  • Talk was canceled after Fran Cowling claimed that Tatchell was racist, Islamophobic and transphobic
  • Evidence was Tatchell's signing of an open letter supporting free speech
• Maryam Namazie
  • Iranian socialist and feminist
  • Invited to speak at Goldsmiths University
  • Speech was repeatedly interrupted by students from the Islamic Society
  • However, rather than defend her, the other left-wing student groups turned on her
• Jordan Peterson
  • Refused to approve a petition calling for the replacement of he/she and him/her with ze/zir
  • Had locks glued shut
  • Was drowned out by a white-noise machine when speaking
• Laura Kipnis
  • Had complaints filed against her for writing an article criticizing "sexual paranoia" on college campuses
• While alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos were figuring out how to leverage these attacks into further fame and fortune, leftist figures tended to be cowed or rendered apologetic by these attacks
• Tumblrization of politics resulted in a brain drain that has done real damage to the left
• These new disputes are a new phase in the campus wars of the late '80s and '90s
  • Highlighted in books like
    • The Closing of the American Mind
    • Illiberal Education
    • Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education
  • Has its origins in the relativism of writers like Stanley Fish
• Even in this earlier phase, there were critiques of moral relativism on the left
  • Bloom and Paglia - relativistic thinking is the road to nihilism
• Although the alt-right and their allies carry some of the ideas of traditional conservatives, their style and ideology much more closely resembles the leftist critics of the radical left identity politics

Chapter 6: Entering the Manosphere

• The alt-right is closely associated with a set of masculinist anti-feminist policies known as "The Manosphere"
• Men's liberation grew out of the same '60s counterculture that led to 2nd wave feminism
• Grew increasingly anti-feminist as feminism began to make more general critiques of culture
• Critiques of traditional men's gender roles gave way to celebrations of masculinity
  • Feminism becomes the political enemy
  • Reject male privilege and focus on areas where men are discriminated against, like family courts
• This new anti-feminism took on a more virulent tone in the 2010s
• Use the metaphor of "the red pill" from the Matrix to describe their awakening into anti-feminism
• Obsession with "beta" vs. "alpha" males
  • Idea that women only prefer dominant males
  • See entire world as a social hierarchy
  • See "game" and pickup artist tactics as a way to go from being "submissive betas" to "dominant alphas"
• One of the chief authors of pickup artistry and "game" is Roosh V
  • Real name: Daryush Valizadeh
  • Wrote a series of books called Bang, in which he detailed his tactics to get sex
  • Runs the anti-feminist website Return of Kings
• Another prominent manosphere author is Paul Elam
  • Runs A Voice For Men
  • Also ran RegisterHer - a site where men could dox and register women that had wronged them
  • Saw Trump's win as a win for the men's rights movement
• There is significant cross-over between the alt-right and the men's rights movement
  • Chateu Heartiste
    • Run by James Weidmann
    • Mixes evolutionary psychology, anti-feminism and white-advocacy
    • Argues that white civilization is being undermined by miscegenation, immigration, and low birth rates
  • Vox Day
    • Another alt-right anti-feminist
    • Author of SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police
    • Early supporter of GamerGate
• Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW)
  • Men who are eschewing romantic relationships in protest against a culture "destroyed by feminism"
  • Focus on individual achievement and goals
  • Women are worthless and mindlessly led by biological impulses
  • Marriage should be boycotted
• Proud Boys
  • Founded by Gavin McInnes
  • Focus on traditional male roles
  • Anti-pornography
  • Socially conservative, seeking to restore traditional gender roles
  • "Throw down bricks" - approach women in real life
• Men's rights spaces have contradictory goals
  • Want benefits of tradition without its restraints and duties
  • Proud Boys say they're for a return to a more traditional lifestyle, but they're led by a partying hipster hedonist
• F. Roger Devlin
  • Alt-right writer
  • "Sexual Utopia In Power"
  • "The breakdown of monogamy has resulted in promiscuity for the few and loneliness for the majority"
  • Decline of lifelong marriage and traditional norms has brought with it a steep sexual hierarchy
  • Growing levels of choice for elite men and increased levels of celibacy for those at the bottom of the pecking order
  • This relentless rejection brings causes bitterness, and that turns into support for misogynistic ideals when combined with social Darwinist ideas from the alt-right
• These ideas translated into real-life action when Eliot Rodger attempted to attack a sorority house in UC Santa Barbara
• Complained bitterly about his own lack of romantic success and how he was affected by seeing those he considered inferior to be having more romantic success than him

Chapter 7: Basic Bitches, Normies and the Lamestream

• The framing of the alt-right as a movement of "ordinary people" reacting against "elites" obscures the elitism of the alt-right itself
• Before adopting the narrative that put them as the champions of the common person against the liberal elites, the alt-right was more than happy to consider the mainstream a bunch of sheep led astray by liberal narratives
• One of the most prominent features of alt-right discourse is misanthropy and anxiety over breeding of the "lower orders"
• Initially the reaction towards this was condemnation from the right and celebration from the left
  • The right saw places like 4-chan and reddit as being the embodiment of the "internet hate machine"
  • Saw it as the logical end of a trend of coarsening culture
  • The academic left, in turn, saw these places as expressions of subcultural rebellion against an oppressive and hegemonic mainstream
• 4-chan's culture has always been racist and misogynistic, but academic liberals were willing to overlook that and mine it for trendy research
• Birmingham school of subcultural studies
  • Insufficiently critical of the ideologies of the subcultures they study
  • Biases tend to agree with the countercultural discourse of their subjects
• Cultural capital used to be earned by being urbane and well-mannered
• Subcultural capital is earned by using the right argot and being "in the know" - informed about the latest trends and memes
• Part of the misogyny of online subcultures comes from the association of feminine traits with the broad masses
• Rejection of feminine is as much a rejection of the mainstream as it as rejection of feminine values themselves
• Women are seen as a force bringing the inauthenticity of mainstream platforms into subcultural spaces
• Hearkens back to the mythos of the domesticating feminine
• The rhetoric of much of the alt-right echoes movies and media like Fight Club, where feminine values are seen as decadent and symbols of a declining civilization
• The alt-right combines the pop-cultural values of subversion, transgression and counterculture with Nietzchean anti-moralism
• Instead of trying to fight the alt-right on their own terms by trying to be edgier than they are, maybe we should reflect on whether edginess and transgression is something that should be aspired to at all

Conclusion: The Joke Isn't Funny Anymore - The Culture War Goes Offline

• The viciousness and hatefulness of the online identitarian left opened moral space for the alt-right
• The online right has shown that it can wield the weapon of online mobs far more effectively than the left can
• Yet, rather than realize that it can't win against the alt-right by using the tools of speech suppression the left doubles down on those tactics and eventually resorts to violence to suppress right-wing speech
• This creates further moral space for the alt-right to transgress further, and further alienates those in the middle who might have been supportive of leftist ideals
• The left has lost the ability to meaningfully argue with people due to the profound intellectual rot caused by calls for greater and greater ideological purity
• Thus trolls like Milo Yiannapoulos can challenge the left to a debate of ideas, confident that no one can eloquently defend leftist ideas against them
• Progressives have gone from praising the emergence of online political movements into offline spaces to hoping that the Internet can contain such movements

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