Experts say the ‘alt-right’ have stormed mainstream consciousness by using ‘humor’ and ambiguity as tactics to wrong-foot their opponents
oh good they’re finallly fucking catching up t o what i’ve been shrieking aobut for six thousand years
One the report’s authors, Dr Alice Marwick, says that fascist tropes first merged with irony in the murkier corners of the internet before being adopted by the “alt-right” as a tool. For the new far-right movement, “irony has a strategic function. It allows people to disclaim a real commitment to far-right ideas while still espousing them.”
Marwick says that from the early 2000s, on message boards like 4chan, calculatedly offensive language and imagery have been used to “provoke strong reactions in outsiders”. Calling all users “fags”, or creating memes using gross racial stereotypes, “serves a gate-keeping function, in that it keeps people out of these spaces, many of which are very easy to access”.
Violating the standards of political correctness and the rules of polite interactions “also functions as an act of rebellion” in spaces drenched in adolescent masculinity.
This was played up by Milo Yiannopoulos in an infamous Breitbart explainer last year, in which he insisted that the “alt-right” movement’s circulation of antisemitic imagery was really nothing more than transgressive fun.“Are they actually bigots?”, Yiannopoulos asked rhetorically. “No more than death metal devotees in the 1980s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.”
What Yiannopoulos left out, according to Marwick, is that these spaces increasingly became attractive to sincere white supremacists. They offered them venues for recruitment, and new methods for popularising their ideas.
“Fascism is more or less a social taboo. It’s unacceptable in modern society. Humour or irony is one of the ways that they can put forward their affective positions without having to fall back on any affirmative ideological positions.”
He adds: “They’re putting forward the anger, the sense of betrayal, the need for revenge, the resentment, the violence. They’re putting forward the male fantasies, the desire for a national community and a sense of unity and a rejection of Muslims. They’re doing all of that, but they’re not stating it.”
@baroquespiral i’ve literally never read a better article on this topic. nobody else has gotten it before now. “troll culture as a means to disguise fascism” fucking holy shit, the PERFECT way to put it.
In which an autist on tumblr and a failed journalist both believe they have uncovered a secret plot but really they are just describing /pol/, a public imageboard that openly espouses fascism and has hourly /NatSoc/ general threads dedicated to talking about and spreading Nazism.
