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While the neo-fascist alt-right is not entirely happy with President Donald Trumps first few months in office, one thing for which they are grateful is that the new administration is giving them free reign to engage in building their movement, completely unencumbered byany law enforcement scrutiny of their activities.

Hes going to give us space to destroy, Michael Peinovich, the creator of The Right Stuff, an alt-right podcast network said during a Sunday guest appearance on Fash the Nation, the movements most popular web radio show.

Peinovich, who also goes by the pen name Mike Enoch, was referencinga 2015 remark by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, then the mayor of Baltimore, which some people interpreted as giving support to rioters who committed numerous acts of violence in the city following the acquittal of several police officers who had been on trial for the death of a black resident.

Hes going to give us space to operate, and frankly, it is space to destroy, Peinovich continued.

Now is the time that we have to make hay while the sun shines . . . while these investigations of domestic terrorist groups are not being funded by the government, theyre not being pushed by the Department of Homeland Securityargued one of the co-hosts of the program, an anonymous former Republican political staffer who calls himself Jazzhands McFeels.

Wed probably be facing fucking [racketeering] charges or some shit like that, Peinovich said, discussing what he believed might have happened if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 presidential election.

We have to use these four years to grow into something that cant be defeated, Peinovich said, referring to possible future investigations of neo-fascist groups.

Some parts of the Trump administration actively want to encourage the growth of the alt-right, the former Hill staffer Jazzhands McFeels said, claiming that Trumps top strategist Steve Bannon secretly was trying to enable the fringe movement.

Theykind of expect us to be doing this. Im not saying hes our guy, but they want at least Bannon, I would think wants us to be able to operate in that space. So we should and we are, he said.

Both podcasters statements were met with agreement by guest Richard Spencer, an alt-right editor who operates a series of niche web publications and conferences catering to self-styled racist intellectuals who has since tried to rebrand himself as more of an activist.

In 2016, Bannon told Mother Jones writer Sarah Posner that Breitbart News, the website he oversaw before going to work for Trump, was the platform for the alt-right. Subsequently, the White House strategist claimed that he was referring to the anti-Washington ethos that permeates the largerRepublican base.

As a matter of policy, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation do not publicize ongoing investigations but presumably, given how tightly knitthe small alt-right movement is, the two podcasters likely have some knowledge about the lack of law enforcement oversight.

One government policy area which does appear to have changed under Trump is that federalgrants to non-profit groups seekingto combat domestic extremism appear to have been frozen by the new administration.

Those funds were to be disbursed under a program called Countering Violent Extremism which was approved by the GOP Congress and former president Barack Obama in January of this year.

In February, Reuters reported that the Trump administration had decided to take the $10 million budget of the program, which was supposed to be given to private-sector groups trying to discourage extremism of all types, and redirect it toward counteracting Islamist influence only. The program itself would be renamed the Countering Radical Islamic Extremism initiative, according to the wire service. Since that time, several nonprofit groups which had been approved for funding allocations have publicly stated that they have not received any information from the federal government, despite the fact that the money was supposed to be disbursed within 30 days of approval.

I hope the way that he [Trump] is looked back on in history is that he was the vehicle that moved the alt-right movement, the white identity movement in the United States, back into the forefront of the political scene, Peinovich said on the podcast.

While he is not as widely covered in the political press as some other alt-right activists, Peinovichs The Right Stuff podcast network currently hosts over a dozen neofascist web radio shows that in total have hundreds of thousands of downloads every week, far in excess of the audience of the some nationally syndicated radio hostspodcasts.

The Right Stuff has begun recovering some of its audience after Peinovich was exposed in January as having a Jewish wife. His business partner claimed after he was doxxed that Peinovich was separating from her but neither activist has ever offered any proof of the assertion.

Read the rest here:
Alt-right activists say Trump and Bannon are giving them space to ... - Salon

Images hold a privileged place within the Internets economy of attention. Social media platforms rely on the visual to channel worldviews ranging from liberalism to right-wing populism. There is no turning back from an image-based culture: politicians right and left simplify their messages to the citizens; stories posted to Facebook with an image generate more engagement; the most viral tweets generate millions of meme-based responses.

The power of images to shape political landscape has been particularly evident in the current actions of far-right groups, such as the alt-right, white nationalist, and mens-rights activists manipulating the mainstream media and large audiences alike in order to red-pill them (a term derived from the film The Matrix (1999) that refers to alerting the citizens that political correctness, gender and race equality and global human rights are nothing but an illusion). Platforms such as Breitbart, Reddit, Voat, Infowars, VDARE, American Renaissance, Alternative Right or The Right Stuff use images for indoctrination; conspiracy-mongering; Holocaust denial; climate change denial; the promotion of isolationist nationalism, racism, xenophobia and misogyny; and fighting multiculturalism and globalism.

The neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer hosts a memetic Monday, where community members create images embracing ideas from the openly racist to the mainstream conservative. Pepe, a cartoon frog, entirely co-opted by the white supremacists and transformed into a Nazi militant, is ubiquitous on the red Facebook feed.

Recently, an anti-CNN wrestling video tweeted by Donald Trump sparked dismay among the liberals, but also promptly gave alt-right groups a common cause: alt-right Twitter users quickly got #CNNBlackmail to trend; 8chan (a spinoff image-board based on infamous 4chan) trolled targeted CNN journalists; the Daily Stormer made even more anti-CNN memes.

This traffic in the visual has consequences to how we think about photography in general. In Trumps post-truth times, the medium, once recognized for its documentary value, authenticity, watchdog role, correctness and truth, now becomes a part of the digital media patchwork, hinting at, rather than chronicling, pseudo-events. These events have no chronology, no development, no beginning or middle, let alone an end. These events are systematically caught up in the power dealings and in attempts to abuse, mystify, and mislead.

War and conflict coverage found online continues to reach back to rich historic and iconographic traditions of photojournalism, while police killings captured by raw, unedited cell-phone videos or crude photographs have become the hallmark of United States visual culture. But what about the images used for populist uses, like unflattering shots if Hillary Clinton? What about Twitters racist harassment of Saturday Night Live actress Leslie Jones? What about Trumps tweet of a photograph of his wife Melania alongside an unfavorable shot of Ted Cruzs wife Heidi? Can we even consider these images as within the same medium as the one Robert Capa embraced and defined terms?

Appropriating, doctoring, and digitally intervening in the photographic image is celebrated rather than shunned, turning photographs into a springboard for other media and for pop-culture references. For example, after Hillary Clinton placed Trumps supporters in a basket of deplorables, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out a modified image of the poster for the action movie The Expendables with prominent Trump supporters faces photoshopped onto those of the action stars, and a cartoon head of Pepe in Trumps wig.

What remains unchanged is the power of images to spark feelings and shape moods. Shared within (and rarely across) subnetworks of people with common feelings about given issues, online photographs tap into emotional profile of particular political worldview: roughly, into democracys empathy and indignation; populisms anger; fascisms hatred, patriotisms love (often abiding with heteronormative, patriarchal and imperialist values, as in the case of white supremacy); conservatisms nostalgia for lost values; neoliberalisms sentimentality. The more users share, like, re-blog, retweet, or cross-link images pertaining to issues like gun control, presidential election, same-sex marriage, the Muslim Travel Ban, climate change, the more these images become integral to a customized and participant-regulated network of emotions and feelings.

The more users share, the more images become integral to a customized and participant-regulated network of emotions and feelings.

Admittedly, progressives use images for political purposes as well some recent examples include the Obama/Biden bromance and But her emails memes, or the widely photoshopped image of Trumps family meeting Pope Francis. But the emotional intensity of visual content in the alt-right social media is particularly high. The emotive seems to obliterate the informative here. Feelings, presented to audiences as a radical, universal hard truth, are used to fuel and popularize hashtags, spread talking points, and boost news stories coming from prominent media figures; they are the essence of racist, sexist, homophobic, or exploitative images.

Alt-Right imagery amplifies and builds upon audiences reactions; they become a sought-after focus of aggressive one-upmanship how to threaten most effectively? Who can hate more? How to shame successfully? While mimicking, in disturbing symmetry, progressive protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and thus influencing news narratives with trending hashtags, the alt-right exploits photography to intimidate, bully, and ridicule minorities, push the rhetoric of cultural and political abjection, and indoctrinate individuals like Dylann Roof and Elliot Rodger.

Hate speech goes hand-in-hand with hate images. Accompanied by equally inflammatory, emotionally-charged words (psycho, hate, kill, bitch, crooked) alt-right photographs are now indistinguishable from policy and info warfare (as exemplified by Trumps tweets). Some of these images are removed by social media moderators graphic violence, body damage, sexual assault, or nakedness seem to be the main triggers for moderating content on Facebook, for example. But images might hate in other ways too faces caught in unflattering, distorted expressions, bodies caught in vulnerable moments, misogyny without undressing, exposure without body damage. I already mentioned some of the frequent targets of the alt-right Hillary Clinton, Heidi Cruz, Leslie Jones (joined by journalists Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski). All women, all turned into a political other, very much in keeping with the trends of Trumps campaign of hate speech and denigration of women. Non-coincidentally, women featured prominently in the memes of the crying liberal, viral among alt-right community in the days immediately following the 2016 US Presidential election.

Additionally, the right-wing extremists and hate groups are remarkably adept at passing hate, anger and contempt as satire. Admittedly, racism and hatred have often been veiled as humor in the visual sphere the US history of Blackface or ongoing tradition of Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands are examples of when satire is anything but a benevolent or light-hearted rhetoric. But now, it seems, the joke is on the stunned liberal audiences. By pretending to satirically spoof how soft and easily triggered progressives view conservatives, alt-right meme creators mimic and mock liberal hysteria. Any reaction from the left often feeds into the narrative, confirming the stereotype. By presenting itself as a source of casual entertainment, of harmless trolling, photographs found online function as gateway drugs to more radical ideas.

Hate speech goes hand-in-hand with hate images.

Their playfulness has one more advantage humor often constitutes a grey zone in the guidelines that social platforms use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. Facebook, for example, has developed hundreds of rules, drawing elaborate distinctions between what should and shouldnt be displayed, designating protected categories based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease in an effort to make the site a safe place for its nearly 2 billion users. However, when reading Facebook Community Standards, humor seems to be an umbrella term that offers a relatively easy pass for messages that otherwise could be seen as hostile and even dangerous. Many offensive images posted by banter groups and consequently reported by users have remained on the platform after having been labelled controversial humor by moderators (see, for example, Alt-Right Memes for Fashy Teens Facebook page).

Images today are perpetually produced, displayed, shared, and fed into algorithms, serving the entangled relationship between visual media and political forces. Photography seems to be affected by these rapidly changing and destabilizing circumstances like no other medium. Whereas for the pre-internet, baby-boom generation photographs were synonymous with the ability to critically question sources, deconstruct opinions, and resist state-imposed ideology, the large majority of images that we encounter on our phones and laptops today seem to have new function: to incite, trigger, offend, and indoctrinate. Re-examining their claims and agendas, and critically re-assessing their emotional impact, might help us acknowledge these two realms and rethink the medium itself.

Marta J. Zarzycka

Dr. Marta J. Zarzycka is a lecturer at the Center of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is author of Gendered Tropes in War Photography: Mothers, Mourners, Soldiers (Routledge, 2017).

(Photo 1:Source: The Daily Stormer, a self-described neo-Nazi website which rips-off memes from 4chan and refuses to give themcredit. Photo 2:A still from a GIF created by Reddit user HanA**holeSolo. President Trump tweeted the GIF on July 2nd 2017. Photo 3:Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out a modified image of the poster for the action movie The Expendables with prominent Trump supporters faces photoshopped onto those of the action stars, and a cartoon head of Pepe in Trumps wig. Photo 4: Women featured prominently in the memes of the crying liberal, viral among alt-right community in the days immediately following the 2016 US Presidential election. Photo 5:Source: Alt-Right Memes for Fashy Teens Facebook page. Caption: Is it too late to make memes at the expense of the black ghostbusters woman?)

See the original post here:
Feeling Alt-Right: Hate and Shame In Online Right-Wing Imagery - Reading the Pictures (blog)

If youve gotten into a fight with a faceless twitter user, or been on certain sub-reddits, you might be familiar with being called a cuck. Short for cuckold, the slang term has become one of the American alt-rights favorite insult used to emasculate men perceived to be weak or being taken advantage of, in an attempt to shame them towards their point of view, or better yet, shut them up. If you look at the core fears of Trump supporters, its clear no one is more terrified of being a cuck than the alt-right.

Where did cuck come from? Cuckold is a derogatory term for a man whose wife or girlfriend sleeps with another man, originating from a Middle English poem written sometime between 1189 and 1296, entitled, The Owl and the Nightingale. The word is a derivative of the French term for the cuckoo, a bird which lays its eggs in other birds nests, leaving others to raise its offspring.

Shakespeare was a big fan of the term, and used it frequently in many of his most famous plays. The term made a comeback in the mid-2000s amongst the BDSM community, but was co-opted by 4chan users during the infamous and nauseating GamerGate, shortened to rhyme with a more visceral obscenity, and injected into internet discourse.

In short, cuck is a humiliating term. Michael Adams, a linguistics professor at Indiana University, explains how its different than other emasculating insults. Cuck stays in the masculine sphere, but it says youre an unnatural man, someone who cant stand for himselfinadequate, unable to hold on to whats his. To be a cuck is to be taken advantage of and made to look weak or foolish.

Unsurprisingly, users on the Donald Trump sub-reddit, r/The_Donald, adopted the term to describe their political opponents and those who like watching the interests of others surpass the interests of their country. The interests of the American nation were predictably tied most closely with those of white people and men. The word was tweeted 63,000 times on November 6, having risen steadily during the election cycle. Thomas Middleditch and Kumail Nanjiani of Silicon Valley were harassed by two men in a bar and called cucks after the inauguration.

So whos a cuck? Are you a feminist? Youre a cuck. How about if youre in favor of LGBTQ+ rights? Youre a cuck. Do you support movements like Black Lives Matter and others striving to eliminate racial disparities? Definitely a cuck. Do you acknowledge differences in privileges between different identities? Oh my goodness, even cuck-ier! Did you vote for Hillary Clinton, are a democrat, support immigration, and/or believe in climate change? Then on all charges you are a cuck.

The alt-rights perception of all of these alignments and beliefs as signs of weakness clearly illustrates exactly what they are most afraid of. They feel threatened, they feel cheated, and they feel taken advantage of. They feel like a bunch of cucks.

The opposition towards feminism is a fairly transparent retaliation against the notion of women having any bodily autonomy. Many men may feel they can only have women if theyre able to control or own them. Alt-right demagogue Milo Yiannopoulos has stated that men whose girlfriends are on birth control are cucks, implying women on birth control are undoubtedly sleeping around or cheating on their partners, an absurd myth built on a hatred for womens sexual independence, but one which plays directly into the fears of many in the alt-right.

No doubt, many alt-right men know the only way they could ever keep a girlfriend is if she couldnt get away, and are deeply distrustful and fearful of the women in their lives. They think women are going to take advantage of them and literally make them cuckolds. Calling feminist men cucks is a projection of the alt-rights own fragile sense of their masculine identity.

Those who hate the so-called experts in Washington or the scientific community are clearly lashing out because they resent the idea of someone being more intelligent than them. Rather than accept an inevitable fact of life, which is that there is always going to be someone who knows more about something than somebody else, the alt-right shuts their ears and scream. The men and women who profit from the denial of climate change cheer them on.

A rejection of LGBTQ+ rights is another symptom of the alt-rights own insecurity. The integration of new identities and expressions of gender threaten hierarchical power structures maintained by established roles. Men are supposed to be the free-roaming breadwinners and women are there to take care of them and push out kids. Gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, and non-binary people upset such an uneven system which benefits straight men. The acceptance of gay men in particular threatens the uniformity of a patriarchy by introducing differing definitions of manhood, thereby breaking down the sharp gap between whats masculine (greater) and feminine (weaker). The alt-right fears such social changes will make them weak. Sad!

Similarly, immigrants and POC represent threats to the privileges white men continue to enjoy in America. The alt-right claim their opposition to the immigration of POC stems from a desire to preserve white nationhood and culture, and while these ideas are already a reflection of a twisted racial philosophy, theres a deeper reasoning behind them.

Theyre scared theyre being erased, frightened of losing their stronghold on American culture, and insecure in the knowledge that if the power structures which benefit them did not exist, many of them would not be successful. They itch at the idea of inter-marriage because they see it as a threat, their xenophobia intersecting with their desire to trap and keep women. The alt-right fears the inclusion of new cultures into the American life because theyre afraid of becoming irrelevant. Theyre horrified by the idea of having to watch while America shares some of the love. Sound familiar?

Jokes aside, I do want to make something clear. Many of these beliefs are spread and perpetuated by manipulative demagogues, glorified trolls with microphones like Alex Jones, Bill OReilly, Sean Hannity, Yiannopoulos, Tomi Lahren, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

These people prey on the disenfranchised with their twisted ideas, and I do not intend to mock those who are actually suffering. I dont want to deny the desperate struggle of workers whose entire lives are built around dying industries like coal, or those who are trapped in destitute poverty and feel they have nowhere else to turn. People who are in desperate situations are easy to trick, and I dont want to make fun of those with serious problems.

These Americans are owed better than the idiotic ideals of the alt-right, and its important to expose the ideology as a twisted, insecure, and weak belief system, perpetuated by small, mean-spirited people and spread by online trolls to poor and working-class white people with nowhere else to turn, intended to seriously harm and destroy the lives of countless women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people of color and everyone in-between.

When all is said and done, the alt-right is a group of bullies, and bullies are classically acting out of a sense of gnawing inadequacy, so the alt-right are figuratively and literally angry children. However, their motives ultimately dont matter. The alt-rights insecurity doesnt excuse them, but does explain why theyre so intolerable, and makes clear just how small and sad these puny little people really are. Dismiss the demagogues and trolls. Youre stronger than them. Dont let those cucks get you down.

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The Alt Right's Fear of Getting 'Cucked' - Study Breaks

Most Americans met Wednesday nights news that Arizona SenatorJohn McCain was facing a dire diagnosis of brain cancer with shows of respect for the elder statesman and former prisoner of war. But to some on the extreme right, the longtime Republican is a traitorworthy of scorn, presumably because ofhis willingness to work with Democrats, as well as his criticism of President Donald Trump.

The attack on McCain--a war hero who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prisonis faintly reminiscent of the early days of Trumps presidential campaign. During a family values summit in Iowa in the summer of 2015, just a month after hed announced his seemingly quixotic bid for the White House, Trump lashed out at McCain: Hes not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who werent captured.

At the time, Trump was angry because McCain had complained that Trump "fired up the crazies" during an anti-immigration rally in Phoenix.

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Trump has in no way endorsed or encouraged the alt-rights attacks on McCain, which have thus far been limited to the fringes of digital discourse. Trump sent a statement of support for McCain on Wednesday. "Senator John McCain has always been a fighter. Melania and I send our thoughts and prayers to Senator McCain, Cindy, and their entire family. Get well soon," that statement said.

The attacks came regardless.

The last president for McCain will be Trump. Theres some godly justice right there, wrote one user on the Politically Incorrect message board of social media network 4chan, a hothouse of right-wing memes.

Im pretty sure that God is punishing him, wrote another 4chan user. God made it pretty clear that he supports New Right now.

"John McCain = a war mongering, never Trumper whom I dislike," wrote a user on Gab, another social media network popular with the alt-right.

The attacks, for the most part, focused on McCains willingness to work with Democrats during his three decades in the Senate. Those attacks, some of which are too tasteless to mention here, speak to the utter debasement of civic discourse, particularly on the internet.

On Twitter, some called McCain a cuck.

Cuck is short for cuckservative, a portmanteau that combines cuckold and conservative. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained, the imprecation aims to depict conservatives who dont kowtow to ultra-right political views as inept traitors to the conservative base that elected them.

Any death of a genuine eternal cuck should be celebrated. John McCain's passing, assuming he passes, will do our race a lot of good and that's what matters, wrote a user on Reddit.

The vitriol against McCain seems especially striking given his record of military service, as well as his leadership of the Republican Party. The attackers, it would seem, have more fealty to alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog than to the GOPs iconic elephant.

Mike Cernovich, among the most vociferous members of the alt-right, implicitly defended such attacks on McCain with a tweet:

Hes a traitor and a psychopath, one responder said. His interests are of the globalists. They all need to die, faster the better. Then we straighten things out.

See more here:
John McCain Cancer Is 'Godly Justice' for Challenging Trump, Alt-Right Claims - Newsweek

What is the alt-right? Where did it come from? And how has this strange online subculture blossomed into a mainstream political movement with real-world power?

A new book by Angela Nagle, an Irish academic and writer, answers these and many other questions. The book is called Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Its a taxonomy of the alt-right a reactionary political movement whose adherents include white nationalists like Richard Spencer and more influential people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, both of whom serve as key advisers for President Trump and a sweeping survey of the subculture that spawned it.

I reached out to Nagle to talk about the book and what she learned while writing it. She sees the alt-right as a product of a hopelessly cynical age, one defined by skepticism and alienation. On the right, she argues, young men have latched onto a burgeoning counterculture that rejects social taboos around race and gender. On the left, intellectual culture has become increasingly insular, creating space for reactionaries on the right.

The result, she says, is a complete absence of any kind of hopeful inspiring vision of the future. This is the broader sickness, she told me, and the alt-right is just a symptom of it.

You can read our full conversation below.

How did this book come about?

I started studying online anti-feminist movements seven or eight years ago. At the time, what was interesting to me about them was their countercultural style, and it didnt resemble traditional anti-feminist movements. One of the big themes of the book, really, is the fact that the same ideas can be translated through very different political and aesthetic styles. Its very hard to describe online politics because it doesn't take the same formation as traditional politics, and that was interesting to me. So I started studying it and just naturally found my way into this world.

Is there a Big Bang moment for the alt-right, a cultural event that helped explode it into being?

Trump was the big explosive moment. Obviously there have been reactionary online for many years before Trump, but Trumps campaign was the moment where it all went completely mainstream. Gamergate was very significant in bringing together a whole cross section of people who were antipolitical correctness, but a lot of these people werent necessarily right-wing. They were cultural libertarians or free speech enthusiasts, but there wasnt a lot of political organizing. That changed with Trump. All the anti-PC stuff, the anti-immigration politics, the trolling campaigns Trump boosted all of that into the mainstream.

When someone identifies themselves as alt-right, what are they trying to signal? Or maybe a better way to put it is what are they defining themselves against?

If they're using the term in the strict sense, it says they're against the idea that problems in society are socially constructed or even that most of our experiences are socially constructed. So they would say that gender is not socially constructed but a biological category. They say the same thing about race. They reject the idea that America is founded on abstract principles and instead believe it's a product of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and that it could be no other way.

I always wonder when it comes to stuff like this if its more about a mischievous contrarianism or if they actually believe what theyre propounding.

I think a lot of them start off by trolling and doing the anti-PC thing and resisting what they feel is dogma being shoved down their throats by liberal professors and parents, but where do you go from there? Do you reject all of these principles? There's not much else there in the way of new ideas to replace them, so it's very easy to end up going very far to the right at that point.

Half the time, I cant tell if theyre waging a civilizational battle or a heroic trolling campaign.

At this stage, anyone who thinks theyre doing it for LOLs is either deluding themselves or hiding behind that ironic style in order to avoid being interpreted, because at this point the stakes are actually quite high, and Trump is in the White House, and this movement has spread far beyond the confines of a few obscure message boards.

For a long while, I saw the alt-right as this weird quasi-nihilistic subculture that latched onto politics purely as a tool of disruption and not necessarily as a means to some actual political outcome. But either I was wrong or at some point this movement shape-shifted into something much more serious than that.

Yeah, I think definitely the latter. But there are different components that make up the alt-right; its only recently that theyve melted together. Some of the younger people who got into in the last couple of years just started out trolling and saying outrageous things for its own sake. It was almost like performance art, a kind of game.

Now I would say that it has changed, especially as more extreme and organized elements of the far right have latched onto this movement and, in some ways, helped to legitimize it. I see a rightward drift because the people who thinks it's all funny and transgressive and ironic are bringing people in but then they have no ideas to keep them there because they don't know what they believe in. But the extreme right groups, led by people like Richard Spencer, do know what they believe in and they do have solutions for the problems they identify.

Its basically a belief that the various societal norms and taboos around race or culture or gender are bullshit and that theyre poking holes in all of it. Its a kind of postmodern questioning of everything.

Can you give me a typical psychological profile of the kind of person drawn into the alt-right movement?

I think it's slightly different depending on where you get drawn in. There are all kinds of characters in this movement that appeal to different people for different reasons. But I suppose the main things that they have in common, and this is why they use the term red pill so much, is that they feel they have stumbled upon this dark truth and that nobody is willing to reckon with or to think about what they have discovered.

And whats that dark truth?

Its basically a belief that the various societal norms and taboos around race or culture or gender are bullshit and that theyre poking holes in all of it. Its a kind of postmodern questioning of everything.

The people you describe in the book, especially the younger, more online-oriented people, seem to be struggling with a contradiction: They want to be relevant in a culture they claim to hate. Or maybe they just read too much Nietzsche.

Yeah, definitely with those guys, I think they are both participants in and very disgusted by what they consider a degenerate culture. Which is why I think its so interesting that a political ideology that is so disgusted by modern libertinism and gender-bending sexuality and porn and everything would find a home in 4chan of all places, because these are people who spent years watching the most horrific and dehumanizing porn you can find on the web, and they all suddenly went right-wing reactionary.

What does that suggest to you about the psychology of the alt-right?

I think it says that their sense of the world gone to hell was actually influenced by their own immersion in the forms of culture that they eventually saw as degenerate and ruined. But if they spent more time in the mainstream culture and in society in general, perhaps they wouldnt have this sense that everything is degenerate and Western civilization is in ruins.

You use the phrase Tumblr left to describe the part of the online left that has made a religion of demonstrating its wokeness. Whats your criticism of this corner of the web?

I think that you cannot take the left out of the picture and make any sense of what's going on, because particularly in these very online younger forms of politics, there was a battle of the subcultures going on online and then it spilled over into campus stuff as that generation of teenagers went to college.

People on the left were annoyed with me because they thought I portrayed a very small subculture on the left as representative of the left in general, but I dont think thats the case. I had to describe the online left accurately as I saw it, and the right was in an absolute state of panic about the fact that they were seeing all of these things happening on college campuses: speakers being shut down, platforms being denied, large groups of people ganging up on dissident voices.

What have your critics on the left got wrong?

I think parts of the left have conflated my attempt to criticize this identity-based internet subculture with all of identity politics, and that's simply not true. Identity politics gave us the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, and so on. It would be absurd to conflate that entire radical history with this small internet subculture.

What I criticized wasnt identity politics in general but a specific version of identity politics that was about performative wokeness, and in particular the reason I didn't like it was because it was very inclined to censor and it was very inclined to gang up on people. I hate that, and I think it deserves to be criticized.

You touch on an argument to which Im increasingly sympathetic, which is that the intellectual culture on the left has become embarrassingly narrow and reactionary in its own way.

I think youre right, and you can see this in the free speech debate. People who are very emotionally heightened about this cannot see why you would want to invite a bad person like Milo Yiannopoulos onto a college campus, because they think why would you bring in someone who's going to say hateful things and make minorities feel intimidated and so on.

But in shutting down its political enemies, the left has also shut down its own internal dissenters, who have always made the left intellectually vibrant. These are the people who keep the ideology from becoming fossilized because they force everyone to constantly rethink things, and these are the very voices that have been shut down. No one on the left wants to discuss taboo subjects anymore. Everyone is shut down for the tiniest of transgressions and anyone who is off message is attacked, and thats a climate in which ideas die.

The crisis of liberalism is that it became so cocky about the hegemony of its own ideas that it lost the ability to make the case for itself

We seem to have reached something like peak alt-right, but in the book you suggest that the movement may not have staying power. Why?

Subcultures come and go, and the thing we now call the alt-right probably will go away. Scandals will come up. The movement will splinter into various groups. There will be infighting. But the central ideas they have put on the table will have to be dealt with, and it is very difficult to deal with them when you have such an intellectually stifling culture.

Whatever we call the alt-right now may go away, but something with a different style and the same central ideas will reemerge in its place.

To be perfectly honest, Im not confident our current political culture is capable of challenging these ideas as forcefully as we need them to be challenged.

The crisis of liberalism is that it became so cocky about the hegemony of its own ideas that it lost the ability to make the case for itself. Theres this assumption that our ideas are brilliant and beyond question and anyone who questions them can be dismissed as sexist or racist or whatever. Well, thats not good enough, and the taboos have been broken.

Its not enough to say what you are against. We have to specifically say what we are for and defend it. Were in an age of enormous cynicism, and theres a complete absence of any kind of hopeful, inspiring vision of the future. This is the real problem, and the alt-right is just a symptom of it.

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If you want to know how the alt-right upended American politics, read Kill All Normies - Vox