The Alt-Right

"By several accounts, there were as many reporters and protesters at the event as there were white nationalists, raising questions about why the event has attracted so much attention."

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/307413-trumps-media-feud-enters-new-era

 

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...us_583884ece4b0c2ab944368dc?hl=1&noRedirect=1

The Alt-Right, The Other Alt-Right, And The Rise Of The Alt-Left
There are two Alt-Rights and distinguishing between them is critical to defeating them.
11/25/2016 08:45 pm ET | Updated 4 hours ago

Seth Abramson
Attorney; Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire; Poet; Editor, Best American Experimental Writing; Editor, Metamodern Studies.

There Are Two Alt-Rights, Not One, and the Alt-Left Is Poised to Defeat Both in the Next Decade
Per usual, the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have picked up on a critical cultural undercurrent years before the mainstream media.

In this case, it’s the fact that there are two Alt-Rights—and that distinguishing between them is critical to defeating them.

The first Alt-Right, routinely lampooned by South Park, comprises, plain and simple, various breeds of under-educated bigots: a multi-faceted gaggle that hates blacks, Jews, feminists, liberals, globalization, and Hispanic and Muslim immigration, to name just a few of the bogeymen ethno-nationalists have been ginning up fear and loathing about online and off for decades.

The second Alt-Right is incensed by all the same groups, but targets them primarily “for the lulz.”

What this digital-age shorthand means is that the second branch of the Alt-Right, typified by über-troll Milo Yiannopoulos (pictured above), daily entertains itself online by provoking all those its perceives to be superfluously thin-skinned. Often found on sites like 4chan and Reddit, these folks are, unlike white nationalists, essentially non-ideological—or at least they’re not ideological in any sense we’ve encountered before.

By most traditional metrics, the majority of these latter folks are apolitical. In my Summer 2015 series of essays about Donald Trump in the Scandinavian academic journal Metamoderna, I observed that it was apolitical actors of just this sort who would be most drawn to Trump’s candidacy, whether as Election-Day voters or online boosters or both. The reason for this, I said, was that in addition to appealing to “angry optimists,” Trump will always, in the view of a certain class of apolitical young people, be a totem or mascot for their anti-dogma, anti-establishment “movement”: a chaos-inducing hand grenade thrown into the middle of America’s village green. While Leftists like myself for years ignored the claim, oft heard on the far Right, that the Left’s increasing fetishization of “political correctness” would lead to the demise of progressivism and the Democratic Party, these folks were hard at work every day making sure that obtuse prophecy would become a fait accompli.

While most of Milo Yannopoulos’ massive troupe of online trolls would never be found at a white pride parade—that’s just the sort of plodding, hyper-literal communalism they detest—there can be no doubt that most of them are white men simmering daily in resentment over their lost cultural capital. Their primary conviction is that contemporary society has been ruined by the anxieties, niceties, and dizzying social-media infighting promulgated by so-called “political correctness.” To the extent they’ve developed an agenda to combat this (in their view) devolution of a pleasingly chaotic sociocultural sphere into one where their impish breed of self-expression has no place whatsoever, their agenda is at once personal and (though they themselves wouldn’t see it as such) conventionally dogmatic.

On the personal side, these folks find trolling progressives online almost orgasmically cathartic; in the longer game, they believe that repeatedly poking communities of so-called “Social Justice Warriors” online makes these sub-communities look so ridiculous in the public gaze that any broad-based support for them will eventually collapse. A tertiary goal is to recruit almost exclusively young white heterosexual men to this sub-strata of the “Alt-Right” cause. The reason for this selective outreach is at once a matter of convenience (the sites this element within the Alt-Right frequents also cater to young-white-male sub-communities such as the gaming community, the Star Wars community, and the indie-lit community) as well as a strategic initiative—as the youngish-white-male demographic still dominates the corridors of power online. Milo Yiannopoulos, though gay as well as young, white, and male, is a prime exemplar.

The problem for media analysts in tracking these phenomena is that the prank- and trolling-oriented “acting up” of Milo’s Alt-Rightists—fundamentally juvenile in its contours as well as its demographic base—is indistinguishable from white-nationalist bigotry, which of course is all part of the “fun.” At base, the message being sent by these increasingly de-centered young white heterosexual males is that if Leftist rhetoric is going to paint them all as white-supremacist neanderthals, they’re going to act that way even when they’re (sort of) not that. Their public profile may be identical to that of the neo-Nazis operating under the aegis of the Alt-Right, but their unwillingness and almost pathological inability to take any ideological dogma seriously distinguishes them from their peers in the Alt-Right movement in a way the Left needs to understand and quickly.

Fortunately, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, progressives who’ve always exercised an atypical approach to political engagement, are again leading the way.

II.

In the current season of South Park, the liberal, Jewish, yarmulke-wearing Gerald Broflovski has become an ostensibly fascist online “troll”—”ostensibly” inasmuch as his targets match those of contemporary ethno-nationalist fascists: feminists, gays and lesbians, and liberals of any stripe. In certain respects, however, Gerald is just a proxy for longtime television provocateurs Parker and Stone, and his rough treatment on the show this season a subtle self-effacement. While early in the season Gerald’s trolling is portrayed as a sort of rock-star performance—one undertaken with the same manic glee one imagines Parker and Stone have enjoyed as the creators of South Park, a show that deliberately triggers everyone on both Left and Right into melodramatic bouts of public self-righteousness—later on Gerald’s actions tear asunder his personal life, the lives of others, and indeed the very fabric of the nation. So while Gerald, trolling “for the lulz,” may intend “only” a nasty tricksterism that calms his anger at (in his view) contemporary society’s emasculation of him—putting aside for a moment that Matt Stone, who is Jewish, knows better than most how male Jews’ fears of emasculation have different origins than other iterations of the same fear—in fact the show implies that impishness is a vestigial form of the perpetually unaddressed ugliness that can lodge itself in any human soul.

Does Trey Parker and Matt Stone putting a liberal Jew at the center of a fundamentally far-Right internet conspiracy mean that, as is often alleged, South Park is merely trying to offend all sides of every political debate equally? In other words, is South Park, as the conventional wisdom goes, at its core a morally ambiguous poststructuralist deconstruction of contemporary mores that takes no position at all on which political commitments are just and which unjust?

No.