What The Hell's The Alt-Right, Anyway?
posted by Winston Smith at
7:23 AM
Thursday, August 17, 2017
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It started out on 4chan as a bunch of fake twitter accounts spamming Pepe the Frog memes while pretending to be racist. They wanted to reclaim "their meme," which had originally circulated on 4chan. They believed that the Pepe meme was misappropriated by the mainstream, so they decided to publicly associate it with racism so as to make non-4chan users stay away from it. They overwhelmingly supported Trump during the election, and they detest the liberal establishment.
Then, Richard Spencer, and people from the white nationalist forum, Stormfront, coopted the term and are trying to create an actual 'alt-right' political movement.
So basically, it began as a 4chan prank to punk the media, the media fell for it (like the 'Donald Trump paying strippers to urinate on a Russian hotel bed' story), and then actual white supremacists/nationalists who also fell for the joke decided to create an actual alt-right. Remember when civil rights groups, Hillary Clintom, and parts of the MSM declared Pepe the Frog an alt-right/white nationalist hate symbol?They all fell for the prank. Meme magic as they call it on the Chan.
So in one sense, 'alt-right' refers to a concomitant of the 4chan prank, and another sense of it is basically a synonym for neo-nazi.
JFC how sure are you of this origin story?
I'm not sure if the chronology is right (did the /pol/ guys really predate Richard Spencer? I genuinely don't know.), but that is what I was seeing as well. There were a ton of 4chan trolls trying to ruffle the feathers of "normies" with Pepe memes, a lot of Trump supporters thought it was hilarious and appropriated it (although usually not going as far as the 4chan guys), and the Daily Stormer types also appropriated it as well.
Mainstream Trump memes didn't start being heavily Pepe though. It was a lot of that Trump-on-a-giant-tank-with-bald-eagles stuff. I kind of prefer the old stuff, because it was straight up hilarious.
But anyways, you have this situation where memetically, there is some similarity between them (look there's Pepe everywhere!), and in fact riffing on what they are all doing, which is simply too confusing for a media populated by functionally illiterate English majors to figure out, even if they are paid to do so.
And again, if you really want to know where this started, you need to go to internet culture pre-Trump. These groupings were realigning for a while pre-Gamergate, when SJWism was marching through the institutions. In 2006, 4chan /pol/ was probably left-leaning and bashing fundamentalist Christians mainly, for instance.
Yeah, my chronology admittedly might be a bit skewed, but I was lurking when some of the aforementioned Twitter raids occurred, so I can confirm that it happened to some degree or another.
I think anon provides a pretty decent rundown. Even if the timeline isn't entirely correct, the conditions for the origin story that I provided are similarly met. Basically, 4chan+Pepe+Gullible "Normies"+some actual white supremacy+media hysteria = alt-right. It started as a joke, but then because of Godwin's Law (among other things, I'm sure), people took it seriously, and now it has blossomed into life.
I don't think that the term 'alt-right' was coined on 4chan, but I could be wrong about that.
I'm still convinced that 4chan played an integral part in getting Trump elected in the same sort of fashion.
Here are some independent accounts of the incident(s). They're from Vice, mind you, but they are a bit helpful. I can send you some more things after I do a bit of digging, if you like.
https://news.vice.com/story/pepe-the-frog-laid-to-rest-but-will-live-on-as-a-hate-symbol
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvbjbx/4chans-frog-meme-went-mainstream-so-they-tried-to-kill-it
"I'm still convinced that 4chan played an integral part in getting Trump elected in the same sort of fashion."
They got a ton of credence with the whole Hillary's health thing early in the campaign, which was really only flying around 4chan, and suppressed everywhere in the mainstream, and then she collapsed from heat exhaustion on a cool fall day making them the only people standing. But there is really more to it.
I think a lot of Trumpism (and Never Trumpism) really was built in the primaries not the election, and liberal commentators simply don't understand it because they did not take the R primaries seriously (all that clown car stuff). The 2016 R primaries were literally the most fun I've ever seen in politics in America. The debates were uproriously funny, and the internet commentary became incredibly engaging.
The whole liddle Marco, lyin' Ted stuff is remembered, but I think most people really were drawn to how thoroughly Trump demolished Jeb!. I still see Trump guys talk about having "high energy" (in contrast to low energy Jeb), and there were so many other amazing jokes. In one debate, Jeb had his hand bandaged, and explained that he cut it making guacamole. So every time he was discussed, people would go on these hilarious guac jokes. Of course, there was the time when Rubio just repeated his talking points 5 times like a poorly programmed chat bot. And there was that spat between Cruz and Trump over their wives, which people were horrified, but was just incredibly funny also.
Basically Trump created a subculture from whole cloth in the primaries, and I have literally seen nothing like it. It's also why he has such a staunch core, because he basically has tribal buy-in from a ton of his supporters. And it's also why he has generated so much intraparty animosity. He was able to politically upend the R establishment by completely realigning the party culturally and ideologically and a ton of the old stalwarts, like McCain, were completely left out in the cold (for McCain it's worse, because he lost to the current Dem party, but Trump won, so he has to live with being Trump's inferior).
I really think this is a crucial achievement, though. I don't think anyone believed the pre-2016 political alignments were stable. Trump forced change. What has actually disappointed me the most is how unintelligent the "elite" response has been. There are plenty of R pundits (I'm thinking of David Frum) who agree with Trump almost entirely on substance (Frum is actually Trump's equal on immigration from what I can tell), but seem to be so viscerally turned off by his accent and that he doesn't properly employ his teleprompter that they turn into these raving fanatics (Frum literally lost it over the Trump two scoops of ice cream story). And of course, you have seen what has happened with the media.
I was expecting more circumspection and insight from these people who have become clearly far too influential, but instead they seem like children who just want to believe they are going to wake up from a bad dream.
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