The leading actual neoreactionaries are not fans of Donald Trump. “Trump appears to have no ideology at all and very little historical/intellectual awareness of his context,” Moldbug — who now just goes by his birth name, Curtis Yarvin — writes in an email.
“I would love to see a CEO with a real track record of strategic execution in a large enterprise — an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos — running against Trump. I don’t even think the ideology matters that much; once someone competent got in that office, and felt a real sense of both authority and responsibility, ideology would start to matter a lot less.”
Instead, the alt-right’s affiliation with Trump comes from another group that blended paleocon-ish ideas with internet culture. I speak, of course, of 4chan.
4chan is mostly still a forum for trolling and random nonsense. It was started to discuss anime, and insofar as it’s been political it’s been in a not strictly left-right way, and usually through the avenue of Anonymous, the activist group that split off from 4chan to do direct action. Protesting Scientology and leaking information on the Steubenville rapists are definitely political acts, but they’re not identifiably left-wing or right-wing.
But in recent years, a vocal right-wing contingent has popped up. As New York magazine’s Brian Feldman explains, part of this is an artifact of 4chan gaining popularity and its popular catchall board — /b/ — losing ground to alternatives, notably /pol/, or the “Politically Incorrect” chat board. “To the extent that there is a shared political ideology across /pol/, it’s a heavily ironic mix of garden-variety white supremacy and neo-reactionary movements,” Feldman writes.
“Most days,” the Daily Beast’s Jacob Siegel writes, “/pol/ resembles nothing so much as [white supremacist blog] The Daily Stormer with the signal to noise dial turned only slightly.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has taken notice, with fellow Keegan Hankes telling Siegel, “You can’t understate 4chan’s role. I constantly see 4chan being mentioned by the more Internet- and tech-savvy guys in the white nationalist movement. They’re getting their content from 4chan.”
Hankes has noticed this trend on Reddit as well, noting in a Gawker essay that “Reddit increasingly is providing a home for anti-black racists — and some of the most virulent and violent propaganda around.”
This has channeled into the Trump movement. Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart writer and major Trump defender who’s perhaps the most vocal exponent of alt-rightism online, famously employs an army of interns, a lot of whom he says are “young 4chan guys.” In their own alt-right explainer, Yiannopoulos and co-author Allum Bokhari argue that /pol/’s alt-righters have embraced racism purely for shock value:
Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide. Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents … Young people perhaps aren’t primarily attracted to the alt-right because they’re instinctively drawn to its ideology: they’re drawn to it because it seems fresh, daring and funny, while the doctrines of their parents and grandparents seem unexciting, overly-controlling and overly-serious.
For good measure, they quote Moldbug/Yarvin: “If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything – an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest fucking thing in the world. Because it is.”
This branch of the alt-right has also played an important role in the Gamergate movement, an ongoing effort to harass women in the video game industry until they shut up about equality and representation. Yiannopoulos, who before the controversy called gamers “pungent beta male bollock-scratchers and twelve-year-olds,” jumped on it as a cause with reactionary potential. “GamerGate is remarkable — and attracts the interest of people like me — because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators,” he wrote in late 2014.
The affinity between gamers and right politics makes sense. “It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks,” Klint Finley writes in his excellent explainer on neoreaction. “It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed.”
“While GamerGate started off as a very diverse, vocal opponent to what they saw was unethical journalism (before it was debunked), many of the anonymous /pol/ rightists would take advantage of its anti-left character by creating sock-puppets,” an anonymous 4channer and ex-Gamergater wrote last year. “Today it is hard to find a 4chan user that doesn’t have an attachment to far right politics.”
And this enthusiasm for far-right politics has bled into Trumpism. JaredTSwift, an alt-righter who got his start on 4chan, gushed to Motherboard’s Oliver Lee, “Trump was meme-able and entertaining, and something like a ban on Muslim immigration would never have been considered before him.”
r/The_Donald — the alt-right dominated home of Trump supporters on Reddit — wracked up 52 million pageviews in March, way more than the 35 million at r/SandersForPresident. The driving force behind the subreddit is CisWhiteMaelstrom, a user whose very name includes the kind of purposefully offensive trolling that defines the Channer alt-right. “Clicking through r/The_Donald is like walking into a rowdy clubhouse for (mostly) men who feel under siege from ‘political correctness,'” MSNBC’s Beny Sarlin reports. Scrolling through the Reddit page, one sees reference after reference to “cuckservatives,” an alt-right term of art which analogizes mainstream conservatives to cuckolded husbands.
