If you really want to know, mock it publicly under you real name and see what happens to you.
Benjamin Wallace writes: You could ask some of the same questions about the alt-right, the loosely assembled far-right movement that exists largely online, and that overlaps with both the Trump campaign and with the politics of Zero Hedge. Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who came up with the term “alt-right,” described the movement in December as “an ideology around identity, European identity.” But the alt-right has often seemed more diffuse than that, more of a catch-all for the least presentable elements of the online right: white nationalists, neo-reactionaries, the male-victimhood clique of GamerGate. Late last year, BuzzFeed proclaimed that the movement, with a boost from the Trump campaign, “has hit it big,” and ever since anxious alarms have been issuing from the conservative mainstream. The Times columnist Ross Douthat worked to distinguish the reactionary tradition from the open racism of the alt-right. National Review denounced the “racism and moral rot” that characterized the movement. Commentary described the alt-right as a gathering force, and warned of a “coming conservative dark age.”
And yet, as an ideology, it can be hard to take the alt-right seriously. When Spencer named the movement, he was the managing editor of Taki’s Magazine, whose founder and namesake, Taki Theodoracopulos, is a monarchist man-about-Gstaad and the society columnist for the London Spectator. Its own propagandists often say they are joking. The right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, of Breitbart, himself a leading fellow-traveller, claimed that some “young rebels” are drawn to the alt-right not for deeply political reasons but “because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms.” The alt-right exists mostly online, and so it is shrouded in pseudonyms.
The strains that run through the alt-right—that wrap together the vicious misogyny and plaintive victimhood of GamerGate with Prussia-venerating neo-reactionaries—are in their essence not matters of substance but of style. They share with the Trump movement a haughty success theatre that complicates their populism: the alt-right’s defense of the white working class, Yiannopoulos insisted, is not an instance of self-preservation but of “noblesse oblige.” The two also share the instinct for provocation. “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,” the blogger Mencius Moldbug wrote to Yiannopoulos.
The alt-right often seems to be testing the strength of the speech taboos that revolve around conventional politics—of what can be said, and how directly. Can you insist that science supports racial differences in intelligence? Can you threaten rape? Can you Photoshop an image of a Jewish reporter who has written critically about the Trumps so that she appears to be in a concentration camp? How far can you go? It is easy to notice the flood of Nazi imagery that has been tweeted from anonymous accounts at reporters, and harder to determine how many people are sending these images. Even the most careful reporting into the less crude edges of the movement usually has to resort to calling the alt-right’s influential voices by their message-board monikers (CisWhiteMaelstrom, JCM267) rather than by their real names.
One way to understand the alt-right is not as a movement but as a collective experiment in identity, in the same way that many people use anonymity on the Internet to test more extreme versions of themselves. Moldbug, when he stepped out from behind his pseudonym, turned out to be a Silicon Valley computer programmer who had started as a commenter in the factional circles of libertarian message boards. CisWhiteMaelstrom, who convened the pro-Trump hordes that swallowed the politics sections of Reddit, turned out to be a law student in his early twenties who was looking forward to a job in which he could make the most money possible.
