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Last weekend, a group of neo-Nazis marched alongside other white supremacists and far right activists in Charlottesville. The chants and visual tools they used from swastikas to wooden shields to blood and soil chants revived rhetoric and imagery that many in America believed to be entirely eradicated: so beyond the pale of common morality that no reasonable person could possibly seek to revive it.

That belief, and the complacency it engendered, was erroneous. If anything, the sheer taboo nature of Nazi imagery how thoroughly outside the window of acceptable discourse it is has, to its supporters, only added to its appeal. Its very transgressive nature has made it easy for propagandists to market it as sexy and forbidden.

This is not new. The sexualization of fascist and, specifically, Nazi imagery precedes even World War II. In his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written against the backdrop of the Nazi rise to power in the late 1930s, critic and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin warned against the aesthetic dangers of fascist imagery, as it was predicated on eroticized notions of power and submission.

"The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life, Benjamin wrote, latter adding: [Mankinds] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

In other words, we culturally fetishize both absolute power and our own apocalyptic destruction, and fascism capitalizes on that fetishism to win supporters. And certainly the success of Hitlers own propaganda lay in part in the Nazis ability to harness that erotic undertone to gain support. Consider German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahls Olympia documentary series, which celebrated (Aryan) German masculine beauty at the 1936 Olympics. (Riefenstahls conscious complicity with Nazi ideology has long been a subject of debate she strenuously denied it but its undeniable that her lens captured how Germans of the time saw their Germany identity, and their Fhrer.)

The taboo nature of Nazi imagery made it even more of an eroticized phenomenon after World War II. Cultural critic Susan Sontag noted this in her 1974 essay Fascinating Fascism, pointing out how the trappings of fascism (particularly here, too, Nazi fascism) gained a cultural potency from being illicit and forbidden.

"To those born after the 1940's, Sontag wrote, fascism represents the exotic and the unknown. ... Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. ... Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, likewise, commented in an interview that Every shoddy erotic fantasy is now attributed to Nazism. Arent we witnessing beginnings of a re-eroticization of power, taken to a pathetic ridiculous extreme by the porn shops with Nazi insignia that you can find the United States?

Plenty of films about World War II made in the second half of the 20th century echo those tensions. On the high culture front, there was Liliana Cavanis The Night Porter, about a sadomasochistic relationship between a concentration camp survivor and her old guard. On the pulp side, there was 1975s Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, one of so many Nazisploitation movies that treated the Holocaust as Eli Roth-style torture porn, complete with a sexual frisson. In Ilsa, the main character and her contemporaries were leather-clad, whip-wielding Nazi dominatrixes.

The more taboo the approach, the more powerful it became in the popular id. After all, Nazi prisoner-themed pornographic pulp, or stalags," were so popular in the newly created state of Israel the population of which was at that time 50 percent Holocaust survivors that the Israeli government had to ban the genre in 1963.

Even today, we fetishize the taboo nature of Nazi ideology. A November 2000 New York Times style article celebrated fascist chic as the in look of the season, quoting a magazine editor as saying: "Fascism I hate to say it, but it's sexy. ... It expresses the idea of taking and then relinquishing control. Often, the aesthetics of Italian fascism a more palatable aesthetic than the German version would make its way into pop culture. The article quotes a New York fashion designer who modeled her latest collection after architecture under Mussolini: Brutal granite and travertine structures, the dictator's pet mode of propaganda, are all about power, the article quotes her as saying, and power is the greatest turn-on.

The eroticization of Nazism was twofold, in other words. It relied on both a wider existing cultural fetishization of power and masculinity and a more recent fetishization of the forbidden. As scholar Laura Catherine Frost writes in her book Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, the politically forbidden and repudiated is just as likely to be the substance of erotic fantasy and the chosen political object. ... Images of sexualized fascism derive their meaning precisely from the distance mainstream culture puts between itself and deviation.

To admit the erotic charge of Nazi ideology openly may seem distasteful or outright immoral. But it is precisely the dialectic between repression and transgression that allowed Nazi ideology to flourish in certain corners of the internet: permitting the Twitter trolls of the alt-right to morph, slowly, into flesh-and-blood perpetrators of racial violence.

After all, as I wrote for Real Life magazine in November 2016, the loose coalition of alt-right that came to form the umbrella we know today wasnt entirely composed of conscious, intentional white supremacists. Some were, to be sure, but as many denizens of alt-right gathering places like 4chans /pol/ modeled themselves after British free speech firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos saying the most offensive thing possible to get a rise out of people, reveling in his disengagement as well as those who were committed white nationalists like Richard Spencer.

Many members of the alt-right and alt-right-adjacent I interviewed then spoke of the Overton window the field of culturally acceptable discourse and how they wanted to widen it as much as possible. Unchecked free speech, including the freedom to do a Hitler salute, was integral to how they presented themselves: as sexy, transgressive agent provocateurs.

And widen the Overton window they did. Capitalizing on those same erotic tropes that defined a 1974 genre of soft porn, or a sexy 2000 fashion trend, they managed to present themselves as the real underdogs: the most punk rock of us all, going beyond the boundaries of outrage, morality, and good taste. In so doing, they provided a culturally acceptable avenue for jokes about a pure ethnostate to become ideology, for the implicit racism underpinning so much of America to become explicit, and to reinforce itself through repetition the real meme magic so popular with the alt-right until irony became truth.

As long as the alt-right continues to be glamorized, we risk making more would-be rebels without a cause like the man who drove his car into the crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

Indeed, perhaps the most effective portrayal of Nazism is one that looks on its horrors with humor. Mel Brookss 1967 film The Producers so controversial when it came out culminated in the (Jewish) protagonists attempting to stage a schlocky propagandistic musical, Springtime for Hitler, a surefire (they hoped) bust. The film presents the musicals title number in its entirety: awkward goose-stepping and robotic salutes, Nazi Rockettes, and a drugged-out Hitler who can barely remember his lines. That film, created by Jews just two decades after the horrors of the Holocaust, smashed open the Overton window far more defiantly than Milo Yiannopoulos and his ilk could ever hope to do.

If the alt-right is correct about anything, its that we should in this one instance keep that very window of discourse open, to strip Nazi ideology once and for all of the taboo eroticism its had since Leni Riefenstahl captured some strapping Aryan boys on camera. And we should use that space to point and laugh.

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Sexualized fascism: how the taboo nature of Nazi imagery made the alt-right more powerful - Vox

For all that he did in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting anti-Semitic slogans, carrying a torch through Emancipation Park, he wasn't even aware that the alt-right existed one year ago. It wasn't until Hillary Clinton condemned the movement in a campaign speech last August that he first learned of it, and from there, the radicalization of William Fears, 29, moved quickly.

He heard that one of its spokesmen, Richard Spencer, who coined the name "alt-right," was speaking at Texas A&M University in December, so he drove the two hours to hear him speak. There, he met people who looked like him, people he never would have associated with white nationalism - men wearing suits, not swastikas - and it made him want to be a part of something. Then Fears was going to other rallies across Texas, and local websites were calling him one of "Houston's most outspoken Neo-Nazis," and he was seeing alt-right memes of Adolf Hitler that at first he thought foolish - "people are going to hate us" - but soon learned to enjoy.

"It's probably been about a year," he said, "but my evolution has been faster and faster."

Last weekend's Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which ended with dozens injured, a woman struck dead by a car, a president again engulfed in scandal and another national bout of soul-searching over race in America, was a collection of virtually every kind of white nationalist the country has ever known. There were members of the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and neo-Nazis. But it was this group, the group of William Fears, that was not so familiar.

The torch-lit images of Friday night's march through Emancipation Park revealed scores like him: clean-cut, unashamed and young - very young. They almost looked as though they were students of the university they marched through.

Who were they? What in their relatively short lives had so aggrieved them that they felt compelled to drive across the country for a rally? How does this happen?

The answer is complicated and unique to each person, but there are nonetheless similarities, according to lengthy interviews with six young men, aged 21 to 35, who traveled hundreds of miles to Charlottesville to the rally. For these men, it was far from a lark. It was the culmination of something that took months for some, years for others. There were plot points along this trajectory, each emboldening them more and more, until they were on the streets of Charlottesville, ready to unshackle themselves from the anonymity of online avatars and show the world their faces.

- - -

From New Orleans, one man journeyed 965 miles. Another arrived from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania - 247 miles. Another drove all night, more than 20 hours in all, from Austin, Texas - 1,404 miles. One more traveled from Dayton, Ohio - 442 miles.

The road to Charlottesville, 540 miles away from his home in Paoli, Indiana, began decades ago for Matthew Parrott, who at 35 calls himself "the first alt-righter," referring to a small and decentralized movement of extreme conservatives, many of whom profess white-supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs and seek a whites-only ethno state.

AJ Mast / For The Washington Post

Parrott was socially awkward and had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at 15. So his family pooled their money and got him a computer with access to the Internet - a rarity in his neighborhood of mobile homes - which he came to see as his "secret portal in my bedroom." In chat rooms, he developed a taste for intellectual combat, always taking the contrarian side, obsessing over how to dismantle progressive arguments until, as he puts it, he "ended up self-radicalizing."

That radicalization was rooted, he said, in his own feelings of alienation, which intensified when he went to Indiana University and confronted an elite he soon came to disdain. "They made fun of my accent and overbite and they called me white trash and hillbilly," Parrott said. "I was never able to identify with a single person."

He dropped out after his first semester, and his disillusionment festered until, at age 23, he went to the national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-nationalist organization based in St. Louis. He considers this moment when comparing what white nationalism once was and what it has become. "I was the youngest one in the room," he said. Old men, "asked me, 'Whose grandson are you?' They were baffled. . . . And now those guys are too frail to understand what's going on."

What was going on: The same alienation and purposelessness that once defined his life had come to characterize that of so many others. An economy capsized, a job market contracted, a student-loan crisis erupted, and feelings of resentment and victimization took hold among some members of Parrott's generation.

"This is not some hypothetical thing," said Parrott, who soon established the white nationalist Traditionalist Youth Network and started recruiting. "This is, 'I'm stuck working at McDonald's where there are no factory jobs and the boomer economy is gone and we have got this humiliating degrading service economy. . . . They feel the ladder has been kicked away from them."

And who was to blame for all of this? Those who joined the alt-right did not view impersonal economic factors or their own failings as culprits.

"In some respects, it's not that different from Islamist extremists," Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center said. A similar set of conditions - disaffected young men, few jobs for them and a radical ideology promising answers - have fueled recruitment for the alt-right movement. These young men, Lenz said, were told "they were sold a raw bill of goods. The government is working against them and doesn't give a s--- about white people, and they were told this during a period when the first African-American president was in the White House."

There came a moment for every young man interviewed when they felt whites, and particularly white men, had become subject to discrimination, a perception that formed the foundation of their new identities.

Peyton Oubre, 21, of Metairie, Louisiana, perceived it after graduating from high school when he was looking for a job. "Where I live, go to any McDonalds or Walmart, and most of the employees are black," said Oubre, who is unemployed. "And I could put in 500 applications and receive one call. Every time I walked into Walmart, there were no white people, and how come they are getting hired and I can't?"

"White privilege," he said. "I'm still waiting on my privilege."

For Tony Hovater, 29, of Dayton, Ohio, it came after he had dropped out of college and was touring with his metal band, for which he played drums, and he passed through the small towns of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. He started thinking that so much of the national narrative focuses on the plight of poor, urban minorities, but here was poverty as desperate as any he had seen, and yet no one was talking about poor whites. "You see how a complete system failed a group of people and didn't take any responsibility for it and has done nothing to help," he said.

For Connor Perrin, 29, of Austin, who grew up upper-middle class, it was during college when he felt campus liberals were ostracizing his fraternity because it was white. "If only people would stop attacking us," he said."I can't say anything just because I'm white. I can't talk about race, and I can't talk about the Jews because I'll be called an anti-Semite, and I can't say I want to date my own race."

For Eric Starr, 31, of Harrisburg, Pa., who has been convicted of disorderly conduct for fighting and possession with intent to manufacture or deliver, it was growing up white in a poor black neighborhood. "I got bullied and I got made fun of and I got beat up," he said. "Cracker, whitey, white boy."

And for William Fears, who has been convicted of criminal trespass, aggravated kidnapping and possession of a controlled substance, it happened while he was incarcerated. "I don't think any race experiences racism in the modern world the way that white people do in a jail," he said. "In jail, whites come last."

From these disparate geographies, social classes and upbringings - rich and poor, rural and urban, educated and not - they converged on a single place last weekend, Charlottesville, with a shared belief that they, white men, are the true victims of today's America.

- - -

"I wanted to be in the fight," Perrin said.

"I need to be more aggressive," Parrot said.

"We never fight for anything," Fears said.

The violence that they would mete out and receive on the streets of the picturesque college town was the most pivotal moment to date in the evolution of the alt-right movement, the men interviewed believe. The alt-right has always been a diffuse movement, but it has also been intensely communal. People make and share memes that glorify President Trump and make jokes of Hitler and the Holocaust. They discuss events on 4chan, Reddit and Discord. They get to know one another despite a distance of hundreds of miles. They learned not to fear being called a racist or a Nazi, and in fact, some found those descriptions liberating, even "addicting," as Parrott described it.

But Charlottesville represented an opportunity to further transcend what they called confining social taboos. Many came prepared for violence, like Fears, who was wearing a blue business suit, a helmet, gas mask and goggles. He rode a van with a group of other alt-right members, and described it as "being transported into a war zone." Bottles burst against the van's windows, he recalled. People hit the van. It stopped before Emancipation Park, and everyone started yelling to get out as quickly as possible. Gripping a flag like a weapon, Fears strode to the front and melted into the melee. He threw punches. He took punches. He felt disgust. "Someone hit me in the head with a stick," he said, "and it split my goggles off."

"Little savages," Starr said of the counterprotesters.

"Subhuman," Perrin said.

Neither the day's events leading to the car crash that killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others in Charlottesville, nor the condemnation from politicians and people across the country that followed, has persuaded those interviewed that their beliefs are wrong. For some, it only confirmed their sense of victimhood. They felt silenced and censored, deprived of their rights. They felt as if the death of Heyer had changed everything, and that uncontrollable forces had been unleashed.

"It was like a war, and some people died, and it was an eerie feeling," Fears said. "Things are life and death now, and if you're involved in this movement, you have to be willing to die for it now, and that was the first time that had happened."

Soon after the rally, Fears started the long trip home to Houston, where he is a construction worker. He talked to his family, who "pretty much agree with me." He tried to calm down his little brother, who was "shaken up by it." He thought about what would happen if he died. "If I'm killed, that's fine," he said. "Maybe I'll be a martyr or something, or remembered."

He knows there will be another Black Lives Matter event soon, and he has plans to go. "I'll take a megaphone and see what they have to say," he said. "I would like there not to be more violence. . . . But it might be inevitable, so let's get this out of the way. If there is going to be a violent race war, maybe we should do it, maybe we should escalate it."

The Washington Post's Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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The road to hate: For six young men of the alt-right, Charlottesville is only the beginning - Chicago Tribune

There's evidence to suggest the events in Charlottesville have motivated numerous individuals to join or actively reengage in dark web white supremacist forums.

Trump has faced a wave of bipartisan backlash in the wake of a jaw-dropping press conference Tuesday at Trump Tower in which he blamed the violence that led to the killing of counterprotester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville on both sides of the conflict, not solely on the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who instigated the rally.

"You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now," Trump said during a contentious back-and-forth with reporters in the lobby of his midtown Manhattan building.

The mixed messages coming from the White House have only fueled the escalating rhetoric from "alt-right" figures and notable white supremacists -- many of whom cheered Trump's statements Tuesday. Law enforcement officials have indicated they are worried about more violence ahead of the widespread alt-right rallies planned in coming weeks across the US.

"I just think the rhetoric has really brought this to a different level, and that's what we're worried about," Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans said Friday when asked about an event planned in his city. "I've never seen so many people looking, almost looking for confrontation, and we've gotta knock it down."

James Norton, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, said he thinks the President's remarks "obviously reignited the issue in a not-productive way."

"It is incumbent on the President to tone down the rhetoric and be clear that the US government has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to racially charged hate group organizations that's mission is to commit violence, spread fear and divide the country," he said.

Several organizers of the upcoming "alt-right" rallies have pledged that their events are about free speech, but that reasoning has done little to mitigate concerns.

"What they're doing is choosing flashpoints around the country to try to rally their people around," said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.

"They do it under guise of free speech or security," he said. "But really what it is is an opportunity for them to express their hatred in the communities."

The uptick of white supremacist online activity taking place within these secure chat rooms reflects "a new sense of motivation to either actively re-engage or get started in this community," according to Alex Kassirer, Flashpoint's director of counterterrorism.

And that renewed motivation has spawned a number of posts that echo the comments made by one subscriber to the white nationalist site Stormfront on Tuesday.

"Just want to say I've been a long time lurker, but with the events in Charlottesville I feel more supportive/compelled than ever. I want to join the fight for a White nation that rules as it was ..." the post said.

The decision of several online hosting providers to deny service to alt-right websites in the wake of the events in Charlottesville has resulted in the migration of such communities to the dark web, according to Flashpoint's analysis.

"Individuals with alt-right sympathies are actively seeking out spaces for interaction with like-minded individuals," which will "likely result in sustained surges of activity on deep dark web white supremacist forums," according to their recent report.

For the most part, local and federal law enforcement agencies said they will prepare for the upcoming rallies the same way they do for all public protests and rallies.

One law enforcement source at the Boston Police Department told CNN that they anticipate large crowds, but there is no indication of an uptick in white supremacist threats.

Officers "expect good behavior but will be prepared should it go bad," the source said.

The Department of Homeland Security said it continues to work with federal and local partners "to assess threats and analyze trends in activity from all violent extremist movements, regardless of ideology."

While law enforcement agencies may not be changing their approach following the violence in Charlottesville, CNN has previously reported that the threat from far-right groups has been on their radar for months, as noted by an internal DHS and FBI memo from May.

The authors of the memo predicted that attacks from white supremacist groups in the coming year would be mostly "spontaneous and involve targets of opportunity."

But despite monitoring efforts by law enforcement, alt-right and white supremacist organizers have been clear that they have no interest in deescalating the situation after Charlottesville.

"I think a lot more people are going to die here before we're done here, frankly," said Chris Cantwell, a white nationalist and speaker for "Unite the Right" in an interview with Vice News.

Former Ku Klux Klan Wizard David Duke called the deadly protests in Charlottesville "a turning point for the people of this country."

"We are determined to take our country back. We're going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump," Duke said in an interview while attending the rally on Saturday.

Duke also praised Trump's comments on Tuesday, thanking the President for his "honesty and courage" in a tweet.

"Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa," read the full tweet from an account that is not verified by Twitter but appears to represent Duke and features videos apparently posted by and of him.

CNN's Jessica Schneider and Rene Marsh contributed to this report.

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Trump's mixed messaging sparks concerns of 'emboldened' alt-right - CNN

Stephen K. Bannon thought hed only serve a year as the presidents chief political strategist. Rumors of his imminent sacking arose every few weeks. In April, the rumor that hed be plucked off the National Security Council actually proved true.

But even with the news Friday that the key Trump adviser was out of the White House , the leaders of the alt-right, which Bannon elevated and then denounced, predicted that their movement would continue.

Im sad to see Bannon go, but I was never sure who Bannon was ideologically and politically, said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who popularized the term alt-right to rebrand the white nationalist movement. Hes a fighter, to be sure, and a populist in a basic sense, but what he actually believed was never clear.

Bannons detractors thought they knew what he believed. They pored over books he praised, especially the 1973 anti-refugee book The Camp of the Saints. They shuddered at how he called the news site he will return to lead, Breitbart, a platform for the alt-right, with verticals on black crime and paranoia about unchecked immigration.

Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor whom Bannon helped turn into a transgressive campus celebrity, said time will tell whether the Trump administration will drift into turpitude without Steve around.

[Steve Bannon says rivals wetting themselves, calls supremacists clowns, contradicts Trump on N. Korea]

Steve is far more dangerous and powerful outside of the White House now. And I think he will be happier, too. I cant wait to see Bannon the Barbarian viciously crush his enemies from whatever perch he believes he will be most effective from, Yiannopoulos said.

For Democrats, the removal of Bannon isnt enough. In statements Friday, Democratic lawmakers were sure to bring up the presidents comments on the violence in Charlottesville, and mention that the Trump administration still included Attorney General Jeff Sessions and immigration policy adviser Stephen Miller.

Steve Bannons firing is welcome news, but it doesnt disguise where President Trump himself stands on white supremacists and the bigoted beliefs they advance, said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Its good news that hes not in the White House, said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.), who has sought Bannons firing since November. But I dont think anyone should have any illusions that now that Steve Bannon is gone, the president is going to take very different positions. These are the presidents positions. These are the presidents policies. They remain.

A Nazi sympathizer, Klan defender, and supremacist protector should not be President of the greatest country in the world, said Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) in a statement, who was first to introduce articles of impeachment against Trump.

No member of Trumps administration worried liberals as much as Bannon. They shared photos of the strategist looking particularly unkempt. The Onion portrayed Bannon as a ghoulish fairy tale villain, with a headline announcing that he had burst into millions of spores upon his departure.

Anthony Atamanuik, a Trump impersonator who hosts the weekly Comedy Central satire The President Show, cast the actor John Gemberling to play Bannon as a shambling, wide-eyed slob.

I conceived him as your friend who breaks out the Ouija board at the seance, Atamanuik said. He was the guy who came up with theories about aliens building the pyramids, because he could not entertain the possibility that they were built by black or brown people. I think we did something accurate without knowing it we had Trump being scared of him.

Progressive activists were genuinely scared of him. The first #FireBannon signs appeared at rallies the day after Trumps presidential victory. At some rallies, the chant No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA was altered to squeeze in a mention of Bannon. The chants never went away, and this week, many of the post-Charlottesville protests and vigils featured calls for Trump to fireBannon.

The progressive group Daily Action organized at least 44,000 calls to the White House demanding Bannon be removed; Color of Change, which has organized advertiser boycotts of Breitbart and other news sites, got close to 100,000 people to sign anti-Bannon petitions.

His record made him such a clear figure of what Trumps policies would mean for people, explained Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change. We wanted to say to members of Congress, who were seeking to treat this administration as normal, that theyd be held accountable for doing business with people like this.

The success of those left-wing protests left a bitter taste for Bannons alt-right defenders. As the Bannon news circulated on Reddit and 4chan forums, Trump fans veered between rationalization (He will return to Breitbart in a civilian capacity in order to fight in the culture war) and depression (Why would you contact a leftist columnist and give an unsolicited interview in which you kill your reputation and give the media an angle on you?).

Vox Day, an alt-right activist and science fiction author, argued that Bannons enemies had missed the real reason he was terminated. Bannons nationalism, for all the hate it drew, put him on the opposing side of neoconservatives the war hawks that the left used to hate.

Hes not a bureaucrat, and the kind of strategic advice he offers Trump can just as easily be provided from outside, Day said. My one concern is that this could mean that the military interventionists are going to get their way in Syria, Venezuela and North Korea. I suppose well find out soon enough.

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost

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Steve Bannon may be out, but the 'alt-right' says their movement will continue - Washington Post

You probably have a good idea of who the so-called alt-right are: a group of white supremacists and nationalists, bound up by a fiery loathing of political correctness, cultural Marxism, and those pesky social-justice warriors. You might have also seen the articles that tell us to stop using that term and call them out for the fascist, neo-Nazis they are. In the wake of the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville last weekend, these calls have only become more urgent. The phrase has become a catch-all for people like Richard Spencer, the head of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the online troll and provocateur who recently fell from mainstream conservative grace. But theres a lot more people it catches in its (inter)net.

The alt-right isnt one group. They dont have one coherent identity. Rather, theyre a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, mens rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, theyre beginning to form a cohesive group identity. And I have the data to prove it.

The_Donald is a Reddit community with over 450,000 subscribers. Its the breeding ground for the alt-right, and the fermenting vat in which this identity is being formed. According to data analysis by FiveThirtyEight, its US president Donald Trumps most rabid online following, and Reddit itself now claims it is the fourth most visited site in the US, behind only Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

As part of the Alt-Right Open Intelligence Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, Ive been working to understand the language of the alt-right and what it can tell us about its members. Working with the UK Home Offices Extremism Analysis Unit, I used Googles BigQuery tool, which lets you trawl through massive datasets in seconds, to interrogate a collection of every Reddit comment ever madeall 3 billion of them.

Focusing on The_Donald, I used a script that lets you see which words are most likely to occur in the same comment. Combining this with a tool that allows you to look at the overlap in commenters between different parts of Reddit, I found that the alt-right isnt just one voice: Its made up by distinct constituencies that share different opinions and ways to express them, identifiable by the language they use and the other communities they post in.

In other words, theres a taxonomy of trolls. So who are they, and what language do they use?

The 4chan shitposters. These men and boys (and they are almost exclusively male) come from 4chan, an image board in the deepest bowels of the internet. Youre most likely to see them deliberately provoking offense and outrage, often using the most extreme racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic slurs, but without necessarily fully buying into racist ideology. Theyre the people you cant argue with, because any attempt to engage them in a serious conversation will provoke an only joking! plea. Other users of The_Donald affectionately refer to them as weaponized autists, named for the orchestration of numerous hacks and leaks through the hacker collective Anonymous. Youll see them talking about memes such as Pepe the Frog, Kekistan, and the normies they despise. Elsewhere on Reddit, youre most likely to find them on /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, /r/CringeAnarchy, or any other deliberately offensive subreddit.

Anti-progressive gamers. Closely related to the above, these trolls were radicalized over the course of the #GamerGate hate movement. They really like video games, and they really hate social-justice warriors, gay people, and feminists, all of whom theyre pretty sure major movie and game studios are pandering to with things like all-female screenings of Wonder Woman. Youre likely to see them talking about the trans community a lot (and repeating the words there are only two genders constantly). Elsewhere on Reddit, youll find them in gaming subreddits, or /r/KotakuinAction, which was the home of GamerGate.

Mens rights activists. This group consists of those who explicitly campaign for mens rights (custody battles and workplace deaths are their favorite talking points) and also includes anti-feminists and misogynists of all stripes. Youll find them at /r/Incels (short for involuntary celibates, who want to have sex or find a partner but cantand blame women for this), /r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way, who believe that they can only find true liberation in a female-dominated world by refusing to interact with women completely), the infamous /r/TheRedPill, and a few less popular Manosphere subreddits as well as misogynistic sites like Return of Kings. Youll find them referring to women as females, and men they perceive as weak as cucks (more on that later).

Anti-globalists. These people like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Sean Hannity, and conspiracy theoriesand they talk about them an awful lot. They are far less enamored (yet still mildly obsessed) with George Soros, who funds everyone they hate, as well as Emmanuel Macron, John McCain, and Paul Ryan. Elsewhere, they can be seen on /r/uncensorednews (primarily news about bad things perpetrated by members of minority groups and left-wing people), and /r/conspiracy. Their hyperbolic conspiratorial language might sound absurd, but its become an increasingly coherent and important part of The_Donald since the subreddit began.

White supremacists. It might seem surprising, but the language of white supremacy is actually quite uncommon in The_Donald. Thats because explicit racism is banned. Implicit or coded racism is very common, for example displaying Islamophobic sentiment and passing it off as criticizing Islamism, or claiming Islam is not compatible with Western culture. They also populate other subreddits like the now-banned /r/CoonTown and /r/GreatApes, as well as sites like Stormfront and the now defunct The Daily Stormer.

For a long time, these people would have very limited reason to interact with one another. There wasnt much in common between meme aficionados, gamers, sexists, conspiracy theorists, and racists. Because the very nature of Reddit is to subdivide and find your own specific corner of the internet, these communities didnt tend to run into each other all that much. But thats now changed.

Over the last year and a half, these types of trolls have formed a central identity around Trumpism and have started to coalesce. Bored teenagers and gamers are becoming indoctrinated into hard-line anti-globalism, conspiracy theories, and Islamophobia, and its happening right before our eyes, on a publicly accessible forum.

The_Donald contains all of these different groups, marked out by their overlapping community memberships and the words that they (and only they) use. Theyve created an in-group language consisting of words like MAGA (Make America Great Again) and based, a word appropriated from rap culture. The latter is taken to mean being yourself and originated in the crack era. Then there is centipede (usually shortened to pede), a self-referential term originating from the viral video series Cant Stump the Trump, which was popularized when the linked video was tweeted by Trump himself.

But the keystone of this vernacular is cuck. A shortening of cuckold, an old word used to refer to men who allow their partners to sleep with other men (and often find sexual gratification in the humiliation of it), its use has become the sine qua non of alt-right group membership.

The word cuck is everywhere, and its story can tell us a lot about the different groups described above.Youll find cuck used in multiple senses. First, theres cuckservative, used against conservatives who are seen as being too soft and allowing their countries (primarily European) to be invaded by Islam and Muslims. The racial connotations of the word were attached during a period when the word was incredibly popular in the now-banned /r/CoonTown, an explicitly racist subreddit.

Then, theres the use of cuck in a more patriarchal sense. The GamerGate movement popularized the word on Reddit when they were banned from 4chan and migrated over to /r/KotakuInAction. They used it first to describe the jilted ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, a games developer they ran a hate campaign against, before turning it against Christopher moot Poole, the administrator of 4chan, when he kicked them off his site.

Thirdly, you have what might now be the most standard usage of the word, which is to refer to those seen as liberal. You can see this in the popularization of words like libcuck, cuckbook, starcucks, and cuck Schumer in The_Donald. In the wider digital world, you might see it in below-the-line comments of articles on Facebook.

This leads us to the final type of usage, which is when anyone who isnt the alt-right uses it to mock those who do use it, flipping its meaning entirely. As a result, its everywhere, and its story can tell us a lot about the different groups described above.

The_Donald and other alt-right spaces are acting as meeting places for disaffected white men from all walks of life to share a communal hatred. They start out in different corners of the internet with different interests and different lexicons. They remain separate when theyre outside of The_Donald, but the more time they spend in there, the more pernicious views of the world they are likely to pick up by osmosis. They are forming a coherent group identity, represented in the language they have begun to speak, which coalesces around their common hatred of liberalism and their love of Donald Trump.

Were witnessing the radicalization of young white men through the medium of frog memes. In order to see it, all you need to do is look at the words coming out of their mouths. The alt-right isnt yet united, but it soon will be.

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Linguistic data analysis of 3 billion Reddit comments shows the alt-right is getting stronger - Quartz