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Among this loose coalition includes a hardcore white nationalist contingent, consisting of think tanks like the National Policy Institute and American Renaissance, as well as intellectual figureheads and movement leaders like Occidental Dissents Kevin MacDonald, AmRens Jared Taylor, Daniel Friberg of Arkos Media, and, of course, Spencer himself. While this big tent approach comes at the expense of ideological purity, many within the white nationalist old guard have admitted, reluctantly or otherwise, that this doddery coalition has benefited their cause tremendously. As Greg Johnson, editor-in-chief of the white supremacist publishing house Counter Currents, wrote shortly before Trumps inauguration, while white nationalists need to remain realistic about the fault lines that exist between them and so-called alt-light, they ought to treat this brief alliance as an opportunity. Even though the alt-light is driven by civic nationalism as opposed to racial nationalism, they ought to be looked upon as potential converts to white nationalism. For a movement plagued by websites that look they came from 1997, that is a hefty boost.

When it comes to online culture wars, few groups are as well-known or well-recognized as the channers. Racist, sexist imageboards on 4chan and 8chan have been both embraced and viewed with some skepticism by the alt-rights more overtly white nationalist contingent, but they helped usher the far-right into the broader public consciousness. What we call the alt-right today could never have had any connection to the mainstream and to a new generation of young people if it only came in the form of lengthy treatises on obscure blogs, Nagle explains. The memification of the alt-right, its transformation into rapidly reproduceable images and short phrases, was what allowed it to spread so contagiously. It was the political discussion board /pol/ (i.e., politically incorrect) on 4chan and 8chan, and the subreddit /r/The_Donald that gave the alt-right its youthful energy, with its transgression and hacker tactics. It was the channers, too, who facilitated the alt-rights move into mainstream internet culture, whether through raids (coordinated efforts to disrupt the content on a site, through, say, extended and vulgar comment threads), memes, or trolling. Memes like Pepe, (((echoes))), and Kekistanall of which are now commonly referenced by young white nationalist groups like Identity Evropa or the youth contingent of the National Policy Institutehave even become a staple at far-right protests throughout the country.

This tentative allyship between a wide variety of bigots and regressives flies in the face of the onetime consensus that the internet would usher in an information utopia. Instead of encouraging our best impulses, the internet has enhanced our worst ones, and the alt-right may be the clearest proof. As Nagle sees it, the cooption of 4chans more sinister racialist elements by a broader political movement is a natural outcome of the troll-happy culture that gave rise to, say, Anonymouss 2008 war against Scientology. The leaderless anonymous culture that once enchanted scholars such as Gabriella Coleman ended up becoming characterized by a particularly dark preoccupation with thwarted or failed white Western masculinity as a grand metaphor, says Nagle. This breed of internet trollwhich flourished on both the chans and Redditheld such a disdain for mainstream social norms that anything, no matter how noxious, that could be conceived as countercultural was welcome. Who cares? It is all ironic anyway!

As older conservatives fought out the 2016 election in the pages of the National Review and the Weekly Standard, a younger, more tech-savvy generation of neoreactionaries, white nationalists, ultra-conservatives, and traditionalists took to some of the darkest corners of the web to stake out their role in American political life. To do so, they embraced a transgressive and performative approachone that, Nagle writes, is more Fight Club than family values, more in line with Marquis de Sade than Edmund Burkeinspired not by the work of conservative ideologues but by the tactics of left-wing vanguards. Soon, those heeding the ideas of the left most closely . . . and applying them most strategically [were] the right. Rightist troll culture embraced the notion outlined by critical theorists such as Michel Foucault and the New Left thinkers like R.D. Laing that madness is a political and cultural rebellion, and in their hands this idea meant that a position of contrarianism and opposition to consensus values became an end unto itself. Indeed, Nagle explains, the libertinism, individualism, bourgeois bohemianism, postmodernism, irony, and ultimately the nihilism that the left was once accused of by the right has found fertile ground in segments of the new far-right.

The alt-right has also demonstrated a proclivity to steal and distort pieces of left-wing theory at will, all the while unironically harping on the dangers of so-called cultural Marxism. Much like one of its ideological forerunners, the French New Right, the alt-right has embraced a Gramscian approach to political change by focusing almost laser-like on what they view as left-wing cultural hegemony. The point is ultimately to redefine the conditions under which politics is conceived, Friberg explained in an excerpt from his book The Real Right Returns. Only by understanding this tool, countering its misuse, and turning it to serve our own ends, can we overcome the miserable situation that our continent is in. He is referring to Europe, but the same could easily be said of the United States, where the far-right is well aware it lost at least one stage of the culture wars. It is posed to turn its enemies tactics against them.

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What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left - New Republic