Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Being, fundamentally, a degraded version of the media, the alt-right’s presentation of this ideological narrative is unsurprisingly theatrical. This extends not only to the “meme magic” approaches that resurrected an ancient Egyptian god of primordial darkness as a cartoon frog that causes people to get punched on national television (which can be understood as a sort of cargo cult re-enactment of the neo-Situationist techniques behind leftist groups like the Occupy movement), but to their stylized and ritualized “debate” with online liberals and feminists. These responses are a quasi-coherent miasma of assumptions, factoids, lazy misapprehensions of their chosen victim’s views, recited talking points and, in most cases, outright lying and distortion. (The dead giveaway is a near complete lack of substantial quotations and close-reading of their supposed opponents.) But it’s arranged in a superficial parody of an actual scholarly, intellectual tradition based on an unslakable thirst for intellectual credentials giving rise to a whole ecosystem of Right-wing ‘atheists’ and ‘rationalists’, who lump feminism in with creationism as an absurd delusion, and claim to debunk feminism and other such ideas they hate using ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ and ‘facts’, etc. It’s a vast system run by imposters without a syndrome, fuelled by Dunning-Kruger.