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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Far-right groups actively targeted online communities dominated by young white men in order to spread their ideology. The most famous of these is Stormfront’s infiltration of 4chan, where they recognized that the community’s embrace of “ironic” racism provided them an opportunity for ideological recruitment. Volumes have been written on the interconnection between forums devoted to pick-up artists, which claim that the secrets to successfully losing your virginity can be yours for whatever the price of their self-published ebook is (the secrets generally being “rape people”), and so-called men’s rights activists. And, most famously, there’s the blatant pile of lies that was Gamergate, a flagrant effort to recruit gamers into fascism. In all of these cases, the strategy is to play on insecurities of young men in an age where there are mounting ideological challenges out there—especially on the Internet—to their untroubled social privilege. Coupled with the twin legacies of decades of neoliberalism—increasing ideological and political disorientation, and a future far less secure than that which faced their parents and grandparents at their age—such challenges can terrify the semi-privileged layer of young, white, middle class men, who enjoy all those privileges without also enjoying actual material security.