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Notes -
The “alt right” was hyped up as a threat, but they did exist and today you can see their influence all over — in the normalization of anti-Judaism on Twitter, in people like Jackson Hinkle, in the reblogs of Elon Musk, in Vivek Ramaswamy posting about a mysterious “they” preventing candidates from winning, in Tucker Carlson’s writers, in the trending trad Christians, in “14% memes” getting 200k likes on tik tok, you name it.
There is no centralized alt right superstructure because the Feds and Media Apparatus in their Infinite Wisdom shut down or infiltrated or had propped up most of the orgs that attempted to do this. And that ensured an organic and implicit cultural cell structure developed in its place, which plays out in tens of thousands of boys’ group chats or discord groups or college republican parties or whatever across the country, with its sole hierarchy being memes / ideology that go through thousands of unique points of evolution and divergence and are consequently filtered into mainstream culture as it has been since 2008 4chan.
So while the alt right does not exist as some kind of third space pseudo-paramilitary group of young men (for very good reason, this would be bad for everyone and pose a threat to the state), it existed and continues to exist as organically-grown ideology factories that affect the mainstream in mostly indirect ways, using nothing but the power of Pepe and persuasion.
Largely agree, though Hinkle seems as much an ideological descendant of the anti-war left as he does the alt right, most of his posting is indistinguishable from what conspiratorial leftists were posting in the late 2000s.
In general a lot of understanding of this movement seems incomplete without an acknowledgment of the often very popular anti-Iraq War anti-Bush 9/11-conspiracist peak oil sphere that was publishing 15-part ‘documentaries’ on YouTube back in like 2007. Alex Jones also grew in this world, which was itself related to more out-there conspiracies of the David Ike variety but which also pushed Rothschild and Soros conspiracies very heavily and was often very much anti-Zionist, and was sometimes relatively close ideologically to the ‘just asking questions’ kind of Holocaust revisionism. This crowd weren’t white nationalists, typically, and may even have identified with the left. But they represent part of the history of the DR that’s often overlooked.
We could say that the 2007-2011 Zeitgeist began with Zeitgeist the documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist_(film_series). This was very influential at the time.
IMO the “original” alt right was not pro-war. Back in 2011-13 there was criticism of Obama’s influence in the Middle East and lots of defense of Assad.
Yeah agreed, I was definitely thinking of that whole Zeitgeist era. Agree that the right during the 2011-2013 phase was often pretty isolationist, although so was a lot of the left, war had become a centrist thing by then. Not to necessarily go full neocon, but I also think that at least some of the more left-aligned peak oil antiwar stuff was directly funded by the Iranian government, Ahmadinejad was prescient with a lot of this and had a good understanding of the western public, started various film festivals to which were invited various Western conspiracists, started and then hugely expanded PressTV in the West, which gave a platform to a lot of those vaguely dissident voices and so on.
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