Postcards from the Edgelords: Alt Right 2.0
Leading up to the 2016 election, a coalition of far right actors, who dubbed themselves the “alt-right,” captured the media spotlight and wielded immense influence over media coverage of race in the US during 2017. The “alt-right” were a loose coalition of open white nationalists and cryptofascist allies, who utilized every tech platform, and even created their own, to spread their manifestos and calls to action. During Trump’s 2016 campaign, this broad coalition of neo-nazis, paleoconservatives, and other white extremists came together for the deadly Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville in 2017.
But since then, the networked faction has been cast into disarray, with high profile defections and constant infighting and yielding to the unrelenting pressure of antifacist activists. While the figures who lead the previous incarnations of the “alt-right” may be sidelined this election due to deplatforming or defection, a new generation has arisen to fill the void, many of whom are skeptical of Donald Trump and the MAGA coalition.
When discussing the many networked factions that make up the extreme right in the US, tracking infighting and disagreement between these factions helps illuminate their internal ideological formations, and how those beliefs may be in support or opposition to the MAGA mainstream. In our previous dissections of the MAGA and Qanon networked factions, we note how violent rhetoric, conspiratorial framing, and disinformation inch closer and closer to the center of acceptable political conversation. This week, we will examine the memes of some of these far right factions, highlighting the nihilistic aesthetic, and their waning faith in President Trump.
The term “alt-right”, coined by paleoconservative writer Paul Gottfried in 2008, and later popularized by white nationalist Richard Spencer, has served as an umbrella term for the coalition of many networked factions attempting to reshape conservatism in a more reactionary frame. These extremist movements have roots in previous forms of organized white supremacy, but their current form stems from shared online communities. This coalition, many of whom identified with the so-called “basket of deplorables” and railed against liberal values and Hillary Clinton, are now without a unifying political figure to serve as an avatar of their reactionary philosophies.
While the “alt-right” alliance has been shaken, the tenants of “alt-right” worldview remain a wellspring of memes and fodder for other online content. The “alt-right” worldview is based on three principle factors: overt anti-seminitsm, an adherence to scientific racism, and biological gender essentialism. Currently, many of the racist, misogynistic and antisemitic leaders of the Unite the Right rally have been sued or prosecuted by a legal team lead by Roberta Kaplan. But, new extremist subfactions and charismatic leaders amongst the US far right have sprung up to take their place, using some old tactics of “alt-right” 1.0 while capitalizing on current protest events to recruit new members.
America First and the Groypers
On May 16, Trump retweeted a small account named “America First Clips,” cosigning a video featuring Michelle Malkin accusing major social media platforms of political censorship. While the original clip was removed by YouTube, those familiar with the online far right immediately recognized the account, and its association with the online America First faction, also known as the Groyper Army. Michelle Malkin, previously a favorite of the Tea Party, lost significant credibility in the conservative movement after embracing these young far right insurgents, and their Gen-Z stylized repackaging of MAGA & white nationalism.
These heirs to the “alt-right,” call themselves the groypers, and are mainly composed of fans of Nicholas J. Fuentes, who signal their affiliation with a frog mascot that is a crueler, more racist permutation of the mischievous Pepeand “Joker” memes. The in-jokes and memes used by Fuentes and his “groyper army” are an example of just how normalized the “alt-right” worldview has become. These pro-white and antisemtic nationalists enjoy embarassing prominent conservatives at public events, brigading new social media platforms like TikTok, and developing new coded racist and antisemitic language delivered in memetic templates familiar to ultra-conservative Gen-Z audiences.
Groypers use memes much in the same way as the previous generation of the “alt-right,” to signal their ingroups, attack mainstream conservatives and liberals, and harass women and visible minorities. Mentored by leading trolls of the far right like Alex Jones, Baked Alaska, Milo, Sam Hyde, and adhering to the scientific racism of Jared Taylor, this faction includes Daily Caller alumn Scott Greet and white nationalist organizer Patrick Casey of the American Identity Movement (previously known as Identity Evropa). Many groyper memes attack previous “alt-right” leadership and others like neo nazis, college conservatives,and Qanon true believers for their “bad optics.”
As Nick Fuentes and other far right creators avoid outright calls to violence and overt racial slurs, they are losing the battle to remain on social media. However, the groyper army continues to sneak back on to YouTube and other platforms with hidden accounts, and increasingly toxic attacks on both liberals and conservatives, all in an effort to draw attention to their political positions and discredit rivals, like Turning Point USA and Ben Shaprio, a right-wing media pundit.
Irony, Nihilism and Terrorism
While the media ecosystem of the groypers is fairly centralized around Fuentes’ persona, other networked factions in the US far-right utilize much more decentralized means for communication. Fueled by paranoid, hyperracist narratives like White Genocide and The Great Replacement conspiracy theory, white extremists continue to organize in anonymous message boards and unmoderated chat apps like Telegram. Some extremist actors have adopted new and more violent positions, which are reflected in their memes. From the accelerationist terrorist cells, anti-government Boogalo Boys, the racist environmentalists dubbed ecofacists, and the “ironic” “Nazbols” who blend communist and Nazi philosophies, new fringe splinters of white nationalism are increasingly concerned with the failures of finance capitalismand looming environmental disaster. They draw inspiration from Norse and Hindu mythology, with violent fantasies recalling the Crusades. Using paramilitary images and coded language and slang in their memes, much of their visuals draw from the earlier “fashwave” aesthetic of the “alt-right,” which glorifies violence as a political solution, continually oscillating between sincerity and irony. The skull mask (seen here and at recent protests) is a nod to these more underground memetic communities.
Hoaxes, Disinfo and Media Manipulation
Since its inception, disinformation and media manipulation have been central to white supremacist infleunce operations online. Sociologist Jessie Daniels writes of white supremacist hoaxes on the early internet, and their use of “cloaked websites” to lure unsuspecting internet users into a complex web of white supremacist propaganda masquerading as tributes to Black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. White supremacists often use online hoaxes to attempt to disrupt social activism or game media coverage for their slogans and talking points. In our own previous research, we have noted the techniques these groups use to hijack press attention for recruitment. Hoaxes and viral images linking antifacist organizing and Black Lives Matter activists to terrorist violence have sprung up in the last few weeks, causing real world confrontations despite being thoroughly debunked.
Each of these memes (below) are hoax campaigns that have circulated in the last two weeks as a way to signal-jam Black Lives Matter activists or turn media attention to white identity politics.
Potato Trump and MAGA Skepticism
While the America First network connects some of the younger white nationalists to more mainstream conservatives who are still supportive of Trump, this is not the case amongst the more fringe and anonymous far right communities localized in social media hives and message boards like 4chanand 8kun. To many white nationalists, the Trump presidency was just a vessel for their extremist ideologies, and to many of them his presidency has been an outright failure. Despite Trump’s continuous dog whistles and overtly racist statements, it just hasn’t been enough to the extreme fringe that went all-in to support him online in 2016. For anonymous neo-nazis and the extreme right, Trump’s support of Israel, his failures to construct a border wall and end all immigration, and action on gun control helped open a fissure between these groups and the MAGA mainstream.
Many of the memes produced by these groups are too blatantly offensive to reproduce here, and those ideologically driven by racism are constantly finding new ways to avoid content moderation on major platforms by using coded phrases and symbols. Popular fodder for memes includes mocking the MAGA mainstream for their blind faith in Trump to “cope” with his material failures, and the incompetent “Potato Trump” meme created by Andrew Yang supporters on 4chan.
Tucker 2024
Tucker Carlson has long been the favorite pundit of many far-right factions due to his slow transition from libertarian to populist. Madeline Peltz of Media Matters has documented a 15-year timeline of Carlson’s frequent brushes with white nationalist talking points and instances of overt racism — details that are often brought up by the US far-right as tactic support. With faith lost in Trump, a new rallying cry has emerged: TUCKER 2024. Even as sponsors continue to pull out of advertising on his nightly Fox News program, support for Tucker amongst these factions increases, where he has taken on a hero’s aura. Whether Carlson has further political ambitions or not, his most fervent followers want to meme it into reality.
As major social media companies take differing approaches to combating white supremacist organizing on their platforms, new alternative tech with shoddy architecture continues to emerge to provide a home for these groups to talk, including gamer streaming sites like DLive. The outpouring of online racism and targeted harassment both in relation to COVID-19 and the BLM protests indicates these ideas have not gone away despite visible disruptions of white supremacist organizing capacity.
White supremacy does not exist at the margins, but at the center of American society, and while it is politically useful to blame US social unrest on foreign actors or extremists, we have yet to reconcile with systemic racism as a nation. As Trump champions transphobic and homophobic policies and anti-Black racism, many on the far-right are talking like a civil war is already underway. While Trump’s most loyal supporters in the MAGA mainstream and Qanon communities are still along for the ride and generating lots of supporting content, the young extremists of the far-right are showing up at protests in Hawaiian shirts and long guns seeking opportunities to grab the media spotlight and twist political debate. Journalists and platform companies must not let that happen again.
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Meme War Weekly is a newsletter addressing political messaging that comes from the wilds of the internet, produced by the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Each week, we will look closely at the use of popular slogans and images and how they are shifting political conversations.
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