Hiding in plain sight: how the 'alt-right' is weaponizing irony to spread fascism
"How Antigovernment Extremists and QAnon took over the Southern Border "‘Fight the Barbarians’: The MAGA Movement Lays Out a Warpath at CPAC "CPAC convention kicks off in Dallas ahead of Trump keynote speech Saturday night"" "
Experts say the ‘alt-right’ have stormed mainstream consciousness by using ‘humor’ and ambiguity as tactics to wrong-foot their opponents
Pepe, a symbol used by the ‘alt right’, in character as Donald Trump. Photograph: Twitter
Jason Wilson @jason_a_w Tue 23 May 2017 20.00 AEST Last modified on Sat 10 Feb 2018 05.43 AEDT
Instead, the protest imagery was dominated by ostensibly comedic images, mostly cribbed from forums and social media. It looked a little like an animated version of a favorite “alt-right” message board, 4chan.
Excerpt: ""We are ready to fight, healthcare is a human right!!" Guy in a Pepe mask: "I mean, we want them to have healthcare."" Tweet
Until recently, it would have been hard to imagine the combination of street violence meeting internet memes. But experts say that the “alt-right” have stormed mainstream consciousness by weaponizing irony, and by using humour and ambiguity as tactics to wrong-foot their opponents. Advertisement
Last week, the Data & Society Institute released a report .. https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf .. on the online disinformation and manipulation that is increasingly shaping US politics. The report focused on the way in which far-right actors “spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture”.
One the report’s authors, Dr Alice Marwick, says that fascist tropes first merged with irony in the murkier corners of the internet before being adopted by the “alt-right” as a tool. For the new far-right movement, “irony has a strategic function. It allows people to disclaim a real commitment to far-right ideas while still espousing them.”
Marwick says that from the early 2000s, on message boards like 4chan, calculatedly offensive language and imagery have been used to “provoke strong reactions in outsiders”. Calling all users “fags”, or creating memes using gross racial stereotypes, “serves a gate-keeping function, in that it keeps people out of these spaces, many of which are very easy to access”.
-- Irony has a strategic function. It allows people to disclaim commitment to far-right ideas while still espousing them Dr Alice Marwick, researcher --
Violating the standards of political correctness and the rules of polite interactions “also functions as an act of rebellion” in spaces drenched in adolescent masculinity.
“Are they actually bigots?” Yiannopoulos asked rhetorically. “No more than death metal devotees in the 1980s were actually satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.”
What Yiannopoulos left out, according to Marwick, is that these spaces increasingly became attractive to sincere white supremacists. They offered them venues for recruitment, and new methods for popularising their ideas.
In other words, troll culture became a way for fascism to hide in plain sight.
Marwick points to another guide to the “alt-right”, published last on Andrew Anglin’s prominent Nazi site, the Daily Stormer, which credited “troll culture” with bringing about “non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism”:
"Irony allows people to strategically distance themselves from the very real commitment to white supremacist values that many of these forums have.
It also allows individuals to push boundaries in public, and to back away when they meet resistance. When Richard Spencer led a fascist salute .. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/ .. to Donald Trump at his National Policy Insitute conference in the wake of Trump’s win, he said it was done in “a spirit of irony and exuberance”.
A compounding difficulty for opponents of the “alt-right” is that online, it’s always been difficult to tell the difference between sincerity and satire.
“Unless you have an obvious marker of another person’s intent, you can’t really gauge their intent. They could be messing around. They could be deadly serious. They could be a mix of both,” Milner says.
But ironic, playful content can have effects in real life. Milner offers the example of Edgar Welch .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/25/comet-ping-pong-alex-jones , who turned up at Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington DC with a gun after imbibing too deeply of the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The theory was ginned up by forum trolls and amplified by fringe rightwing media. It asserted, on the basis of some of John Podesta’s leaked emails, that the restaurant was the hub of an elite pedophile ring.
-- " Fascism is more or less a social taboo. Humour is one of the ways that they can put forward their positions Alexander Reid Ross, author --
Last December, Welch drove to Washington from North Carolina with three firearms. When he arrived, he texted a friend: “Raiding a pedo ring, possible sacrificing the lives of a few for the lives of many.” He fired shots inside the restaurant, but fortunately was arrested without harming anyone.
“A lot of the people propagating the Pizzagate conspiracy were doing it winkingly. But in the moment that somebody walked into that shop with a gun, then that playful buzzing participation around that conspiracy turned into real consequences,” Milner says.
More generally, every “ironic” repetition of far-right ideals contributes to a climate in which racism, misogyny, or Islamophobia is normalised.
“Every time you see a viral video of somebody shouting down a person of Muslim descent in a supermarket line, what you’re seeing are the effects of an environment where it’s increasingly normal, increasingly accepted and expected to speak in this register, whether or not that started out as a joke,” Milner says.
Milo Yiannopoulos gives a speech at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. Photograph: ZumaWire/Rex
Author Alexander Reid Ross agrees that irony has been deployed by the far right in chipping away at whatever prohibitions have existed around publicly adopting far-right politics. His book, Against the Fascist Creep .. https://www.amazon.com/Against-Fascist-Creep-Alexander-Reid/dp/1849352445 , published late last year, explores the long history of fascists attempting to mainstream their ideas, or even sell them to the left.
“Fascism is more or less a social taboo. It’s unacceptable in modern society,” Ross says. “Humour or irony is one of the ways that they can put forward their affective positions without having to fall back on any affirmative ideological positions.”
He adds: “They’re putting forward the anger, the sense of betrayal, the need for revenge, the resentment, the violence. They’re putting forward the male fantasies, the desire for a national community and a sense of unity and a rejection of Muslims. They’re doing all of that, but they’re not stating it.”
“The thing that people have to realize is that it isn’t that complicated. We know what they believe in, and if you say that you’re ‘alt-right’, presumably you believe in those things too.”
Rather than getting lost in the weeds of a fast-moving internet culture, we should be bearing down hard on those core beliefs.
“Journalists should be saying, ‘I don’t want to talk about Pepe memes and hand signs. Tell me what are the limits of what you’re prepared to do’. We should force them to talk about what they really stand for,” Nagle says.
In future, the best step may be to meet irony with sincerity.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
