boundary 2

Category: The New Extremism

  • Moira Weigel — Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

    Moira Weigel — Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

    Moira Weigel

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    Since the election of Donald Trump, a growing body of research has examined the role of digital technologies in new right wing movements (Lewis 2018; Hawley 2017; Neiwert 2017; Nagle 2017). This article will explore a distinct, but related, subject: new right wing tendencies within the tech industry itself. Our point of entry will be an improbable document: a German language dissertation submitted by an American to the faculty of social sciences at J. W. Goethe University of Frankfurt in 2002. Entitled Aggression in the Life-World, the dissertation aims to describe the role that aggression plays in social integration, or the set of processes that lead individuals in a given society to feel bound to one another. To that end, it offers a “systematic” reinterpretation of Theodor Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity (1973). It is of interest primarily because of its author: Alexander C. Karp.[1]

    Karp, as some readers may know, did not pursue a career in academia. Instead, he became the CEO of the powerful and secretive data analytics company, Palantir Technologies. His dissertation has inspired speculation for years, but no journalist or scholar has yet analyzed it. Doing so, I will argue that it offers insight into the intellectual formation of an influential network of actors in and around Silicon Valley, a network articulating ideas and developing business practices that challenge longstanding beliefs about how Silicon Valley thinks and works.

    For decades, a view prevailed that the politics of both digital technologies and most digital technologists were liberal, or neoliberal, depending on how critically the author in question saw them. Liberalism and neoliberalism are complex and contested concepts. But broadly speaking, digital networks have been seen as embodying liberal or neoliberal logics insofar as they treated individuals as abstractly equal, rendering social aspects of embodiment like race and gender irrelevant, and allowing users to engage directly in free expression and free market competition (Kolko and Nakamura, 2000; Chun 2005, 2011, 2016). The ascendance of the Bay Area tech industry over competitors in Boston or in Europe was explained as a result of its early adoption of new forms of industrial organization, built on flexible, short-term contracts and a strong emotional identification between workers and their jobs (Hayes 1989; Saxenian 1994).

    Technologists themselves were said to embrace a new set of values that the British media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron dubbed the “Californian Ideology.” This “anti-statist gospel of cybernetic libertarianism… promiscuously combine[d] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” they wrote; it answered the challenge posed by the social liberalism of the New Left by “resurrecting economic liberalism” (1996, 42 & 47). Fred Turner attributed this synthesis to the “New Communalists,” members of the counterculture who “turn[ed] away from questions of gender, race, and class, and toward a rhetoric of individual and small group empowerment” (2006, 97). Nonetheless, he reinforced the broad outlines that Barbrook and Cameron had sketched. Turner further showed that midcentury critiques of mass media, and their alleged tendency to produce authoritarian subjects, inspired faith that digital media could offer salutary alternatives—that “democratic surrounds” would sustain democracy by facilitating the self-formation of democratic subjects (2013). 

    Silicon Valley has long supported Democratic Party candidates in national politics and many tech CEOs still subscribe to the “hybrid” values of the Californian Ideology (Brookman et al. 2019). However, in recent years, tensions and contradictions within Silicon Valley liberalism, particularly between commitments to social and economic liberalism, have become more pronounced. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, several software engineers emerged as prominent figures on the “alt-right,” and newly visible white nationalist media entrepreneurs reported that they were drawing large audiences from within the tech industry.[2] The leaking of information from internal meetings at Google to digital outlets like Breitbart and Vox Popoli suggests that there was at least some truth to their claims (Tiku 2018). Individual engineers from Google, YouTube, and Facebook have received national media attention after publicly criticizing the liberal culture of their (former) workplaces and in some cases filing lawsuits against them.[3] And Republican politicians, including Trump (2019a, 2019b), have cited these figures as evidence of “liberal bias” at tech firms and the need for stronger government regulation (Trump 2019a; Kantrowitz 2019).

    Karp’s Palantir cofounder (and erstwhile roommate) Peter Thiel looms large in an emerging constellation of technologists, investors, and politicians challenging what they describe as hegemonic social liberalism in Silicon Valley. Thiel has been assembling a network of influential “contrarians” since he founded the Stanford Review as an undergraduate in the late 1980s (Granato 2017). In 2016, Thiel became a highly visible supporter of Donald Trump, speaking at the Republican National Convention, donating $1.25 million in the final weeks of Trump’s campaign for president (Streitfeld 2016a), and serving as his “tech liaison” during the transition period (Streitfeld 2016b). (Earlier in the campaign, Thiel had donated $1 million to the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC backed by Robert Mercer, and overseen by Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway; see Green 2017, 200.) Since 2016, he has met with prominent figures associated with the alt-right and “neoreaction”[4] and donated at least $250,000 to support Trump’s reelection in 2020 (Federal Election Commission 2018). He has also given to Trump allies including Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who has repeatedly attacked Google and Facebook and sponsored multiple bills to regulate tech platforms, citing the threat that they pose to conservative speech.[5]

    Thiel’s affinity with Trumpism is not merely personal or cultural; it aligns with Palantir’s business interests. According to a 2019 report by Mijente, since Trump came into office in 2017, Palantir contracts with the United States government have increased by over a billion dollars per year. These include multiyear contracts with the US military (Judson 2019; Hatmaker 2019) and with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (MacMillan and Dwoskin 2019); Palantir has also worked with police departments in New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles (Alden 2017; Winston 2018; Harris 2018).

    Karp and Thiel have both described these controversial contracts using the language of “nation” and “civilization.” Confronted by critical journalistic coverage (Woodman 2017, Winston 2018, Ahmed 2018) and protests  (Burr 2017, Wiener 2017), as well as internal actions by concerned employees (MacMillan and Dwoskin, 2019), Thiel and Karp have doubled down, characterizing the company as “patriotic,” in contrast to its competitors. In an interview conducted at Davos in January 2019, Karp said that Silicon Valley companies that refuse to work with the US government are “borderline craven” (2019b). At a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in July 2019, Thiel called Google “seemingly treasonous” for doing business with China, suggested that the company had been infiltrated by Chinese agents, and called for a government investigation (Thiel 2019a). Soon after, he published an Op Ed in the New York Times that restated this case (Thiel 2019b).

    However, Karp has cultivated a very different public image from Thiel’s, supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016, saying that he would vote for any Democratic presidential candidate against Trump in 2020 (Chafkin 2019), and—most surprisingly—identifying himself as a Marxist or “neo-Marxist” (Waldman et al. 2018, Mac 2017, Greenberg 2013). He also refers to himself as a “socialist” (Chafkin 2019) and according to at least one journalist, regularly addresses his employees on Marxian thought (Greenberg 2013). On one level, Karp’s dissertation clarifies what he means by this: For a time, he engaged deeply with the work of several neo-Marxist thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. On another level, however, Karp’s dissertation invites further perplexity, because right wing movements, including Trump’s, evince special antipathy for precisely that tradition.

    Starting in the early 1990s, right-wing think tanks in both Germany and the United States began promoting conspiratorial narratives about critical theory. The conspiracies allege that, ever since the failure of “economic Marxism” in World War I, “neo-“ or “cultural Marxists” have infiltrated academia, media, and government. From inside, they have carried out a longstanding plan to overthrow Western civilization by criticizing Western culture and imposing “political correctness.” To the extent that it attaches to real historical figures, the story typically begins with Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács, goes through Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and other wartime émigrés to the United States, particularly those involved in state-sponsored mass media research, and ends abruptly with Herbert Marcuse and his influence on student movements of the 1960s (Moyn 2018; Huyssen 2017; Jay 2011; Berkowitz 2003).

    The term “Cultural Marxism” directly echoes the Nazi theory of “Cultural Bolshevism”; the early proponents of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory were more or less overt antisemites and white nationalists (Berkowitz 2003). However, in the 2000s and 2010s, right wing politicians and media personalities helped popularize it well beyond that sphere.[6] During the same time, it has gained traction in Silicon Valley, too.  In recent years, several employees at prominent tech firms have publicly decried the influence of Cultural Marxists, while making complaints about “political correctness” or lack of “viewpoint diversity.”[7]

    Thiel has long expressed similar frustrations.[8] So how is it that this prominent opponent of “cultural Marxism” works with a self-described neo-Marxist CEO? Aggression in the Life World casts light on the core beliefs that animate their partnership. The idiosyncratic adaptation of Western Marxism that it advances does not in fact place Karp at odds with the nationalist projects that Thiel has advocated, and Palantir helps enact. On the contrary, by attempting to render critical theoretical concepts “systematic,” Karp reinterprets them in a way that legitimates the work he would go on to do. Shortly before Palantir began developing its infrastructure for identification and authentication, Aggression in the Life-World articulated an ideology of these processes.

    Freud Returns to Frankfurt

    Tech industry legend has it that Karp wrote his dissertation under Jürgen Habermas (Silicon Review 2018; Metcalf 2016; Greenberg 2013). In fact, he earned his doctorate from a different part of Goethe University than the one in which Habermas taught: not at the Institute for Social Research but in the Division of Social Sciences. Karp’s primary reader was the social psychologist Karola Brede, who then held a joint appointment at Goethe University’s Sociology Department and at the Sigmund Freud Institute; she and her younger colleague Hans-Joachim Busch appear listed as supervisors on the front page. The confusion is significant, and not only because it suggests an exaggeration. It also obscures important differences of emphasis and orientation between Karp’s advisors and Habermas. These differences directly shaped Karp’s graduate work.

    Habermas did engage with psychoanalysis early in his career.  In the spring and summer of 1959, he attended every one of a series of lectures organized by the Institute for Social Research to mark the centenary of Freud’s birth (Müller-Doohm 2016, 79; Brede and Mitscherlich-Nielsen 1996, 391). He went on to become close friends and even occasionally co-teach  (Brede and Mitscherlich-Nielsen 1996, 395) with one of the organizers and speakers of this series, Alexander Mitscherlich, who had long campaigned with Frankfurt School founder Max Horkheimer for the funds to establish the Sigmund Freud Institute and became the first director when it opened the following year. In 1968, shortly after Mitscherlich and his wife, Margarete, published their influential book, The Inability to Mourn, Habermas developed his first systemic critical social theory in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972). Nearly one third of that book is devoted to psychoanalysis, which Habermas treats as exemplary of knowledge constituted by the “critical” or “emancipatory interest”—that is, the species interest in engaging in critical reflection in order to overcome domination. However, in the 1970s, Habermas turned away from that book’s focus on philosophical anthropology toward the ideas about linguistic competence that culminated in his Theory of Communicative Action; in 1994, Margarete Mitscherlich recounted that Habermas had “gotten over” psychoanalysis in the process of writing that book (1996, 399). Karp’s interest in the theory of the drives, and in aggression in particular, was not drawn from Habermas but from scholars at the Freud Institute, where it was a major focus of research and public debate for decades.

    Freud himself never definitively decided whether he believed that a death drive existed. The historian Dagmar Herzog has shown that the question of aggression—and particularly the question of whether human beings are innately driven to commit destructive acts—dominated discussions of psychoanalysis in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. “In no other national context would the attempt to make sense of aggression become such a core preoccupation,” Herzog writes (2016, 124). After fascism, this subject was highly politicized. For some, the claim that aggression was a primary drive helped to explain the Nazi past: if all humans had an innate drive to commit violence, Nazi crimes could be understood as an extreme example of a general rule. For others, this interpretation risked naturalizing and normalizing Nazi atrocities. “Sex-radicals” inspired by the work of Wilhelm Reich pointed out that Freud had cited the libido as the explanation for most phenomena in life. According to this camp, Nazi aggression had been the result not of human nature but of repressive authoritarian socialization. In his own work, Mitscherlich attempted to elaborate a series of compromises between the conservative position (that hierarchy and aggression were natural) and the radical one (that new norms of anti-authoritarian socialization could eliminate hierarchy entirely; Herzog 2016, 128-131). Klaus Horn, the long-time director of the division of social psychology at the Freud Institute, whose collected writings Karp’s supervisor Hans-Joachim Busch edited, contested the terms of the disagreement. The entire point of sophisticated psychoanalysis, Horn argued, was that culture and biology were mutually constitutive and interacted continuously; to name one or the other as the source of human behavior was nonsensical (Herzog 2016, 135).

    Karp’s primary advisor, Karola Brede, who joined the Sigmund Freud Institute in 1967, began her career in the midst of these debates (Bareuther et al. 1989, 713). In her first book, published in 1972, Brede argued that “psychosomatic” disturbances had to be understood in the context of socialization processes. Not only did neurotic conflicts play a role in somatic illness; such illness constituted “socio-pathological” expressions of an increase in the forms of repression required to integrate individuals into society (Brede 1972). In 1976, Brede published a critique of Konrad Lorenz, whose bestselling work, On Aggression, had triggered much of the initial debate with Alexander Mitscherlich and others at the Institute, in the journal Psyche (“Der Trieb als humanspezifische Kategorie”; see Herzog 2016, 125-7).  Since the 1980s, her monographs have focused on work and workplace sociology, and on the role that psychoanalysis should play in critical social theory. Individual and Work (1986) explored the “psychoanalytic costs involved in developing one’s own labor power.” The Adventures of Adjusting to Everyday Work (1995) drew on empirical studies of German workplaces to demonstrate that psychodynamic processes played a key role in professional life, shaping processes of identity formation, authoritarian behavior, and gendered self-identity in the workplace. In that book, Brede criticizes Habermas for undervaluing psychoanalytic concepts—and unconscious aggression in particular—as social forces. Brede argues that the importance that Habermas assigned to “intention” in Theory of Communicative Action prevented him from recognizing the central role that the unconscious played in constituting identity, action, and subjectivity (1995, 223 & 225). At the same time, she was editing multiple volumes on psychoanalytic theory, including feminist perspectives in psychoanalysis, and in a series of journal articles in the 1990s, developed a focus on antisemitism and Germany’s relationship to its troubled history (Brede 1995, 1997, 2000).

    During his time as a PhD student, Karp seems to have worked very closely with Brede. The sole academic journal article that he published he co-authored with her in 1997. (An analysis of Daniel Goldhagen’s bestselling 1996 study, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the article attempted to build on Goldhagen’s thesis by characterizing a specific, “eliminationist” form of antisemitism that Karp and Brede argued could only be understood from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalytic theory; see Brede and Karp 1997, 621-6.) Karp wrote the introduction for a volume of the Proceedings of the Freud Institute, which Brede edited (Brede et al. 1999, 5-7). The chapter that Karp contributed to that volume would appear in his dissertation, three years later, in almost identical form. Karp’s dissertation itself also closely followed the themes of Brede’s research.

    Aggression in the Life World

    The full title of Karp’s dissertation captures its patchwork quality: Aggression in the Life-World: Expanding Parsons’ Concept of Aggression Through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture. “This work began,” the opening sentences recall, “with the observation that many statements have the effect of relieving unconscious drives, not in spite, but because, of the fact that they are blatantly irrational” (Karp 2002, 2). Karp proposes that such statements provide relief by allowing a speaker to have things both ways: to acknowledge the existence of a social order and, indeed, demonstrate specific knowledge of that order while, at the same time, expressing taboo wishes that contravene social norms. As result, rather than destroy social order, such irrational statements integrate the speaker into society while also providing compensation for the pains of being integrated. To describe these kinds of statements Karp indicates that he will borrow a concept from the late work of Adorno: “jargon.” However, Karp announces that he will critique Adorno for depending too much on the very phenomenological tradition that his Jargon of Authenticity is meant to criticize. Adorno’s concept is not a concept at all, Karp alleges, but a “reservoir for collecting Adorno-poetry” (Sammelbecken Adornoscher Dichtung) (2002, 58). Karp’s own goal is to clarify jargon into an analytical concept that could then be incorporated into a classical sociological framework. As synecdoche for classical sociology, Karp takes the work of Talcott Parsons.

    The second chapter of Karp’s dissertation, a reading and critique of Parsons, had appeared in the Freud Institute publication, Cases for the Theory of the Drives. In his editor’s introduction to that volume, Karp had stated that the goal of their group had been to integrate psychoanalytic concepts in general and Freud’s theory of the drives in particular into frameworks provided by classical sociology. The volume begins with an essay by Brede on the failure of sociology as a discipline to account for the role that aggression plays in social integration. (Brede 1999, 11-45, credits Georg Simmel with having developed an account of the active role that aggression played in creating social cohesion; more on that below.) Karp reiterates Brede’s complaint, directing it against Parsons, whose account of aggression he calls “incomplete” or “watered down” (2002, 11). In the version that appears in his dissertation, several sections of literature review establish background assumptions and describe what Karp takes to be Parsons’ achievement: integrating the insights of Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. Taking, from Durkheim, a theory of how societies develop systems of norms, and from Freud, how individuals internalize them, Parsons developed an account of culture as the site where the integration of personality and society takes place.

    For Parsons, pace Karp, culture itself is best understood as a system constituted through “interactions.” Karp credits Parsons with shifting the paradigm from a subject of consciousness to a subject in communication—translating the Freudian superego into sociological form, so that it appears, not as a moral enforcer, but as a psychic structure communicating cultural norms to the conscious subject. Yet, Karp protests that there are, in fact, parts of personality not determined by culture, and not visible to fellow members of a culture so long as an individual does not deviate from established norms of interaction. Parsons’ theory of aggression remains incomplete on at least two counts, then. First, Karp argues, Parsons fails to recognize aggression as a primary drive, treating it only as a secondary result that follows when the pleasure principle finds itself thwarted. Karp, by contrast, adopts the position that a drive toward death or destruction is at least as fundamental as the pleasure principle. Second, because Parsons defines aggression in terms of harms to social norms, he cannot explain how aggression itself can become a social norm, as it did in Nazi Germany. For an explanation of how aggressive impulses come to be integrated into society, Karp turns instead to Adorno.

    In Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity, Karp found an account of how aggression constitutes itself in language and, through language, mediates social integration (2002, 57). Adorno’s lengthy essay, which he had originally intended to constitute one part of Negative Dialectics, resists easy summary. The essay begins by identifying theological overtones that, Adorno says, emanate from the language used by German existentialists—and by Martin Heidegger in particular. Adorno cites not only “authenticity,” but terms like “existential,” “in the decision,” “commission,” “appeal,” and “encounter,” as exemplary” (3). While the existentialists claim that such language constitutes a form of resistance to conformity, Adorno argues that it has in fact become highly standardized: “Their unmediated language they receive from a distributor” (14). Making fetishes of these particular terms, the existentialists decontextualize language in several respects. They do so at the level of the sentence—snatching certain, favored words out of the dialectical progression of thought as if meaning could exist without it. At the same time, the existentialist presents “words like ‘being’ as if they were the most concrete terms” and could obviate abstraction, the dialectical movement within language. The function of this rhetorical practice is to make reality seem simply present, and give the subject an illusion of self-presence—replacing consciousness of historical conditions with an illusion of immediate self-experience. The “authenticity” generated by jargon therefore depends on forgetting or repressing the historically objective realities of social domination.

    Beyond simply obscuring the realities of domination, Adorno continues, the jargon of authenticity spiritualizes them.  For instance, Martin Heidegger turns the real precarity of people who might at any time lose their jobs and homes into a defining condition of Dasein: “The true need for residence consists in the fact that mortals must first learn to reside” (26). The power of such jargon—which transforms the risk of homelessness into an essential trait of Dasein—comes from the fact that it expresses human need, even as it disavows it. To this extent, jargon has an a- or even anti-political character: it disguises current and contingent effects of social domination into eternal and unchangeable characteristics of human existence. “The categories of jargon are gladly brought forward, as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations but rather belonged to the essence of man,” Adorno writes. “Man is the ideology of dehumanization” (48). Jargon turns fascist insofar as it leads the person who uses it to perceive historical conditions of domination—including their own domination—as the very source of their identity. “Identification with that which is inevitable remains the only consolation of this philosophy of consolation.” Adorno writes. “Its dignified mannerism is a reactionary response to the secularization of death” (143, 144).

    Karp says at the outset that his goal is to make Adorno’s collection of observations about jargon “systematic.” In order to do so, he approaches the subject from a different perspective than Adorno did: focused on the question of what psychological needs jargon fulfills. For Karp, the achievement of jargon lies in its “double function” (Doppelfunktion). Jargon both acknowledges the objective forces that oppress people and allows people to adapt or accommodate themselves to those same forces by eternalizing them—removing them from the context of the social relations where they originate, and treating them as features of human existence in general. Jargon addresses needs that cannot be satisfied, because they reflect the realities of living in a society characterized by domination, but also cannot be acted upon, because they are taboo. For Karp, insofar as jargon is a kind of speech that designates speakers as belonging to an in-group, it also expresses an unconscious drive toward aggression. In jargon we see the aggression that drives individuals to exclude others from the social world doing its binding work. It is on these grounds that Karp argues that aggression is a constitutive part of jargon—its ever-present, if unacknowledged, obverse.

    Karp grants that Adorno is concerned with social life. The Jargon of Authenticity investigates precisely the social function of ontology, or how it turns “authenticity” into a cultural form, circulated within mass culture. Adorno also alludes to the specifically German inheritance of jargon—the resemblance between Heidegger’s celebration of völkisch rural life and Nazi celebration of the same (1973, 3). Yet, Karp argues, Adorno does not provide an account of how a deception or illusion of authenticity came to be a structure in the life-world. Even as he criticizes phenomenological ontology, Adorno relies on a concept of language that is itself phenomenological. Echoing critiques by Axel Honneth (1991) of Horkheimer and Adorno’s failures to account for the unique domain of “the social,” Karp turns to the same thinkers Karola Brede used in her article on “Social Integration and Aggression”: Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel.

    In that article, Brede develops a reading that joins Freud and Simmel’s accounts of the role of the figure of “the stranger” in modern societies. In Civilization and its Discontents, Brede argues, Freud described “strangers” in terms that initially appear incompatible with the account Simmel had put forth in his famous 1908 “Excursus on the Stranger.” Simmel described the mechanisms whereby social groups exclude strangers in order to eliminate danger—thereby controlling the “monstrous reservoir of aggressivity” that would otherwise threaten social structure. (The quote is from Parsons.) Freud wrote that, despite the Biblical commandment to love our neighbors, and the ban on killing, we experience a hatred of strangers, because they make us experience what is strange in us, and fear what in them cannot be fit into our cultural models. Brede concludes that it is only by combining Freudian psychodynamics with Simmel’s account of the role of exclusion in social formation that critical social theory could account for the forms of violence that dominated the history of the twentieth century (Brede 199, 43).

    Karp contrasts Adorno with both Freud and Simmel, and finds Adorno to be more pessimistic than either of these predecessors. Compared to Freud, who argued that culture successfully repressed both libidinal and destructive drives in the name of moral principles, Karp writes that Adorno regarded culture as fundamentally amoral. Rather than successfully repressing antisocial drives, Karp writes, late capitalist culture sates its members with “false satisfactions.” People look for opportunities to express their needs for self-preservation. However, since they know that their needs cannot be fully satisfied, they simultaneously fall over themselves to destroy the memory of the false fulfillment they have had. Repressed awareness of the false nature of their own satisfaction produces the ambient aggression that people take out on strangers.

    For Simmel, the stranger is part of all modern societies, Karp writes. For Adorno, the stranger extends an invitation to violence. Jargon gains its power from the fact that those who speak, and hear, it really are searching for a lost community. The very presence of the stranger demonstrates that such community cannot be simply given; jargon is powerful precisely in proportion to how much the shared context of life has been destroyed.  It therefore offers a “dishonest answer to an honest longing” for intersubjectivity, gaining strength in proportion to the intensity the need that has been thwarted (Karp 2002, 85).  Wishes that contradict social norms are brought into the web of social relations (Geflecht der Lebenswelt), in such a way that they do not need to be sanctioned or punished for violating social norms (91). On the contrary, they serve to bind members of social groups to one another.

    Testing Jargon

    As a case study to demonstrate the usefulness of his modified concept of jargon, Karp takes up a notorious episode in post-wall German intellectual history: a speech that the celebrated novelist Martin Walser gave in October 1998, at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt. The occasion was Walser’s acceptance of the 1998 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The novelist had traveled a complex political itinerary by the late 1990s. Documents released in 2007 would uncover the fact that as a teenager, during the final years of the Second World War, Walser joined the Nazi Party and fought as a member of the Wehrmacht. But he first became publicly known as a left-wing writer. In the 1950s, Walser attended meetings of the informal but influential German writer’s association Gruppe 47 and received their annual literary prize for his short story, “Templones Ende”; in 1964 he attended the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, where low ranking officials were charged and convicted for crimes that they had perpetrated during the Holocaust. In his 1965 essay about that experience, “Our Auschwitz,” Walser insisted on the collective responsibility of Germans for the horrors of the Nazi period; indeed he criticized the emphasis on spectacular cruelty at the trial, and in the media, to the extent that this emphasis allowed the public to maintain an imaginary distance between themselves and the Nazi past (Walser 2015, 217-56). Walser supported Social Democratic Party member Willy Brandt for Chancellor and even joined the German Communist Party during that decade. By the 1980s, however, Walser was widely perceived to have migrated back to the right. And when he gave his speech “Experiences Composing a Sermon” on the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, he used the occasion to attack the public culture of Holocaust remembrance. Walser described this culture as a “moral cudgel” or “bludgeon” (Moralkeule).

    “Experiences Composing a Sermon” adopts a stream of consciousness, rather than argumentative, style in order to explain why Walser refused to do what he said was expected of him: to speak about the ugliness of German history. Instead, he argued that no further collective memorialization of the Holocaust was necessary. There was no such thing, he said, as collective or shared conscience at all: conscience should be a private matter. Critics and intellectuals he disparaged as “preachers” were “instrumentalizing” and “vulgarizing” memory, when they exhorted the public constantly to reflect on the crimes of the Nazi period. “There is probably such a thing as the banality of good,” Walser quipped, echoing Hannah Arendt (2015, 513). He did not spell out what ends he thought that these “preachers” aimed to instrumentalize German guilt for. He concluded by abruptly calling on the newly elected president Roman Herzog, who was in attendance, to free the former East German spy, Rainer Rupp, from prison. Walser’s speech received a standing ovation—though not, notably, from Ignatz Bubis, then the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who was also in attendance. The next day, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bubis called the speech an act of “intellectual arson” (geistiges Brandstiftung). The controversy that followed generated a huge amount of debate among German intellectuals and in the German and international media (Cohen 1998). Two months later, the offices of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung hosted a formal debate between the two men. It lasted for four hours. FAZ published a transcript of their conversation in a special supplement (Walser and Bubis 1999).

    In February and March 1999, Karola Brede delivered two lectures about the controversy at Harvard University, which she subsequently published in Psyche (2000, 203-33). Brede examined both the text of Walser’s original speech and the transcript of his debate with Bubis in order to determine, first, why Walser’s speech had been received so enthusiastically, and second, whether Walser, despite eschewing explicitly antisemitic language, had in fact “taken the side of anti-Semites.” In order to explain why Walser’s speech had attracted so much attention, Brede carried out a close textual analysis. She found that, although Walser had not presented a very cogent argument, he had successfully staged a “relieving rhetoric” (Entlastungsrhetorik) that freed his audience from the sense of awkwardness or self-consciousness that they felt talking about Auschwitz in public and replaced these negative feelings with a positive sense of heightened self-regard. Brede argued that Walser used jargon, in the sense of Adorno’s “jargon of authenticity,” in order to flatter listeners into thinking that they were taking part in a daring intellectual exercise, while in fact activating anti-intellectual feelings. (In a footnote she recommended an “unpublished paper” by Karp, presumably from his dissertation, for further reading; Brede 2000, 215). She concluded that indeed Walser had taken the side of antisemites because, in both his speech and his subsequent debate with Bubis, he constructed a point of identification for listeners (“we Germans”) that systematically excluded German Jews (203). By organizing his speech entirely around “perpetrators” and the “critics” who shamed them, Walser elided the perspective of the Nazi’s victims. Invoking Simmel’s essay on “The Stranger” again, Brede argued that Walser’s behavior during his debate with Bubis offered a model of how unconscious aggression could drive social integration through exclusion. Regardless of what Walser said he felt, to the extent that his rhetoric excluded Bubis from his definition of “we Germans” as a Jew, his conduct had been antisemitic.

    In the final chapter of his dissertation, Karp also offers a reading of Walser’s prize acceptance speech, arguing that Walser made use of jargon in Adorno’s sense. Like Brede, Karp bases his argument on close textual analysis. He catalogs several specific literary strategies that, he says, enabled Walser to appeal to the unconscious or repressed emotions of his listeners without having to convince them. First, Karp tracks how Walser played with pronouns in the opening movement of the speech in order to eliminate distance and create identification between himself and his audience. Walser shifted from describing himself in the third person singular (the “one who had been chosen” for the prize) to the first-person plural (“we Germans”). At the same time, by making vague references to intellectuals who had made public remembrance and guilt compulsory, Walser created the sensation that he and the listeners he has invited to identify with his position (“we”) were only responding to attacks from outside—that “we” were the real victims. (In her article, Brede had quipped that this narrative of victimhood “could have come from a B-movie Western”; Brede 2000, 214). Through this technique, Karp writes, Walser created the impression that if “we” were to strike back against the “Holocaust preachers,” this would only be an act of self-defense.

    Karp stresses that the content of “Experiences Composing a Sermon” was less important than the effect that these rhetorical gestures had of making listeners feel that they belonged to Walser’s side. In the controversy that followed Walser’s acceptance speech, critics often asked which “intellectuals” he had meant to criticize; these critics, Karp says, missed the point. It was not the content of the speech, but its form, that mattered. It was through form that Walser had identified and addressed the psychological needs of his audience. That form did not aim to convince listeners; it did not need to. It simply appealed to (repressed) emotions that they were already experiencing.

    For Adorno, the anti-political or fascist character of jargon was directly tied to the non-dialectical concept of language that jargon advanced. By eliminating abstraction from philosophical language, and detaching selected words from the flow of thought, jargon made absent things seem present. By using such language, existentialism attempted to construct an illusion that the subject could form itself outside of history. By raising historically contingent experiences of domination to defining features of the human, jargon presented them as unchangeable. And by identifying humanity itself with those experiences, it identified the subject with domination.

    Karp does not demonstrate that Walser’s “jargon” performed any of these functions, precisely. Rather, he focuses on the psychodynamics motivating his speech. Karp proposes that the pain (Leiden) that Walser’s speech expressed resembled the “domination” (Zwang) that Adorno recognized in jargon. While Adorno’s jargon made the absent or abstract seem present, through an act of linguistic fetishization, Walser’s jargon embodied the obverse impulse: to wish the discomfort created by the presence of history’s victims away.

    Karp is less concerned with the history of domination, that is, than with Freudian drives. For Adorno, the purpose of carrying out a determinate negation of jargon was to create the conditions of possibility for critical theory to address the real needs to which jargon constituted a false response. For Karp, the interest of the project is more technical: his goal is to uncover forms and patterns of speech that admit aggression into social life and give it a central role in consolidating identity. By combining culturally legitimated expressions with taboo ones, Karp argues, Walser created an environment in which his controversial opinion could be accepted as “obvious” or “self-evident” (selbstverständlich) by his audience. That is, Walser created a linguistic form through which aggression could be integrated into the life-world.

    Unlike Adorno (or Brede), Karp refrains from making any normative assessment of this achievement. His “systematization” of the concept of jargon empties that concept of the critical force that Adorno meant for it to carry. If anything, the tone of the final pages of Aggression in the Life-World is forgiving. Karp concludes by arguing that Walser was not necessarily aware of the meaning of his speech—indeed, that he probably was not. By allowing his audience to express their taboo wishes to be done with Holocaust remembrance, Karp writes, Walser convinced them that, “these taboos should never have existed.” Then he cuts to his bibliography.

    Grand Hotel California Abyss

    The abruptness of the ending of Aggression in the Life-World is difficult to interpret. At one level, Karp’s apparent lack of interest in the ethical and political implications of his case study reflects his stated goals and methods. From the beginning, he has set out to reveal that the social is constituted through acts of unconscious aggression, and that this aggression becomes legible in specific linguistic interactions, rather than to evaluate the effects of aggression itself. Reading Walser, Karp explicitly privileges form over content, treating the former as symptomatic of unstated meanings and effects. Granting the critic authority over the text he is analyzing, such an approach presumes the author under analysis to be ignorant, if not innocent, of what he really has at stake; it treats conscious attitudes and overt arguments as holding, at most, a secondary interest. At another level, the banal explanations for Karp’s tone and brevity may be the most plausible. He was writing in a non-native language; like many graduate students, he may have finished in haste.[9] In any case, his decision to eschew the kinds of judgments made by both his subject, Adorno, and his mentor, Brede is striking—all the more so because Karp is descended from German Jews and “grew up in a Jewish family” (Karp 2019a). This choice reflects a different mode of engagement with critical theory than scholars of either digital media or digitally mediated right-wing movements have observed.

    Historians have shown that the Frankfurt School critiques of mass media helped shape the idea that digital media could constitute a more democratic alternative. Fred Turner has argued that the research Adorno conducted on the role of radio and cinema in shaping the authoritarian personality, as well as the proximity of Frankfurt School scholars to the Bauhaus and other practicing artists, generated a set of beliefs about the democratic character of interactivity (Turner 2013). Orit Halpern is more critical of the essentially liberal assumptions of media and technology critique in which she, too, places Adorno (2015, 18-19). However, like Turner, Halpern identifies the emergence of interactivity as a key epistemic shift away from the Frankfurt School paradigm that opposed “attention” and “distraction.”  Cybernetics redefined the problem of “spectatorship” by transforming the spectator from an individual into a site of perceptions and cognitions—an “interface or infrastructure for information processing.” Where radio, cinema, and television had promoted conformity and passivity, cybernetic media promised to facilitate individual choice and free expression (2015, 224-6).

    More recently, critics and scholars attempting to account for the phobic fascination that new right-wing movements show for “cultural marxism” have analyzed it in a variety of ways. The least sophisticated take at face value the claims of “alt-right” figures that they are only reacting to the ludicrous and pernicious excesses of their opponents.[10] More substantial interpretations have described the far right fixation on the Frankfurt School as a “dialectic of counter-Enlightenment” or form of “inverted appropriation.” Martin Jay (2011) and Andreas Huyssen (2017, 2019) both argue that the attraction of critical theory for the right lies in the dynamics of projection and disavowed recognition that it sets in motion. As Huyssen puts it, “wider circles of American white supremacists and their publications… have been drawn to critique and deconstruction because, on those traditions, they project their own destructive and nihilistic tendencies” (2017).

    Aggression in the Life World does none of these things. Karp’s dissertation does not take up the critiques of mass media or the authoritarian personality that were canonized in the Anglo-American world at all, much less use them to develop democratic alternatives. Nor does it project its own penchant for destruction onto its subjects. In contrast with the “lunatic fringe” (Jay, 30) Karp does not carry out an “inverted appropriation” of critical theory, so much as a partial one.  He adapts Frankfurt School concepts for technical purposes, making them more instrumentally useful to the disciplines of sociology or social psychology by abstracting them from their contexts. In the process, he also abandons the Frankfurt School commitment to emancipation. It is at this level of abstraction that his neo-Marxism—from which Marx and materialism have all but disappeared—can coexist with the nationalism that he and Thiel invoke to defend Palantir.

    I asked at the beginning of this paper what beliefs Karp shares with Peter Thiel and what their common commitments might reveal about the self-consciously “contrarian” or “heterodox” network of actors that they inhabit. One answer that Aggression in the Life World makes evident is that both men regard the desire to commit violence as a constant, founding fact of human life. Both also believe that this drive expresses itself in social forms like language or group structure, even if speakers or group members remain unaware of their own motivations. These are ideas that Thiel attributes to the work of the eclectic French theorist René Girard, with whom he studied at Stanford, and whose theories of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and herd mentality he has often cited. In 2006 Thiel’s nonprofit foundation established an institute to promote the study of Girard and support the further development of mimetic theory; this organization, Imitatio, remains one of the foundation’s three major projects (Daub 2020, 97-112).

    The text that Karp chose to analyze, as his case study, also shares a set of concerns with Thiel’s writings and statements against campus multiculturalism and political correctness; Walser’s speech became a touchstone of debates about historical memory in Germany, in which the newly imported Americanism politische Korrektheit circulated widely. In his dissertation, Karp does not celebrate Walser’s taboo speech in the same way that Thiel and his associates have sometimes celebrated violations of speech norms.[11] However, he does assert that jargon, and the unconscious aggression that it expresses, plays a role in the formation of all social groups, and refrains from evaluating whether Walser’s jargon was particularly problematic. Of course, the term “jargon” itself became a commonplace during the U. S. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s, used to accuse academics and university administrators who purported to be speaking for vulnerable populations of in fact deploying obscure terms to aggrandize themselves. Thiel and his co-author David O. Sacks devote a chapter of The Diversity Myth to an account of how the vagueness of the word “multiculturalism” enabled activists and administrators at Stanford to use it in this manner (1995, 23-49). The idea that such terms express ressentiment and a will to power is consistent with the theoretical framework that Karp went on to develop.

    Ironically, by attempting to expunge jargon of its subjective or impressionistic content, Karp renders it less materially objective. Rather than locating jargon in specific experiences of modernity, he transforms it into an expression of drives that, because they are timeless, are merely psychological. Karp makes a version of the eternalizing move that Adorno criticizes in Heidegger, in other words. Rather than elevating precarity into the essence of the human, Karp makes aggressive violence the substance of the social. In the process, he empties the concept of jargon of its critical power. When he arrives at the end of Walser’s speech, a speech that Karp characterizes as consolidating community based on unspeakable aggression, he can conclude only that it was effective.

    A still greater irony in retrospect may be how, in Karp’s telling, Adorno’s jargon anticipates the software tools Palantir would develop. By tracing the rhetorical patterns that constitute jargon in literary language, Karp argues that he can reveal otherwise hidden identities and affinities—and the drive to commit violence that lies latent in them. By looking back to Adorno, he points toward a possible critique of big data analytics as a kind of authenticity jargon. That is, a way of generating and eternalizing false forms of selfhood. In data analysis, the role of the analyst is not to demystify and dispel reification. On the contrary, it is precisely to fix identity from its digital traces and to make predictions on the basis of the same. For Adorno, jargon is a form of language that seems to authenticate identity—but only seems to. The identities it makes available to the subject are based on an illusion that jargon sustains by suppressing the self-difference that historicity introduces into language. The illusion it offers is of timeless “human” experience. It covers for domination insofar as it makes the human condition—or rather, human conditions as they are at the time of speaking—appear unchangeable.

    Big data analytics could be said to constitute an authenticity jargon in this sense: although they treat the data set under analysis as having something like an unconscious, they eliminate the temporal gaps and spaces of ambiguity that drive psychoanalytic interpretation. In place of interpretation, data analytics substitutes correlations that it treats simply as given. To a machine learning algorithm that has been trained on data sets that include zip codes and rates of defaulting on mortgage payments, for instance, it does not matter why mortgagees in a given zip code may have been more likely to default in the past. Nor will the algorithm that recommends rejecting a loan application necessarily explain that the zip code was the deciding factor. Like the existentialist’s illusion of immediate experience these procedures generate an aura of incontestable self-evidence.

    As in Adorno, here, the loss of particular contexts can serve to conceal, and thus perpetuate, domination. Algorithms take the histories of oppression embedded in training data and project them into the future, via predictions that powerful institutions then act on. If the identities constituted in this way are false, the reifications they generate do real work, and can cause real harm. And yet, to read these figures historically is to recognize that they need not come true. This is not an interpretive path that Karp pursues. But for those of us concerned about the relationship between digital technologies and justice, this repressed insight of his dissertation is the most critical to follow.

    _____

    Moira Weigel is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an editor and cofounder of Logic Magazine. She received her PhD from the combined program in Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies at Yale University in 2017.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] Translations from German are mine unless otherwise noted.

    [2] In 2017, when activists doxxed the founder of the neofascist blog the Right Stuff and the antisemitic podcasts Fash the Nation and The Daily Shoah, who went by the alias Mike Enoch, they revealed that he was in fact a programmer named Michael Peinovich (Marantz 2019, 275-9). Curtis Yarvin, who wrote a widely read blog advocating the end of democracy under the name Mencius Moldbug, also worked as a software engineer (Gray 2017). Several journalists have documented the interest that figures in or adjacent to the tech industry evince with Yarvin’s Neoreaction (NRx) or Dark Enlightenment (Gray 2017; Goldhill 2017). Prominent white nationalist media entrepreneurs also claim to have substantial followings in the tech industry. In 2017, Andrew Anglin told a Mother Jones reporter that Santa Clara County was the highest source of inbound traffic to his website, The Daily Stormer; Chuck Johnson said the same about his (now defunct) website Got News (Harkinson 2017). In response to an interview question about his “average” supporter, the white nationalist Richard Spencer claimed that, “many in the Alt-Right are tech savvy or actually tech professionals” (Hawley 2017, 78).

    [3] James Damore, the engineer who wrote the July 2017 memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” and was subsequently fired, toured the right wing speaking circuit (Tiku 2019, 85-7). Brian Amerige, the Facebook engineer who identified himself to the New York Times in July 2018 as the creator of a conservative group on Facebook’s internal forum, Workplace, and then left the company, did the same (Conger and Frankel 2018). Shortly after, it was reported that Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey’s departure from the company in 2017 had also been driven by conflicts with management over his support of Donald Trump (Grind and Hagey 2018); Luckey has since publicly claimed to speak on behalf of a silent majority of “tech conservatives” (Luckey 2018). Arne Wilberg, a long time recruiter of technical employees for Google and YouTube, filed a reverse discrimination suit in 2018, alleging that he had been fired for “opposing illegal hiring practices… systematically discriminating in favor of job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, against Caucasian and Asian men” (Wilberg v. Google 2018). Most recently, in August 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that the former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee had been fired in 2017 in retaliation for expressing “conservative” viewpoints on internal listservs (Copeland 2019). Former colleagues subsequently published screenshots showing that, among other things, Cernekee had proposed raising money for a bounty for finding the masked protestor who punched Richard Spencer at the Presidential inauguration in 2017 using WeSearchr, the now-defunct fundraising platform run by Holocaust “revisionist” Chuck C. Johnson. They also shared screenshots showing that Cernekee had defended two neo-Nazi organizations, The Traditionalist Workers Party and Golden State Skinheads, suggesting that they should “rename themselves to something normie-compatible like ‘The Helpful Neighborhood Bald Guys’ or the ‘Open Society Institute’” (Wacker 2019; Tiku 2019, 84). Like Damore, Amerige, and Wilberg, Cernekee received national media coverage.

    [4] For instance, emails that BuzzFeed reporter Joe Bernstein obtained from Breitbart.com stated that Thiel invited Curtis Yarvin to watch the 2016 election results at his home in Hollywood Hills, where he had previously hosted Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos; New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz reported running into Thiel at the “DeploraBall” that took place on the eve of Trump’s inauguration (2019, 47-9).

    [5] Thiel supported Hawley’s campaign for Attorney General of Missouri in 2016 (Center for Responsive Politics); in that office, Hawley initiated an antitrust investigation of Google (Dave 2017) and a probe into Facebook exploitation of user data (Allen 2018). Thiel later donated to Hawley’s 2018 Senate campaign (Center for Responsive Politics); in the Senate, Hawley has sponsored multiple bills to regulate tech platforms (US Senate 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2019d, 2019e, 2019f, 2019g). These activities earned him praise from Trump at a White House Social Media Summit on the theme of liberal bias at tech companies, where Hawley also spoke (Trump 2019a).

    [6] Pat Buchanan devoted a chapter to the subject, entitled “The Frankfurt School Comes to America,” in his 2001 Death of the West. Breitbart editor Michael Walsh published an entire book about critical theory, in which he described it as “the very essence of Satanism” (Walsh 2016, 50). Andrew Breitbart himself devoted a chapter to it in his memoir (Breitbart 2011, 113). Jordan Peterson more often rails against “postmodernism,” or “political correctness.” However, he too regularly refers to “Cultural Marxism”; at time of writing, an explainer video that he produced for the pro-Trump Epoch Times, has tallied nearly 750,000 views on YouTube (Peterson 2017).

    [7] The memo that engineer James Damore circulated to his colleagues at Google presented a version of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy in its endnotes, as fact. “As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their ‘capitalist oppressors,’” Damore wrote, “the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics” (Conger 2017). The group that Brian Amerige started on Facebook Workplace was called “Resisting Cultural Marxism” (Conger and Frankel 2018).

    [8] The Stanford Review, which Thiel founded late in his sophomore year and edited throughout his junior and senior years at the university, devoted extensive attention to questions of speech on Stanford’s campus, which became a focal point of the US culture wars and drew international media attention when the academic senate voted to (slightly) revise its core curriculum in 1988 (see Hartman 2019, 227-30). In 1995, with fellow Stanford alumnus (and later PayPal Chief Operating Officer) David O. Sacks, Thiel published The Diversity Myth, a critique of the “debilitating” effects of “political correctness” on college campuses that, among other things, compared multicultural campus activists to “the bar scene from Star Wars” (xix). In 2018 he moved to Los Angeles, saying that political correctness in San Francisco had become unbearable (Peltz and Pierson 2018; Solon 2018) and in 2019 Founders Fund, the venture capital firm where he is a partner, announced that they would be sponsoring a conference to promote “thoughtcrime” (Founders Fund 2019).

    [9] Aggression in the Life World is significantly shorter than either of the other two dissertations submitted to the sociology department at Frankfurt that year: Margaret Ann Griesese’s The Brazilian Women’s Movement Against Violence clocked in at 314 pages, and Konstantinos Tsapakidis, Collective Memory and Cultures of Resistance in Ancient Greek Music at 267; Karp’s is 129.

    [10] Angela Nagle (2017) put forth an extreme version of this argument, arguing that the excesses of “social justice warrior” identity politics provoked the formation of the alt-right and that trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos were only replicating tactics of “transgression” that had been pioneered by leftist intellectuals like bell hooks and institutionalized on liberal campuses and in liberal media. Kakutani similarly argued that the Trumpist right was simply taking up tactics that the relativism of “postmodernism” had pioneered in the 1960s (2018, 18).

    [11] In The Diversity Myth Sacks and Thiel describe on instance of resistance to the Stanford speech code, which was adopted in May 1990 and revoked in March 1995, as heroic. The incident took place on the night of January 19, 1992, when three members of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, Michael Ehrman, Keith Rabois, and Bret Scher, were walking home from a party through one of Stanford’s residential dormitories. Rabois, then a first year law student, began shouting slurs at the home of a resident tutor in the dormitory, who had been involved in the expulsion of Ehrman’s brother Ken from residential housing four years earlier, after Ken called the resident tutor assigned to him a “faggot.” “Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” Rabois shouted. “Can’t wait until you die, faggot.” He later confirmed and defended these statements in a letter to the Stanford Daily. “Admittedly, the comments made were not very articulate, nor very intellectual nor profound,” he wrote. “The intention was for the speech to be outrageous enough to provoke a thought of ‘Wow, if he can say that, I guess I can say a little more than I thought.” The speech code, which had not until that point been used to punish any student, was not used to punish Rabois; however, Thiel and Sacks describe the criticism of Rabois from administrators and fellow students that followed as a “witch hunt” (1995, 162-75). Rabois subsequently transferred to Harvard but later worked with Thiel at PayPal and later as a partner at Founders Fund. More recently, the blog post that Founders Fund published to announce the Hereticon conference cited in Footnote 8, described violating taboos on speech as its goal: “Imagine a conference for people banned from other conferences. Imagine a safe space for people who don’t feel safe in safe spaces. Over three nights we’ll feature many of our culture’s most important troublemakers in the fields of knowledge necessary to the progressive improvement of our civilization” (2019).

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    Works Cited

  • Jonathan Ratcliffe — Rebooting the Leviathan: NRx and the Millennium

    Jonathan Ratcliffe — Rebooting the Leviathan: NRx and the Millennium

    Jonathan Ratcliffe

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    Recently something rather unexpected happened. Curtis Yarvin began writing again. A decade ago, back in the spotty youth of the internet when blogs meant something, Yarvin, a Silicon Valley computer programmer, made a cult name for himself under the nom de plume of reactionary political philosopher Mencius Moldbug. Often memed, frequently cited as an important ancestor of the “alt-right” (but largely left unread) and father of the online political movement known as NRx/neo-reaction (which has been declared dead endlessly since at least 2013), Moldbug may well be the only notable political philosopher wholly created by and disseminated through the internet.

    In his journey from Austrian Economics to attempting to update early modern absolute monarchy for the information age, Yarvin regularly churned out tens of thousands of word screeds on his blog Unqualified Reservations (UR) about the need to privatise the state and hand it over to an efficient CEO monarch to keep progressives out, the Christian roots of progressivism, and encomia to nineteenth century Romantic Thomas Carlyle. All of this was so liberally coated in rhetorical irony and Carlylean bombast that it was often difficult to tell what was supposed to be serious and what was not. Moldbug was among the first to discover the power of reactionary post-irony, though these days of course, playing long-read rhetorical games to affect ideological change seems a rather primitive affair. The work of post-irony can now be compressed into a couple of memes very easily.

    Between 2007 and 2010 Moldbug was immensely prolific. Thereafter UR petered off as Yarvin turned his efforts increasingly towards developing a blockchain-based data-storage scheme called Urbit.[1] By 2014, when Moldbug began to become a household name across the internet as the social media platforms were increasingly politicised, Moldbug was pretty much finished writing. In April 2016 UR was wrapped up with a “Coda” declaring that it had “fulfilled its purpose.” The same month attendees threatened to withdraw from the LambdaConf computing conference because the “proslavery” Yarvin would be speaking at it (Towsend 2016).[2] To this Yarvin (2016a) wrote a reply insisting on the innocence of his Moldbuggian stage as simply a matter of curiosity about ideology. The same year in an open Q&A session about Urbit on Reddit, Yarvin (2016b) was more than happy to answer some questions about Moldbug and defend both projects as parts of a dual mission to democratise the current monopolies controlling the internet and to dedemocratise politics for the sake of enlightened monopoly.

    In early 2017, following Trump’s election, rumours began to circulate that Yarvin was in communication with Steve Bannon, though nothing came of this (Matthews 2017b). Around the same time Yarvin was quoted as supporting single-payer healthcare (Matthews 2017a). News also surfaced that Yarvin was on a list of people to be thrown off Google’s premises, should he ever make a visit (Atavisionary 2018). Then, early in 2019, Yarvin (2019a) quit Urbit after seventeen years on the project, causing some to wonder whether Moldbug might now make a return. Old rumours also began to get about the place that Yarvin was behind Nietzschean Twitter reactionary Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), especially after Yarvin passed a copy of BAP’s book Bronze Age Mindset to Trumpist intellectual Michael Anton (2019) with the insistence that this was what “the kids” are into these days. And now Yarvin has started publishing again, under his own name, a decade on from the salad days of UR. On the 27th of September 2019 the first of a five-part essay for the conservative Claremont Institute’s The American Mind landed, titled “The Clear Pill.”

    If Moldbug/Yarvin is famous for one thing, it is that he’s the fellow who put the symbol of the “red pill” into reactionary discourse. The “Clear Pill” promises to be a reset of ideology in which progressivism, constitutionalism and fascism will each receive an “intervention” through their own language and values to show up how “ineffectual” each is (Yarvin 2019b). Thus far this “clear pill” sounds all rather typically Moldbuggian–for Yarvin it has always been about resetting the state and the rhetoric of undoing brainwashing. Anyone passingly familiar with the oeuvre of Moldbug knows that Yarvin is more than capable of speaking all three of these political dialects reasonably well, even if, as Elizabeth Sandifer (2017) astutely notes, Moldbug is so deep in neoliberal TINA, he is unable to take Marxism seriously as a contemporary opponent at all. For Moldbug the American liberal pursuit of equality was always more “communist” than the USSR, which is to say, paranoid reactionary hyperbole aside, that he only ever regarded Marxism as an early phase of progressivism.

    And yet, six months on from the first part of the “Clear Pill”, only a second of the promised five parts has thus far been published. Part two (Yarvin 2019c), or “A Theory of Pervasive Error” appeared on the 25th of November, and, so one might surmise, even the most die-hard Moldbug-fans must have found it somewhat lacking. The initial purpose of the piece seems to be to outline a theory of human desire that utilises the Platonic language of thymos (courageous spirit), but ends up sounding far closer to a Neo-Darwinian Hobbes than anything else. Human beings are petty and selfish beasts, we are encouraged to believe. The essay meanders on until it finally arrives at the simple old Moldbuggian point that because liberal “experts” in governance and science have a touted monopoly on truth, they should not automatically be trusted. That’s it. By taking such the long way around to say something so simple and banal, the result is more than a little anticlimactic. Perhaps after all these years the bounce has gone out of Yarvin’s bungy; his lemonade has gone flat.

    The only other piece to appear on The American Mind from Yarvin since “A Theory of Pervasive Error” has not been part of this “Clear Pill” series, but a stand-alone essay published on the 1st of February 2020 titled “The Missionary Virus”. In this Yarvin argues that the recent coronavirus pandemic offers an unparallel opportunity to dismantle American “internationalism” and reboot a politically and culturally multi-polar world while economic globalisation continues. Imagine, Yarvin asks the reader, what it would be like if the virus did not go away and the travel bans lasted not a month, but a decade, or centuries. One thing can be said about this essay that cannot be said of the “Clear Pill” so far – at very least it is entertaining. Perhaps parts three to five of the “Clear Pill” will actually say something interesting after all.

    Indeed there are all sorts of questions that are still left unanswered. Will the crescendo of part five simply restate the need to privatise governance and let the market system work? Will Yarvin take some drastic new turn or even disown Moldbug? Will he finally acknowledge eccentric death-cultist Nick Land, who, for the best part of this decade has largely been the “king” of NRx as a political ideology? We must wait and see.

    ***

    Obviously, a great many people of all manner of political bents will be lining up to release their takes on the “Clear Pill” when it is finally done and dusted. I most certainly will be among them because, sad to say, I’ve been trying to work out Moldbug/Yarvin for years now. It’s very easy to brush him off as something archaic and nasty and even structurally predictable–a little racist ghoul who wants a CEO emperor–a desublimation of the Silicon Valley unconscious, a monstrous giving the game away about the fears and imperial pretensions of our techno-optimist masters. On this account Moldbug is very, very important indeed. Ten years ago, for Moldbug the solution was as simple as handing over California to Steve Jobs to run as a business, because Steve Jobs is very good at solving problems. The Moldbuggian wedge (esp. 2008a) was the belief that in the US, the two elite groups are “Brahmin” progressive intellectuals (who are bad) and the pragmatic businessmen (who are good), which is bizarrely very close to the recent terminology (but not ideology) of Thomas Piketty’s research (2018) on American and European elites in the Post-War Period.

    Nevertheless, today the remnants of Moldbuggery as an ideology seem to spend their time bemoaning “woke capital”–that those with the talents and power to make something like Moldbug’s “patchwork” of privatised city states come true all seem to be believers in the various progressive gender and racial talking points of the present. But here’s the thing–Moldbug was never one to spend his time huffing and puffing about gender politics like just so many of his tradcath monarchist and other old school reactionary fans do, who somehow seem to imagine him as some new Joseph de Maistre. In spite of his night terrors about ghetto warlords and migrant invasion (see: Moldbug 2007d, 2008a), Moldbug/Yarvin always made efforts to appeal to “open-minded progressives”–there will always be room in the “patchwork” for dope and death metal (2008c); a privatised California’s welfare system of dividends would be so good it’d give the sick bionic wings (2008b: 99); prison in the future will be replaced by being put to sleep forever in VR (2009e); the American Empire sucks because it pretends that the world is made of independent countries, but rather than improving things, it keeps them as quashed clients and puppets (esp. 2008b).

    But what if Moldbug always-already was “woke capital?” As I have written at length elsewhere (Ratcliffe 2018a, 2018b), the godawful possibility is that Mencius Moldbug was a kind of political basilisk that once thought, cannot be unthought–that he is a left liberal arriving from a cursed future, the obscene image of the juggernaut of hyper-capital with a human face haphazardly sutured to the front of it, like one of those awful homemade Thomas the Tank animations one finds at the bottom of YouTube at three in the morning. Although she doesn’t mention Moldbug, Vicky Osterweil’s diagnosis of a Silicon Valley liberal “left fascism” decidedly hits the nail on the head concerning certain aspirations of Amazon and friends to buy up whole towns and to remake the globe:

    Rather than invoke Herrenvolk principles and citizenship based on blood and soil, these left fascists will build nations of “choice” built around brand loyalty and service use. Rather than citizens, there will be customers and consumers, CEOs and boards instead of presidents and congresses, terms of service instead of social contracts. Workers will be policed by privatized paramilitaries and live in company towns. This is, in fact, how much of early colonialism worked, with its chartered joint-stock companies running plantation microstates on opposite sides of the world. Instead of the crown, however, there will be the global market: no empire, just capital. (Osterweil 2017)

    Does this not sound so terribly Moldbuggian that it makes the skin itch? Against this sort of thing what is needed is a healthy combination of strong local communities committed to telling Google and Amazon to shove it–or whatever else it is that might succeed them–matched with commitments by governments to break up these companies and prevent private police forces. Even better would of course be nationalisation of these companies and handing them over to worker-control. Nonetheless, the dismal old Guild Socialist localist in me finds contemporary dreams of simply nationalising the miserable and soulless infrastructure of our present, such as we find in recent texts like The People’s Republic of Walmart (Phillips and Rozworski 2019), not only supremely vulgarian, but at present as unlikely as the possibility that the neo-reactionaries will ever get their future of a consciously reactionary world governed by Megacorps.

    For now, at least, we’re all stuck with the political and corporate monopolies we let happen–none of us can “head for the exit,” not even the Zuck. We’re all locked in the same room together. Leviathan is not going to be letting anyone’s people go, not for all the hyperstitional meme magic of a couple of cut-price Twitter occultists thinking that NRx v.2.0 is simply supporting all secession movements and waiting for a rich papa to make the private state a reality. Liberalism is a jealous “Mortalle God,” as its primordial violent father Thomas Hobbes would say. As we will see later, Hobbes remains the most important figure for understanding NRx, its “woke” corpocratic mirrored other, and liberalism in general.

    The possibility of the “left fascist” Moldbug draws out attention to the oft-overlooked fact that there was more than one Moldbugpolitik outlined on UR over the years. I think I’ve managed to isolate at least three strains thus far. Moldbug 1 is the Moldbug we’ve been talking about. This is the “neocameralist” of the 2008 “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” who is simply trying to make anarcho-capitalist Hans Hermann Hoppe’s “patchwork” of private states sound cooler by adding some extra monarchy aesthetics and criticism of the American Empire (Moldbug 2008b). This is the Moldbug from which (with an added injection of race and IQ sorcery and the removal of Carlyle in favour of Malthus) Nick Land builds his variant of NRx. You have ideology as a parasitic virus, the powerlessness of populist reaction, open borders chaos, shiny futuristic city states. While this Moldbug might on the surface look like he is all about the sovereign One–the single absolute ruler–the “king” is of course simply someone hired by a body of shareholders to get their city to make money. If the mediaeval Christian monarch had “two bodies”–one mortal and the other his immortal perpetuation down the generations–then the immortal body of the Moldbuggian CEO is that of the corporate personhood of the joint stock company behind the scenes. You may go to sleep for hundreds of years, but when you wake up Wayland-Yutani will still be there.

    Moldbug 2, from the “Gentle Introduction,” on the other hand, is the Moldbug (2009d) of what its section 9d calls “The Plinth”: an unabashed attempt to theorise a vanguard party like Hitler’s or Lenin’s with cells everywhere and then simply taking over government. This is the “populist” Moldbug that Nick Land doesn’t want you to know about, though some of the more “trad” reactionaries have been interested in it, as I have discussed in the past on my Mechanical Owl blog (Ratcliffe 2018a, 2018b). Moldbug 2 is a total departure from Moldbug 1 because the earlier version seemed so adamantly convinced that popular reaction in America is instantly crushed by the liberal media: it is “a mile wide and an inch thick … like taking on the Death Star with a laser pointer” (2008b, 116). One wonders what Moldbug 2 thinks of Trumpism and its effectiveness thus far.

    Then we come to Moldbug 3. This is a strange theocratic Moldbug (2013) we find in a single late post on UR, in which he praises the political coherence and mass appeal that Christian reactionaries in the US such as Lawrence Auster sometimes seem to possess. We are told by Moldbug that because of this it is highly likely that “when our dark age ends and the kings return, if ever, it will be under any banner but the Cross,” which of course the tradcaths have endlessly cut and pasted across the internet without context. What is most interesting about Moldbug 3 is that Moldbug/Yarvin is an avowed atheist “secular humanist.” In the post in question he even writes about telling his daughter that God is just Santa for grown-ups. It is, however, not so uncommon to find atheist reactionaries who believe that Christianity has an important utility as a “social technology”–whether for supporting patriarchy, keeping Islam at bay or providing a collective myth that can be used to bolster nationalism.

    Nonetheless, this Moldbug 3 stands in stark contrast to the main Moldbuggian discourse we find in the 2007-8 Moldbug 1 in which Christianity is found historically to be the root behind “progressivism.” Moldbug 1 (2008b, 58 & 104-7) is especially fond of colourful language about American political history as “creeping Calvinism,” “Quaker thuggery” and “applied Christianity” concerning the pursuit of equality and universalism. This is perhaps why I keep coming back to Moldbug and giving him the time of day. Moldbug 1’s only truly remarkable idea was his grand narrative about millenarianism and modern liberal politics. Millenarianism is the idea of the imminent (and immanent) arrival of a “Third Age” of Christianity in which the world becomes a realm of plenty and universal equality after the old order is scoured from the Earth by the Apocalypse. As Revelation 21:4 promises: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” As we will see below, such notions have had a profound formative effect on the progress narratives of modernity.

    Moldbug 1 avidly believed that progressivism is the mainstream American political tradition, a “W-Force” child of Calvinist and Quaker universalism that developed through the seventeenth century British Whigs. In a very early blog entry entitled “Universalism: Post-War Progressivism as a Christian Sect” Moldbug claims:

    Universalists, as descendants of Calvin’s postmillenial eschatology, are in the business of building God’s kingdom on Earth. (The original postmillennialists believed that once this kingdom was built, Christ would return–a theological spandrel long since discarded.) The city-on-a-hill vision is a continuous tradition from John Winthrop to Barack Obama. In Britain, the closely-related Evangelical movement used the term “New Jerusalem,” which I’m afraid never really made it across the pond, but expresses the vision perhaps best of all… What’s really impressive about Universalism is the way in which this messianic teenage fantasy power-trip has attracted, and continues to attract, so many people who don’t believe at all in the spirit world, only smoke weed on the weekends, and think of themselves as sensible and down-to-earth. Of course, the belief that all Universalist ideals can be justified by reason alone is a necessary condition. But Christian apologists have been deriving Christianity from pure reason since St. Augustine. You’d think these supposedly-skeptical thinkers would be a little more skeptical. (Moldbug 2007a)

    Moldbuggian rhetoric aside, it is difficult to find anything shocking about the millenarian ancestry of progressive thought. But then again it is not 2007 and thankfully our collective social neck is not quite as gormlessly bearded as it once was. I think it is a dashed good thing indeed that there is a long history of marvellous radical Christians like the Baroque Levellers and Diggers of the Civil War who “turned the world upside down” (Hill 1991), the Anabaptists of Thomas Müntzer who called for the princes to be killed (Cohn 1962), and even earlier, mediaevals like John Ball, who famously asked during the Peasant’s Revolt “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was a Gentleman?” One cannot do nigh on two millennia of something and not have it rub off in a myriad of strange ways, even if the End always seems to defer and remain not yet. America especially is no exception to this.

    As Jonathan Kirsch (2006, 185) in his astounding History of the End of the World pertinently puts it, America is the land of two millenarian “tectonic plates” that developed out of the radical protestant belief that the New World was where the New Israel would be built. The first plate, that of aspirations towards theocratic “dominionism” and purchasers of rapture insurance is the obvious one and remains primordial. The other, however, increasingly secularised from the 17th century under the belief that America was the exceptionalist future land of techno-commercial and social progress. The “two plates” give us all the worst parts of Moldbug 3 and Moldbug 1, the theocrat often predictably accompanied by the vilest forms of prosperity theology and racism and so too the Silicon Valley techno-optimist. But this weird mutant geology also gives us the only force Moldbug could really be scared of, the ghost of a radical “applied Christianity.” The gap between Moldbug 1 and Moldbug 3 must be drawn out in consideration of hidden theological core of NRx itself. So too will I suggest that to attempt to recuperate and come to love the Moldbuggian accusation of “Quaker thuggery” might be a very useful idea indeed.

    ***

    There is nothing odd at all about the notion that a great deal of modern values are secularised theological ones. Nearly a century ago now Max Weber (1976) and R. H. Tawney (1948) famously had a great deal of insightful things to say about Anglo-American Calvinism, the protestant work ethic, and the spirit of capital. Moldbug, curiously, mentions Weber only once to my knowledge, concerning the ruler and “charisma” (Moldbug 2009a), yet somehow manages to avoid having to talk about the theological ancestry of his own very American arch-capitalist belief system. For that matter, he never says anything about one of the most frequently-cited (but generally rather shallowly analysed) heroes of monarchist reactionaries, Carl Schmitt.[3] In the 1920s Schmitt (2005) launched the field of juridical genealogical investigation called “political theology” that declared that the modern secular ruler is modelled on the voluntarist God of Ockham who acts with trans-rational potentia absoluta (absolute power) to create a miraculous “state of exception” during emergencies.

    Through leftist thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben (esp. 2011) and Roberto Esposito (2015) “political theology” has undergone a revival in recent years, exploring the political-theological genealogies of subjects such as neoliberal economism, personhood, human rights, ownership, victim-blaming and imperialism. So too from Ernst Bloch (2000) and Walter Benjamin (1940) to Slavoj Žižek (with Gunjevic 2012) there has long been a recognition of the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic and universalist roots of Marxism. From the more conservative side, not only Schmitt, but Oswald Spengler (1926) in his discourse on “Faust” and “Gothic Christianity,” Eric Voegelin (2000a) on “Gnosticism,” and Carl Löwith (1949) too, all had a great number of valuable things to say about the history of secularisation and the pursuit of the millennium. Thus, when NRx torchbearer Nick Land claimed in a 2017 interview for reactionary podcast Red Ice Radio that “hardly anyone, still, has really begun to dig down into [the destiny of Western Christianity’s] contemporary relevance” concerning leftist universalisms (Land and Palmgren 2017, 27m.20s-28m.10s), it is hard to think how Land could be any more incorrect if he tried.

    But from where did Moldbug get his “creeping Calvinism” thesis? I have often wondered if it was from Eric Voegelin, who occasionally garners a passing mention or two in American “paleocon” circles. Voegelin (2000b, 71-2 & 185-7) argued that in the Anglosphere something very strange had happened after the Reformation, a “Second Reformation” in which the newer branches of Protestantism, such as Wesleyanism and Methodism, had been instrumental in the push towards democratisation through their belief in social equality and community participation. This, so Voegelin believed, had immunised the Anglosphere against the worst of Fascism, Communism and Positivism compared with continental Europe. Voegelin (2000b, 61-2), however, was also very much aware of the less savoury aspects of this “Second Reformation.” The idea of building a totalising community of elect believers could end up in the sort of paranoid pressure cooker epitomised by Calvinist Geneva, or many of the other “perfectionist” efforts that we find in early America attempting to build the New Israel. It is a startling idea indeed to ponder whether the American reactionary religious commune and the experimental hippie commune might be two sides of the same coin of “election.” Even stranger would be to wonder if the inverse of the language of theocratic “dominionism” is that of egalitarian social justice.

    Nonetheless, the only mention Yarvin has ever made of Voegelin was during his apologia of Moldbug in relation to the LambdaConf scandal (2016a). Here Voegelin is invoked in relation to his thesis that the variety of Christian thought that has informed so many of modernity’s “political religions” is Gnostic–that is, it makes a claim to totalising knowledge of reality and its manipulability in order to replace God with its own unshakeable race of supermen as the agents of history. To Voegelin in order to produce his total system, the Gnostic, whether Positivist, Fascist, Marxist or Liberal, must forbid the asking of questions about doctrine and must selectively forget extremely obvious problems that could get in the way of remaking the world. As Yarvin (2016a) quotes him:

    In the Gnostic dream world…non-recognition of reality is the first principle. As a consequence, types of action that would be considered as morally insane because of the effects that they will have will be considered moral in the dream world. (Voegelin 2000a, 226)

    Voegelin continues that the gap between the real and the desired world is then used to project the immorality onto some other for not behaving in accordance with the thinker’s personal fantasies. Yarvin (2016a) utilises this to claim that what he finds real may seem like a daydream to others and vice versa.  Now, all this may well have simply been Yarvin attempting to find an obscure thinker he liked to feed back to left liberals the cliché cultural relativism and perspectivism he believed they would accept. There’s little chance anyone would have accepted the idea that it’s okay to be reactionary simply on the basis of it’s just, like, my opinion, man. The thought that deep down “free speech advocate” Curtis Yarvin (as his reply to his critics titles him) might really be Richard Rorty saying we’re all numinously entitled to our own truths and will just live together in pragmatic tolerance is rather hilarious. Moreover, it is hard to believe that he could possibly read Voegelin so badly as to think that he’s saying that we are all supposed to be deluded like this. To Voegelin, who was a highly complex Christian Platonic realist, this sort of consciousness was a very bad thing indeed.

    Rather, the earliest articulations one might find of Moldbug’s “creeping Calvinism” thesis (2007a, 2007b) seem to come from a different place, from a previously undeveloped libertarian discourse that anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard had conspiratorially hinted at in “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals”:

    Also animating both groups of progressives was a postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered “Yankee” areas of northern Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state, and finally federal governments to stamp out “sin,” to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. The victory of the Bryanite forces at the Democratic national convention of 1896 destroyed the Democratic Party as the vehicle of “liturgical” Roman Catholics and German Lutherans devoted to personal liberty and laissez faire and created the roughly homogenized and relatively non-ideological party system we have today. After the turn of the century, this development created an ideological and power vacuum for the expanding number of progressive technocrats and administrators to fill. In that way, the locus of government shifted from the legislature, at least partially subject to democratic check, to the oligarchic and technocratic executive branch. (Rothbard 1989)

    Can we trust Rothbard as an historian? When American libertarianism began to self-consciously develop after WWII and create for itself a grand narrative against the dominant Keynesian economic consensus of the time, it fixated on and hypertrophied conservative beliefs that the New Deal and events leading up to it were the Fall and betrayal of a “real America” of laissez faire and free trade, transforming the Gilded Age into a primaeval Golden Age now lost. In the earliest stages of his thought, Moldbug 1 simply seems to be working from this rather typical right-wing American position. He even insists (2008b, 193) that should 1908 America suddenly appear in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it would be able to outcompete 2008 America hands down. Nonetheless, Rothbard appears to have opened up the religious dimension as an answer for this Fall to Moldbug. In early Moldbug 1 (2007a, 2007b) the Fall is augmented with obscure conservative texts on the role played by the evangelical churches in encouraging the New Deal, occasionally supplemented by more mainstream sources now forgotten.

    For instance, in the June 2007 UR post “A Short History of Ultracalvinism,” we find a small 16th of March 1942 article from Time magazine cited, titled ‘American Malvern” that reports on “the high spots of organized U.S. Protestantism’s super-protestant new program for a just and durable peace after World War II.” These include “Complete abandonment of U.S. isolationism…International control of all armies & navies…A universal system of money so planned as to prevent inflation and deflation… Autonomy for all subject and colonial peoples” (with much better treatment for Negroes…).” Should it be at all shocking that the churches, both liberal and conservative, ever had a key role to play in encouraging the idea of a beneficent American imperialism? No, I do not think it is, not a jot. Moldbug, however, simply takes the article to indicate that in the intervening half century Time “has become as stupid as its audience,” the implication being that the average reader in 1942 would have been as suspicious as 2007 post-Iraq II Moldbug about America’s global “civilising mission.” Let us not forget that the tiny isolationist paleoconservative movement of people like Pat Buchanan was only rediscovered by Moldbug, Richard Spencer and others following the collapse of faith in the myths of neo-con missionary interventionism with Iraq War II. As Moldbug (2008b, 6) says at the start of his “Open Letter,” in recognition of both the openly religious and crypto-religious faith behind interventionism, the American military was now busy “doing donuts on the road to Damascus.”

    Having been led by Rothbard back to the 19th century in search for a solution to the Fall, Moldbug then decided to go back much further into the 17th century to trace a history of protestant radicals undermining the power of the absolute monarch. Moldbug’s actual evidence for this period is very thin. We find Hooker’s complaints about non-conformists, but that is about it. One might expect Moldbug to cite something like Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1991) on the relevance of 17th century British radical non-conformism to twentieth century politics or the astounding appendix on the pantheistic and free-love heresies of the Ranters in the 1962 edition of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. He never does.

    But why is Moldbug so interested in early modern absolutism? This he seems to have acquired from anarcho-capitalist Hans Hermann Hoppe’s anti-democratic screed Democracy: The God That Failed (2007) in which monarchism is celebrated for being simply the vast private ownership of land. The absolute ruler is thus reinvented as the ultimate capitalist landlord, the perfect model for creating a future world of privatized territories. One is strongly reminded of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus in which the Persian Great King is represented as simply a very big and powerful homesteader in a world of patriarchal homesteaders. Nevertheless, the fact should remain that Austrian Economics is infamous for its beliefs that capitalism has always existed and that economics began not in primitive accumulation or ritualized gift economies, but in barter. There are no changes in economic modes for the Austrian, and the long history of the temple in the development of money, loans and credit is completely ignored. The eternal foe is simply those who would threaten the natural right of the eternal “rugged individualist’s” private property.

    Thus, for Moldbug, the history of modernity is reinvented as a wrong turn–the rise of Christian radical egalitarian movements through the Whig Party who sought to undermine the rights of the absolute ruler as private owner. One wonders what Moldbug would make of Carl Schmitt’s (2009) marvelous Hamlet or Hecuba in which Shakespeare’s character is found to reflect the absolutist James I as a weak decision-maker being undermined by the growing forces of piratical capital. For Schmitt modern techno-capitalism’s desire to “neutralise” political violence requires the quashing of the absolute ruler of decision. But then again, Moldbug seems absolutely blind to ever having to ask about the mercantile aspects of the birth of radical, egalitarian “creeping Calvinism” that Tawney in particular addressed so well. He is never able to realise, even in his belief that the American elite is the radical universalist intellectuals versus the merchants, that genealogically much of this is an “inhouse” Anglo political-theological problem.

    The way Moldbug sweetens the anti-democratic rhetoric of Hoppe is with recourse to Thomas Carlyle. Although now largely unread, Carlyle was one of the most widely-popular political and historical authors of the 19th century, infamous for his impassioned appeals against laissez faire abandonment of the poor to poverty and starvation (see esp. Carlyle 1915, esp. 85-6; Carlyle 1971,  71-84). Carlyle’s answer to these problems was better rulers, Great Men, whom he could find in abundance and celebrate in just about every other period of history except his own. This caused Carlyle to become increasingly bitter and apocalyptic as time wore on, leading to what Voegelinian Richard Bishirjian (1976) aptly identifies as a thoroughly “Gnostic” outlook in search of some kind of soterical God-man ruler to save the world from chaos and to bring about the millennium.

    While it is obvious that Yarvin loves Carlyle for his florid language (who doesn’t?), the real appeal seems to be his paternalism, the conviction that the true Great Man should care for those who are subservient to him. Moldbug 1 especially wants you to know that he cares, that in 2008 the Great Man looks like Steve Jobs because Steve Jobs is cool and cares too. When Moldbug (2008b, 117) argues that black Americans living in the ghetto should be forcibly re-educated in panopticon communities, this is because he cares compared with liberals who have abandoned them to crime and welfare. The obvious model here is Carlyle’s (1915, 302-33) “Negro Question” speech, in which he had insisted to his shocked 19th century liberal audience that he really did care when he argued that freed blacks in the Caribbean should be forced to labour for their masters for their own moral good rather than living on cheap pumpkins.

    One should emphasise that Moldbug’s affection for Carlyle is in strict contrast to the few other libertarians who seem to have ever heard of him, predictably regarding him as a feudal remnant, a bad guy who defended slavery, compared with noble 19th c. laissez faire liberals (e.g. Levy 2000). On the slavery question, Moldbug (2009b) can certainly admit that his beloved Carlyle wasn’t “perfect,” but perhaps only because he dismissed the “financial” side of things. Yet, just when we might be expecting Moldbug to try to fold chattel slavery into some kind of wretched anarcho-capitalist discourse that it was just another form of harmless voluntary wage labour all along (and he does very nearly get there), he instead takes a sharp turn towards romanticising feudal hierarchy and comparing it to the strict efficiency of Japanese companies. In a direct homage to Carlyle we find him castigating liberalism for allowing Haiti to become a failed state. Nonetheless, Moldbug is, without a doubt, a “proslavery” thinker: he even believes some people (especially those with a low IQ) are “natural slaves,” but this shouldn’t mean that they need to be treated cruelly. The new corporate Great Men feudalists of the 21st century will treat them very nicely, thank you very much indeed.

    It is ponderously obvious that Silicon Valley has long possessed a penchant for believing that its “thought leaders” are of equal historical importance to the Great Men of the past, as is evidenced by the great sea of pulpy awfulness on learning the business secrets of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan that spills out of the self-help section of crummy bookstores everywhere. Most notable is former student of anthropologist René Girard and NRx-ally Peter Thiel’s gormless Zero to One (2014) that pulls no punches in comparing today’s entrepreneurs and celebrities to sacred kings. Seen in this context, Moldbug is doing very little that is original. It’s certainly easy to scoff at the notion of Divus Marcus Zuccus and so on, but, as has been emphasised, one should not underestimate for a moment the possibility of a Silicon “left fascism” with its garish attempt at appearing kind and “progressive.” It is perhaps not necessarily that our Silicon masters literally wish they were pharaoh, but, far worse, that perhaps they think that they already benevolently determine the direction of the world and should simply branch out slowly into governance in order to formalise it for its own good. Maybe like Carlyle they’ll even pay their wage-slave chattels the compliment of saying how handsome and cheerful they think they look when put to work for a pittance with no toilet breaks. Hang on–Amazon already does that.

    ***

    What Moldbug is doing with his discourse on “creeping Calvinism” is not a “secularisation thesis” in the manner of Weber, wherein one is simply looking for the roots of current social formations, however dour they might be, or a “political theology” as Schmitt and his Foucauldian leftist successors do, wherein it is often debated whether an “exit” to the political-theological machine is even possible. What Moldbug is doing is part and parcel with a certain kind of Enlightenment ideological discourse and genealogical fallacy–compare anything to a religion, you demystify and delegitimise it; if you find that something actually has religious roots this is thus even better for delegitimising it as fantasy. One only need think of John Gray’s Black Mass (2007), written around the same time Moldbug was actively blogging, in which the Christian millenarian ancestry of modern ideologies from Communism and Anarchism to the American liberal “end of history” all testify to the idea that progress is a rather worthless religious delusion.

    Perhaps this sort of thing is simply a vulgar attempt to “own the libs” by rubbing in the educated leftist sceptic’s face the idea that he is a religious lunatic. As an educated leftist religious lunatic, I am not fazed one iota by this. One could simply stop here and say no more, but what Moldbug (and Gray) are up to has in itself very particular crypto-theological roots worth discussing. Both Moldbug and Gray are deployers of a cynical materialism most clearly presaged in Thomas Hobbes’s need to cut down the competing religious claims of his dissonant age of Behemoth (Civil War) by reinforcing the image of man as little more than a dangerous animal that needs to be kept in line. Man is a wolf to man; life is nasty, brutal and short under the state of nature. For Gray the political religions have been a psychotic disaster unable to grasp Neo-Darwinian cosmic indifference. Climate change is the only real Apocalypse, likely to bring what fellow climate-cynic James Lovelock calls “global decline into a chaotic world ruled by brutal war lords on a devastated Earth” (Lovelock 2007, 154; cf. Gray 2007, 202). For Moldbug the Behemoth is instead liberal naïveté about “open borders.” He wants to tell you that America is run by a “Cathedral” of crazed post-Christian hippies who are so blinded by their ideological “blue pill” called “Millennium” (2008b, 241), that they cannot possibly understand that what they are doing is dangerous. The perfect Hobbesian Moldbuggism is perhaps found in Yarvin’s Urbit “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit of all places:

    I think that when we use the word “human” we often really mean “angel.” So, yes: we are all subhuman. Black people included. I’m not just saying this: I think the main flaw of 20th-century political systems is that they’re designed to govern angels. If you plan for apes and allow for angels, I think you get a much better result (especially when there’s a Y chromosome in the mix). (Yarvin 2016b)

    What hard cruel realism! Surely Yarvin is the modern sceptical Hobbes speaking the truth to the deluded, just as Hobbes’ works were blamed in parliament for being a cause of God’s wrath visiting England in the form of the Great Fire of 1666! But, strangely, Moldbug has close to nothing to say about Hobbes, except perhaps a passing comment or two that in the 17th c. as a materialist he was the “leftist” compared with the divine right absolutism of his contemporaries such as Robert Filmer (Moldbug 2009c). Amusingly some Ur-Catholic reactionary thinkers have considered Moldbug little more than a godless “leftist” for his materialism and have compared him explicitly to Hobbes (Charlton 2013; cf. Nostalgebraist 2016). Several centuries earlier of course the idea of an absolute monarch on the basis of divine right would have been regarded as equally radical and heretical for its usurpation of the authority of the church and the complex myriad of local political institutions, as John Milbank (2019) has recently pointed out to the NRx and “post-liberal” crowd at Jacobite. But then again Moldbug has nothing to say about the Middle Ages at all. History starts with absolutism as though it had always been in place.  More than anything this should draw our attention back, once again, to the fact that Moldbug 1’s claim to “Jacobitism” is all shallow aesthetics to stitch together Hoppe and Silicon Valley aspirations towards governance. Nonetheless, Moldbug cannot escape from Hobbes and his legacy so easily.

    As John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (2015, 22-24) argue, in the tradition of Tawney’s secularisation thesis on British Calvinism and capitalism, with Hobbes what we see is not some new cynical variant of a reborn version of antique materialism, but the materialist rendering of the Anglo Calvinist belief in absolute human depravity and selfishness. This attitude developed from the rising emergence of a society that had uprooted and alienated agricultural labour, professionalised governance and established its grip on the New World primarily through piracy. Man is a very fallen and wicked little animal indeed to the cynical leveller and this, so Milbank and Pabst claim, continues to haunt the Anglo mindset through John Locke, Bernard Mandeville and Thomas Malthus, down to liberal selfishness in the present. That which appears sceptical and “realist” concerning human nature stems from a debased Christianity that cannot imagine the human soul to have anything good in it at all but a selfishness that might be put to use making contracts, consuming and perishing.

    This alternative aspect of “creeping Calvinist” especially seems to leak out of Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” (2013 pt1) of “Hobbesian undercurrents” like there’s no tomorrow. So too his race and IQ “naturalism” and neo-reactionary deity Gnon (Nature or Nature’s God) that punishes those who go against the “nature of things.” Land’s decades-long revulsion and boredom with the human and demonology of entities like Cthelll (2011, 498-9), the primaevally wounded world-soul of the Earth passing on its misery and horror to all its children, were already more than half-way there. If anything, this earlier more bombastic, body-horror-obsessed phase of Land’s thought has always smacked to me of the worst of Christian “vale of tears” masochism, as epitomised in Luther’s hyperbole that the Earth is “a gaping anus,” the “Devil’s arse,” a “worm bag” and a “rotten chicken’s crop” because of its domination by evil merchants. Perhaps Norman O. Brown’s (1959, 222-7) old Freudian political theology was correct to read in these sentiments of Luther’s the origin of the protestant work ethic and its fixation with accumulation as an extended “anal stage”–a masochistic falling in love with the world as shit. Land’s attempts in the 90s to embrace the consciously worst aspects of neoliberal TINA to its masochistic limits simply seems to recycle this process.

    By now just about everyone with an internet connection is familiar with Land’s (2017a) eccentric views that the forces of capital are the real agent of history, some kind of “intelligent” insentient egregore. Nonetheless, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2014, 91-101) has argued in Economy and the Human Future there is something very similar to the dominant neoliberal view of the almighty economy today and the Calvinist belief in predestination–that only God knows who is saved and who is damned and that any and all human good and bad works are powerless before it. Land is torn between, on one hand. a kind of deterministic triumphalism sneering at any and all mass action as failed (2016), and, on the other hand, a kind of deep terror that salvation is very unlikely indeed–that the Anglosphere will collapse under immigrant invasion, that high IQ states with low birth-rates are “IQ shredders” (2017b), and that only some fantastical vision of “Neo-China” completing the system of cyberpunk idealism can make up for this. That, or simply the weak theurgy of “hyperstition”: trying to force memes into reality under the bizarre belief that what one is actually doing is bootstrapping an already-realised future that is retrojectively invading the present.

    It is very much worth noting that while Land may have developed this invasion from the future idea from watching too many sci-fi films (see: Reynolds 2009), as Catherine Pickstock (2013, 55-8) has observed this retrojective motion is an integral part of his old hero Gilles Deleuze’s cosmology in Difference and Repetition (1994). Here, so she noted, “difference” bootstraps itself by invading from the future in a blatantly theurgical gesture reliant on mediaeval millenarian Joachim of Fiore’s belief in a Third Age that completes history (Deleuze 1994, 296-7; cf. Pickstock 2013, 57). Land, so one might say, seems to have exchanged the fantasy of pure difference in favour of all too ponderous identity in the form symbols like cyborgs, post-human supermen and AI overlords. These were symbols cooked up in the atmosphere of the Post-War Boom, when people were a great deal more confident that both Paradise and imminent Judgement Day were at hand; but then, like the millennium, these have remained put off, not yet, for all the rumours otherwise. That scholar of “Accelerationism” Benjamin Noys (2014, 63) made reference to Norman Cohn’s (1962) study of millenarianism Pursuit of the Millennium when he referred to Land’s ideas as “apocalyptic acceleration” was very much on the right track.

    Land has a long history of being a hyperbolic contrarian, a sort of pantomime Satanist of theory. Elizabeth Sandifer (2017) has even considered whether the entire thing, from Land’s early left cyber-anarchism in the 1990s to his embrace of neo-reaction in the early 2010s, is one long postmodern “dirty joke.” Maybe Land became a neo-reactionary simply because he had run out of edge to lord, so to speak, and decided it was worth LARP-ing the evil capitalist Kantian white man attempting to immunise himself from the world he was pillaging, as Land’s first famous essay “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest” (Land 2011, 55-80) set out to oppose. Perhaps resentment for the cyberpunk future not arriving as quickly as he had imagined in the 90s was what led him to the “Dark Enlightenment’s” (2013 pt 1) condemnation of the welfare state as the chief means of the capacity for capital to waste itself rather than liberating technology. This self-wasting (though not on welfare) in order to cheat liberation with “antiproduction” was one of the few instances in which Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 262) took Freud’s dread “death instinct” seriously, it being Land’s (2011, 123-44 & esp. 261-88) pet cause for reinsertion into their work in the 1990s. Maybe Land dwelt so much on the “death instinct” that he ended up turning Deleuze and Guattari’s Reichian-Rousseauian rejection of Death back towards a more Freudian-Hobbesian position out of fear of human beastliness cancelling the future. All manner of things might be posed, but Land seems to have a strict policy of not explaining his shift, instead claiming that he was always an anarcho-capitalist all along and that much of his early work was simply naïve.

    ***

    Thus, one thing then seems clear about NRx. It wants to tell you that human beings are fallen and dangerous creatures and that “progressivism” naively and conveniently forgets this fact. But does it really? Let us turn things around for a moment. It is very easy to acknowledge that the old meme of conservatism and reaction being based entirely in irrational fear and ignorance is a popular one, evidenced, obviously, by recourse to the shorthand of bigotry as -phobias. However, when I have put it to common or garden progressive types that they also seem to draw a great deal of their politics from threat perception and fear (climate change, the return of fascism, theocrats, that bigoted language is implicitly violent), one is often met with the reply that yes, but these threats are real. Out come the charts, out come the think-pieces and rarely is anyone ever convinced that anything but strategic silence and bad faith is at work. From all sides the world is filled with a great tribal refrain of “But why don’t you take X seriously? It is very dangerous!” “Because they do and they are terrible people who believe other terrible things.”

    The internet is very good at endlessly reminding us of the existence of this species of communicational deadlock, but it is an aspect of human being that has existed long before the electronic “echo chamber.” For Schmitt (2005) this is the “friends vs enemies” division of the political-theological emergency, a great irrational Two based in the dualism of God and his people versus the Other. Thinkers such as Roberto Esposito (2015) have gone to great lengths to try to deconstruct this Two and its violent aspects–to the point of eccentrically claiming that to rid ourselves of it, the whole concept of “personhood” (theological and legal) would have to be done away with first. Esposito never tells us what such a “depersonalised” world in which all thought, guilt, authority and existence is deprivatised would look like. It seems almost impossible to imagine such a thing. Instead we remain stuck with incommensurate claims to the “right side of history” imagining that the apocalyptic day shall eventually come on which the Other is, at very least ideologically, completely eradicated.

    This faith lies at the core of Moldbug’s “Open Letter” (2008b) and its dreams that his reactionary future will be so well-run, hi-tech, luxuriant and happy that socially “progressive” ideas will be reduced to the position that reactionary ones held in 2008: if not a hilarious lost cause, then something virulently dangerous that must be suppressed. In our era when it is often lamented, especially by the Left, that it has become impossible to conceive of a “different world,” perhaps the goad towards imagining such things again should be that the reactionary right is frequently not quite as afflicted by the omnipresent fear of recuperation and failure. Cross this with Silicon Valley techno-optimism, and no matter how ridiculous or facetious Moldbug’s visions of VR prisons or handing over the state to airline pilots to privatise it might seem (2008b, 216-7), the fact remains that he was naïve enough to stake a claim on the future when hardly anyone else would dare do such things. That should be concerning (and perhaps a little shameful).

    But how did Moldbug get there? Social habitus of course plays a very important part in the formation of the political Two in our age. This is especially obvious regarding NRx, which seems mostly peopled by college-educated middle-class white guys reacting with boredom towards the largely left liberal cultural pod in which they have been raised and educated. Reaction promises a totally different series of moral imperatives and threat-perceptions, an exciting virgin land untouched by hardly a soul smarter than a rock since the days of Real Existing Fascism. The mixture of excitement and resentment at the fact that a whole ideological continent had long been reduced to Neo-Nazis in the trailer park was palpable in Moldbug writing a decade before the “alt-right.” At the opening of his early declaration of a search for a new politics, entitled “A Formalist Manifesto,” Moldbug says:

    My beef with progressivism is that for at least the last 100 years, the vast majority of writers and thinkers and smart people in general have been progressives. Therefore, any intellectual in 2007, which unless there has been some kind of Internet space warp and my words are being carried live on Fox News, is anyone reading this, is basically marinated in progressive ideology. (Moldbug 2007c)

    Even though a complex reactionary news-ecosystem now exists, there still remains a profound need for reaction to distance itself from the image of the conservative as the angry uncle shouting at Fox. As a friend once put it–you piss off anarchists by telling them to move to Somalia, you piss off Marxists by telling them to move to North Korea, you piss off Neo-Reactionaries by telling them to move to Alabama.

    Nonetheless, a particularly curious side-effect of this acting out against “the libs” is the fact that Moldbug, like a great many reactionaries today lurching between fantasies of some Sorosian League of Doom and “clownworld,” can never make his mind up whether his “Brahmin” enemies are evil geniuses trying to unite “high and low against the middle” by teaming up with “Dalit” POCs to replace white America (2008a), or zombified morons unable to perceive that: “History is not over. Oh, no. We are still living it. Perhaps we are in the positions of the French of 1780 or the Russians of 1914, who had no idea that the worlds they lived in could degenerate so rapidly into misery and terror” (2008b, 264-5). Thus, it will be particularly interesting to see which threats Yarvin will acknowledge in the rest of the “Clear Pill” as the Real upon which to found his touted new alternative to Progressivism, Constitutionalism and Fascism. Will he concede things to each of these ideologies? Can we imagine a Yarvin who believes in catastrophic climate change, “the great replacement” conspiracy and civic nationalism all at once? That one would not be hard at all to imagine, nor a Yarvin of slavery with UBI, nor a Yarvin that simply repeated everything from between Moldbugs 1-3 all at once. However, it is highly likely that the “new” alternative will simply be another modification on the same basic ingredients of authoritarian capitalism, and it is on this matter that we should draw this essay to a close.

    Perhaps the soberest approach to Yarvin/Moldbug would be to contextualise him as but one example on a growing list of specimens of the now obvious American “libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline,” in which one might enrol the Tea Party and a fair slab of the recent US “alt-right” (especially the Hoppe enthusiasts), but also things much older. Perhaps we can find rumours of it first in Thomas Hobbes’s belief that if the monarch of Leviathan is installed to keep the religious factions down then supply and demand will simply make everything work out: “The Value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value is that which they be contracted to give” (1651, 208). A number of thinkers including George Dyson (1997, 159) and Philip Ball (2004, 34 & 221) have taken note of this line in Hobbes and consider it possibly the first example of economics represented as an autopoetic system. But, of course, one can only “let the market system work” under the authoritarian conditions that neutralise selfish, violent human brutes into homines oeconomici.

    This machine is the “lizardbrain” of liberalism, a reactive Calvinist mess terrified of what men might do if the market were not there to tame them. The libertarian inversion of this, to find the market eternal and the state a parasite, is a marvellous delusion indeed, and one of very recent invention that is belied by the fact that the movement so easily flirts with authoritarianism and even outright Fascism when it gets frightened. The Austrian Economics dons Ludwig Mises and F.A. Hayek were more than happy to shill for both Mussolini’s promise of a “free market stage” and Augusto Pinochet’s brutishness under the belief that at very least a temporary dictatorship to keep out the communists was not an entirely bad idea (Robin 2013). Nonetheless, of course the libertarian refrain always remains that Fascism is a leftist qua collectivist movement. No one wants to be left holding that hot potato any more than the mainstream American libertarian scene is willing to acknowledge the problem that the work of Hoppe keeps on churning out self-titled “fascists” dreaming of playing Pinochet and “physically removing” people.

    For instance, in early 2017 there was a great internal furore among American libertarians over the Hoppe Caucus’s invitation of Richard Spencer to the 2017 International Students For Liberty Conference. This ended in a punch up and several of the website Liberty Conservative’s writers being “doxxed” by self-titled “Antifa libertarians” for covering the event (Lucente 2017). In October 2017 in a speech titled “Libertarianism, the Alt-Right and AntiFa” Hoppe responded by simultaneously expressing his disappointment in Spencer’s embrace of “white nationalist socialism” and commending the “alt-right”–in spite of its ideological disorganisation–for its ethnocentrism, belief in natural hierarchy, refusal to be cowed by Antifa, and distrust of academia. As far as Hoppe was concerned, much of the “alt-right” seemed part and parcel with the tradition of American “paleoconservatives” such as Pat Buchanan and thinkers like Moldbug, links with whom he admits have earned him “several honourable mentions” from the SPLC over the years. Moreover, in early 2018, following concerns by the Mises Institute over the white nationalism of an upcoming book titled White, Right and Libertarian, for which Hoppe had agreed to write a foreword, Hoppe retracted the foreword and distanced himself from the author (Rachels 2018).

    What can we make of all this? Should we concentrate on the phylum of reaction that is clearly fascism qua hypertrophied authoritarian capitalism and desire to get a better look at its subspecies, we find ourselves caught in a strange triangle of a sort. On one side we have NRx as a Utopian patchwork of shining privatised Neo-Singapores, as Moldbug 1 and Land would seem to desire. On another side by the sort of shiny Google “left fascism” of “woke capital” Land and his minions would obviously abhor. On a third we have good old fashioned, blood-soaked Pinochetian brutalism, Leviathan with its sword raised. In this triangle no single side can be folded into another–each continues to haunt the others. It would be too easy to turn them into a spectrum running Left Fascist-M1-Pinochet in increasingly open brutality, but this would of course obfuscate the “niceness” that the information age society of cybernetic control likes to affect through technological means of repression in order to appear to soften the blow (including futuristic fantasies of VR prisons).

    In this we should not pass over the fact, once again, of the plurality of Moldbugs. Moldbug 2 is far closer to Pinochet, as too would Moldbug 3 very likely be. The Landian accelerationist “patchwork” vision of things doesn’t stand a chance in hell of existing because there’s nothing to support its fantasies of secessionism, not even in some tiny imagined gap between the US Empire’s decline and some Neo-Chinese Empire rising. Nonetheless, “left fascism” will certainly have a go at eating the world given half a chance, even if it must beg the existing liberal Leviathan to turn a blind eye, for Leviathan increasingly cannot do without the informatic monopolies of Google and friends to maintain governance. So too, one can never underestimate the possibility that at some point the “libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline” will bring forth something truly nasty, blunt and simple in the manner of a Pinochet in America and that it is only likely that it will lean on a certain sort of cold, cruel Calvinist Christianity in order to support itself.

    It is against both of these forces that one would do well to look back over the counter history of “creeping Calvinism” and “Quaker thuggery,” for, in America at least, Christianity still retains the power to build images of alternative worlds, some hellish, some paradisiacal. That the American Left in the second half of the 20th century was so keenly and myopically willing to abandon Christianity as something primitive and irredeemable, fit only for the bigots, is perhaps one of the most politically foolish decisions ever made. Back in the 1960s epochal thinkers like Norman Brown (1959) and Theodor Roszak (1973) understood well that they were the inheritors of the tradition of radical non-conformists like William Blake. This was soon forgotten in efforts to be as far away as possible from anything even vaguely mystical for fear of its commercial recuperation, lifestylism and naïveté.

    OrbGang meme
    Figure 1. OrbGang meme
    OrbGang meme
    Figure 2. OrbGang meme

    But strangely, this old spectre recently re-appeared again in the online “Orbgang” meme-factory of Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson that managed to unite all sorts of people across political, racial, age, gender and religious spectra (Figure 1, Figure 2). More than any public figure in recent memory Williamson with her message of politics-as-love and Course in Miracles embodies a bizarre distillation of the weirdest aspects of non-conformist Christianity that could only still be cooked up in America. It’s very easy, of course, to put down Williamson as a New Age hack and a joke (though the memes about her are a great deal of fun and we do live in a meme-war economy in these times). But one rarely finds a New Age hack interested in politics, let alone one with practical proposals on matters such as reparations and climate change to the left of just about all of her competitors. Williamson was always very unlikely to get anywhere, and the American Left were particularly cruel to her. But one does wonder whether something very powerful could be done against our age’s overwhelming atmosphere of pessimism, fear, jealousy and bad faith if the powers of both Christian and post-Christian love, harmony and mercy could be harnessed once again for political purposes.

    _____

    Jonathan Ratcliffe was educated by mad Guénonians, holds a doctorate in Mongolian Studies from the Australian National University, and writes the occasional piece on political theology. He blogs at Mechanical Owl.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] Back in mid-2017 the main page for the Urbit website contained the very Moldbuggian libertarian motto that: “If Bitcoin is money and Ethereum is law, Urbit is land.” This seems to have been removed as part of an overall renovation of the page between then and now–likely following Yarvin’s departure. One should also note Moldbug’s (2010a) old idea of Feudle, a feudal search engine where the trustworthiness of information was controlled by tiers of experts.

    [2] Also note that in 2015 Yarvin’s invitation to another conference, Strange Loop, was cancelled. This drew a fair amount of momentary media attention. See Auerbach (2015) in Slate, and, for comparison, Bokhari (2015) in Breitbart on the issue.

    [3] Perhaps the most profound difference in vocabulary between Moldbug and Carl Schmitt is that while both of them take the sovereign absolute ruler to be the superior form of government, Schmitt of course regards this as “the political” historically threatened by attempts to neutralise it using religion, technology, metaphysics. In comparison Moldbug (2008b esp. 55, 2010b) is avidly against “politics,” which is what happens once more than a few people are involved in the decision-making process. Moldbug even as a quasi-Platonic scheme of degeneration of a sort. Imperium in imperio (absolute sovereignty of the ruler) passes from the decisionism of a monarch “…to oligarchy, oligarchy to aristocracy, aristocracy to democracy, democracy to mere anarchy” (2010b). Schmitt fears a world without conflict; Moldbug fears chaos.

    _____

    Works Cited

     

  • Julia DeCook — How Deep Does the Rabbit Hole Go? The “Wonderland” of r/TheRedPill and Its Ties to White Supremacy

    Julia DeCook — How Deep Does the Rabbit Hole Go? The “Wonderland” of r/TheRedPill and Its Ties to White Supremacy

    Julia DeCook

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

    —Morpheus, The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski 1999)

    In the 1999 film The Matrix, Morpheus presents the protagonist, Neo, with the option of taking one of two pills: taking the blue pill would close off Neo’s burgeoning consciousness of the constructed nature of his life in the Matrix; taking the red pill would allow Neo to remain in Wonderland, meaning he would remain conscious of the real world around him. In The Matrix, human beings who have not taken the red pill exist in a type of virtual reality. Thus, to “take the red pill” means to be awakened—to become conscious—to see the world for what it truly is.

    The phrase entered popular vernacular in ways that the transgender Wachowski siblings undoubtedly never intended. In the context of The Matrix, taking the Red Pill means awakening to the oppressive mechanisms of control. But the phrase has been taken up by the far right to mean waking up to the oppressive mechanisms of feminism, progressive politics, and multiculturalism (Read 2019). Notably, on the popular content aggregator and forum website Reddit, the prominent men’s rights/pick up artist subreddit r/TheRedPill takes its name from this famous scene. However, instead of giving the user insight to see the world as one where robots have enslaved humanity, the Reddit “red pill” awakens men to the realization that they have been enslaved by women and feminism (Baker  2017; Ging 2019; Van Valkenburgh 2018).

    This rhetoric may feel familiar to those who have been following the rhetoric of the alt right, who often point to the need to “wake people up” to a constructed reality where white people— particularly white men—have been oppressed by feminism and multiculturalism. Discussions surrounding the Manosphere, (a loosely connected online network of men’s rights activists, pick up artists, Incels [so-called Involuntary Celibates], and other male-focused social movements) in both popular media as well as academic scholarship point to the ways the Manosphere functions as a gateway ideology for the alt right (Futrelle 2017b). Often, the broad connection that links these two groups together is misogyny and anti-feminist sentiments that they use as a way to ground their group identity and the political goals of the various factions within them. These affective dimensions that appeal to the frustration and anger of men who flock to these groups then create a new cultural practice (Ahmed, 2004). Although what these men pride themselves is their ability to think logically about the “reality of the sexual marketplace,” what we see emerging is a stronger appeal to emotion that then shapes their relationship with the group itself, and is performed through misogyny.

    The ways misogyny is performed on r/TheRedPill is under the guise of providing a “positive identity for men” by highlighting mechanisms by which Manosphere discourse and ideology can set up a foundation for further radicalization into more extremist thought. The ways the group strategizes in facilitating this radicalization as well as how it indoctrinates its members warrants further exploration, particularly to understand how such processes may occur. Particularly, the ways that the Manosphere’s ideology may set up a foundation for further indoctrination is important to highlight the radicalization process, since the Manosphere’s “pill” may be easier to swallow at first than outright white supremacy (Futrelle 2017b). Since the Manosphere and its many groups lure members into their communities by playing on their frustrations regarding sexual and romantic relationships, the ways that this radicalization occurs may be subtle at first but become more pronounced as time goes on.

    r/TheRedPill is both a prominent community in the Manosphere as well as a sizable Reddit community on its own. With over 400,000 members scattered across a variety of affiliated subreddits (i.e., r/RedPillWomen and r/RedPillParenting), the subreddit is not just a notable case study for its sheer size and popularity within the Manosphere but also for the ways the community has expanded its boundaries to appeal to a larger group of people—including women. By positioning itself as a social movement, the radicalization happening within the Manosphere first attracts men by appealing to their sexual or romantic frustrations, and then promises to give them the tools to alleviate this frustration and become “better men” for it. Unlike MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), whose members voluntarily abstain from romantic or sexual relationships to reclaim their “power” (Futrelle 2017a), and unlike Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), who do not focus on pursuing sexual and romantic relationships, r/TheRedPill packages itself as a group that helps men successfully engage in sexual or romantic relationships with the added benefit of reclaiming one’s manhood.

    To “Red Pillers” (what r/TheRedPill members call themselves and are referred to as outside of the community), feminism and society in general promote “sexual strategies” that favor women, thus giving women power in relationships, whereas The Red Pill community teaches men sexual strategies to take back the power in sexual or romantic relationships. Focusing on only heterosexual relationships, to “Red Pill” in this context means to invoke heteronormative gender roles that benefit the man in the relationship and subjugate the woman, a dynamic achieved by becoming what they call an “Alpha Male.” On the surface, r/TheRedPill is mostly aligned with the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) community, which teaches men strategies to seduce women, but cultivates a more intense focus on men’s rights activism.

    Importantly, men who adhere to the teachings promulgated by r/TheRedPill view it as much more than sexual strategy—they view it as an identity, a community, and an ideology in which they base their realities upon. Recently, and particularly after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, studies have emerged in both academia and within journalistic sources that attempt to lump together MRAs with Red Pillers and Incels as similar groups that belong in the Manosphere (Ging 2019). However, it is critical to understand that they are different and distinct from one another within the larger Manosphere ecosystem, particularly in terms of how they define themselves. Yet the common thread running through these communities that connects them to the larger alt right movement is misogyny. Misogyny, and the rejection of feminism, which many men in these groups view as a “cancer” inflicted upon “Western civilization,” are the glue that keep these groups within the same extremist networks.

    “How Women Destroy Western Civilization”

    The discourse in the forum focusing on the ways “Western civilization is doomed,” especially in so far as feminism and/or women can be blamed for it, is perhaps one of the clearest indications of the links between the Manosphere and the alt right. It is this misogyny that helps bind together these affective networks of rage (Ahmed, 2004), which drives the movements to attempt to subvert and replace a perceived dominant culture they feel is oppressive to [white] men. Although there are many Red Pillers who explicitly reject the association of the group with white supremacy, for there are indeed non-white Red Pillers, the rhetoric that both movements espouse is constructed based on three central claims: 1. That Western Civilization has been ruined by feminism; 2. That men are oppressed, and only by fixing this “imbalance” will Western Civilization be saved; and 3. That women who reject feminism and instead embrace “traditional” roles as wives and mothers, subservient to their husbands, are happier. Accordingly, men in the r/TheRedPill community do not necessarily reject women who are not virgins (unlike Incels, who insist on the virginity of women that they aspire to be with), but do believe that women are morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to men, thus providing the basis of the argument for why feminism has violated the “natural order” of things by giving women power (Manne 2017).

    The violation of a “natural order” based in biological determinism in regard to race and sex is a core argument used in far-right circles, including the Manosphere, to justify their beliefs. And although they share many similarities in regard to the superiority of men over women, grouping the Manosphere and the alt right under the same umbrella is insufficient to understand the crux of their ideologies and the arguments they use to support them. The Manosphere often invokes a nostalgic remembrance of a past before feminism “tainted” women, just as white supremacist rhetoric in other parts of the alt-right also invokes this kind of nostalgic remembrance of a past that was white and patriarchal. However, in terms of how directly connected the Manosphere is to white supremacy, one piece of “literature” that r/TheRedPill uses to support their ideological beliefs about women and “hypergamy” comes directly from The Occidental Quarterly, a known white nationalist/white supremacist academic journal funded by the Charles Martel society (Southern Poverty Law Center n.d.). The Occidental Quarterly helps to blast open a gateway from r/TheRedPill to white supremacy and/or white nationalism. What r/TheRedPill and its affiliated subreddits and websites has demonstrated through publications like these is that the rabbit hole goes deeper than sexual strategy.

    Hypergamy, in particular, is a concept that highlights the ways the misogynistic discourse of the Manosphere and the white supremacist movement (in particular, the alt right) are connected. Devlin, the author of the piece, begins an article by stating that “white birthrates worldwide have suffered a catastrophic decline in recent decades,” (see figure 1), and goes on to explain why hypergamy is the reason why. Specifically, hypergamy is defined as a sexual and romantic drive to be with the “Alpha Male,” regardless of current relationship status. In other words, women will instinctively seek out the most attractive, successful, or powerful man in a group to have sexual or romantic relations with, and this “hypergamy” drives women to only “mate at the top.” Devlin goes on to say that the sexual revolution of the 1960s shifted culture to be a “female sexual utopia,” and that this brought upon a new cultural norm where women had sexual rights, leading to the downfall of “white birthrates” and “Western civilization.” In sum, the article states that it is not only hypergamy that is responsible for this downfall, but that women having sexual and reproductive freedom is the cause of all of the modern day white man’s woes—sexually, romantically, economically, and culturally. Pointing to all of these collapses of a patriarchal, white, masculine world as the reason for the discontent of “Western civilization”, the concept of hypergamy is easily transportable across these extremist groups and easily embraced.

    The first paragraphs of Sexual Utopia in Power
    Figure 1. The first paragraphs of Sexual Utopia in Power

    The reclamation of power is the fundamental motivation that drives these communities. This article, as well as many of the other readings that serve as the foundation of r/TheRedPill and Manosphere thought, are about reclaiming masculinity, reclaiming power, and reclaiming truth and reality in general. They not only give the men who flock to these communities an answer; they also completely disassemble the world the person knew before (thus the phrase “being Red Pilled”). The postmodern era is most notably significant for the collapse of the “grand narratives” that held societies together, and in particular in Western contexts these grand narratives were based in hegemonic masculinity, patriarchy, Christian religion, and whiteness. The ideologies of r/TheRedPill and the Manosphere promise a return to this grand narrative to ground one’s reality. This collapsing—and ultimate rebuilding—of a grand narrative and purpose that privileges male power over all else, then, helps develop a mind to accept more extremist thoughts and to act on them. Not unlike the tactics used by cults, who often exploit people who are seeking meaning, The Manosphere and the alt right provide meaning in the form of misogyny and white supremacy, creating an “affective fabric” that binds them together (Kuntsman, 2012).

    It is worth mentioning that the material consequences of the extremist ideologies of the Manosphere have often resulted in mass violence. Elliott Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter, was a member of PUA communities online (McGuire 2014) and is often venerated in communities like r/Incels, where they refer to him as “Saint Elliott.” James Jackson stabbed an elderly black man to death in New York with a sword and was also a member of MGTOW. Indeed, MGTOW is the more extreme faction of the Manosphere and is often not concerned with the advancement of men’s rights. It thus lends itself easily to other extremist beliefs.

    Along with r/Incels, MGTOW may be the most severe and extreme of all of the groups of the Manosphere. This does not, however, mean that r/TheRedPill and other Manosphere groups are not extreme or severe in their misogyny, but rather that their packaging of their misogynistic beliefs may be easier to swallow at first and lead men who flock to their groups down the rabbit hole even farther. By positioning themselves as advocating for the interests of men, and as groups that foster “positive identities” for them, they are able to recruit members who feel as though they are lost and without community—providing them with a sense of belonging and a group identity to subscribe to gives these groups their long-term sustainability (Hogg & Williams 2000). The acknowledgement of the ideologies of the Manosphere and its connections to the alt right has been established; however, understanding of how each group within the Manosphere recruits and indoctrinates its members will lead to further insight as to how they ensure their sustained existence in and outside of this ideological web.

    Although there are distinctive differences among the groups in the Manosphere in terms of the levels of violence they advocate for, and what their activism and membership focus on, the common underlying thread among them is rage toward modern society and women. These differences, however, are important to understand in order to identify what draws men (and even women) to these groups. In particular, it is crucial to comprehend these differences to better strategize around the prevention of further radicalization. Thus, the underlying base ideology that fuels these movements, connects them to the alt right, and results in mass violence is one that warrants further investigation, particularly regarding the role of platforms in connecting them all together through algorithmically generated recommendations and the ease of navigating the digital communities that make them home (Massanari 2015; Noble 2018).

    Rather than aimlessly wandering the digital wilderness searching for meaning, meaning is being given to them through these Manosphere groups who exploit the frustrations of men who desire romantic and sexual relationships. But these frustrations are manifestations of unfulfilled desires, and these communities are where these desires and frustrations are validated and strengthened. And as we have seen too often with the rise of hate crimes and mass murders, these violent desires result in violent ends.

    _____

    Julia R. DeCook is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago. She is currently working on publishing her dissertation which examined how various extremist groups responded to censorship and bans to understand how digital infrastructure sustains these movements. She is also a fellow with the newly formed Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Works Cited

  • Alexander Reid Ross — Fooling the Nation: Extremism and the Pro-Russia Disinformation Ecosystem

    Alexander Reid Ross — Fooling the Nation: Extremism and the Pro-Russia Disinformation Ecosystem

    Alexander Reid Ross

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    Introduction

    This study produces a theoretical basis for understanding the political organization behind contemporary illiberal disinformation. I use the word “illiberal” because disinformation tends to attack liberal positions from both the left and the right, often deploying conspiracy theories and populist tropes. While I do not dispute the fact that liberal-oriented disinformation exists, the majority of disinformation is illiberal and pro-Russian in an “information war” waged against the post-war liberal order.[1]

    Starbird, Arif, and Wilson (2018) found a “strategy of targeting, infiltrating, and shaping online activism” among information operations connected to Russia, while Hjorth and Adler-Nissen (2019) found conservatives up to 39% more likely to be exposed to disinformation.[2] It becomes important, then, to understand how disinformation flows influence popular discourse, and conservative discourse in particular, through the radicalization of social movements and the accentuation of certain aspects of them. In this study, I analyze the horizontal and vertical structure of disinformation networks, their ideological character, and their spatial scales.

    First, I consider the form of illiberal ideology within disinformation within the historical patterns and generic definition of fascism, assessing its syncretism in light of a brand of fascist ideology associated with the Russian fascist Alexander Dugin. Second, I assesses the content of “junk news” dissemination via the “vertical” news syndicates of Russian media and the “horizontal” networks of news sites, blogs, and influence groups that help to spread disinformation through a process that I characterize as “refraction.”[3]

    I call this process “refraction,” because it is similar to the way light entering a prism is bent into different colors. It is still the same conceptualization, but different components of it attune toward particular representations. By circulating the same “master narratives” of national decline and rebirth through an ostensibly diverse panoply of sources identified with differing and often combative ideologies—such as libertarian, far left, far right, and environmentalist—disinformation campaigns can gain the appearance of authenticity and media saturation.[4] As I show, these “master narratives” that are “refracted” into different angles or approaches often bear a consistent alignment with “multipolar” goals. This strategic approach involves both the production of “junk news” across a diverse tableau of websites, which tend to be either political or non-political, and its dissemination, far more often by autonomous actors than by automated bots.[5] I do not investigate the psychology of willing actors disseminating “junk news,” because that would require an entire study of its own, involving different methods and data sources.

    Thirdly, to add a practical component to my study, I analyze the function of these media networks in light of Russia’s active measures during the 2016 presidential elections. I find that disinformation has been aided and facilitated through infiltration within and exploitation of broader left-wing narratives casting opposition to Russia-supported disinformation as “McCarthyism.” In this way, I show that disinformation can succeed when given cover by sectors of the media already deemed credible by a significant audience, and that even when utilized by the left, most often serves the interests of the far right.

    I. Fascism and Geopolitics

    In this section, I compare the major ideological positions and strategic devices of contemporary disinformation networks to those of the far-right and fascist networks. I describe fascist syncretism in relation to arguably the most influential fascist in the world, Alexander Dugin. I further describe the key geopolitical aspects of Dugin’s ideology as multipolarism, Traditionalism, and Eurasianism, and explore the strategic importance of “entryism,” or infiltration, to his movement. This ideological analysis helps to illustrate the material influences and tendencies of specific disinformation disseminators, while also forming a backdrop for broader information campaigns.

    Fascism, Right and Left

    Understanding the flows of disinformation across scales in their proper political context requires a precise understanding of the political ideologies involved, including fascism, the populist radical right, and the hard left. Close inspection of fascist ideology reveals a tacit tendency to fuse opposing positions in order to produce a syncretic, quasi-populist combination of elitism and popular mobilization. We need to understand fascism before elaborating the similarities and differences of the populist radical right and the “hard left,” which tend to engage in collaborative efforts to defeat liberalism at the polls or in the streets. I first take a genealogical approach, then a typological approach toward recognizing fascism’s relationship to other movements and ideologies in order to get at a “generic definition” of fascism.

    Fascism must be understood as both an ideology with both revolutionary and reactionary features. The roots of fascism lie in reactionary juridical aspirations to total counter-revolution, which in the late 19th century contributed to a populist movement that appealed to workers, shopkeepers, and the upper-middle class in opposition to republicanism.[6] As the crisis of liberalism manifested in its failure to fulfill its own egalitarian promise, fascists exploited the violent rupture caused by revolutionary socialist opposition. Following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the Italian victory in World War I, fascism emerged as a movement of vanguard aesthetes, intellectuals, and war veterans who called for the obliteration of liberal bureaucracies in favor of a futuristic system based on classical archetypes reproduced by the New Man’s march, unfettered by compromise, into a world of national will. Fascists suffused the reactionary tradition inherited by proto-fascists like the antisemitic trade union, Les Jaunes, with modern elements of collectivism and ultra-nationalism joined with elitism.[7] In opposition to undeserving liberal elites who created the conditions for chaos by offering lip service to equality, they promised their own version of a future where “natural” elites could gain support from a purportedly anti-capitalist system.[8]

    While fascists exploit revolutionary anti-capitalist responses to the failure of liberalism, they also benefit from a history of antisemitism and nationalism within the social movements of the 19th and early 20th Century.[9] I use the term “hard left” to connote such groups identified as left wing who nevertheless perceive the world through the inflexible lens of authoritarianism and conspiracy theories.[10] The “hard left” often abandons precise analyses of material conditions in favor of attacking individuals and groups like the Rothschilds, George Soros, the Bilderberg Group, or an esoteric “Zionist cabal” as the prime movers of world-historical events. Historically, such disdain for supposed conspiratorial “masters of the universe” has led members of the hard left to promote populist syntheses of right and left-wing opposition to liberalism.[11] At this juncture between hard left and radical right, fascist groups can gain hegemony by deploying syncretic ideology toward the generation of socio-political conditions more amenable to fascist movements. At the same time, these movements fail to deliver on their “revolutionary” promises, typically succeeding merely in providing a smoother socio-political basis for the accumulation of capital.[12]

    Thus, fascists glean from revolutionary movements the auspices of a virile state even while finding “classical liberal” allies in their crushing of the radical mass movements they pretended to truly represent.[13] Fascist advocacy of a “national revolution” against technocratic liberal democracy deploys populist tropes against the rising tide of grassroots leftwing movements and invited collaborations with the anti-parliamentary left.[14] The fruits of these efforts emerged in Italy with an aesthetic-nationalist movement that openly conflated right and left terminology in efforts to produce a “New Man” who would bring about the “New Age.”[15] Hence, fascism in its early form represented an undoubtedly right-wing political ideology that offered a totalitarian solution to dissatisfaction with parliamentary compromises—a national revolution that would restore older forms of sovereignty, re-establishing patriarchy at the heart of a revival of classical myths and archetypes. In this sense, I follow Roger Griffin’s “new consensus” definition of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism—i.e., the rebirth of a mythical nation founded on myths of sovereignty and projected into a futurist “New Age” through the nomination of a subjectivity created by and creating a fusion of different, often conflicting and paradoxical ideologies, ideas, and commitments.[16]

    Syncretism

    Syncretism is not merely the fusion of left and right but the assemblage of contradictory concepts into a quasi-spiritual worldview (e.g., national socialism, elitist populism, esoteric political religion, and völkisch futurism) held together as if by magic. Although in general it exposes massive internal conflicts, syncretism enables the particular spatio-temporal adaptation of fascist movements to localized and historical phenomena in order to insinuate “palingenetic ultranationalism” into different conditions, while also opening the possibility of entryism within different political and social groups. In the same way, syncretism becomes a tool through which disinformation networks appropriate pre-existing online cultures, political groups, and social movements, warping their discourses toward the objectives of illiberal populism. Intentional disinformation flows suffuse not only right and left, but disparate socio-political subcultures from the organic food movement to anti-vaxxers to flat earth theories for the development of a syncretic geopolitical subject that conforms to the desires of authoritarian leaders.

    George L. Mosse, among the forerunners of the “new consensus,” Sternhell, one of its critical contemporaries, and Emilio Gentile, a luminary in the current study of fascism, have all offered incisive interpretations of such tendencies, as has antifascist scholar Umberto Eco. For Mosse, fascism represented both the incitement of revolution against liberal democracy and the subsequent taming of that revolution through the incorporation of the masses—an “anti-bourgeois bourgeois revolution.”[17] Hence, through a conditioned populist resentment against the current bourgeois elites, fascism empowered frustrated groups within the bourgeoisie to overthrow the “system” and replace it with their own.

    In his well-known essay, “Ur-Fascism,” Eco contends with the frustration at the heart of fascism and its implications for the “fuzziness” of fascist ideology. Fascism becomes “an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.” Only through this physical acting out of ideological fallacies can fascism oppose the “analytical criticism” that would otherwise level it, Eco argues.[18]

    Throughout his work, Zeev Sternhell observes similar tendencies at root in fascism—namely fascist Georges Valois’s calling for a “fusion of nationalism and socialism.”[19] The currents that emerged in France and Italy, using syndicalist anti-parliamentarianism to fan the flames of mass action in the service of an idealized national myth, produced a collective, right-wing revolutionary subject. Hence, fascism emerged from a sense that the violent overcoming of intellectual and political oppositions could form an ideology of action over ideas.

    In his important essay, Roger Eatwell expands on the contextualization of fascism, identifying a “spectral-syncretic model” for understanding its motivations. Drawing from the themes of “natural history,” geopolitics, political economy, and “leadership, activism, party and propaganda,” Eatwell approaches fascism across different stages and scales in order to obtain a fuller understanding of its necessary components.[20] Fascism could not reconcile entirely the ideological divisions of its time and was left with a partial incorporation of a number of different positions—the New Man and the classical archetype; Christianity and anti-clerical paganism; irrationalism and science; private property and social welfare.[21] For these reasons, fascism’s totalitarian approach to “political culture” actually spread immense ideological confusion that further enabled the Leader to make apparently pragmatic decisions.

    This final point appears also in the work of Emilio Gentile on “Fascism as a Political Religion.” Gentile argues that “this syncretism of different beliefs within fascist ideology permitted the existence of diverse approaches, but none of these could hope to present itself as the only authentic interpretation of the ‘faith.’” The ideological split between fascism and the Catholic Church had to be closed by Fascism’s ultimate triumph over the Church as its genuine representative. Similarly, German fascism “‘Aryanized’ and ‘Germanized’ Christ and God.”[22] In other iterations of fascism throughout the world, for example with Brazil’s Integralistas, syncretism enabled the adoption of “Fascist rationale and leadership… but only in association with local and cultural traditions and innovations carefully selected and emphasized by leading intellectuals.”[23]

    A Brief Introduction to Multipolarity

    The syncretic alternative media networks that engaged in political discourse surrounding the 2016 presidential elections in the US shared in common a commitment to “anti-establishment” politics. Across international and local scales, this alternative media ecosystem typically framed Russia as a leading, global opponent to the establishment. The approach of syncretic alternative media networks, then, promoted a geopolitical understanding of the North Atlantic as the liberal, establishment base, sympathizing instead with Eurasian hegemony in a “multipolar” context.

    Multipolarism emerged in the Soviet Union during the late-60s and 1970s as a realpolitik fix for the crises of Khrushchevian internationalism. Among its most important progenitors, Yevgeni Primakov developed crucial ties between the Soviets and the Ba’athist Parties in both Iraq and Syria.[24] Through multipolarism, the Soviets could support authoritarian-conservative nationalism as a bastion against the US and the State of Israel, which it deemed the global imperialist powers. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Primakov helped translate Soviet era policies, including intelligence operations, into the modern Russian Federation while serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs and then Prime Minister from 1996-1999.[25] After President Boris Yeltsin’s pro-Western tenure, the regime of Vladimir Putin drifted increasingly toward a “multipolarism” dedicated to Russia as an independent, Eurasian world power somewhere between empire and “civilization state.”[26] Today, Putin’s policies are often viewed as a vacillation between Primakov’s “pragmatic” approach and the syncretic approach advocated by the most radical progenitor of “multipolarism,” Russian fascist Alexander Dugin.[27]

    Multipolarism suits Dugin’s brand of fascism, because it stems from the Soviet Union’s support for the authoritarian fusion of nationalist and socialist tendencies in opposition to liberal capitalism.[28] As a National Bolshevik who longed for an ultranationalist form of the Soviet Union, Dugin set the groundwork for the junction of left and right as a feature of disinformation campaigns that often promote Russian media over and against establishment “mainstream media,” and in some cases are openly affiliated with Duginist ideology. However, disinformation involves a complex field of shared interests, overlapping audience, and collaborative partnerships in which Dugin and his ideology play an important and influential role—perhaps even to the chagrin of some of its other progenitors.

    Dugin’s Eurasianism and Traditionalism

    Dugin’s geopolitical ideology, which he calls “Eurasianism,” stems from an effort to join multiple regions and diverse political and spiritual approaches into an overarching, imperial construct stretching from Dublin to Vladivostok.[30] Configured in accordance with a “multipolar” strategy, Dugin’s Eurasia would echo an agenda similar to the European New Right and its chief advocate, Alain de Benoist, who is one of Dugin’s intellectual heroes.[31] Arguing for a heterogeneous assemblage of homogenous ethnostates, such a multipolar world relies on authoritarian regimes masked as direct democracy through predicates of a community solidarity based on strict “natural hierarchies” associated with staunch, “blood and soil” patriarchy.[32]

    Hence, Dugin argues for a Traditionalist approach that endorses far-right Russian Orthodoxy, Protestant fundamentalists, the kind of reactionary Catholicism advocated by Rexist Leon Degrelle and practiced by members of the Spanish Falange, and hardline Shi’a Islam, as long as they remain within discrete geographic regions. Dugin’s most influential book to date, Foundations of Geopolitics, situates post-war fascists within the genealogy of “classical” geopolitical theorists. Instead of full-blown Hitlerism, then, Dugin maintains a position of “conservative revolution,” referring to far-right Nazi collaborators like Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger as his immediate influences.[33] Despite his efforts to place some distance between himself and the old Nazi Party core, Dugin’s analysis results in a racist, occult screed about the prior existence of a Hyperborean “root race” of pure Aryan types.[34]

    Nationalist Entryism

    Amid the reaction to Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution in Russia, Duginism was transmitted into a street-level movement of “managed nationalism” that, alongside youth organizations like the Gladiators, Nashi, and the Slavic Union, could defeat liberal opposition to Putin’s administration within Russia, itself.[35] Dugin also helped create a new political party called Rodina (Motherland) alongside former left-wing economist and LaRouche associate, Sergei Glazyev, hoping to support Putin through “controlled democracy” by using nativism to draw working class votes from the Communist Party.[36] Although Rodina transitioned to the leadership of Sergei Rogozin, whose geopolitical vision is quite different from Dugin’s, Rodina and its leadership continued to draw leftists into a right-wing opposition to liberalism.

    In accordance with their worldview, Duginists and similar far-right activists worked to enter the anti-globalization movement through an illiberal “anti-globalist” approach. Among the most open instances of entryism occurred among Dugin’s followers in Italy, where Claudio Mutti and his colleagues, Claudio Terciano and Tiberio Graziani, among other right-wing extremists, were allowed to affiliate with the Assisi-based Campo Antimperialista.[37] Although recent literature on the subject suggests that their interventions ended due to the controversy that it raised, the milieu fostered by active participation of fascists with left-wing anti-imperialists provided the space for important left-wingers to convert to the Eurasianist cause.[38] By the mid-2000s, the Campo had drawn in Holocaust denier Claudio Moffa and an important Marxist theorist named Costanzo Preve, who gravitated toward the Duginists, publishing with their presses and appearing with them at conferences.

    In conjunction with the Russian Anti-Globalization Movement, later recast as the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, members of Rodina would emerge as an illiberal, reactionary force merging right and left through collaboration with other ostensibly left-wing, anti-imperialist groups from the Campo Antimperialista to associated left-wing groups in the US like the Workers World Party.[39] This considerable left-right crossover compounded ongoing organizational crossover across national and international scales, particularly over the question of geopolitical “multipolarism.”[40] Along with other interlinked think tanks like the German Center for Eurasian Studies and the Polish European Center of Geopolitical Analysis, propaganda organs like Graziani’s Geopolitica, and international conferences like Iran’s New Horizon, the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, Campo Antimperialista, and Workers World Party contributed to the development of an extensive international network supported by Russian soft power and largely favorable to the Kremlin’s geopolitical initiatives.

    Conclusion

    The ideology and strategy of “managed nationalism,” or state support of right-wing groups to dismantle the gains of the left, emerged across international and local scales in relation to Dugin’s participation in the ideological and practical reactionary movements of the early-mid-2000s. With the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the later conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, the Kremlin’s rhetoric and practices pivoted more toward Eurasianism, bringing Dugin and his associates greater influence.[41] For instance, Dugin’s compatriot, Sergei Glazyev, who opined about a Jewish plot to replace Russians, became Putin’s advisor on Eurasianism.[42] This geopolitical pivot brought with it a new form of “hybrid warfare” (often framed as “the Gerasimov doctrine”), which advances cyber-attacks, propaganda techniques, and disinformation in accordance with many of the “net-centric war” theory outlined by Dugin and developed further by the Command and Control Research Program of the Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense, in which Russia strives to win physical contests before they happen by controlling the information space through information operations that delegitimize their geopolitical opposition.[43]

    It is important to note that the theories that drive modern covert action are opaque by nature, and Dugin’s is one of at least three leading, and often interwoven, influential theoretical formulations of hybrid war (with Evgeny Messner and Igor Panarin), which cannot be fully exposited in this article. In the next section, however, I will show the integral participation of Duginist networks in disinformation campaigns, and the deployment of discursive and strategic approaches associated with Duginism—particularly, as Starbird, Arif, and Wilson show, the “strategy of targeting, infiltrating, and shaping online activism,” syncretism, and geopolitical positions aligned with multipolarity.[44] Through this effort, we can gain a clearer understanding of the usage of extremism within disinformation campaigns.

    II. The Vertical and Horizontal Structure of Illiberal Disinformation Networks

    When presenting the media ecosystem that forwards the Kremlin’s foreign policy interests, the obvious imperative falls on describing its state-funded and state-run media, which have at many points spearheaded online disinformation. This section first unpacks Russian state media available in the West through RT and Sputink in Horbyk’s terms, as “a vertikal—a Soviet‐time term connoting a strictly hierarchical and monolithic power apparatus—in the media system.”[45] Next, it explores some different horizontal networks of influence groups and websites that help disseminate pro-Russian disinformation. Lastly, it shows tacit integration between the two.

    The “Vertikal”

    The origins of RT are somewhat murky, but can generally be located in RIA Novosti. A state-run Russian news agency, RIA Novosti created a non-profit called TV-Novosti, which then founded RT as “Russia Today” in 2005 amid the “managed nationalism” campaign. While TV-Novosti’s non-profit status gives RT the pretense of autonomy from direct state control, the organization is considered extremely important for the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign strategies. RT first emerged to promote Russian culture, but the experience of the 2008 conflict in Georgia and contested 2011 Russian legislative elections led to its transition into “a political tool to undermine the American position in global politics.”[46]

    During Occupy Wall Street, RT promoted left-wing opposition to liberal economics by hosting a number of left activists from the US and other countries in Europe. In discussions ranging from economics to geopolitics, leftists found the attention they felt they deserved, and a platform to spread their ideas to millions of people. At the same time, RT provided platforms to Eurasianists like German Duginist Manuel Ochsenreiter, Polish activist Mateusz Piskorski, and Claudio Mutti’s colleague Tiberio Graziani. Piskorski would go to Polish jail on charges of spying for Russia and China, while Ochsenreiter stands implicated in a 2019 “false flag” firebombing of a Hungarian cultural center in Ukraine, which prosecutors believe is connected to Russian secret services.[47] As well, RT promoted conspiracy theorists like “great replacement” theorist Renaud Camus and French “9/11 truth” activist Thierry Meyssan, whose own media node, Voltaire Network, includes Dugin associate and Rosneft spokesperson Mikhail Leontyev among its stable of writers.[48] In this manner, RT groups together left-wing and right-wing illiberalism corresponding to a quasi-populist coalition in favor of the Kremlin’s geopolitical imperatives (e.g., support for Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s semi-clandestine occupation of the Donbass, and Euroskepticism).

    RT’s efforts provide an aura of respectability to marginal Duginist activists, thus boosting their pet causes and projects. For instance, RT promoted an obscure fascist commentator named Joaquin Flores as an informed pundit. Hailing from Los Angeles, Flores helped moderate a left-wing MySpace forum in the early 2000s before moving to fascism based on his rejection of feminism and liberalism. He joined a spin-off of the fascist skinhead group American Front, called New Resistance, run by long-time fascist James Porrazzo. New Resistance helped bring Flores into the international Duginist network, through which he moved to Belgrade, developed political affinities with the far-right Serbian Radical Party, and helped broaden the Duginist online network. In the early 2010s, Flores joined the Center for Syncretic Studies (CSS), which focuses on developing the Duginist foundations of Eurasianism and multipolarism.[49] CSS’s media site, Fort Russ, provides news and analysis from a Duginist perspective. Through this work, Flores became a well-known figure among Duginists, but remained entirely obscure until RT’s promotion opportunities.

    Another Duginist given public attention by RT is Andrew Korybko. One of the more prolific commentators in the Duginist think tank Katehon, Korybko has written a book about hybrid war addressing Syria and Ukraine, and between 2015-2016 he placed seven articles in the website of Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, which likely developed aspects of the strategy for intervention in the 2016 elections.[50] The leader at the time, a Lieutenant General of the Foreign Intelligence Service named Leonid Reshetnikov, also sat on the board of Katehon.[51] Though at this point Korybko maintains a high stature in Russian political life, RT’s attention both represented and propelled his ascent.

    Hence, RT not only facilitates the spread of Duginist geopolitics through the promotion of its exponents, but it has become a key conduit relaying informational presentation from think tanks to the public. As well, RT came to promote conspiracy theories as ways of confusing its audience’s understanding of key issues in order to advance Russian policy interests. In the words of scholar Ilya Yablokov, RT became “a specific tool of Russian public diplomacy aimed at undermining the policies of the US government and, in turn, defending Russia’s actions.”[52] In particular, Yablokov observes, RT promoted the “underdog” vision of Vladislav Surkov, mastermind of “sovereign democracy” and “managed nationalism”—“conveying Russia as a ‘speaker’ on behalf of the third-world nations excluded from the US-led ‘New World Order.’” However, Yablokov argues that RT is not truly Duginist, since the “ambiguity and heterogeneity of the ideological foundation of the current Russian political regime makes anti-Americanism the only constant element of RT’s agenda.”[53] Such an orientation enables the support of populist political parties, usually of the radical right, which the Kremlin hopes to support as an increasingly viable alternative to the EU and NATO.

    In December 2013, RIA Novosti and radio service Voice of Russia were brought together under the name Russiya Segodnya, which literally translates to Russia Today. Although the Kremlin denies that Russiya Segodnya and RT are connected, they share the same editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan.[54] Within a year, Russiya Segodnya reconfigured the previously-existing Voice of Russia into Sputnik News, which would feature international news and podcasts under the name Radio Sputnik. In the words of Roman Horbyk, “The launch of new state news agencies Rossiya Segodnia (based on the restructured RIA Novosti) and Sputnik, with budgets in the billions, marked the completion of a vertikal—a Soviet‐time term connoting a strictly hierarchical and monolithic power apparatus—in the media system.”[55] Created to counter “propaganda promoting a unipolar world,” Sputnik more explicitly delivered their terms of multipolarism and more openly advocated for left-right syncretism against “Atlantic liberalism.”[56] Sputnik would become more radical than RT in forwarding conspiracy theories, Eurasianism, and alliances between fascists and leftists in opposition to liberalism.

    Additional fascinating examples of Russian state systems percolating into the alternative media ecosystem are Redfish, the New Eastern Outlook (or Journal-NEO), and Strategic Culture. Promoting stories of social unrest in opposition to neoliberalism, Redfish is a project supported by the Kremlin that bears the aesthetics of an independent alternative news startup giving it more social media appeal than RT, from which most of its publicly-associated employees hailed in 2018.[57] The publication of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, New Eastern Outlook produces conspiracy theories about Rothschilds and George Soros and Islamophobic material, and hosts articles by Duginist Catherine Shakhdam and conspiracy theorist Vanessa Beeley, among others. Although New Eastern Outlook has a far smaller reach than Sputnik and RT, it provides more appearance of diversity within a media ecosystem largely controlled by think tanks and the vertikal.[58] Similarly, the Strategic Culture Foundation emerged from a Moscow think tank run by former-Soviet politician, Yuri Prokofiev, to undermine US foreign policy, hosting disinformation purveyors who appear to present autonomous and unbiased findings on their commentary site, Strategic Culture.[59] In short, the post-Soviet vertikal functions as controlled state media despite giving the appearance, on occasion, of an autonomous “free press” that appeals to left-of-center dissenters and lay geopolitical analysts who feel underrepresented in Western media.

    Horizontal Soft Power and the Alternative Media Ecosystem

    If Russian state media marks a vertikal, soft-power groups and alternative media organizations make up the accompanying horizontal networks. Here, the term “horizontal” is used to connote relative autonomy from the state but not equal relations between sites. Some sites are obviously more privileged than others, as is reflected in differential support from the vertikal, but they nevertheless remain engaged in a common system of propaganda “refraction.”

    Since Journal-NEO and Strategic Culture are directly connected to the Russian state, I have grouped them in the vertikal, but they behave more like horizontal network nodes, because their affiliations are opaquer. Soft power groups are often funded by the Kremlin or its loyal oligarchs, and typically promote round tables, academic conferences, and the dissemination of information and disinformation. The latter work of dissemination is commonly related to an alternative media ecosystem that engages a network of editors and journalists in the publication of articles that often reuse the same pro-Kremlin narratives with different “packaging” depending on the ideological bent of the site and its audience.[60] Soft power networks rely on fascists and far-right nationalists developing institutions that will propagate pro-Russian influence.

    Soft-power groups explored by Anton Shekhovtsov’s monograph, Russia and the Western Far Right, include the group around the Italian journal Geopolitica, founded by Graziani, and its related French group, the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, founded by Natalya Narochnitskaya, who ran for election as a Rodina candidate. These two groups have had overlapping membership—for instance Narochnitskaya is on Geopolitica’s “Scientific Board” and US libertarian John Laughland has featured on the board of both.[61] Other inter-connected “think tanks,” publications, and institutions, such as Piskorski’s European Center of Geopolitical Analysis and Ochsenreiter’s German Center for Eurasian Studies, join in the promotion of pro-Kremlin propaganda efforts, including “election observation” for fraudulent elections in Eastern Europe.[62] While these European networks hold import for regional politics, an interlinked US-centered network similarly exists to support Russia’s geopolitical interests across the Atlantic.

    Many of the current influence groups within the US promoting Russia’s agenda through disinformation have a common “roof” through the efforts of far-right political operator Edward Lozansky. Born in the Soviet Union, Lozansky moved to the US toward the end of the Cold War in order to lobby in favor of Russian dissidents. He gained useful friends among the US New Right, including Heritage Foundation founder, Paul Weyrich, who would prove instrumental in replacing regimes formerly under Soviet control with far-right nationalists. Lozansky worked to set up a new “American University in Moscow” and a related “think tank,” which would group together “non-interventionist” journalists and political activists. Through his university, Lozansky produced a semi-annual “Russia Forum” where both pro-Russia leftists and rightists, including influential Congressmen and prominent media figures, mingle and share ideas on media, policy, education, and political strategy.[63]

    As of mid-2018, “Research fellows” at Lozansky’s university included members of RT and the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, as well as the head of Dugin’s Centre for Conservative Studies, Mark Sleboda, and Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute, who described himself as a “Traditionalist” in his Twitter profile before changing it in 2019.[64] Another “research fellow,” Gilbert Doctorow, worked through the Russia Forum in 2014 to re-found the 1970s pro-détente group, the American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA), with co-founder Stephen F. Cohen.[65] A contributing editor to The Nation magazine, Cohen helped bring important political and business figures onto the board of ACEWA, while the group took on far-right journalist James Carden to edit its website.[66] The ACEWA’s launch later that year in Brussels brought together a round table including Aymeric Chauprade, a far-right advisor to the Front National’s Marine Le Pen who had recently returned from “observing” the illegal referendum in Crimea (Chauprade is also a member of the red-brown Izborsky Club think tank with Dugin, Glazyev, Leontyev, and Narochnitskaya, and is also on the “scientific committee” of Graziani’s Geopolitica).[67] Lozanksy himself has appeared with Dugin both on television and at conferences, as well as fascist ideologues like Alain de Benoist and former WikiLeaks attaché Israel Shamir. Aside from co-authoring articles with Lozansky in the far-right Washington Times, Doctorow openly advocates de Benoist’s vision of an illiberal populism fusing left and right.[68]

    Hence, Doctorow helped to foster in the ACEWA a pro-Kremlin organization linked to other soft-power groups around Europe through Lozansky’s Russia Forum. Along with the Russia Forum, Doctorow helped give a pro-alt-right propaganda site called Russia Insider its start. Russia Insider’s North American donations were “processed” by Consortium News, another pro-Kremlin site featuring syncretic political activists.[69] Among Consortium News’s stable of authors is Caitlin Johnstone, who calls for “shameless” alliances between the left and right in favor of the Kremlin’s interests, Pepe Escobar, who regularly appears at the conferences of Iran’s sanctioned, anti-Semitic New Horizon organization, and Max Blumenthal, who has been criticized for promoting conspiracy theories about Syria’s White Helmets and advocating a “multipolar world.”[70] Other fellows listed at Lozansky’s university think tank include a blogger named Anatoly Karlin, who has moved from his Da Russophile blog to the far-right Unz Review, and disbarred attorney Alexander Mercouris of alternative media site, The Duran, whose director hosts a program on RT. As well, Patrick Armstrong, James Jatras, and Anthony Salvia are interesting mentions on Lozansky’s list, because they were also listed as authors for Global Independent Analytics (GIAnalytics), a site that New Knowledge finds closely associated with the Internet Research Agency’s “troll factory.”[71] A glance at a sample of the members of Lozansky’s think tank who are connected to alternative news outlets and the sites they represent shows impressive content sharing [Table 1].

    American University in Moscow Ron Paul Institute The Duran Consortium News Russophile/Unz Review GIAnalytics Rank
    Edward Lozansky X X X 3rd
    Daniel McAdams X X X X 2nd
    Alexander Mercouris X X X X 3rd
    Gilbert Doctorow X X X 3rd
    Anatoly Karlin X X 4th
    Patrick Armstrong X X X  * X 2nd
    James Jatras X X X X X 1st
    Anthony Salvia X X 4th
    Rank
    		 1st 3rd 2nd 4th 2nd 4th

    Table 1. An examination of cross-referenced authors and websites linked to the American University in Moscow’s think tank. The grey boxes signify that the author is a high-ranking member of or core writer for the site.
    * Note that Patrick Armstrong appears to post in Consortium News’s comments, but does not appear to be an author for the site.

    I analyzed the content sharing and cross-promotion of authors associated with the American University in Moscow in Table 1 by searching for the authors’ bylines within the websites in question. An “X” signifies that the author’s work appears in or is associated with the site or group in question. Association is used with regards to the American University in Moscow, while content inclusion is used with the other four sites. The most cross-published author in the group associated with Lozansky that I studied is Jatras, with Mercouris close behind and Lozansky, McAdams, and Doctorow tied for third. The sites that have cross-published every author are The Duran and the Unz Review, with Consortium News proving the most selective in this context. At the same time, Consortium News does quote McAdams as “a highly respected former Foreign Service Officer possessing impeccable credentials,” and while the Ron Paul Institute is only the second most selective, it also hosts an article quoting Gilbert Doctorow as a US-Russia relations analyst without an indication of bias. It is important to note that this set is only representative of alternative figures associated in 2018 with the American University in Moscow according to its website, and other connections with other sites are explored further in this article.

    I could not find evidence that GIAnalytics, the group most directly tied to the Internet Research Agency by the Mueller Report, cross-published any of the other authors; however, the site is offline now, making it difficult to research their archives. Other than Lozansky’s think tank, GIAnalytics has the highest membership out of the sample of groups represented at the American University in Moscow, with Consortium News in close second. Importantly, Joaquin Flores features as a member of GIAnalytics, and his site Fort Russ found promotional space at Lozansky’s Russia Forum along with Consortium News and Russia Insider. This again shows open Duginist involvement within the “alternative media” networks mobilized and supported by Lozansky in the context of his institutions. Figure 1 shows clear connections between GI Analytics and other groups in the sample, such as Russia Insider and The Duran (DiResta et al., 2018).

    Figure 1. Image of the GIAnalytics network produced by DiResta et al., 2018. Note the presence of Russia Insider, The Duran, The Saker, and Fort Russ, as well as Mercouris and Flores.

    Lozansky and his fellows also receive promotion and airtime on Russian state media, particularly Sputnik Radio. One show host at Sputnik, Brian Becker, is the head of Party for Socialism and Liberation, a spin-off of the hard-left Workers World Party.[72] On his show Loud & Clear, Becker has hosted Mercouris, as well as McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute, whose board also includes Geopolitica and Institute for Democracy and Cooperation member, John Laughland. Duginist Mark Sleboda made it on Loud & Clear more than forty times in the first two years of the program. Another Duginist, Catherine Shakhdam, was hosted more than twenty times during the same time period. Lozanksy, himself, joined the Sputnik News program of Scottish socialist John Wight, Hard Facts, for interviews promoting the “multipolar world.”[73] Of course, RT has helped forward the same voices, for instance hosting Doctorow, Becker, and McAdams on the same CrossTalk program in September 2016 for a conversation about “Increased Tensions” between Russia and the US. The promotion of horizontal networks joining the hard left to Duginists through the vertikal suggests that the Eurasianist approach to the “multipolar world” plays a role in overdetermining the geopolitical oppositions between nationalism and internationalism, particularly through the uses and distortions of the notion of anti-imperialism.[74]

    Site Overlap and Content Sharing

    Studies of site metrics and content sharing have exposed significant overlap both among “master narratives” and audiences who visit pro-Russian sites responsible for disinformation. This overlap suggests that a strong subculture of internet users regularly access these websites for their understanding of current events. It also renders explicit different scales of dissemination, from vertical to horizontal to mainstream.

    In December 2017 and January 2018, I ran the Audience Overlap Tool available through Alexa.[75] Using proprietary algorithms, the Audience Overlap Tool identifies and ranks the sites that audience members use to travel from and to a given site, and then presents a visualization of those sites based on their own audience. Thus, it both visually and numerically represents the clustering of sites. It should be noted that audience overlap does not necessarily imply shared ideology. A site might share an audience because people click to and from a ruthless critique. However, using empirical data and qualitative analysis, we can identify ideologically similar sites from ideologically opposed ones. This becomes complicated given the syncretic characteristics of disinformation schemes; however, where their agreement on specific issues becomes more pronounced than their general ideological differences, they are still considered similar and their clustering is considered to be representative of their similarity rather than their opposition.

    It should also be noted that clustering becomes dependent on the variables, or sites, selected in relation to one another. I chose Russia Insider, Consortium News, and The Nation because they have important relationships in associated personnel, and added The Saker as another site anchored within the illiberal disinformation ecosystem. While those individual sites do not change with regards to their individual site cross-overs, the overall visualization reflects the way that clustering occurs in relation to the four sites. Had I chosen different sites within the same network, the overall clustering would not appear the same.

    When I ran Alexa’s model, I observed significant clustering among Russian sites (vertical) clearly connected to Western-based pro-Russia media (horizontal), which shows a clear relationship with more mainstream sites autonomous from the disinformation ecosystem [Figure 2]. The Nation appears to present this bridge from the horizontal to the mainstream, while Russia Insider seems to present the site furthest embedded within the Russian media. As we will see in the next section, this composition appears to be further evidenced when examining the usage of “McCarthyite” as a slur during 2016 presidential elections.

    In an investigation into the site metrics (clicks from incoming and outgoing readers) of the most frequented Russia-friendly site in December 2017, The Duran, turned up a cluster of related sites—especially The Saker and 21stCenturyWire, which harbor the closest affinity for Russian politics and Duginist positions outside of those self-described Russian websites, themselves. Most of its viewers clicked over from Facebook, Google, and YouTube; however, importantly, Russia Insider and rt.com accounted for the fourth and fifth most clicks, showing how the audience flutters between networks.

    The fourth and fifth most entered sites from The Duran were Russia Insider and The Saker, which received more than 54,000 unique hits per month. The audiences for the Duran and The Saker show significant audience overlap with Russia Insider and Fort Russ, according to Alexa, suggesting a strong correlation between its politics and those of the Duginist network. Significantly, among the highest search engine keywords for those clicking on The Duran was “George Soros,” indicating a high degree of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists enjoying their articles.[76]

    Figure 2. The site overlap visualization tool from Alexa produced this representation of discrete overlapping groups.
    Figure 3. Data visualization of content sharing networks found in Starbird et al. 2018.

    This complex assemblage of groups not only shares significant audience overlap but engages in important content sharing. In an important academic study of this syncretic approach, “Ecosystem or Echosystem? Exploring Content Sharing across Alternative Media Domains,” scholars Kate Starbird, et. al., identify the same websites appearing to produce alternative frameworks and approaches to news stories, such as The Russophile, 21st Century Wire, The Duran, and Consortium News [Figure 3].[77] Each of these sites maintains “strong political themes reflecting distinct (and in some cases, seemingly conflicting) ideologies—including anti-imperialist left, libertarian, conservative and alt-right; as well as other more niche ideological leanings, including explicit anti-Semitism,” the authors state. Yet, the authors importantly conclude that these websites “are publishing the same content, but inside very different wrappers.”[78] A number of the same sites also appear in the study conducted by New Knowledge for the US Senate, because they either participated in or were directly supported by Russian disinformation “factory,” the Internet Research Agency.[79]

    Table 2 assesses overlapping members across Lozansky’s think tank, the content-sharing conspiracy theory sites in Starbird et al, 2018; those associated with GI Analytics according to New Knowledge’s 2018 white paper; those who the 2019 Stanford study found published fake authors attributed to the GRU, [80] and the Alexa model’s findings of overlapping sites between Russia Insider, Consortium News, The Saker, and The Nation. It should be noted that lack of affiliation of a member of a site with the American University in Moscow’s think tank does not indicate no connection to Russian media, while the reverse is true: affiliation suggests a person is engaged in pro-Russian illiberal media efforts.

    Lozansky fellow Starbird New Knowledge
    		 Stanford Rank
    Consortium News X X 3rd
    Fort Russ X X X 2nd
    The Saker X X 3rd
    The Duran X X X X 1st
    Russia Insider X X X X 1st
    RT X X 3rd
    Global Research X X X X 1st
    Unz/DaRussophile X X X 2nd
    21st Century Wire X 4th
    MintPressNews X X X X 2nd
    Voice of Russia/Sputnik X X 3rd

    Table 2. An X marks representation of affiliation of a member of the website with Lozansky’s think tank and presence in studies on disinformation content sharing (Starbird et al., 2018), Russian meddling (DiResta et al., 2018), fake authors (DiResta and Grossman, 2019), and audience overlap (based on 2018 Alexa search).

    Overlap in Table 2 mostly indicates whether the site is connected to Lozansky’s think tank, and whether it is observed as part of a disinformation ecosystem that involves significant content sharing (Starbird et al., 2018), audience overlap (Alexa), and is connected to the Internet Research Agency (Diresta et al., 2018) or published fake authors associated with the GRU’s disinformation efforts (Diresta and Grossman, 2019). The highest overlap occurs with The Duran, associated with Lozansky fellow, Alexander Mercouris; Global Research, a conspiracy theory site founded by former LaRouchite Michel Chossudovsky (who is also on the board of Graziani’s Geopolitica); and Russia Insider, associated with ACEWA cofounder, Consortium News member, and Lozansky co-author, Gilbert Doctorow. Next come Unz, Fort Russ, and MintPressNews. Voice of Russia, RT, The Saker, and Consortium News come in third place. The least overlap comes with 21st Century Wire, a site founded by a former associate editor of Alex Jones’s Infowars that includes, among other things, a 45-minute interview with Dugin.

    By embracing politics associated with different factions and sides in political conflict, media can appeal to different audiences and bind them through a common thread. In most cases I studied, that commonality would be geopolitical. By spreading disinformation across discrete political platforms, the alternative media “echo-system,” as some have called it, could exploit popular discontent against “the establishment” and desire for radical analysis through a process of media saturation. Yet the saturation, whereby multifarious platforms disseminate the same content by sharing one another’s articles, carries a second effect of uniting those discrete ideologies in a singular geopolitical agenda. For this reason, the horizontal disinformation syndicate studied above can be seen as a combined, if decentered and complex, system with syncretic characteristics. While it is largely self-organized, it relies on subtle cues within a hierarchy of privileged interests to adapt and reproduce media narratives often spontaneously in real time.

    Through this process, the syncretic media system engages in what I call refraction—a splitting and polarizing movement that reinforces the distinction between ideological “wrappers” that produce a “multipolar” assemblage of ideological positions out of a single ur-narrative under the aegis of geopolitics. While they vie for attention and publicity toward their own particular tendencies and leaders, the procedure tends to promote illiberal politics on an affective range and in matters of policy, whereby the commonality between ideologies is typically some variance of anti-establishment politics, and the establishment is generally viewed as “neoliberal.” Relying on Noberto Bobbio’s explication of the difference between left and right that hinges on the assertion of equality, the present study therefore finds that illiberal syncretism, while supportive of some left-wing tendencies, ultimately reproduces an authoritarian and therefore inegalitarian assemblage. There is perhaps no better example of the tacit support for authoritarian, populist politics than the disinformation media landscape’s engagement in the 2016 presidential elections in the US.[81]

    III. Disinformation as Cover for Active Measures: A Case Study of the 2016 US Presidential Elections

    During the lead-up to the November 2016 elections, some of the same journalists and media critics who denied Russian intervention and called people who recognized it “McCarthyites” were, at the same time, involved in pro-Kremlin influence groups with ties to Russian soft power organizations. Late in March 2019, special prosecutor Robert Mueller submitted his report to the Attorney General, William P. Barr, who promptly offered a summary declaring insufficient evidence in the case of collusion between the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and Russian officials. While many across the alternative news scene celebrated what they deemed vindication for casting doubts on collusion between Trump and Russia, they did not focus on the part of the Attorney General’s summary that described the special prosecutor’s findings of Russian intervention in the 2016 elections. Indeed, Mueller’s team exposed a sweeping disinformation operation extending from Kremlin-supported sources, and found that Russia’s GRU hacked the the Democratic National Committee and Clinton advisor John Podesta.[82]

    The final part of this study describes the influence of alternative media sites, supported by disinformation, in promoting the narrative that the assertion of Russian election meddling represented “McCarthyism.” Because of my findings of overlap described above, I was unsure where the narrative of “McCarthyism” would have begun. I created a vertikal hypothesis that the term was initially fielded by disinformation agents among the vertikal and then percolated through the horizontal media system into the mainstream. My alternative hypothesis was that the narrative emerged in the horizontal network and found re-enforcement in the vertikal. A null hypothesis identifying “no difference” would suggest the narrative began and was propogated chiefly by actors not associated with either horizontal or vertikal.

    After a careful, qualitative study of the evidence, my alternative hypothesis proved more adequate to explain the complex dissemination of the “McCarthyite” narrative than either the null or primary hypotheses. The claims of “McCarthyism” actually began with media figures connected to Russian disinformation circles closest to the US mainstream. Hence, in this case, there was a directional movement between Russian media, the horizontal structure of supporting sites, and the mainstream, but it flowed in the opposite direction from the one that would indicate a top-down, Russian operation, per se. Even if those using the accusation were still engaged in each cluster within the overall system, what I observed was something more like an incentive-based marketplace in which Russian media helped select and amplify particular networks and signals coming from discrete, autonomous and semi-autonomous actors within a syncretic network engaging in broad content-sharing.

    Methods

    My research question was whether pro-Kremlin influence operations helped forward pro-Trump narratives in the lead-up to the 2016 elections, and if so, what were their relationship to the international fascist movement? To answer this question, I performed a qualitative content analysis of the media listed by Google News referencing “McCarthyite” and “McCarthyism,” and then cross-referenced my findings with a Nexis Uni® search of the same terms with regards to the US presidential elections, from the end of the primary races to the end of Election Week. With this time span, we can understand better how the term “McCarthyite” increased in usage, as well as the extent to which its usage changed in relation to events taking place during the Republican and Democratic primary campaigns—particularly the release of the hacked Podesta and DNC emails.

    The popularity of particular articles using the term, as well as their impact on other articles and the extent to which they were linked to, reveal key influencers with regards to the usage of the term and the context through which its meaning is constructed. The total number of articles featuring “McCarthyite” and “McCarthyism” in 2015 was 1,464, increasing by 21% to 1,772 in 2016, and again by 104% to 3,611 the year after that, illustrating a significant growth in the terms’ usage. The most referenced person was Donald Trump, followed by Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Bernie Sanders in that order, with the content indicating that most articles on “McCarthyism” were opposed to the notion that his campaign was supported by Russian active measures.

    I first stratified the population of hundreds of reports from the time period of June 1 to November 12, 2016 (n=693 in Nexis Uni®), at the end of elections week, separating articles using “McCarthyite” and “McCarthyism” in reference to the elections from those referencing other events. I then took a semi-random sample of 40 articles from mainstream and alternative news sources serving a mostly-US-based audience for qualitative analysis. Because the data is time series-dependent, insofar as the quantity of articles using “McCarthyism” increased, my sample needed to reflect the proportion of articles published within that time series. By using this method, I performed an analysis of the trends in the way that “McCarthyism” or “McCarthyite” was used, the inter-relations between usages, and the popularity of specific usages in reflexive, temporal, and co-constructive context. Lastly, I analyzed the Google Trends spreadsheet for “McCarthyism” to gauge the level and time of public interest and see if Google searches for the term coincided with prominent articles and events.[83]

     

    Search of “McCarthyism” (blue, n = 6,106) in Google Trends from June 1 to November 12, 2016 (searched on January 11, 2020)

    Data analysis required a qualitative differentiation between left and right-wing sites that used the term, and how the term is deployed relative to the political orientation of the site. In this way, better understanding could be gained on whether or not the term is used in a “partisan” fashion, or if its usage is generalized across political boundaries (and whether the fusion of political opposites bears its own partisanship). Other key terms, such as “Russia” and “collusion,” as well as “liberal,” point us toward a qualitative comprehension of the purpose for the term “McCarthyite.” In sum, this approach, which assesses the influence of given articles while qualitatively discerning their political positionality, brings us to a closer understanding of the evolution of the deployment of the term “McCarthyite,” and the dynamics of political relations comprising the ideology of Trumpism and its opponents.

    In short, I observed the usage of the term “McCarthyism” across different political platforms to understand the extent to which usage overlapped in terms of rhetoric, as well as deliberate cross-over (e.g., an interview of WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange on FOX News reposted on Sputnik News). The driver for the discourse of McCarthyism seems to have been Kremlin-sympathetic media networks, some of which actively engage with Kremlin oriented soft-power organizations. However the phenomena became widespread very rapidly as key influencers adopted and endorsed it. Hence, while decrying “McCarthyism” and conflating Russia with the left, a number of actors engaging in accusations of “McCarthyism” participated in a syncretic network with critical nodes in Russian media itself. This should not be surprising, since those involved in pro-Russia groups might level accusations to defend against people criticizing Russian interference. It follows that the claims of Russian interference have been supported by available evidence, so the accusations were often deceptive and functionally part of a broader disinformation campaign around the hacks and dissemination thereof that included conspiracy theories around murdered Clinton campaign staffer Seth Rich.

    Allegations of “McCarthyism”

    July 2016 was a busy month for the Clinton campaign as it geared up for the Democratic National Convention. On Friday, July 22, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 emails leaked from seven different accounts of high-level DNC officials like Communications Director Luis Miranda and Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer. At least some of the leaks came from a hacker who went by the name “Guccifer 2.0,” allegedly a GRU cutout, but Assange denied that Guccifer or any other Russian source had provided the leaks, implying that they may have come from Seth Rich, a deceased DNC worker, while simultaneously stating that as a matter of policy WikiLeaks never disclosed the sources of leaks.[84] The salacious contents of the emails would preclude any party unity, as Sanders supporters grew outraged over emails that showed that the DNC unjustly favored the Clinton’s campaign.

    The day after the leaks, Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN that they believed that Russia had hacked the DNC’s accounts and sent the emails to WikiLeaks, who timed the release to help the Trump campaign. Many enraged Sanders supporters rejected the implications. As the Democrats went into their Convention, they were more disunited than ever, with embittered Sanders supporters attacking the notion of Russian intervention as a distraction from the DNC’s sabotage of the left. After Mook’s appearance, journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted an image of Joseph McCarthy with the hashtag “UniteBlue” (Figure 4). The next day, June 24, ACEWA participant and then-editor and publisher of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, tweeted a RealClearPolitics article about Mook, adding the commentary: “McCarthyism 3.0/ Clinton Campaign Manager: Russians Gave Hacked DNC Emails to WikiLeaks In Attempt To Elect Trump” (Figure 5). The Nation’s editorial, “Against Neo-McCarthyism,” came three days later.[85] Between July 17 to 24, Google Trends shows a sharp increase of searches for the word “McCarthyite.” The term “McCarthyism” began to rise at this time and did not peak until election week, after which it dropped off considerably before rising even higher in January 2017.[86]

    Figure 4. Tweet by Glenn Greenwald posted after Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook appeared on CNN to say that Russia had hacked the DNC servers.
    Figure 5. Tweet by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, the day after Robby Mook’s appearance on CNN.

    Trump continued to gaslight the Clinton campaign, at once denying Russian involvement and enjoining Russian hackers, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”[87] That Saturday, Stephen F. Cohen of the ACEWA appeared on CNN, responding to claims that Putin might have hacked the DNC emails by insisting, “Vladimir Putin wants to end the ‘New Cold War’—and so do I.”[88] Vanden Heuvel further elaborate her position in an article published in the Washington Post the following Tuesday, declaring that the Democrats “are on the verge of becoming the Cold War party, with Trump, ironically, becoming the candidate of détente.”[89] Cohen joined conservative radio host John Batchelor for an interview published the next day titled, “Cold War, Détente, Neo-McCarthyism, and Donald Trump,” in which he claimed that Trump displays a “clearer advocacy for détente.”[90] In the meantime, nominally left-wing CounterPunch’s editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, similarly decried “the new McCarthyism,” and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting argued that Clinton’s approach “serves to stoke Cold War panic with Russia.”[91]

    Writing for Jared Kushner’s former magazine, the Observer, an activist declared that “what Robby Mook did is pure McCarthyism.”[92] In the week and a half after the July 22 WikiLeaks release, the split in the Democratic Party between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters had become irreconcilable, with the party’s left flank insisting that “Russiagate” was a McCarthyite distraction from the failures of Clinton’s global outlook—an opinion that fed into earlier expressions of support for Trump over Clinton.

    It should be recalled that, during this time, “Russiagate” referred almost exclusively to the since-proven claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for hacking the DNC and using WikiLeaks as a conduit for the dissemination of hacked emails. It should further be noted that the rise of the “McCarthyite” narrative appears to have begun with Greenwald, who openly aspires to boost the image of Russia in the US, and The Nation, which is directly connected to the ACEWA—The Nation’s Publisher/Editor, vanden Heuvel, and Stephen F. Cohen, contributing editor to The Nation and ACEWA co-founder, are married.[93] It is sufficient to say that their fiery rejection of Russian meddling afforded cover for ongoing Russian active measures, whether or not they provided that cover deliberately.

    Similarly distressing instances have occurred with regards to other media disinformation campaigns, including the downing of flight MH17 and Assad’s use of chemical weapons. In these cases, Russian media has joined the fray after autonomous media networks have promoted different theories absolving Russia and Assad of crimes.[94] By promoting these seemingly-autonomous channels, the Russian vertikal appears merely to be supporting the syncretic pro-Russia media network’s critique of its own government, while actually drawing from actors with whom it is connected. As well, the vertikal functions like a “nested hierarchy” in a market-like system, identifying favored theorists, rewarding them with media attention, and outsourcing regime propaganda.

    “McCarthyite” Hits the Mainstream

    On August 2, the LA Times featured an editorial from Justin Raimondo, an editorial director for the libertarian site Antiwar.com, calling the suggestion of Russian intervention, “the sort of McCarthyism that we haven’t seen in this country since the most frigid years of the Cold War.”[95] Antiwar.com draws 128,067 unique visitors per month, many of whom click over from Consortium News and Pat Buchanan’s far-right website, American Conservative, according to my 2018 Alexa Audience Overlap Tool search. Among its overlapping websites are the usual suspects, including The Unz Review, which hosts the openly antisemitic Da Russophile blog by Lozansky’s think-tank participant, Anatoly Karlin.[96]

    By August, websites had shifted the “McCarthyite” accusation from accusations of Russian hacking to claims that the Trump campaign might have been involved in, or known about, hacking the DNC server (the latter also being true, according to the Mueller report).[97] Following Raimondo’s editorial, Sputnik News posted two articles in quick succession on “the Clinton campaign’s rush into the comforting arms of McCarthyism” and how “the Clinton camp is obviously following in Joseph McCarthy’s footsteps.”[98] On August 9, Consortium News founder Robert Parry decried “Hillary Clinton’s Turn to McCarthyism,” and the fever pitch only increased as the campaign continued.[99]

    Continuing the gaslighting of the Clinton campaign, on August 8, long-time Trump consiglieri Roger Stone admitted to communicating with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. A few days later, he exchanged public tweets with Guccifer 2.0, thanking them, and then engaged in private communications with the account over a couple of weeks. [100] Regardless of Stone’s open flirtations with a cutout for the GRU and WikiLeaks, which disseminated its hacked data, the Trump campaign denied any insinuation of contact with Russian agencies or political operatives (a denial later proven false).[101]

    In mid-August, RT ran a five-minute piece titled “Parallels Drawn Between Clinton Campaign and McCarthy’s Witch-Hunt” featuring former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, a leading figure in the syncretic media ecosystem with bylines in all of the horizontal media sites studied in relation to Lozansky’s think tank.[102] On August 21, Sputnik announced “the resurgence of Cold War style McCarthyism and anti-Russian propaganda,” followed the next day by Huffington Post, which stressed the dangers of “Clinton’s present-day McCarthyism.”[103] The World Socialist Web Site extended the analysis the next day, attacking the New York Times for “outright lies in a manner reminiscent of McCarthyism.” By this point, as we see with Huffington Post, the “McCarthyite” narrative had become generalized and mainstream.

    Two days later Julian Assange gave a widely-viewed interview to Megyn Kelly of FOX News, insisting that Clinton has “grabbed on the neo-McCarthyism hysteria about Russia and has been using it to demonize the Trump campaign.”[104] Sputnik International and RT both publicized the interview through their networks, and RT published an article the following Sunday criticizing Clinton for “Russophobia.”[105] That Tuesday, Antiwar.com published “The Campaign to Blame Putin for Everything,” excoriating “the historically Russophobic Clintons,” and the next day, August 31, Glenn Greenwald went on Democracy Now to denounce linking WikiLeaks with Russia as “a new McCarthyism.”[106] That same day, the New York Times published an interview with Julian Assange in which he accused the newspaper of “erecting a demon” by supporting Clinton.[107] Nevertheless, the Mueller report later confirmed WikiLeaks likely received stolen emails from the GRU through an encrypted file sent via email, a fact which few of the advocates of the “McCarthyite” narrative have reflected on, much less been able to convincingly rebut.[108]

    The day after Greenwald’s interview with Democracy Now, the Observer criticized “an insurgence of neo-McCarthyism, alleging that the Trump campaign has ties to the Russian government,” and RT interviewed left-wing commentator Mike Papantonio, who called the question of Russian intervention “crazy, radical talk,” “all supposition” intended to distract from the content of the emails.[109] Two days after Papantonio’s interview, on September 3, RT turned on the left, inquiring into a “McCarthyism of the left?”[110] The following Wednesday, September 6, Breitbart was mocking “Hillary Clinton’s Absurd, McCarthyist Russian Conspiracy Theory” from their headlines, followed the next day by Consortium News’s scathing piece, “New York Times and the New McCarthyism.”[111] The period from September 4-11 saw an interesting rise in searches for “McCarthyite” according to Google Trends. Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Center tweeted on September 26 that Clinton’s claim that “Putin is hacking us” was an “insane conspiracy theory.”[112]

    The frequency with which alternative news sites published articles denouncing the “mainstream media” for McCarthyism, as well as their crossover in terms both of audience and journalists, is fascinating for a number of reasons. Perhaps paramount among those is the inability to explain the hacked emails. Some sites turned to conspiracy theories surrounding Seth Rich, a former DNC employee who had been tragically murdered; further investigation was unable to demonstrate that Rich or his murder had anything to do with the leaks, and Rich’s parents currently have an ongoing lawsuit against FOX News and two of its commentators for its unsubstantiated allegations about Rich.[113] Another interesting facet of the research thus far is the repudiation of “mainstream media” in and even to the mainstream media, as with vanden Heuvel’s editorial in the Washington Post, Raimondo’s editorial in the LA Times, and Assange’s interview in the New York Times. Similarly important was the convergence of left-wing repudiations with far-right media like Breitbart lambasting the “mainstream” media and left-wing McCarthyism, even amid high site ratings and campaigns to oust left-wing professors from universities.

    It is important to note that, at this point, not only had the term “McCarthyite” become diffuse but its narrative had also slipped into different meanings and contexts. The accusation that began with a denial of Russian hacking now involved general “Russophobia” and especially the idea that Trump was collaborating with the Russian government. Generally, the hysteria and anxiety surrounding the accusations of “collusion” were easily matched, if not exceeded, by the accusations of “McCarthyism” against those who correctly assigned blame for the email releases to Russian hackers disseminating through WikiLeaks. Again, it is important to stress that evidence does not necessarily show that the “McCarthyite” spin was centrally planned or conspired by the Kremlin, but that (1) it was propagated first by individuals like Cohen, Greenwald, and vanden Heuvel who have directly involved themselves in promoting Russia’s image, and (2) the Russian vertikal eagerly exploited it on behalf of a disinformation campaign in support of Trump’s campaign.

    Just days after the articles from Breitbart and Consortium, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that the negative spin surrounding the revelations around Russian meddling resulted in a tightening race with ominous signs for the Clinton campaign.[114] While nearly 100% of Trump’s supporters insisted they would vote, only 80% of Clinton’s said the same, and only a third of her supporters claimed to be enthusiastic. As Jeff Greenfield wrote in Politico, “constituencies most critical to her campaign seem to have no sense of urgency about keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.”[115] Of course, other elements contributed to the disenfranchisement of Clinton’s base, as well; however, after each debate, Clinton came out the victor, suggesting that her policies and approach appealed to more voters who participated in CNN/ORC polls.[116] As others have argued, the release of the hacked emails, the proliferation of disinformation, and the later, associated FBI announcement regarding Clinton’s use of a private email server, contributed to the decline in her popularity between and after the debates but was not necessarily decisive.[117]

    Importantly, many of those disillusioned with Clinton could be found among the Democratic Party’s base of non-white supporters actively targeted by disinformation.[118] Amid controversy over her comments on “super-predators” during the 1990s and the legacy of mass incarceration, as well as disillusionment with the Democrats’ handling of the Black Lives Matter movement, Black Agenda Report declared that “the Clinton campaign has ignited a neo-McCarthyist war on Russia and anyone who stands in the way of her agenda.”[119] Meanwhile, Sputnik continued its onslaught with headlines like, “When Hillary Clinton Gets Scared She Plays the Russia Card,” making an allusion that connected criticism of Russian interference to the “race card.”[120] Furthermore, it is now understood from millions of published tweets pushed out of the Internet Research Agency at the time, that Kremlin-controlled bot and troll accounts on social media used racial divisions to turn discontent and disenfranchisement against liberalism.[121]

    The Elections and Aftermath

    Clinton’s bad September turned into a terrible October when, on October 9, WikiLeaks produced a new bevy of emails from Podesta’s email account, leading to a deluge of fiery illiberalism throughout the syncretic ecosystem. That evening, Trump proclaimed, “I love WikiLeaks!” at a rally. Two days later, WikiLeaks wrote Trump, Jr., “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us… Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.” In an apparent exposition of collaboration, Trump, Jr., tweeted in support of Wikileaks two hours later, lamenting the “Rigged system!” and two days later tweeted out their link.[122] That same day, Roger Stone publicly denied collusion with WikiLeaks as “categorically false,” insisting that his relationship with Assange was only through a “mutual friend,” but that he had “a back-channel communications with WikiLeaks.”[123] He would later be convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering in efforts to obstruct federal investigators’ inquiry into the hacked emails and Russian interference in the elections.[124]

    The week of October 9-16 saw the sharpest rise of Google searches for “McCarthyite” in the study period, indicating that, as the emails were released, more accusations of Russian meddling emerged, and activists responded with accusations of “McCarthyism.” As the weeks closed in on the November 7 election day, the flurry of articles cautioning against McCarthyism and Russophobia increased apace. From Counterpunch on Oct 18, left-wing organizer Srećko Horvat denounced the Clinton camp’s “‘soft’ McCarthyism,” while a Sputnik writer capitalized on the trends, lamenting that he was “The first victim of McCarthyism 2.0.”[125] The next day, Roger Stone was quoted in Breitbart as saying, “this is the new McCarthyism.”[126] At the same time, Consortium News ridiculed “The Democrats’ Joe McCarthy Moment” and nominally left-wing AlterNet blogger Ben Norton tweeted about Clinton’s claim that WikiLeaks received the emails from Russian intelligence, “McCarthyism is alive and well.”[127]

    On RT on October 23, anti-imperialist commentator Daniel Patrick Welch declared, “Clinton [is] using anti-Russia red-baiting not seen since days of McCarthyism,” followed the next day by Consortium News’s recap of the Russian response to the recent debate in which Doctorow declared, “The main theme of American political life right now is McCarthyism and anti-Russian hysteria.”[128] Antiwar.com ran their piece, “’McCarthyism,’ Then and Now,” the following day, and three days later, on October 28, CounterPunch likened the charges of Russian interference to “the paranoia that accompanied the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and then reappeared with greater intensity in the form of McCarthyism.”[129] The Observer declared that “McCarthyism 2.0 Has Infected the Democrats” on November 1, with Sputnik insisting, “Washington Fails to Prove Russia Interfered in US Elections in ‘Big Way.’”[130] Pro-Palestine blog MondoWeiss quoted Carden of the ACEWA decrying “a very very ugly echo of McCarthyism” three days later, and then the day before the election, left-wing site Jacobin stated that, “to distract attention from the content of the emails, the Democrats have engaged in a modern-day version of McCarthyism.”[131] Again, the inclusion of sites like Jacobin and Huffington Post only further illustrates how widely the campaign to identify Russia’s hacking of the DNC as “McCarthyism” had spread throughout the alternative media ecosystem well beyond Russia’s apparent direct influence.

    In the two years following the election of Donald Trump, the term “McCarthyism” would splash across some 5,260 headlines internationally, according to Nexis Uni®, producing an average of at least seven articles every day. The prominence of allegations of McCarthyism also increased. There is no doubt that the discourse of McCarthyism expressed a radical frustration with the liberal, centrist wing of the Democratic Party by a new generation of left-wing participants largely identified with Bernie Sanders. According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 12 percent of those who voted for Sanders in the primaries voted for Trump in the general election, meaning that, ceteris paribus, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would have swung to Clinton had those voters stayed home or voted with the party.[132] While this does not mean that Sanders helped Trump win the election, it suggests that members of the electorate to whom the radical left would have appealed, and who likely disapproved of the Obama administration, accorded, in general terms, with the crossover between right and left constituted by the network of sites ranging from Sputnik and Russia Insider to Consortium News and The Duran to The Nation and others.

    IV. Discussion

    The Meaning of McCarthyism

    While the sites I studied all share a common geopolitical imperative aligned with the “multipolar world” and, more specifically, Eurasianism, calling them “Duginist” would be too broad a generalization.[133] They certainly take part in the same movement in favor of Kremlin-centered geopolitics, and they engage in substantial crossover, but they are different nonetheless. This study does not suggest that everyone engaging in the discourse of “McCarthyism” is a fascist or deliberately contributing to fascist discourse or connected to the Kremlin. It merely reveals the extent to which disinformation has influenced the geopolitical approaches of the Western left and right wing, while also establishing a pattern of far-left and far-right agreement encouraged by Duginist tendencies.

    Importantly, the allegations of McCarthyism appear to have begun principally with horizontal networks tied to pro-Kremlin soft power, and extended to Russian state media’s vertikal soon afterwards. The groups within the horizontal networks that have been identified by myself, in Starbird et al., 2018, in New Knowledge’s 2018 report, and the Stanford 2019 report reproduced similar narratives. According to a Lexis Uni® search, The Nation was the top influencer among the sites that I studied, having published about a dozen stories featuring the keywords “McCarthyism” or “McCarthyite” in reference to the elections during the study period, inclusive of cross-posts from the conservative John Batchelor show. All but one of The Nation’s “McCarthyite” articles came from Cohen.

    By contrast, Consortium News and Global Research each published some four such articles each during the five-month study period, not an insignificant number by any means, but small compared to Cohen’s output alone. By comparison, the Ron Paul Institute’s director, Daniel McAdams, tweeted twice about it, and both The Duran and Russia Insider posted a story on it. Antiwar.com and the Observer also featured prominently in my sample, but remained peripheral to my study outside of audience overlap and content sharing (Starbird et al., 2018). Perhaps, then, the most weight was likely given to the “McCarthyite” accusation from sharing and cross-publishing Cohen’s persistent articles, along with the important mainstream editorials by vanden Heuvel and Raimondo, as well as the generalized narrative saturation and refraction. In this way, disinformation networks helped stoke and guide the discourse on “McCarthyism,” but were not wholly responsible for their proliferation, as unaffiliated sites and groups took the proverbial baton during the race. It should be noted, though, that such independent activity is precisely the goal of disinformation.

    This pattern suggests that pro-Russian disinformation efforts do not always emanate vertically from Russian media, but through an adaptive process of testing the bounds of political discourse and farming out opinions in order to ascertain and develop popular trends on pressure issues. The vertikal, then, appears to reinforce broader ideological trends that are developed in a more complex, multi-scalar fashion, rather than controlling them. However, it is important to notice that The Nation is one of the most important influencers in the US Left, so the direct, early interventions of individual editors and the magazine suggests that, in this case, the movement of disinformation across the horizontal structure did not flow in a necessarily bottom-up or grassroots fashion, but instead manifested through a weighted system of nested hierarchies. Furthermore, given The Nation’s proximity to the ACEWA, a pro-Russia influence group with ties to prominent figures close to the Kremlin, it is difficult to view its coverage as fully autonomous.

    Of course, reward systems involve greater public notoriety through more prominent media and conference appearances. Following the election, The Nation began publishing breathless denunciations of “Russiagate” by journalist Aaron Maté, a contributor to The GrayZone Project, which spreads conspiracy theory narratives about Venezuela, Xinjiang, and Syria, among other places.[134] Through a November 2, 2019 Alexa search, I discovered that the most similar site to GrayZone is TheAmericanConservative, a far-right publication that names ACEWA editor James Carden as a “Contributing Editor.”

    By building a bridge from the political margins to the mainstream, The Nation continued to make pro-Russia disinformation palatable to larger audiences interested in the merging of left and right. Through Maté, The Nation became one of the last sites conected to the public assertion that Russia did not meddling in the 2016 elections, going on Tucker Carlson’s far-right show as late as December 2019 as a contributor to The Nation to claim that no evidence could either tie Russia to the hacking of the DNC or disprove Trump’s false assertion that Ukraine had actually hacked the DNC in 2016.[135] A quantitative analysis by the Twitter account Conspirador Norteño shortly after Maté’s FOX News appearance found that “a significant portion of the amplification” of Maté’s twitter presence “is coming from #MAGA Twitter.”[136]

    Using the tool Pushshift, which sifts through social media for trends and topics, I collected the total number of tweets using the term “McCarthyite” over the last five years [Figure 6][137]. The top ranked twitter accounts included Glenn Greenwald at the top, with Maté ranked fifth and his GrayZone colleagues, Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal ranked second and third, respectively. While Eli Valley lands in the fourth spot, his usage of the term appears to fall in a different milieu (anti-Zionism) from the context of Russian interference in the U.S. elections. Using the same tool to scan subreddits on the site Reddit for the same term, I found WayOfTheBern ranked second, left-wing podcast ChapoTrapHouse ranked fifth, and notoriously racist The_Donald ranked seventh [Figure 7].

    These searches of social media sites indicate the influence of conspiracy theorists spreading the message on Twitter, and the confluence of left and right-wing subreddits disseminating the same message on Reddit. They also show to what extent the GrayZone has emerged as a hub for allegations of “McCarthyite” activity since 2017—a process likely helped along through Maté’s collaboration with The Nation.

    Figure 6. PushShift.io analysis of top 10 Twitter accounts mentioning “McCarthyite”
    Figure 7. PushShift.io analysis of top 20 Subreddits mentioning “McCarthyite”

    It has been shown that a number of the groups insisting that the accusations of Russian influence in the elections amounted to McCarthyism were actually engaged in Russian influence groups during that period, not least of which being the Russia Forum and the ACEWA. Most importantly, the spread of the trope of “McCarthyism” was stoked by important actors supportive of the Kremlin, and occurred virtually overnight by thousands of independent actors, including journalists who ran with the narrative in a number of different directions. However, the most staunch promoters of the narrative appear to have come from the horizontal network of disinformation sites reinforced by the vertikal. In this fashion, disinformation benefits from a kind of “social capital” model that might provide some explanatory potential for the ease with which disinformation spreads through social media. Hence, by tracking claims of McCarthyism, we have seen how right and left met during the elections in an illiberal and populist, anti-establishment movement that generally viewed Trump as a more viable candidate than Clinton on the basis, in particular, of his position as the “détente” candidate toward Russia and its allies.

    Geopolitical alignments are critical, because they rely on phenomenological articulations of spatial association, rather than association by class or sociality. In this way, geopolitical alignments skew toward nationalism or similarly structured regionalism, even if they involve some degree of collectivist discourse of solidarity. It is, therefore, important to use caution approaching geopolitical arrangements, as such, working instead to deconstruct the claims that presuppose deterministic geopolitical thinking. The trap of syncretism, as Sternhell, Eco, Gentile, and Eatwell have noted, is alluring, but its inconsistencies produce chimerical ideologies given to authoritarian, nationalist systems.

    Potential for Follow-up Research

    The results of this study suggest many avenues for follow-up research and discussion. The syncretic, pro-Kremlin media networks described above form part of larger geopolitical networks that share many of the same interests. Importantly, they consist of a broader network incorporating far-right, left-wing, libertarian, and other ideological positions, making the network itself syncretic. On the other hand, within the network are not only left and right sites, but also syncretic sites that meld an array of political commentators, ideas, and theories together typically in support of conspiracy theories. Syncretism exists on different scales within this alternative media network, which maintains connections (as previously stated) based on audience overlap as well as personnel collaborations—as with Lozansky’s think tank, for example. The overlap and collaboration does not mean that over planning took place in dark, smoke-filled rooms, but that the network can be viewed as a system of discrete units with shared interests and goals, as well as common understandings which manifest in myriad verisimilar articles across disparate platforms and ideologies.

    Ascertaining and describing the differences between the various groups, from Consortium News to The Nation to The Duran, would take an article in and of itself. That these different but intersecting ideological producers appear to fit within the same discursive frameworks and conferences intimates the populist, “big tent” approach to pro-Kremlin geopolitics provided by syncretic platforms loosely aligned with the multipolar world. Furthermore, more extensive research is needed into the networks of bots on social media, as well as the extent of their influence. This could be accomplished through the creation of an index that combines the number of retweets and Facebook shares with monthly website hits, processed into a quantitative scale. Learning more about the global influence of pro-Kremlin media would enable closer understanding of the behavior of the sites, although the potential for sources like New Eastern Outlook and Strategic Culture that are not as popular would remain relatively opaque.

    Lastly, more geographical thought might be included in interdisciplinary research related to data science, communications, psychology, sociology, and international relations. Media strategies and policy proposals might emerge from this field that would enable the freedom of the press while delimiting the spread of damaging conspiracy theories and deliberate geopolitical propaganda that twists left-wing messaging toward the geopolitical aims of authoritarian regimes. While we might understand how disinformation spreads, we do not yet know why individuals promulgate it. Unlocking that question might provide the secrets to stopping the flow of disinformation not only at its source but at the point of consumption.
    _____

    Alexander Reid Ross is a PhD candidate in Portland State University’s Earth, Environment, Society Program and a Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. He is the author of Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press 2017), and his articles on disinformation and the far right have appeared in the Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data and The Independent.

    Back to the essay

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    Appendix

    Attached as an appendix in PDF format is a table including notes on some of the outcomes of searches conducted in Alexa.com in December 2017.

    Notes

    [1] Bevensee, E., Ross, A.R., S. Nardin. 2019. “Malicious Bot Activity in the European Union Parliamentary Elections.” Autonomous Disinformation Research Network; Ferrara, E. 2017. “Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election.” First Monday, 22(8); Bennett, W.L., S. Livingston. 2018. “The Disinformation Order: Disruptive Communication and the Decline of Democratic Institutions.” European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122-139; Marwick, A., R. Lewis 2017. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. NYC: Data & Society Institute.

    [2] Starbird, K., A. Arif, T. Wilson. 2018. “Understanding the Structure and Dynamics of Disinformation in the Online Information Ecosystem.” Defense Technical Information Center, Technical Report; Hjorth, F.G. & R. Adler-Nissen. “Ideological Asymmetry in the Reach of Pro-Russian Digital Disinformation to United States Audience.” Journal of Communication, 69(2), 168-192.

    [3] DiResta, R., K. Shaffer, B. Ruppel, D. Sullivan, R. Matney, R. Fox, J. Albright, B. Johnson. 2018. The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency. Austin, TX: New Knowledge; Starbird, K., A. Arif, T. Wilson, K. Van Koevering, K. Yefimova, D. Scarnecchia. 2017. “Ecosystem or Echo-System? Exploring Content Sharing across Alternative Media Domains.” Proceedings of the Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018), 365-374.

    [4] Starbird et al., 2017; Levinger, M. 2018. “Master Narratives of Disinformation Campaigns.” Journal of International Affairs, 71(1.5), 125-134.

    [5] Howard, P.N., G. Bolsover, B. Kollanyi, S. Bradshaw, L-M. Neudert. 2017. “Junk News and Bots During the US Election: What Were Michigan Voters Sharing Over Twitter?” COMPROP Data Memo, 26 March 2017; Starbird et al., 2017

    [6] See Mosse, G.L. 1972. “The French Right and the Working Classes: Les Jaunes.” Journal of Contemporary History.

    [7] Rainey, L.S., E. Gentile. 1994. “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism.” Modernism/Modernity, 1(3), 55-87.

    [8] Landa, I. 2010. The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism. Leiden: Brill. 134. Importantly, fascists are quasi-populist, in so far as their use of völkisch and populist rhetoric is contradicted by their self-image as the “natural elite” within “the people” rather than “of the people” itself. Here, fascism is distinct from the populist radical right, which promotes an authoritarian, nativist agenda within the confines of parliamentary systems. While both utilize tropes identifiable both with left and right, fascism ultimately desires the overthrow of parliamentary democracy. Fascists might abide with participation in electoralism, but their ends are never met within the existing parliamentary context, partly because of their disdain for socialist successes within it. See Mudde, C. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    [9] Wistrich, R.S. 2012. From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, The Jews, and Israel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

    [10] For more on the hard right, see Lyons, M., C. Berlet. 2000. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. NYC: Guilford Press, 16.

    [11] Fine, R., Spencer, P. 2017. Antisemitism and the Left: On the Return of the Jewish Question. Manchester: Manchester University Press. See also Lyons and Berlet, 144.

    [12] Landa, 203.

    [13] Ibid, 194-200.

    [14] Sternhell, Z. 1986. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, Trans. David Maisel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    [15] Dagnino, J. 2016. “The Myth of the New Man in Italian Fascist Ideology.” Fascism, 5, 130-148.

    [16] Griffin, R. 1993. The Nature of Fascism. NYC: Routledge, 32-36.

    [17] Benadusi, L. 2014. “A Fully Furnished House: The History of Masculinity,” In L. Benadusi, G. Caravale, eds. George L. Mosse’s Italy: Interpretation, Reception, and Intellectual Heritage. NYC: Palgrave MacMillan.

    [18] Eco, U. “Ur-Fascism.” New York Review of Books. June 22, 1995.

    [19] Sternhell, 105

    [20] Eatwell, R. 1992. “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism.” Journal of Theoretical Politics, 4(2), 174.

    [21] Ibid, 189

    [22] Gentile, E. 2006. “New Idols: Catholicism in the Face of Fascist Totalitarianism.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 11(2), 143-170.

    [23] Da Costa, L.P. P. Labriola. 1999. “Bodies from Brazil: Fascist Aesthetics in a South American Setting.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, 16(4), 166.

    [24] Andrew, C. 2005. The World Was Going Our Way. NYC: Basic Books.

    [25] Katz, M.N. 2006. “Primakov Redux? Putin’s Pursuit of Multipolarism in Asia.” Demokratizasya 14(1), 144-152.

    [26] Silvius, R. 2015. “Eurasianism and Putin’s Embedded Civilizationism,” in D. Lane, V. Samokhvalov, eds. The Eurasian Project and Europe: Regional Discontinuities and Geopolitics. NYC: Palgrave Macmillan. 78-79.

    [27] Chebankova, E. 2017. “Russia’s Idea of the Multipolar World Order: Origins and Main Dimensions.” Post-Soviet Affairs, 33(3), 217-234.

    [28] See Stein, E. 2017. “Ideological Codependency and Regional Order: Iran, Syria, and the Axis of Refusal.” Political Science & Politics, 50(3), 676-680.

    [29] In particular, the Internet Research Agency promoted websites within the Duginist network. See DiResta, 2018.

    [30] See Laruelle, M, Ed. 2015. Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship. NYC: Lexington Books

    [31] Laruelle, M. 2006. Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the European Radical Right? Washington, DC: Kennan Institute; Bar-On, Tamir. 2013. Rethinking the French New Right. New York: Routledge.

    [32] Bar-On, T. 2007. Where Have All the Fascists Gone? New York: Routledge; Bassin, M. 2016. The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    [33] Dugin, A. 1999. Основы Геополитикии (Foundations of Geopolitics). Found online at ratnikjournal.narod.ru.

    [34] Ibid, 274.

    [35] Clover, C. 2016. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    [36] Wilson, A. 2005. Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    [37] Savino, G. 2015. From Evola to Dugin. In Laruelle 2015, 108.

    [38] Gramigna, A.d., Chi Sono I “Fascisti Trosa Che Gridano ‘Forza Iraq.’”

    [39] Michael, G. 2019. “Useful Idiots or Fellow Travelers? The Relationship between the American Far Right and Russia.” Terrorism and Political Violence, 31, 64-83; Clover, 271-272, 286-287; Laruelle, M.. 2016. “The Izborsky Club, or the New Conservative Avant-Garde in Russia.” The Russian Review, 75, 626—44. See also M. Lyons, “Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, U.S. leftists,” ThreeWayFight, February 2, 2015.

    [40] Campo Antimperialista spokesperson Pasquinelli notably declared, “Fascism and the fascists are our main enemy today? Absolutely not. It really seems pleonastic to me to have to explain on a list of anti-Americanists and anti-imperialists who is the main enemy today. This means maybe be indulgent towards the fascists? Of course not. The fascists are all contained in Forza Nuova positions? Absolutely not. It’s in this area a great ferment, a heated discussion not only political, but theoretical. Should we follow this discussion carefully? Or we’ll piss over it? I think we have to follow it.” Cernigoi, C., “’Rossobruni’ e nuova destra ‘internazionalista,’” I Falsi Amici conference, December 7, 2013; Cernigoi, C., “Comunitaristi e Nazi-Maoisti,” Nuova Alabarda, February 2007.

    [41] March, L. 2011. “Is Nationalism Rising in Russian Foreign Policy? The Case of Georgia.” Demokratizatsiya, 19(3), 187-207.

    [42] “Putin Aide Says New Ukraine Leader Could Populate War-Torn Region with Jews,” Moscow Times, May 7, 2019.

    [43] Fridman, O. 2018. Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’: Resurgence and Politicization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 75-84.

    [44] Starbird, Arif, & Wilson, 2018.

    [45] Horbyk, R. 2015. “Little Patriotic War: Nationalist Narratives in the Russian Media Coverage of the Ukraine-Russia Crisis.” Asian Politics & Policy, 7(3), pp. 505-511

    [46] Yablokov, I. 2015. “Conspiracy Theories as a Russian Public Diplomacy Tool: The Case of Russia Today (RT).” Politics, 35(3-4), 305-315.

    [47] See Shekhovtsov, 2018; Ross, A.R. “The Anti-Semitism Conference Where Russian Spies, Code Pink, David Duke and The Nation of Islam Make Friends and Influence People.” Haaretz, March 14, 2019.

    [48] Bromley, R. 2018. “The Politics of Displacement: The Far Right Narrative of Europe and Its ’Others.’” From the European South 3, 13-26.

    [49] Ross, A.R. 2017. Against the Fascist Creep. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

    [50] Parker, N., J. Landay, J. Walcott. “Putin-Linked Think Tank Drew Up Plan to Sway 2016 US Election—Documents.” Reuters, April 19, 2017. Oscar Jonnson calls Korybko a member of the expert council at RISS in 2019. The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines between War and Peace. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

    [51] A Bellingcat Contributor, “Russia Tries to Influence Le Pen to Repeal Sanctions,” Bellingcat April 29, 2019.

    [52] Yablokov, 301

    [53] Ibid, 305-306.

    [54] Godzimirski, J.M., M Østevik. 2018. How to Understand and Deal with Russian Strategic Communication Measures? Policy Brief. Oslo: Norweigen Institute of International Affairs.

    [55] Horbyk, 2015.

    [56] Jainter, M., P.A. Mattsson. 2015. “Russian Information Warfare of 2014.” 7th International Conference on Cyber Conflict: Architectures in Cyberspace, 39-52.

    [57] Davis, C. “‘Grassroots’ Media Startup Redfish is Supported by the Kremlin,” The Daily Beast, June 19, 2018.

    [58] Ballacher, J.D., V. Barash, P.N. Howard, J. Kelly. “Junk News on Military Affairs and National Security: Social Media Disinformation Campaigns Against US Military Personnel and Veterans.” COMPROP Data Memo, 09 October 2017.

    [59] Schreckinger, B. “How Russia Targets the US Military,” Politico, June 27, 2017.

    [60] Starbird et al., 2017.

    [61] Shekhovtsov, 2018.

    [62] Lough, J., O. Lutsevych, P. Pomerantsev, S. Secrieru, A. Shekhovtsov. 2014. “Russian Influence Abroad: Non-state Actors and Propaganda.” Russia and Eurasia Programme Meeting Summary. Chatham House: The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

    [63] Bevensee and Ross, 2018; Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson have done great work researching Lozansky’s past at the blog, The Stern Facts.

    [64] US-Russia.org, “Think-Tank & American University.” The site was changed to conceal the names of the associates some time in 2018; McAdams’s Twitter profile can be seen by Google searching his full bio: “Executive Director, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Hypocrisy hunter. Traditionalist. Tweets are mine alone and often rude.”

    [65] Young, C. “Putin’s New American Fan Club?” The Daily Beast, October 11, 2015. Michel, C. “Why Is This Russia ‘Expert’ Writing for an Anti-Semitic Outlet?” ThinkProgress, February 16, 2018. Doctorow left the ACEWA in March 2017 after around two and a half years with the group he co-founded.

    [66] Michel, C. “How Putin Played the Far Left,” The Daily Beast, April 11, 2017.

    [67] Laruelle, 2016.

    [68] G. Doctorow, “Book Review: Alain de Benoist, ‘Contre Liberalisme. La société n’est pas un marché,’” GilbertDoctorow.com, May 14, 2019.

    [69] @ConsortiumNews, Twitter, January 11, 2019, 12:48PM, accessed June 10, 2019, https://twitter.com/consortiumnews/status/1083812955861540864.

    [70] Di Giovanni, Janine, “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets,” New York Review of Books, October 16, 2018; Hasan, H. “’Fake News’: The Mainstreaming of Syria Conspiracy Theories,” Middle East Monitor, April 21, 2018; Lucas, S. “Who Are the White Helmets and Why Are They So Controversial?” The Conversation, October 7, 2016; Proyect, L. “Max Blumenthal and the Streisand Effect,” New Politics, March 14, 2018.

    [71] See DiResta et al., 2018, 97-8.

    [72] Lester, C. “The CIA Spy Who Became a Russian Propagandist,” The New Republic, May 14, 2018.

    [73] For more, including links, see Vagabond, “An Investigation into Red-Brown Alliances: Third Positionism, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, and the Western Left,” Ravings of a Radical Vagabond, January 15, 2018, also see Ross, A.R., “The Left and Right through Russian Political and Information Operations,” AlexanderReidRoss.net, November 19, 2018.

    [74] Flock, E. “After a Week of Russian Propaganda, I Was Questioning Everything,” PBS.org, May 2, 2018; Vázquez-Liñán, M. 2019. “The Political Discourse of the Kremlin in Spain: Channels, Messages, and Interpretive Frameworks,” in T. Hoffmann, A. Makarychev, eds., Russia and the EU: Spaces of Interaction, New York: Routledge.

    [75] The model was run on January 17, 2018, available at http://alexa.com.

    [76] See Appendix 1; Analysis processed on December 27, 2017

    [77] Starbird et al., 2017.

    [78] Ibid, 9.

    [79] DiResta et al., 2018.

    [80] Diresta, R., Grossman, S. 2019. Potempkin Pages and Personas: Assessing GRU Online Operations, 2014-2019. Stanford: Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center.

    [81] Bobbio, N. 1994. Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, Trans, A. Cameron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    [82] Mueller, R.S. 2019. Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice.

    [83] “McCarthyite,” Google Trends, Past 5 years, last searched on June 18, 2019.

    [84] Satter, R., D.; Butler, “Charges Undermine Assange Denials About Hack Origins,” AP, July 1, 2018; Mueller, 2018.

    [85] The Editors, “Against Neo-McCarthyism,” The Nation, July 27, 2016,

    [86] “McCarthyite” and “McCarthyism,” Google Trends, Past 5 years, last searched on June 18, 2019.

    [87] Graham, D.A., “Trump’s Call for Russian Hacking Makes Even Less Sense after Mueller,” The Atlantic, March 27, 2019.

    [88] Transcript here: Hains, T., “Russia Expert Stephen Cohen: Trump Wants to Stop the New Cold War, but the American Media Just Doesn’t Understand,” RealClearPolitics, July 30, 2016.

    [89] Heuvel, K.v. “Democrats, Stay Out of Trump’s Gutter,” Washington Post, August 2, 2016,

    [90] Cohen, S.F. “Cold War, Détente, Neo-McCarthyism, and Donald Trump,” The Nation, August 3, 2016.

    [91] Johnson, A., “Trump’s Bigotry Reminds US Media of Anywhere but Home,” FAIR, July 29, 2016.

    [92] Bay, A., “Tailgunner Hillary and the Putin Hack,” Observer, July 28, 2016.

    [93] “Greenwald: I Came to Russia to Combat Toxic View on the Country,” RT.com, July 6, 2018.

    [94] Agarwal, N., Al-khateeb, R. Galeano, R. Goolsby. 2017. “Examining the Use of Botnets and their Evolution in Propaganda Dissemination.” Defence Strategic Communications, NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, 2. 90-91; Starbird et al., 2018.

    [95] Raimondo, J., “To Fight Trump, Journalists Have Dispensed With Objectivity,” LA Times, August 2, 2016.

    [96] Unz is worth explicating for a moment, and not only for its impressive 163,703 average unique visitors per month in 2017. Developed by former editor of American Conservative, Ron Unz, after he controversially attacked Ivy League schools with claims that they prejudicially favor Jews, The Unz Review is a favorite of academic anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and fascist David Duke. Unz also plays host to a regular blog from Steve Sailer, a well-known figure on the far right. Aside from these clear right-wing affinities, Unz has helped finance left-wing anti-Zionist publications like Mondoweiss and CounterPunch. The Unz Review’s top audience cross-overs include white nationalist sites VDare, Taki’s Mag, and American Renaissance, as well as Consortium News, The Saker, and Antiwar.com. Although his Antiwar.com displays such audience overlap, however, it is important to note that Raimondo himself does not have a byline or feature in the horizontal network of sites represented in Lozansky’s think tank.

    [97] Mueller, 2018.

    [98] “Hillary Ally Accuses Green Party’s Jill Stein of Being Trump-like Russian Agent,” Sputnik News, August 8, 2016, ; “Voting for Anyone but Clinton Means You’re Obviously a ‘Russian Agent,’” Sputnik News, August 10, 2016.

    [99] Parry, R., “New York Times and the New McCarthyism,” Consortium News, September 7, 2016.

    [100] Larson, E., “Roger Stone Timeline Puts Trump’s Wikileaks Ties in Focus,” Bloomberg News, January 25, 2019.

    [101] See Panetta, G., “The Mueller Report Is Here—Here Are All the Known Contacts Between the Campaign and Russian Government-Linked People or Entities,” Business Insider, April 18, 2019.

    [102] “Russian Propaganda Meddling in US Election: RT Charge Clinton Campaign With McCarthyism,” Euromaidan Press, August 18, 2016.

    [103] “Nooscope: Media Concocts Conspiracy Theory About Putin’s New Mind Melting Weapon,” Sputnik News, August 22, 2016; Goodman, H.A., “Who Cares If Russia Leaks Clinton’s Emails? 5 DNC Officials Resigned For Cheating Bernie Sanders,” Huffington Post, August 22, 2016.

    [104] “Assange: Clinton Campaign is Full of ‘Disturbing’ Anti-Russia ‘Hysteria,’” Sputnik News, August 26, 2016.

    [105] Raimondo, J., “The Campaign to Blame Putin for Everything,” Antiwar.com, August 31, 2016.

    [106] Greenwald, G., A. Goodman, “A New McCarthyism: Greenwald on Clinton Camp’s Attempts to Link Trump, Stein & WikiLeaks to Russia,” Democracy Now, August 31, 2016.

    [107] Takala, R., “Assange: US Media Is ‘Erecting a Demon’ By Supporting Clinton,” Washington Examiner, August 31, 2016.

    [108] Mueller Report, 46.

    [109] Sainato, M., “Clinton Never Does Anything Wrong, So Why Does She Lie So Much,” Observer, September 1, 2016; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCajV4tUguM

    [110] “McCarthyism of the Left? Clinton Supporters Use Anti-Russia Rhetoric to Bash Opponents,” RT.com, September 3, 2016.

    [111] Pollak, J.B., “Hillary Clinton’s Absurd McCarthyist Russian Conspiracy Theory,” Breitbart, September 6, 2016; Parry, R., op. cit.

    [112] McAdams, D., Twitter, September 26, 2016.

    [113] Sterling, R., “Ten Problems with Anti-Russian Obsession,” Consortium News, July 9, 2017; Whitney, M., “Seth Rich, Craig Murray and the Sinister Stewards of the National Security State,” Ron Paul Institute, May 20, 2017; Schneider, A., “Appeals Court Reinstates Lawsuit Against Fox News Over Seth Rich Story,” NPR, September 13, 2019.

    [114] Clemons, S., D. Balz, “Clinton Holds Lead Over Trump in New Poll, But Warning Signs Emerge,” Washington Post, September 10, 2016.

    [115] Greenfield, J., “How Hillary’s Very Bad September Could Be Very Good for Her in November,” Politico, September 30, 2016.

    [116] CNN/ORC Poll 14, September 26, 2016, https://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2016/images/09/27/poll.pdf; Agiesta, J. “Hillary Clinton Wins Third Presidential Debate, According to CNN / ORC Poll,” CNN, October 20, 2016; Agiesta, J, “Post-Debate Poll: Hillary Clinton Wins Round One,” CNN, September 27, 2016.

    [117] Enten, H., “How Much Did WikiLeaks Hurt Hillary Clinton,” FiveThirtyEight, December 23, 2016; Kennedy, C., M. Blumenthal, S. Clement, J.D. Clinton, C. Durand, C. Franklin, K. McGeeney, L. Miringoff, K. Olson, D. Rivers, L. Saad, E. Witt, C. Wlezien, An Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the US, American Association for Public Opinion Research, May 4, 2017.

    [118] New Knowledge, 2018; Mueller, 2019.

    [119] Haiphong, D., “Hillary Clinton’s Neo-McCarthyism and the Real Father of ‘Extreme Nationalism,’” Black Agenda Report, September 21, 2016. It is also interesting to note that Black Agenda Report writer Margaret Kimberly is also close to the Workers World Party and its front groups, having joined a delegation to the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia.

    [120] “When Hillary Clinton Gets Scared She Plays the Russia Card,” Sputnik, September 28, 2016.

    [121] Michel, 2017.

    [122] Ioffe, J., “The Real Story of Donald Trump, Jr.,” GQ.com, June 21, 2018.

    [123] Jackson, H., P. Helsel, J. Meyer, M. Alba. “Roger Stone Calls Claims of WikiLeaks Collusion ‘Categorically False,’” NBC News, October 12, 2016.

    [124] Hsu, S.S., Weiner, R., Zapotosky, M. “Roger Stone guilty on all counts of lying to Congress, witness tampering,” Washington Post, November 15, 2019.

    [125] Horvat, S., “The Cyber-War on WikiLeaks,” CounterPunch, October 18, 2016; Moran, B., “I Am Vladimir Putin: The First Victim of McCarthyism 2.0,” RT.com, October 18, 2016.

    [126] Stone, R., “Stone: Wikileaks, Mike Morell, Russia, and Me,” Breitbart, October 19, 2016.

    [127] Parry, R., “The Democrats’ Joe McCarthy Moment,” Consortium News, October 19, 2016,. Norton, B., Twitter, October 19, 2016, https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/788915185016836096. Norton was a part of the left-wing GrayZoneProject, whose founder, Max Blumenthal, would later call “Russiagate” a “vicious backlash… against Trump’s moves toward detente.” A regular guest on Russian media, Blumenthal had attended the December 2015 anniversary gala for RT along with Jill Stein, conspiracy theorist Ray McGovern, and Mike Flynn, and followed the Kremlin’s line regarding the Syria Civil Defense (also known as the White Helmets), conflict in Ukraine, and other geopolitical issues. GrayZoneProject’s work on the White Helmets was significant enough to assist AlterNet in featuring prominently in Starbird et al., 2018. See Giovanni, J.D., “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets,” New York Review of Books, October 16, 2018.

    [128] “Clinton Using Anti-Russia Red-Baiting Not Seen Since Days of McCarthyism,” RT.com, October 23, 2016; Doctorow, G., “Questioning the Russia-Gate ‘Motive,’” Consortium News, December 18, 2017.

    [129] Raimondo, J., “Anti-Russian Hysteria and the Political Elites,” AntiWar.com, October 2, 2016; Brenner, M., “American Foreign Policy in the Post-Trump Era,” CounterPunch, October 28, 2016.

    [130] Schindler, J.R., “McCarthyism 2.0 Has Infected the Democrats,” Observer, November 1, 2016; “Washington Fails to Prove Russia Interfered in US Elections in ‘Big Way,” Sputnik News, November 2, 2016.

    [131] Weiss, P., “Media Reports that Russians Are Behind Email Leaks Are Official Stenography—Carden,” MondoWeiss, November 5, 2016; Barrett, P., D. Kumar, “The Art of Spin,” Jacobin, November 7, 2016.

    [132] Kurtzleben, D., “Here’s How Many Bernie Sanders Supporters Ultimately Voted for Trump,” NPR.org, August 24, 2017,

    [133] For instance, the calls of Stephen F. Cohen of The Nation and the ACEWA, for a “multipolar world” were published in Sputnik News. See “Washington’s Refusal to Embrace Multi-Polar World is an Obstacle to Peace,” December 5, 2019,.

    [134] Regarding Venezuela, in an article co-written with RT host Dan Cohen, GrayZone founder Max Blumenthal cited GlobalResearch writer William Engdahl’s conspiracy theories about the “oily hands” of George Soros pertaining to Serbian pro-democracy group Otpor, see Cohen, D. and Blumenthal, M. “The Making of Juan Guaido: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader,” GrayZoneProject, January 29, 2019. Blumenthal also attempted to tie Engdahl’s idea of Otpor to Hong Kong protestors, see @MaxBlumenthal, Twitter, August 12, 2019, 10:00PM, Accessed January 6, 2020, https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1161140387769200640. Regarding Xinjiang, GrayZone authors repeatedly attempted to downplay reports of mass detention centers and discredit investigations into them, see L. Proyect, “A Reply to Ben Norton and Ajit Singh’s Hatchet Job on the Uyghers,” Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist, December 15, 2018; see also @JimMillward, Twitter, January 3, 2020, 12:45PM, Accessed January 6, 2020, https://twitter.com/JimMillward/status/1213199645079416835. Regarding Syria, GrayZone authors have promoted a number of discredited reports, including attacking the White Helmets as an Al Qaeda front group, see Hamad, S.C., Katerji, O. “Did a Kremlin Pilgrimage Cause Alternet Blogger’s Damascene Conversion?” Pulse, August 22, 2017.

    [135] C. Ecarma, “Tucker Carlson Stunned When Guest Says ‘No Evidence’ Russia Hacked DNC,” Mediate, December 4, 2019.

    [136] @conspirador0, Twitter, December 19, 2019, 3:03PM, Accessed January 6, 2020, https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1207798734102220800.

    [137] Baumgartner, J. PushShift.io, search conducted January 10, 2020.

  • Robert Topinka — “Back to a Past that Was Futuristic”: The Alt-Right and the Uncanny Form of Racism

    Robert Topinka — “Back to a Past that Was Futuristic”: The Alt-Right and the Uncanny Form of Racism

    Robert Topinka

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    There are reduced expectations for the younger generation, and this is the first time this has happened in American history. Even if there are aspects of Trump that are retro and that seem to be going back to the past, I think a lot of people want to go back to a past that was futuristic—The Jetsons, Star Trek. They’re dated but futuristic.

    —Peter Thiel, quoted in Dowd (2017)

    In the scramble to explain Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, then-campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon’s claim to a Mother Jones reporter that Breitbart under his editorship was a “platform for the alt-right” (Posner 2016) generated widespread attention in mainstream media publications.[1] A rash of alt-right “explainers” appeared that attempted to familiarize the uninitiated with this so-called movement by outlining the obscure intellectual roots of the alt-right’s seemingly inscrutable meme-driven cultural politics. This paper begins from the premise that the alt-right is not a movement but a reactionary ideology, a “bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics,” better understood as an ideological “milieu” rather than a movement (Nagle 2017, 19 & 18). Through an analysis of alt-right meme practice and neoreactionary theory, I will show in what follows that the intellectual innovation of the alt-right and its neoreactionary co-travelers is to attach white identity politics to a critique of modernity that turns postcolonialism on its head. Where the latter attacks racism for compromising the democratic promise, the former attacks democracy for compromising the white race’s promise, which is to accelerate capitalism to the lost Hobbesian future of the CEO-King, a vision implied in Peter Thiel’s words quoted in the epigraph to this article. Neoreactionaries have resurrected nineteenth-century notions of racial degenerationism and race as civilizational index, sutured them to techno-futurism, and deployed this monstrous racist hybrid in the form of what look on the surface like left and postcolonial critiques of modernity. The components of this thinking are familiar, but this precise combination is novel. The intellectual and aesthetic practice of the alt-right can thus be described as uncanny: strange but entirely familiar, a return in the present of a repressed past. In short, the alt-right’s newness is a symptom of its oldness.

    This argument draws on Corey Robin’s (2013) analysis of two key features of reactionary ideology, which, Robin argues, seeks to restore a lost past to a fallen present, and does so precisely by attacking the present on its own terms. This reactionary war against contemporary culture therefore tends to assume the aesthetic form of this culture—an immanent critique from the right that attacks the present culture to restore a past it has lost. Adopting Robin’s framework, I examine the attack on the present in the form of alt-right meme culture and the neoreactionary proposal for restoring a lost past.

    Neoreactionaries have a name for the structure of the fallen present: the “Cathedral,” the term Curtis Yarvin (writing as the blogger Mencius Moldbug) coined to describe the academics and mainstream journalists who preach the official “faith” of political correctness (2008a). The notion bears resemblance to the “propaganda model” (Herman and Chomsky 1988) of mass media, but instead of mainstream media and academia colluding with capital, they are preventing its flourishing. In its broad contours if not in its politics, this “Cathedral” critique resonates with left critiques of identity politics and diversity discourse, both of which are central to what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism,” or the form of capitalism that captures resistance by materializing practices of agency, participation, and diversity in communication technologies (Dean 2002, 2009). Left academics therefore find themselves united with corporate capital around “enthusiasm for diversity, multiplicity, and the agency of consumers” (Dean 2009, 9), a state of affairs that has led many on the left to call for a rejection of identity politics. Hence Nagle, in her important if controversial work on the emerging reactionary ideologies, argues that the alt-right opposes “the new identity politics” of liberal online spaces like the social blogging network Tumblr that normalize “anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric” on the “cultural left” (Nagle 2017, 68).

    I want to suggest here, though, that whatever the merits of identity politics as a scholarly approach or political strategy might be, the alt-right critique of identity politics is only the first reactionary gesture—the immanent critique of the present. The second move—the restoration of the lost past—does far more than violate the terms of diversity discourse; it seeks to install race as an interface that gathers humans in a global frame and sorts them hierarchically. Mobilizing memes as the aesthetic form of reaction, the alt-right popularizes this racial interface. Richard Spencer’s slogan—“race is real, race matters, race is the foundation of identity” (Caldwell 2016)—seeks to formalize racism as a political strategy, appropriating diversity discourse to claim white nationalism as a protected identity formation. Racist exclusion is the fulcrum of the proposed political order.

    The uncanny is a useful figure for analyzing the reactionary attempt to restore a lost past. This formal racism is uncanny in the strict sense Freud (1919) defines the term: the appearance of “something long familiar” that was estranged “only through being repressed” (148).  The appearance of this estranged object motivates ideological attempts to “integrate the uncanny” and “assign it a place” in a fallen present (Dolar 1991, 19). By focusing on the alt-right’s immanent critique of identity politics, we allow the alt-right to direct us to the “place” in the fallen present that needs critiquing, all the while missing the lost past that the alt-right seeks to restore. As a figure of encounter with the present, the uncanny directs us to the formal practice of assigning a place.

    I begin with the first reactionary gesture—immanent critique—by examining the meme as a formal manifestation of what Dean calls communicative capitalism, and therefore as an entirely familiar form, even if the content of alt-right memes is bizarre. I then turn to the second reactionary gesture—the restoration of the lost past—by turning to the intellectual roots of the alt-right, focusing on Bannon’s summer of 2014 speech at a Vatican conference and its resonance with the neoreactionary thinkers Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, whose form of uncanny racism I will describe. The connection extends beyond shared sympathy: Yarvin’s start-up counts the Trump-supporting Thiel as an investor (Pein 2014), and Yarvin reportedly communicated through an intermediary with Bannon while the latter was still Trump’s Chief of Staff (Johnson and Stokols 2017). I conclude by suggesting how attention to ideological form makes it possible to critique reactionary ideology without replicating the first reactionary gesture and arriving at the same place of critique that reactionary ideology selects, a danger that haunts any attempt to contextualize reaction.

    First, a brief note on terminology: the alt-right is a contested term, but is best understood as a shorthand for anti-politically correct reactionary ideology that developed its meme aesthetic in message boards, particularly 4chan (see Nagle 2017, 12 & 19). Neoreactionary thinking is a specific intellectual tradition that influences many alt-right adherents. This paper does not seek to define the alt-right, and indeed such definitional questions tend to impose a misreading of the alt-right as a coherent movement rather than a reactionary ideology. Nor does this paper deny the existence of extreme right organization (Berlet and Lyons 2000; Berlet 2004); rather, it seeks to analyze the “metapolitics” (Lyons 2017) of an ideological “fascist creep” (Ross 2017).

    Memes and the Allegorical Interface

    After Trump’s 2016 victory, alt-right partisans began claiming the election as a turning point in a meme war that most mainstream audiences nevertheless knew little about until mainstream journalists began publishing “explainers” on the subject.  A journalistic genre of recent vintage, the “explainer” responds to the perpetual news and commentary stream by expanding the nut graph into a contextual framework for understanding complex or obscure issues, stories or trends, allowing those who find themselves “out of the loop” to “grasp the whole” of the story (Rosen 2008). The alt-right, with its cornucopia of obscure memes and references—from the mystical “meme magic” of the pseudo-religious Cult of Kek (more on this below) to the infamous Pepe the Frog to racist approximation of African American Vernacular English of “dindu nuffin”—would seem to demand the explainer treatment, particularly for those who discovered the alt-right only after Trump’s hiring of Bannon brought the alt-right to mainstream attention. As I show below, mainstream explainers tend to attempt to uncover the ostensibly obscure symbolism of alt-right memes.

    Before turning to the explainers, though, it is necessary to attend to the meme and its function in reactionary ideology. The critical impulse is to reveal that which ideology conceals, but the alt-right does not conceal its racism; there is no cover (Topinka 2018). Instead, there is an attempt to repurpose the form of communicative capitalism to critique the present. As a form, the meme is ideally suited to such a task. The meme form encourages inclusion, participation, and bricolage—all the tools once associated with emancipatory politics and now absorbed into communicative capitalism. In this sense, the meme offers a perfect reactionary tool: reappropriative in its form, it reacts against the present by repurposing it.

    Indeed, the meme is a privileged form of communicative capitalism; it is an allegory of exchange, where culture exits only to be repurposed, and where the symbolic submits to circulation. Although their content may appear obscure, the form of alt-right memes is entirely familiar; in this sense, they are uncanny allegories of communicative capitalism.  Building on and contesting the media formalism of Lev Manovich and the hard media determinism of Friedrich Kittler, Alexander Galloway’s (2012) recent work on control allegories argues that media cannot be reduced to their technical predicates—storing, transmitting, and processing—or understood as “objects” bearing a set of formal characteristics that afford certain determinant effects. Galloway (2012) proposes the notion of the “interface” to examine media as forms that inaugurate sets of practices. Mediation is therefore a “process-object” (46), a space of flow, transformation, and transition where the “inside” of technical media encounters the “outside” of the social world. This encounter between technical media and social technique is, for Galloway, an allegory of how contemporary power works: technical apparatuses tend to encourage sets of practices that produce a flexible, modular, and endlessly transformable form of power.

    A technical apparatus might encourage a reactionary response as well. Consider Urbit, the “personal sever” created by Curtis Yarvin, also known as Moldbug, the neoreactionary blogger. The Urbit interface inserts an “opaque layer” between the user and the combination of cloud services users rely on (Wolfe-Pauly 2017). Rather than outsourcing computing to cloud services, Urbit offers general purpose personal server that “holds your data; runs your apps; wrangles your connected devices; and defines your secure identity” (Wolfe-Pauley 2017). Urbit seeks to reclaim the sovereignty that Benjamin Bratton (2016) argues has been vested in “the Stack” of computing and cloud services (particularly Facebook, Google, and Amazon) that now comprise planetary-scale computation. As creators Galen Wolfe-Pauly and Yarvin suggest, Urbit restores digital independence and reclaims sovereignty by returning to users exclusive control over their data. Instead of more participatory culture—“toiling on Mark Zuckerberg’s content farm” (Yarvin, quoted in Lecher 2017)—Urbit offers what neoreactionaries call “exit.” It is software as an allegory for the neoreactionary age.

    The meme form relies on participation from users competent in digital remixing. To meme is to participate through reappropriation. Scholars have tended to read this participatory reappropriation as democratizing and politically liberating (Coleman 2014)—even, at times, when meme practice becomes explicitly racist (Phillips 2015, 97).[2] Yet moving too quickly from technique to politics risks misunderstanding both. Amidst the recent attention in mainstream culture given to memes forged on the website 4chan’s message boards, it is also tempting to claim that “4chan invented the meme as we use it today” (Beran 2017). However, the meme form emerges from message board formats rather than any particular community. Börzsei (2013) thus traces the meme’s genealogy to Usenet, where meme use signals familiarity with message board discourse and offers a means of performing digital competence. Memes emerge from a constellation of interfaces—photo editors, image hosting sites, meme generators for image macro memes, and message boards—that encourage exchange, appropriation, and repurposing. As such, the meme is an allegory for communicative capitalism, which does not capture each instance of resistance through cultural reappropriation so much as engulf resistance in its very form.

    Memes function through deixis: they signal location in a culture, relying on in-group agreement for understanding.  The meme operates through the digital media aesthetics of the “stream” (Lovink 2016), where the signaling of links in circulatory networks replaces symbolic representation. This accounts for the uncanny familiarity of alt-right memes, since their obscurity requires laborious explanation to “understand;” that is, of course, unless one already knows the references. But the obscurity to outsiders is a basic function of the meme form itself. Consider the “Most Interesting Man in the World” meme, an example of the image macro, which in turn provides the basic grammar for the meme: an image, typically drawn from popular culture, is overlaid with text, which itself typically references popular culture or tropes from internet culture (the image might be also be drawn from a viral video, but, as Shiffman (2011) argues, something that “goes viral” does not become a meme unless it becomes the subject of imitation and transformation).

    most interesting man internet explorer meme

    This meme imitates the performed cultural sophistication of the “most interesting man” but transforms it to apply to internet culture, where no geek would be caught using Internet Explorer. Even such a banal meme as this requires some familiarity with a range of cultural discourses and figures: the “Silver Fox,” the Latin lover, and geek culture. This meme is as strange as any alt-right meme, and equally void of symbolism. It is a tethering of cultural domains, the formal manifestation of the reappropriation that dominates internet culture and communicative capitalism. By ignoring the meme form, the explainers approach the alt-right as inscrutable, when in fact the alt-right practices a vernacular aesthetic form. To be sure, alt-right memes rely on a relatively esoteric referential repertoire, but the form in which this repertoire appears—the meme, an allegorical form of communicative capitalism—is entirely familiar.

    The Alt-Right Explainer

    Capitalizing on Breitbart’s connection to Trump through Bannon, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopolous (2016) published “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” on Breitbart, an article that helped establish the generic conventions for the alt-right explainer: ride the momentum of the tenuous links between the alt-right and Donald Trump, identify the intellectual base (including neoreactionaries, especially Moldbug), point up the contrast with two of the main wings of mainstream American conservatism (anti-globalization, anti-theocracy), and demystify “meme magic” by explaining what memes—especially Pepe the Frog—mean. Similar explainers soon echoed in the nave of the “Cathedral.” The Daily Wire, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, Vox, and The New York Times published explainers following Breitbart’s pattern, as did the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer. Citing the left’s purported culture war victory, the Weekly Standard claims that the alt-right’s racism is merely a rhetorical response to the “left’s moralism” (Welton 2015), and the New York Times explainer (an op-ed by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard) emphasizes that alt-right racism is partly a result of the undue expansion of what it means to be “racist” (Caldwell 2016), an expansion Caldwell redresses by carefully distinguishing malignant white supremacists from the purportedly more benign white nationalists. In the face of such prevarication, the Daily Stormer’s “Normies’ guide to the alt-right” makes for bracing reading (Anglin 2016). Although it follows the generic conventions Breitbart established, it rejects the latter as a latecomer, claims racism as the fundamental fulcrum of alt-right ideology, and calls racist trolling a form of “culture-jamming” directed against so-called “normie” culture (Anglin 2016). The Daily Stormer, unfortunately, sees things more clearly than the “Cathedral” on this score. This racist trolling takes form in the meme, which becomes a mechanism of ideological assault and community-building.  

    Hillary Clinton’s campaign famously responded to one such meme—shared most prominently by Donald Trump, Jr. and Roger Stone—that featured a photoshopped film poster for The Expendables, retitled as “The Deplorables,” with the original actors’ heads replaced with a number of prominent Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential campaign: Roger Stone, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Eric Trump, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Jr., Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopolous. Trump is the central figure in the image. Hovering over his left soldier, Pepe the Frog looks smugly on, his red-blond hair coiffed in Trump’s signature style (Chan 2016). The photoshopping is clumsy, and the film referenced is archetypical Hollywood mediocrity, but to explain this meme is to marvel at the range of discourses it summons: from the visual and textual pun on The Expendables—which is in turn a play on Clinton’s dismissal of Trump supporters as belonging in the “basket of deplorables”—to the visual enrollment in Trump’s campaign of Pepe the Frog himself, whose bizarre internet career has by now been thoroughly chronicled.[3] The meme sutures a complex intertextual tissue, with each reference signaled on the aesthetic surface of the meme.

    The explainer genre encourages a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970) that seeks to wrest some underlying meaning from the meme. The Clinton campaign formalizes its explainer of this meme as a question-and-answer session between the innocent and the knowing: “Who is that frog standing directly behind Trump? / That’s Pepe. He’s a symbol associated with white supremacy.  / Wait. Really? White supremacy?” (Chan 2016). The dialogue falls into the trap of attempting to demystify Pepe. The Clinton campaign approaches the meme with a surface-depth aesthetic model, asking what the meme symbolizes, and this representational reading misrecognizes the meme form. As a result, the explainers fail to reckon with the uncanny familiarity of these ostensibly obscure aesthetic forms. As is often the case in critical theory, the explainer positions the audience as the innocent questioner in the Clinton campaign’s explainer—What? Really? A white supremacist frog? The alt-right is truly esoteric! Hence the headline of the New York Times explainer: “What the Alt-Right Really Means” (Caldwell 2016). Or the Vox headline for its explainer: “The Alt-Right Is Way More Than Warmed-Over White Supremacy. It’s That, but Way Way Weirder” (Matthews 2016). Or from the Huffington Post: “My Journey to the Center of the Alt-right” (O’Brien 2016). These headlines suggest that the alt-right’s racist ideology is obscure (even though it has always been a feature of American politics) and that its aesthetic practices are inscrutable (even though the meme is a primary aesthetic form of participatory media). Thus the Weekly Standard blames the alt-right on the “left’s moralism” and the New York Times diagnoses the undue expansion of the meaning of “racist” as the cause of the alt-right’s reactionary politics. By failing to reckon with aesthetics of the meme form, these “explainers” unwittingly redeem “meme magic” and its racist politics as something obscure and inscrutable rather than familiar and intractable.

    As an allegorical form of communicative capitalism and the aesthetics of the “stream” (Lovink 2016), the meme operates by signaling links—including to racist subcultural formations—rather than by encoding symbolic representation. Updating for the digital age Richard Dawkins’s 1972 notion of memes as the genetic expression, selection, and variation of cultural units, Limor Shifman (2012) offers a rigorous definition of memes as “building blocks” of complex cultures that propagate quickly, reproducing through imitation and transformation (189). A form of Henry Jenkins’s “spreadable media” (Jenkins et al 2013), memes exist in circulation, transforming through “remixes” (Wiggins and Bowers 2015) that blend cultural domains and generate the meme’s circulatory momentum. This remixing and repurposing wrenches objects from their cultural domain, creating a new, thickly referential memetic context. The meme is thus a form that transforms in circulation. To “get” the meme, one has to recognize both the cultural domain the meme references and how the meme is dislocating that cultural domain. Although memes are thickly referential, with dizzyingly complex circulatory histories, they are not typically rich hermeneutic texts. They signal and enact cultural convergence, but they do not symbolize it. Hence the awkwardness of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” the Clinton campaign brings to Pepe. Those who use Pepe in white supremacist memes do not smuggle him in as a covert symbol. His appearance signals a trajectory of transformation in circulation, not a symbolic repertoire. The Clinton campaign is thus right to associate Pepe with white supremacy but wrong about the meme, which signals circulation without symbolizing.

    By “unmasking” political correctness as the true cause of racism, mainstream explainers follow the first reactionary gesture, repeating the contours of the reactionary immanent critique. In a widely shared Medium post, Dale Beran claims that Pepe, the “grotesque, frowning, sleepy eyed, out of shape, swamp dweller, peeing with his pants pulled down because-it-feels-good-man frog” represents in an ideology that “steers into the skid of its own patheticness. Pepe symbolizes embracing your loserdom, owning it” (Beran 2017). This attempt at a hermeneutics of Pepe ignores that the alt-right does not make memes out of the “feels good man” Pepe; the alt-right Pepe wears a smug smile, openly declaring his troll status. Such a pathos-laden reading of “steering into the skid” shares with Laurie Penny’s (2017) reading of Yiannopolous’s followers as duped “Lost Boys” a tendency to position the “loser” status of the geek (the archetypal perpetual virgin housed in his parents’ basement) as an alibi for misogyny and white nationalism. Indeed, Beran claims the left’s “radical idea of sexual-difference-as-illusion,” which is “meant to solve the deplorables’ problem” by “dispelling it as a cloud of pure ideas” is in fact an “Orwellian” declaration to “these powerless men” that “‘There’s no such thing as your problem!’” (Beran 2017). Beran’s critique here echoes Nagle’s criticism of the “anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric” on the “cultural left” (Nagle 2017, 68). It is certainly possible to criticize such rhetoric, and reflexivity is surely a crucial political practice. But it is also notable that these critiques replicate the reactionary gesture: the left has won the culture war, diversity is ascendant, and the straight cisgender white male has lost his position—political correctness is everywhere run amok. The left therefore becomes the cause of the alt-right, and alt-right’s reactionary thinking becomes justified, if misguided. Indeed, these “Lost Boys,” dispossessed by the regime of political correctness, have also lost agency, and their hateful meme magic is a mere symptom of this fall. The critical impulse is to unmask the discourse by assigning it a context, but this is precisely its weakness in its approach to reactionary ideology. The alt-right’s blatantly racist discourse offers little to unmask. Its esoteric memes turn out to be banal cultural references. Unmasking its discourse tend to replicate the first reactionary gesture by arriving at the same place—the same cultural context—to be targeted for immanent critique.

    Reactionary Critical Theory

    I turn now to the second reactionary gesture—the restoration of the lost past. Alt-right and neoreactionary racism is uncanny—old and out of place, yet entirely familiar. Attending to the uncanny as a figure of ideology—an attempt to assign a place to that which is out of place—allows an approach to reactionary ideology that does not replicate the gesture of its immanent critique.

    Neoreactionary ideology tends to adopt the form and style of critical theory. Of course, neoreactionary thinker Nick Land was once a celebrated academic critical theorist, particularly in the UK, where he became something of a cult figure for his “dark Deleuzian” capitalist accelerationism and experimental theory-fiction, which he developed as part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s.[4] The infamous reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug also offers a critical genealogy of modernity on his Unqualified Reservations blog, particularly in the fourteen-part “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” (2000a-d &c). Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” text attempts to formalize Moldbug’s prolific if rambling blogposts into a neoreactionary theory of capitalist acceleration grounded in a despotic sovereign political order. Moldbug and Land follow the form of a left and postcolonial critique of modernity, but turn the critique on its head: the modern promise of equality and democracy was not compromised (by slavery, colonialism, and capitalism); the promise is itself the compromise that prevents capitalism’s flourishing. Modern notions of equality legitimate any grievance as oppression, and democracy compels the state to recompense any grievance claim. Democracy and equality therefore combine to promote personal failure. Neoreaction seeks to replace democratic voice with exit, or the right to leave any polity at any time, and to restore sovereignty in the figure of a CEO-King who seeks only to maximize value and therefore to accelerate capitalism. Race serves a crucial function in this theory: ministered to by the “Cathedral,” race mediates between citizens and state, sanctioning grievance claims and incentivizing dysfunction. However, by properly reprogramming race through neo-eugenics rather than modern notions of equality, it could become the accelerationist motor capable of restoring the lost future of capitalist sovereignty before its corruption through enforced diversity.

    The obsession with restoring lost ethnic sovereignty links the more abstruse neoreactionary thinkers with populists such as Bannon, who also adopt the form of left critique to advance reactionary thinking. Although Bannon’s status as a political star did not long outlive his tenure in Trump’s White House, which ended on August 18, 2017, he remains a pivotal figure for his role in linking the openly fascist politics of figures like Aleksander Dugin and Julius Evola with mainstream political discourse. In his 2014 speech to a conference in the Vatican, Bannon channels left critical theory, citing Marx in a critique of the “Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism,” which seeks to “make people commodities, to objectify people” (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Identifying a “crisis in the underpinnings of capitalism,” he diagnoses the post-crash bailout as symptomatic of a system that favors elites over the working classes (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). As a reactionary, though, Bannon proposes to rescue the future by restoring the past. Bannon praises Vladimir Putin, and his “advisor [Aleksander Dugin] who harkens back to Julius Evola” for “standing up for traditional institutions” and national sovereignty (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Acknowledging Evola’s fascism, Bannon nevertheless argues that “people want to see sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism” and a return to the time of America’s founding when “freedoms were controlled at a local level” rather than by elites in global command centers such as New York, London, and Berlin (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Bannon’s thinking here precisely follows the reactionary paradigm Robin outlines: Bannon develops a withering critique of the present order—one that overlaps in places with left critiques of finance capital—and offers as a solution the restoration of a fallen order.[5] Although they distance themselves from populist fascists like Bannon, Land and Moldbug share the same reactionary preoccupation. Land’s systematization of Moldbug sketches a program for fulfilling Bannon’s desire for sovereignty. This program relies on race as a formal explanatory category—a mode of immanent critique—and an interface that ran reconfigure the political order, assigning a place for the lost future of the CEO-King.

    The Cathedral and History

    As I have argued, following Robin (2013), reactionary politics combines two gestures: first, an immanent critique of the present, and second, a call to restore a lost past. This impulse surfaces in racist meme culture, but it receives a more rigorous treatment in Land and Moldbug, both of whom wage a critique of the present in service of a resurrection of the past. I turn now to the neoreactionary “Cathedral” critique—the first reactionary gesture—in order to show how it sanctions a call for a return in the present to neo-Victorian racism—the second reactionary gesture.

    Land and Moldbug are profoundly lapsarian thinkers. For them, progressivism—the conspiracy the “Cathedral” sustains—is the fall that obscures and indeed encourages the degeneration of the races. Land (2013) argues that the progressive Enlightenment follows the “logical perversity” of “Hegel’s dialectic,” enforcing the “egalitarian moral ideal” through progressivism’s sustaining formula: “tolerance is tolerable” and “intolerance is intolerable.” This formal structure guarantees a “positive right to be tolerated, defined ever more expansively as substantial entitlement” (Land 2013). If progressivism is the fall, tolerance is the juggernaut that tramples any attempt at ascent. For Land, the American Civil War is a moment of original sin that that “cross-coded the practical question of the Leviathan with (black/white) racial dialectics” (Land 2013). Of the Civil War, Land writes:

    The moral coherence of the Union cause required that the founders were reconceived as politically illegitimate white patriarchal slave-owners, and American history combusted in progressive education and the culture wars. If independence is the ideology of the slave-holders, emancipation requires the programmatic destruction of independence. Within a cross-coded history, the realization of freedom is indistinguishable from its abolition. (Land 2013)

    The Civil War thus installs a “cross-coded” history running on parallel historical tracks between progressive and dark enlightenments, emancipation and independence, voice and exit. This genealogy allows Land to identify a formal mechanism that propels the “only tolerance is tolerable” formula of the Progressive Enlightenment. The anachronistic insertion of “progressive education” and the “culture wars” into the stakes of the Civil War does not trouble Land because his analysis is formal rather than historical: the “cross-coded” history leads inexorably to progressivism, which in turn functions as a transhistorical epistemological and ontological force. Hence Moldbug claims, bizarrely, that Harvard’s “progressive” curriculum has not changed in 200 years, that British politics has been moving steadily left for 150 years, and that progressives—among whom he includes all mainstream Western politicians—have no enemies to the left (Moldbug 2008a).

    The “Cathedral” conspiracy therefore assigns a context for reaction. If neoreactionary thinking appears to be out of place, it is only because of the long reign of progressive dogma. The reactionary desire for a lost past follows close behind. Moldbug thus routinely cites the pre-1922 texts available on Google Books to pierce the “Cathedral” veil, approvingly linking, for example, to Nehemiah Adams’ 1854 account of his trip to the south, where he found himself surprised to find the slaves “were all in good humor, and some of them in a broad laugh” and charmed by the “unbought” friendliness of slaves (Adams 1854). Elaborating on the dubious claim that the “neat thing about primary sources is that often, it only takes one to prove your point,” Moldbug brags that high school students “won’t be assigned the primary sources I just linked to” (Moldbug 2008d). He cites the same source in a post defending and indeed advocating Thomas Carlyle’s view on slavery, suggesting that those who view slavery as “intrinsically evil” would “quickly change their tunes if forced,” like Adams, “to function in an actual slave society” (Moldbug 2009). The “Cathedral” conspiracy excuses Moldbug from evaluating Adams’ account, or from consulting the numerous contemporary accounts of slavery’s evils. If high school students wouldn’t be assigned it, that’s only because it violates “Cathedral” dogma. And since Adams’ account predates the Civil War (though not Enlightenment itself), it is therefore more likely to see the truth before the fall. Piercing the mists of this transhistorical progressivism, we see that “Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery” (Moldbug 2009). To take the measure of these aptitudes, Moldbug turns to an uncanny form of racism that functions as an interface for gathering and sorting human populations.

    Race as Interface

    Land and Moldbug accept race as a means of categorizing human aptitude within a global hierarchy. This notion of race plays a crucial role in their thinking, which describes the following racial dynamic: Insofar as progressivism incentivizes inaptitude, it also encourages racial degeneration. This is race as a technology, as Wendy Chun (2009) has described: race has particular affordances for enframing human populations, and this enframing shapes the contours of social and political orders. Extending Galloway, this is race as interface, as a form that gathers humans into a global frame and sorts them hierarchically (see also Weheliye 2014).

    Land and Moldbug’s uncanny racism resurrects a notion of race as an interface for gathering and sorting global populations first deployed in late Victorian eugenics. Like the eugenicists, Land and Moldbug rely on race as a mean of categorizing humans based on their biologically determined aptitude.  In 1869, Francis Galton called this aptitude “hereditary genius,” and offered it as a scientific explanation for the advance of certain civilizations over others, with Europeans, of course, at the apex of racial hierarchy (Galton 1869). Land and Moldbug adopt a range of figures (although no trained geneticists) in articulating a new version of race science called “human biodiversity,” which includes the relatively banal argument that humans are not neurologically uniform coupled with the dubious and insidious claim that this “biodiversity” can be best measured by plotting genetically-determined racial categories to IQ distribution.[6] Yarvin makes this argument without his typical circumlocution in a Medium post (which he later deleted) that attempted to persuade delegates at the LambdaConf functional programming conference against boycotting his presence because of his slavery apologetics (Breitbart sympathetically chronicled Yarvin’s plight).[7] Yarvin insists he does not equate “anatomical traits” with “moral superiority” but makes the explicit argument for a genetically determined racial hierarchy as measured by IQ in the comments section of the Medium post (Yarvin 2016). Here Yarvin is trying to speak to what Moldbug would call the “Cathedral,” defending himself from committing the moral sin of racism as the bad ideology of individual viewpoints. He also criticizes mass incarceration—the first reactionary gesture. Yet Yarvin also summons race in its uncanny neo-eugenicist form to suggest that “Malik cannot be magically turned into a Jewish math nerd” (Yarvin 2016). This is the second gesture, a proposal that neo-eugenicist racism can explain and resolve the problem of mass incarceration and “the destruction of African American society” (Yarvin 2016).

    Another crucial connection between neoreaction and Victorian racism is the use of race not only to categorize humans by aptitude, but also to plot the potential for civilizational achievement. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty offers a canonical description of Victorian Liberal conceptions of the hierarchy of races, which Mill leverages to justify violent repression in India: savages cannot “practise the forebearance” that “civilized society” demands, and they therefore require “despotic” governance to restore sovereignty and subdue passions (209). Land’s claim that Europeans are genetically predisposed to “low time preference” is formally indistinguishable from Mill’s preoccupation with forbearance. However, neoreaction reverses the racial trajectory. For liberal Victorian racial theorists, exposure to Enlightenment civilization could advance a given race beyond savagery. Land’s neoreaction reverses this trajectory: the exposure to Enlightenment formula that “only tolerance is tolerable” encourages further dysfunction in the lower races. This argument adopts another strain of Victorian racism: racial degenerationism, or the notion that races could devolve to be increasingly ill suited to civilization. Racial degenerationism found practical application in criminal atavism, the theory that criminals resembled “prehistoric man” and behaved “in a way that would be appropriate to savage societies” (Ellis 1890, 208). Adopting a similar assumption, Land suggests that “barbarism has been normalized,” in “lethally menacing” cities where “civilization has fundamentally collapsed” (Land 2013). Indulging in racist moral panic about urban decay—another anachronism in this age of urban “revitalization”—Moldbug argues that most American cities would benefit from martial law, and Land (2013) identifies white flight as the “spontaneous impulse of the dark enlightenment”: it is all exit and no voice. Land’s investment in white flight is also a libidinal investment in the fear of violently virile black bodies, which finds its parallel in the alt-right’s obsession with cuckoldry and “cucking” racialized as a white man watching his white wife dominated by a “black bull.” The purposefully excessive “cuck” discourse offers a means of indulging the fear of the black body while at the same time enjoying the act of violating tenets of “Cathedral” faith. The crucial point, though, is that “cuck” discourse not only operates to critique political correctness; it also signals an understanding of race as interface for governance, that which promotes degeneration but also—properly reprogrammed—promises acceleration to a lost future.

    Conclusion

    Before an antifa (anti-fascist) protestor sucker-punched Richard Spencer in the face in Washington, D.C. on Trump’s inauguration day—a moment that quickly achieved meme status—a bystander asked Spencer if he liked black people. Spencer smirked, shrugged, and said, “Sure” (Burris 2017). Identity politics poses a double trap for approaching the alt-right: Criticize the alt-right for bad identity politics, and they can easily dodge the accusation by parroting mainstream acceptance of diversity discourse, or point to the fact that political correctness is mainstream and therefore part of the power structure that so clearly needs dismantling. Criticize identity politics, and cede to the alt-right the choice of battleground. I have argued here that alt-right critics tend to make just such a concession. By focusing on the first gesture—the immanent critique—we risk missing the form of reactionary ideology, which includes a call for restoring a lost past. Spencer attempts to distill this call into a slogan: “race is real, race matters, race is the foundation of identity.” This slogan adapts Land and Moldbug’s racial formalism, but instead of an exit from grievance democracy, it argues for inclusion within grievance status. Hence Moldbug’s (2007) coy refusal of white nationalism: “I’m not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he writes, but white nationalists only recognize the symptom, missing the cure. The critique of “cucks” and the obsession with “red-pilling” offers a more nakedly libidinal, pop cultural take on the “Cathedral,” but, according to Moldbug, the alt-right fails to recognize that the entitlement state cannot expand to include white nationalist grievance, because to do so would violate “Cathedral” dogma. Bannon’s strong sovereignty more closely approaches the cure, but insofar as nationalism entails protectionism, he fails to follow techno-futurism back to the futuristic past that neoreactionaries desire.

    Land proposes as a formal fix “hyper-racism,” his vision for accelerating the “explicitly superior” and already “genetically self-filtering elite” through a system of “assortative mating” that would offer a “class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector toward neo-speciation” (Land 2014). This is eugenics as a program for exit, not only from the progressive Enlightenment but also from the limits of humanity. Despite its contemporary jargon, this hyper-racism is indistinguishable in its form from late Victorian eugenics, which also recommended a program of “assortative mating.” Of course, now eugenics places us on a vector toward neo-speciation; so it’s back to the past, but now it’s futuristic.

    The “Cathedral” conspiracy justifies and motivates this recuperation of uncanny racism. Clearly, the “Cathedral” conspiracy shares much in common with rudimentary applications of Gramscian notions of hegemony or Hermann and Chomsky’s (1988) propaganda model. Ideology critique and reactionary critique tend to mirror one another. This is because both attempt to assign the uncanny object to a place, to contextualize it, whether as a justified response to the “Cathedral” or as a misguided response to left moralism. Reactionary thinking tends to fully indulge the critical impulse. Behind every veil, it finds the “Cathedral.”  This libidinal investment in unveiling resonates in the alt-right obsession with “red-pilling” and cuckoldry. Just as neoreactionaries fear that the “Cathedral” faith promotes black dysfunction, the alt-right fears “blue-pilling” as a form of penetration by the Other.

    To those of us reared in the “Cathedral’s” halls, this is all repugnant. It is also uncanny: Haven’t we moved beyond this racism?  Of course, the alt-right has a memetic response to this critique: “I mean, come on people, it’s [current year].” The alt-right has fully anticipated critical unmasking and absorbed it into the meme form, which refuses symbolic decoding and provides a formal interface for the participatory reappropriation and bricolage that characterize media practice in this age of communicative capitalism. Ideology critique and reactionary critique are similar in form: both attempt to recuperate the uncanny, to assign it a place. It is therefore crucial to attend to the uncanny form of reactionary ideology, which develops an immanent critique of the present in order to find a place in which to restore a lost past. Rather than following the alt-right to the purported excesses of identity politics, it is crucial to reckon with reactionary racism as the fulcrum of a proposed political order. This is not just a call to examine “structural racism,” because neoreactionary racism and alt-right racism have yet to harden into structure. It is instead a form, an interface between certain technical predicates (race as a gathering and sorting mechanism) and the social (the lost white future of the CEO-King). Reactionary ideology attempts to recuperate this uncanny racism; ideology critique must do more than cite the desire for this recuperation.

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    Robert Topinka is Lecturer in Transnational Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is currently working on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project entitled “Politics, Ideology, and Rhetoric in the 21st Century: The Case of the Alt-Right.”

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] This work was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for “Political Ideology, Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the ‘Alt-Right,’” (AH/R001197/1).

    [2] As Nagle (2017) documents, Gabriella Coleman (2014) continued to write approvingly of 4chan as late as 2014, when the forum was dominated by extreme racism and misogyny, and she also celebrated the hacker “weev” despite his open Nazism (102-105). In her book on trolling, Whitney Phillips (2015) argues for the redeeming qualities of “racist statements forwarded by people whose stated goal is to be as racist and upsetting as possible” because, unlike more subtle racists, “at least trolls advertise” (97). Although Phillips is right to argue that there is no value in simply condemning trolls, it is similarly difficult to see the value in well-advertised racism. The history of celebratory studies of participatory culture weighs heavily on such accounts.

    [3] The explainers cited in this paper all recount a version of Pepe’s history. For an academic treatment, see Marwick and Lewis (2017: 36).

    [4] On “Dark Deleuze,” see Culp (2016). For a succinct account and critique of Land’s accelerationism see Noys (2014: 54-58). For more on the controversy surrounding Nick Land’s planned 2016 appearance at the London art gallery LD50 and the seminar series he offered in 2017 at the New Centre for Research and Practice, see Shutdown LD50 (2017) and “Against Nick Land and the Reactive Left” (2017).

    [5] This contradictory impulse to restore the past in the future is a key feature of fascism. In an analysis of National Socialism, Jeffrey Herf (1981) calls this “reactionary modernism.”

    [6] On HBD, Land and Moldbug’s sources include prolific eugenicist bloggers such as “hbd chick” and Steve Sailer, controversial popular genetics writers including Charles Murray and Nicholas Wade, and the physicist Stephen Hsu, whose recent interest in the genetics of intelligence has generated controversy (see Flaherty 2013). Galton, Land, and Moldbug share a similar strategy of racial typing. Galton adopted Quetelet’s use of the Gauss-Laplace distribution to identify physical generations in human populations, which Galton sought to index with racial categories (Galton 1869: xi, and Wozniak 1999).

    [7] Breitbart lists four articles under the “Curtis Yarvin” tag as of May 3, 2019. For the first defense of Yarvin’s presence at LambdaConf, which, incidentally, was published the same day as Breitbart’s alt-right explainer, see Bokhari (2016).

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    Works Cited

  • Brian Hughes — Thriving from Exile: Toward a Materialist Analysis of the Alt-Right

    Brian Hughes — Thriving from Exile: Toward a Materialist Analysis of the Alt-Right

    Brian Hughes

    Introduction: Postmortem

    Between the years 2015-18—when the (so-called) “alt-right” first exploded to prominence in the public eye—media coverage and academic scrutiny of this loose knit far-right coalition approached the topic almost exclusively from the perspectives of ethnography, culture/discursive mapping and ideological historiography. And, indeed, circumstances demanded such approaches. Countless readers were taken off-guard by the sudden wave of antisemitic internet trolls and polo-clad neo-fascists whom they now saw marching in the streets. Only methods such as these were capable of operating with the necessary speed to orient the public to a grotesque new movement that appeared to enjoy the ear of the president himself.

    But in that haste, something was neglected. To date, a rigorous, comprehensive materialist analysis of the alt-right and its origins has yet to be seen. Of course, the great challenge of historical materialism is that it demands detail—facts pertaining to the realities of finance, technological affordances, regulation of capital and labor under the law, stacks and flows of raw currency, and so on. And such detail cannot be developed without ample time for researchers to acquire and organize it, or for readers to absorb it. But time was in short supply as the alt-right made its transition from a mostly virtual media phenomenon to a political movement characterized by public demonstrations, entry into the halls of American power, and, very quickly, murder. And so, the “culturalist” approach rightly predominated.

    It should go without saying that such an absence of materialist analysis has left us only partially equipped to recognize, let alone oppose, future movements owing their origins to conditions similar to those of the alt-right. Today, at least in the opinion of some commentators, the alt-right proper may be a spent force (Weill 2018; McCoy 2018; Barrouquere 2018). But its legacy lives on in even more extreme ideologies and movements. These new forces of the far-right are emerging according to patterns startlingly similar to those which birthed the alt-right. It is essential that we study them in light of the relations of capital to productive labor and technology.

    Unfortunately, the convergence of crises that menace the present day, spanning from the rise of a new populist authoritarianism to climate catastrophe and beyond, are defined precisely by an urgency that would seem to preclude the production of rigorous dialectical works. This essay nevertheless advocates for such an impossible approach—indeed, insists upon the necessity of this tedious, time-consuming work. Toward that end, this essay will indicate some approaches that such a fact-driven, dialectical method might take. It will identify key economic antagonisms and moments of technological revolution, which set into place the conditions necessary for the emergence of a proto-alt-right media ecosystem, and eventually the alt-right itself. It will indicate how similar patterns of antagonism and technological change are contributing to the emergence of newer, yet-more radical and dangerous far right fringe movements today. And while these are, at best, trailheads to a more detailed and rigorous analysis, perhaps it will at least serve as postmortem for a moment that has since grown into a crisis. Perhaps in its very failure to fully answer its own mandate, this essay will succeed in stressing the urgency of such an undertaking.

    Gaps and Surfeits: Reviewing the Culturalist Literature

    To be sure, many fine works of political economy addressing this era of far-right ascendancy are being written. But while indispensable, these do not address the alt-right per se. The journal Critical Sociology recently published its symposium “Neoliberalism and the Far Right,” a concise set of articles describing the “organic or constitutive pathologies or contradictions within the political economy of neoliberalism that, in many respects, dates back to the emergence of this distinct ideo-political framework in the 1930s,” and (so the symposium’s participants argue) produced the conditions that have led us to our current moment of authoritarian populism (Kiely and Saull 2018, 821). The Monthly Review continues to publish exemplary works of materialist political economy, such as Michael Joseph Roberto’s 2017 piece, The Origins of American Fascism. In it, he seeks to recruit the works of key theorists of 20th Century fascism (Baran, Sweezy, Haider, Corey, Magil and Stevens) for the needs of today (Roberto 2017). As in the Critical Sociology symposium, this work insists upon a recognition of historical continuity. In steep contrast to the exceptional or atavistic treatment that characterizes so much popular coverage and analysis of President Trump (Robin 2017), Roberto’s insistence upon a sense of historical continuity will be essential to a project of materialist analysis of the alt-right.

    Unfortunately, these works, and others like them, leave the alt-right itself untouched, or at best tangential, to the broader issues of far-right populism, the radicalization of the American white middle class, the legacy of neoliberalism and of its “cleansing [of] state from the consequences of (social) democracy” (Kiely and Saull 2017, 822). Perhaps this is appropriate. For while the alt-right may have seized an outsized share of public attention, it is debatable just how great an influence the movement can realistically claim (Mudde 2018). Indeed, the works of Roberto, Foster, and the Critical Sociology symposiasts indicate that we must not treat the alt-right as a primary stimulus of our country’s current predicament. However, neither is the alt-right reducible to a generic symptom of these same historical forces. While unimaginable outside of the broader historical political-economic context sketched above, the alt-right is a consequence of a subset of productive forces specific to itself. A historical materialist analysis of the alt-right must seek to identify the productive patterns that were unique to the genesis and metastasis of the movement—hence the importance of an initial focus on media and communication technology.

    Major works specifically addressing the alt-right have been largely free of political economic approaches. The most prominent long-form texts on the topic make no claims‚ implicit or otherwise, to performing a materialist analysis of the subject. George Hawley’s Making Sense of the alt-right is a rigorous (if brief) scholarly treatment of the movement, which profiles prominent movement personalities, pivotal moments in the movement’s evolution and metastasis, and highlights the ideological positions that defined the movement over the past decade and a half (Hawley 2018). While Hawley does hazard to identify some causal patterns pertaining to relations between capital and the productive forces that gave birth to the movement, he stops far short of a structural analysis. Mike Wendling’s alt-right from 4chan to the White House is a detailed taxonomy of the cultural and ideological categories that comprise the alt-right. It offers a clear and well-delineated lexicon with which to discuss to alt-right, but it offers effectively no causal analysis for the origins and orientations of the alt-right (Wendling 2018). David Neiwert’s Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump does attempt to trace origins and contingencies, narrativizing the movement through the political evolution of American conspiracy cultures (Neiwert 2017). Neiwert makes a convincing case for the presence of conspiratorial thinking across American far-right subcultures. And his claim that the alt-right represents an outgrowth of militia and anti-New World Order subcultures is intriguing enough to warrant serious pursuit. Nevertheless, Niewert’s analysis is also primarily cultural, and leaves material explanations largely unmodeled.

    The sole full-length work to focus on the alt-right while claiming to speak from the socialist position is Angela Nagle’s monograph Kill All Normies. The alt-right, Nagle argues, emerged as a force of opposition to what the right characterizes as unchecked “PC-cultural politics” (Nagle 2017, 19) of the online left, a movement which had become preoccupied with toxic identity politics and ideological purges. In what has become one of the book’s most hotly debated passages, Nagle writes that “the key driving force behind [online call-out culture] is about creating scarcity in an environment in which virtue is the currency… the counterforce of which was the anonymous underworld from which the right-wing trolling cultures emerged” (Nagle 2017, 76). That is to say that an exclusionary left-wing culture created the opening for a strategic right-wing backlash. This contention has, in the years following its publication, further exacerbated divisions within the left (Liu 2017, Stewart 2017) while simultaneously provoking attempts to seal these fissures (Weatherby 2017).

    Whether it is or is not accurate, and for all the self-reflection it may have provoked on the left, Nagle’s critique should not be mistaken for a materialist analysis of the alt-right’s origins and modes of self-reproduction. Rather, it would more accurately be described as a cultural ethnography presented via market metaphor. Nagle’s “online economy of virtue” (Nagle 2017, 68) belongs to the realm of political economy only insofar as it is libidinal and “there is as much libidinal intensity in capitalist exchange as in the alleged ‘symbolic’ exchange” (Lyotard 1993, 109). But while such a transposition is no doubt possible, this cannot credibly be claimed as Nagle’s project.

    Nagle’s critique takes place at the level of culture, engaging with culture as experienced and described by those within it. And while this approach contains some shortcomings, so too do all methodologies and critical frameworks. The culturalist approach no doubt offers advantages that other analytic lenses do not. Culturalist approaches like Nagle’s can reveal intra-movement fault lines while charting the expressions of (for example) commodity fetishism in online subculture. This can help us to understand how consumer identity merged with reactionary politics in the Gamergate movement that began in 2014 (Massanari 2017, Salter 2018). It should also be noted that culturalist approaches offer lay readers a compelling entry point into otherwise alien objects of study. When faced with the sudden appearance of a strange and frightening movement like the alt-right, such reader appeal is vital.

    Clearly, we do not lack for well-drawn histories and ethnographies of the alt-right. Nor do we lack for serious political economic treatments of the global authoritarian populist turn. What we lack is a substantive work that will specifically treat the alt-right as the outcome of relations of production at those sites from which the alt-right issued forth.

    Trailheads: Sites of Interest for Material Analysis

    The alt-right was initially a media-oriented phenomenon, existing almost exclusively in the communicative space of Web 2.0 and subsequent Social Web. Since “different ways of financing and organizing cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourse, representations, and communicative resources…and for the organization of audience access and use” (Golding and Murdock 2005, 70), a materialist analysis on the origins of the alt-right might well begin with the financial, technological, and productive-relational history of media and communication technology.

    In fact, the alt-right came about through a decades-long intra-right-wing struggle over ownership and access to media and communication technologies—both in the organs of the press and broadcast, and within the space of think-tanks, intellectual societies, and, occasionally, universities. This internecine struggle was augmented by much broader shifts in conditions of ownership and techno-legal regulatory frameworks, which characterized communication technology and media in the late-20th and early 21st centuries.

    Each generation of 20th Century American reactionaries found itself forced to contended with a progressive narrowing of its access to mass media. Lacking access to the organs of conservative ideological commodity production, these groups and individuals would coalesce over the course of decades into a thriving network of clubs, social circles, and publications funded by wealthier members of the marginal far-right. This sequestration effected a process of further ideological radicalization, characterized by risk-shifting and isolation-cohesion (McCauley and Moskalenko 2016)—trends only exacerbated by the need to produce and reproduce a market for far-right ideological content that went mostly unsatisfied by mainstream counterparts. As digital technology (defined in large part by the commercial internet and its laissez-faire regulatory regime) offered new and inexpensive vehicles by which to the reach the public, a new generation of reactionaries came of age, radicalized in an era when now access could be taken for granted.

    Many observers, both within and outside of the alt-right, cite William F. Buckley’s purge of the John Birch Society from the American conservative movement as the beginning of the American far-right’s years on the media fringe (Ashbee 2000). Finding itself out of step with the relatively liberal tenor of the times, Buckley, his National Review magazine, and the conservative movement for which they claimed to speak, pursued not merely a change in image, but a wholesale redrawing of the circumferences of American conservatism. Along with the expulsion of the John Birch Society and its leader Robert Welch, this reorientation involved the rejection of Randian objectivists, along with the explicitly antisemitic Liberty Lobby, and other, smaller concerns (Mintz 1985). Through a campaign of editorial and organizational exclusion, a new, “midcentury American conservatism was self-consciously created to appeal to the mainstream of American philosophical liberalism” (Deneen 2017, 24). Throughout its history National Review never turned a profit and was dependent on Buckley’s ability to “draw on elite social circles for additional donations to the magazine” (Sivek 2008, 267). Therefore, purging the embarrassments of Robert Welch, Ayn Rand, et. al was imperative in order to continue funding American conservatism’s mid-century journal of record. And so, this purge was as much a ruthless financial decision as an ideological one (and indeed, an orthodox dialectical materialism would stress the determining pressure of finance upon ideology).

    Despite the National Review’s considerable influence, it was never the sole gatekeeper of conservative communications. The Buckley purge did not single-handedly create the critical mass necessary for a rival, dissident far-right media ecosystem to coalesce. Buckley’s “no-platforming” strategy succeeded in sanitizing the public face of movement conservatism while disciplining its operatives. But in doing so, it only curtailed the ability of these tendencies to steer conservative politics in the second half of the 20th Century. Birchers continued to operate their own not-inconsiderable media operations via ownership of a vast publishing and distribution infrastructure (Mintz 1985). Meanwhile, Objectivists remained a numerically small but disproportionately influential current within midcentury discourse as a justifying function of unbridled capitalism (Toy 2004). The ideological projects represented by these now-officially fringe groups were merely repressed—not eliminated. While their sequestration from primary economies of ideological media production severely diminished their ability to impact mass politics, it did not end their (small i) ideological projects. These would remain constant, until such time as the conditions of the political economy of media shifted several decades later.

    It was the neoconservative ascension, and concomitant “paleoconservative purges,” of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s (Berlet 2008, Gottfried 2015), which brought together the primary cohort of individuals, groups, and sources of financing that would constitute the core of the proto-alt-right. Racist ultraconservatives such as Paul Gottfried, Joe Sobran, Patrick Buchanan, William Regnery II, Peter Brimelow, Mel Bradford, and Sam Francis (to name but a few) found themselves, one by one, forced from such organs of the conservative movement as Commentary, the Intercollegiate Institute, and (many times over) the National Review (Williams 2017). As increasing numbers of far-right ideologues and financiers found themselves recast as liabilities within movement conservatism, an alternative right wing at last began to coalesce.

    These newly radioactive writers and politicos sought out new sites at which to produce media commodities. A constellation of paleo-friendly print serials such as Chronicles, Left and Right, and The Rockwell-Rothbard Report, established “an interconnected set of rhetorical pipelines and echo chambers [to] amplify and repeat the messages and…ideology of the group into the mainstream” (Berlet 2008, 580). This paleoconservative alternative media, with its inferior range and capital resources, was well-suited to producing increasingly unapologetic extremist ideological content and reach a small audience. However, this alternative print market proved simply too meagre to deliver the American far-right back into power.

    Again, movement conservatism had succeeded in sanitizing and disciplining itself, throwing its ugliest tendencies to the margins of the market. By century’s end, paleoconservatism seemed a dead letter, dashed apart by internecine ideological conflicts over foreign interventionism and Austrian economics (Ashbee 2000, 82-83). The paleo-purge might even have achieved what the Bircher purge could not, ending paleoconservatism as an ideological project altogether—but for an epochal revolution in markets and technology brought about by the age of mass internet access.

    With the arrival of the internet—specifically Web 2.0 and the blogosphere—several key sites in the paleoconservative diaspora became launching sites for the incipient Alt-Right. The American Conservative, founded in 2002 by Pat Buchanan, Taki Theodoracopulos, and Scott McConnell, was perhaps the most high-profile of these post-paleo print/digital crossovers (Hawley 2017, 57-59). The American Conservative would become a prime site of synergy and metastasis between paleocons and the proto-alt-right. TAC would give future alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer his entré to publishing as an Assistant Editor from 2007-08. When Spencer was fired (purportedly for his extremist beliefs), he found a soft landing at Theodoracopulos’s new endeavor, the blog TakiMag. One year later, Spencer would go on to found AlternativeRight.com, funded by another National Review exile, Peter Brimelow, and by disillusioned paleo-financier William H. Regnery II (ibid).

    By the time that Spencer left Taki’s Magazine in 2010, the era of “Web 2.0” was in full flower, characterized by increasingly inexpensive tools for developing professional-looking websites. However, these cosmetic improvements were in fact symptomatic of a more fundamental change in the power of publishing capital. With the arrival of Web 2.0, control over the relevant means of producing media commodities increasingly migrated to blogging platforms (WordPress), user generated content sites (YouTube), and website building software as a service (Squarespace). This technological shift occurred within the context of a broader financialization of the press, which decimated medium-sized publications, and ushered in an era of precarious, contingent “content production” labor, feeding these new platforms a rush of media industry refugees. While the largest media companies would continue to employ their own web developers, smaller companies and independent content producers quickly adopted these alternatives. This effected a radical reversal of the sale of labor between small media companies and web developers. Whereas in the past, web developers would have sold their labor to media companies, now small media producers sold theirs to an ever-shrinking handful of hosting, publishing, and design platforms, who reaped the surplus value of advertising and data mining.

    The success of this arrangement depended on an unprecedented alienation of labor, even to the extent that small content producers did not recognize the arrangement as such. The (capital-I) Ideological façade of individual empowerment which accompanied the tech-libertarian disruption of Web 2.0 ensured that companies would exercise no oversight save the bare legal minimum. The so-called “safe harbor” protections afforded to digital tech platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act fostered both the expansive logic of this new mode of capital exploitation as well as its Ideological rationale. Under the statute, interactive computer service providers such as the low-cost blogging platforms upon which the alt-right would be built could not be held accountable for the content or actions of their clients (Balasubramani 2017; Citron and Wittes 2017). As digital economic refugees flooded the new platforms during the years of the great recession, the new wielders of productive capital did not investigate their labor pool too deeply. The dregs of the American conservative movement were no exception to any of these pressures or affordances.

    Spencer seized this opportunity (albeit unwittingly) to launch AlternativeRight.com (Hawley 2017, 57). Now, the American far-right became more eclectic than ever before. At AlternativeRight.com, paleoconservatives like Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis appeared alongside self-proclaimed “manosphere” misogynists like Matt Forney, academic antisemites Kevin MacDonald and Ricardo Duchesne, mainstream libertarians like David Gordon and Thomas Woods, and fringe “right-wing anarchists” Keith Preston and Jack Donovan. To these were added Norse pagan revivalists, heterodox Eastern Rite Christians, Evolan perennialists, and conspiracists of all stripes (Nagle 2017). While many factors contributed to this eclecticism (the biases and affordances of hypertext and Spencer’s intention to create a “big tent” movement, to name just two) market forces underpin them all. Cross-pollination expanded Alternative Right‘s readership, which in turn expanded funding opportunities, which subsequently created new readerships with new demands for representation within the burgeoning proto-alt-right. A similar phenomenon may be glimpsed today in the “alternative influence” networks which knit together far-right networks on user generated content platforms such as YouTube (Lewis 2018).

    In the early 21st Century, when arrangements of productive capital and technological capacities changed so radically, ideological projects that had endured, and even festered, in exile, now returned to reclaim their place in the American conservative movement. What had been sanitized was reinfected; what had been disciplined was now set loose.

    The points of conjunction mentioned so far are only a few of the most obvious sites of inquiry at which a materialist analysis of the alt-right movement might begin. There are many more historical watersheds where technology, capital, and human intention met to produce what ultimately became the alt-right. We may point to the consumer-cultural revolt of #Gamergate, or to strategic courting of online troll groups by Trump consigliere and former executive chairman for Breitbart.com Steve Bannon (Green 2017). The ongoing role of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in financing a now badly damaged alt-right raises a pressing need both for new modalities of digital political economy and their application to the question of far-right extremism (Golumbia 2016). Deeper questions of labor and masculine identity have the potential to unearth entirely new vistas of investigative potential intersecting with gender and cultural theory (Kimmel 2018).

    However, we should not wait for an exhaustive materialist survey and analysis before applying lessons from the history (crudely) sketched above. These very same patterns of repression-exile-metastasis-and-return appear to be reoccurring in microcosm today, as mainstream conservatism has redrawn the boundaries of acceptability. Conservatism under Trump embraces some on its former extremes, while new, semi-disavowed fringes escalate to heights of ever-more spectacular violence. An array of legal and financial pressures force sites such as 8chan toward distributed hosting strategies (Poulson 2019). The same combination of pressures is increasingly forcing far right extremists onto encrypted messaging apps (Glaser 2019). Will these exiles continue their ideological projects in that exile? How might these ideologies blend, mutually provoke, and metastasize? And what unforeseen revolution in the relations of production might one day affect their ascent to power?

    Conclusion: Moving Faster

    The conditions according to which the 20th Century American far-right financed and organized the production of its ideological commodities enabled a denial of its fringes. As each generation of the 20th-Century American far-right was forced to contend with increasingly narrow access to capital and productive means, new logics of producing ideological commodities emerged. With the revolution in technology and relations of labor incited by the internet and Web 2.0, and organized by a techno-libertarian legal regime, these far-right logics metastasized and returned to the broader cultural marketplace in the form of the alt-right.

    To the extent that the mass and momentum of capital and technology might have overwhelmed attempts at strategic intervention during these early periods, the culturalist approach to understanding the alt-right takes on renewed importance. Those periods of exile during which the far-right incubates its ugliest offspring are precisely the points at which culturalist insights might do the most to shape counterstrategy. These factors which incubated the alt-right may have belonged to Neiwert’s conspiracies, Nagle’s subculture wars, or some as-yet-unidentified tendency. During that period of incubation, in which capital, the law, technology, and social pressure converged to isolate and minimize the American far right, it was these sites at which successful intervention might have occurred. Now that the extremist right’s end of exile has laid bare the material causes for its return, political economy is positioned to make a case for intervention appropriate to the present day.

    The materialist analysis of this movement must be written. This analysis should be incorporated with the findings of culturalist study, so that together they can inform both policy and strategies of civil action. The scope of such a project seems large indeed. But perhaps it is only impossible if undertaken in a spirit of retreat or abstract reflection.

    In the short term, the lessons provided by this materialist sketch might help to understand hidden dynamics in the cat-and-mouse game of deplatflorming and reemergence that defines far right activity on the internet today. As the history of American conservatism’s purges seems to indicate, deplatforming does indeed limit the extreme fringes from wielding power and influence but only for so long as they remain pushed to the margins. When these repressed tendencies return, as in the case of the alt-right, we are reminded that synergies and antagonisms of capital, labor, and technology have the power to return these once-exiled fringes back into the world.

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    Brian Hughes is a doctoral candidate and lecturer at the American University School of Communication. His work explores the impact of communication technology on political and religious extremism, terrorism and fringe culture. He is a Doctoral Fellow with the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right.

    Back to the essay

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    Works Cited

     

  • Kevin Musgrave and Jeff Tischauser — Radical Traditionalism, Metapolitics, and Identitarianism: The Rhetoric of Richard Spencer

    Kevin Musgrave and Jeff Tischauser — Radical Traditionalism, Metapolitics, and Identitarianism: The Rhetoric of Richard Spencer

    Kevin Musgrave and Jeff Tischauser

    Introduction

    On May 14, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of torch-bearing individuals gathered to protest the removal of a statue of former Confederate leader Robert E. Lee. Proclaiming “all white lives matter” and chanting Nazi slogans such as “blood and soil,” the group was led by alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer. Calling upon a politics of white identity to decry the symbolic erasure of Southern history and culture, Spencer extolled that “what brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced” (quoted in Vozzella 2017). Resonating with the rhetoric of the resurgent nationalism and anti-political correctness of the Trump administration, Spencer has utilized sharpening racial divisions to create alliances with mainstream conservatives and to help build a powerful political base. Importantly, however, such a convergence between US conservatism and far-right, white nationalist politics is not a new phenomenon. Signaling a long and complicated history of the interrelated nature of far-right racism, proto-fascism, and conservative traditionalism in the US, the incidents in Charlottesville provide an entry point for interrogating the ideological underpinnings and contemporary resurgence of radical conservatism under the guise of Spencer’s alt-right.

    Undertaking a criticism of alt-right discourse we will define and critique the movement through its language, rhetorical forms, and lines of argument. In doing so we seek to make visible the ideological and theoretical underpinnings of the movement, to more properly situate the alt-right within the history of US conservatism, and to better understand the historical roots and contemporary iterations of white supremacist politics in the United States. While the alt-right exists in both online and offline spaces, has several prominent leaders, and contains differing political visions and social projects, we take the rhetoric of Richard Spencer as representative of the soft ideological core of the alt-right (see Hawley 2017).[1] As perhaps the most visible alt-right spokesman, leader of the National Policy Institute (NPI), and with Paul Gottfried, the coiner of the term alt-right, Spencer offers a clear image of the political aspirations of the far-right insurgent movement. Described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as an “academic racist” who utilizes his pseudo-intellectual works on Radix and elsewhere to “appeal to educated, middle-class whites,” Spencer’s academic style and approach also help to more clearly map the points of convergence between conservatism and neo-Nazism in the US (Southern Poverty Law Center nd).

    Tracing the history and intellectual influences of Spencer and the alt-right, ultimately we argue that the alt-right is an outgrowth and logical extension of traditionalist idioms of conservatism in the US, particularly post-Cold War visions of paleoconservatism in the works of Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis. To say that the alt-right is a logical extension of US traditionalist conservatism is not to say that it draws its influence strictly from US political thought. Rather, we argue that not only must we understand how US conservatism was born of European circumstances but that we must also understand the continuing influence of European, particularly French, far-right thought and movements on US conservatism. Spencer’s particular vision, then, is an admixture of European New Right thought with US paleconservatism, creating a unique articulation of far-right politics suited to the contemporary global, post-modern political climate while maintaining a distinctive American flavor.

    Though the lineage is not entirely direct, one can nonetheless trace a jagged seam through various iterations of conservatism that gives rise to the racial nationalism and fascism of the alt-right from the early conservatism of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. Importantly, we are not arguing that we should collapse the distinctions between conservatism on the one hand and fascism on the other. Whereas conservatives have more traditionally been concerned with preservation as opposed to innovation or active revolution, fascism may be identified with a revolutionary-rightist or conservative position that seeks to reclaim, through violence and insurrection, a past thought lost or destroyed by the political left (see Burley 2017). Recognizing the significance of these distinctions, we nonetheless argue that fascism emerges from the history of conservatism, and thus bears family resemblances that cannot be ignored. These family resemblances remain present today, linking the alt-right with traditionalist conservatism. This position in some ways cuts against the grain of Hawley’s (2017) work on the alt-right, which claims that “It is totally distinct from conservatism as we know it” (4), and resonates more with the work of Corey Robin (2011) who argues that all conservatives and far-right thinkers and movements are united by a common “animus against the agency of the subordinate classes” (7). This is not to disregard the importance of Hawley’s work—for he also connects the alt-right to paleoconservatism and the European New Right—nor to overlook the nuanced differences  among various articulations of conservatism that may be missed by the umbrella definition provided by Robin. Rather, it is to argue that, in fact, though the alt-right may differ from the traditionalism of the paleoconservative movement, it is nonetheless not as wholly distinct from it as one might think. Indeed, we argue that it is a logical, even if more radical extension of paleoconservatism as envisioned by Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis, blended with the thought of German and French far-right thinkers and movements.

    Our essay unfolds in five main sections. First, we provide a brief history of conservatism, from its birth as a reactionary response in France, Germany, and England to the liberalism of the Enlightenment philosophes and the violence of the French Revolution. Tracing a through line from early conservatives such as Joseph de Maistre to contemporary far-right conservatives in France, we demonstrate that French conservatism and far-right politics have been and remain crucial to understanding American conservatism and the alt-right of Spencer. In sections two and three, we undertake a similar history of US conservatism, paying particular attention to the Old Right and traditionalist idioms of conservatism and the paleoconservative movement, connecting this intellectual strain of the US right to those continental thinkers who came before them, as well as to the alt-right. Section four provides a criticism of alt-right discourse by attending to the rhetoric of Richard Spencer. Deconstructing his arguments regarding the biological nature of racial difference, the imperatives of identitarianism and metapolitics, and the call for a white ethno-state in the US, we demonstrate both the resonances of traditionalist conservative thinkers from France, Germany, and the United States, as well as the ways in which Spencer co-opts and inverts so-called cultural Marxist theory to buttress his white privilege politics. Finally, we conclude by discussing the larger theoretical and historical takeaways of our essay, suggest lessons for opposing alt-right rhetoric in the public sphere, and call for conservatives to be more critical and reflexive regarding how best to excise far-right ideologies from within their ranks

    Conservatism’s European Roots

    To understand the contemporary importance of the alt-right we need to first understand its history and complicated relationship with other articulations of conservatism. Indeed, the alt-right has not arisen in a political vacuum but rather is a product of conflicting visions of conservatism and various iterations of conservative traditionalism in the US and abroad.

    Emerging primarily as a reactionary movement against the perceived atheist humanism of the French philosophes and the subsequent Revolution in France, conservatism offered an alternative vision of modernity that retained a commitment to the religious monarchy and organic social order of the ancient regime. As a broader discourse, conservatism emphasizes difference and division as a means of critiquing the limits of Enlightenment reason. As Zeev Sternhell writes, conservatism emerged to offer a different vision of modernity than that of the Enlightenment. Revolting “against rationalism, the autonomy of the individual, and all that unites people” (2010, 7-9), the modernity articulated by the anti-Enlightenment conservatives was “based on all that differentiates people—history, culture, language” and sought to create “a political culture that denied reason either the capacity or the right to mold people’s lives, saw religion as an essential foundation of society, and did not hesitate to call on the state to regulate social relationships or to intervene in the economy” (8). In this way, Sternhell paints conservatism as a radically historicist discourse that emphasizes particularity, plurality, and difference as a means of preserving social hierarchy.

    These ideas took influence from the counter-Reformation that came before it, while adapting arguments against the Reformation to comport with a more modern set of exigencies bent on maintaining religious authority in the face of the equalitarianism of the philosophes. Indeed, the counter-revolutionary right understood philosophy as the logical outcome of fundamental changes to French values and culture, beginning with the Reformation and culminating in the bloodshed and violence that marked the Revolution. This anti-Revolutionary sentiment remains a central component of far-right conservatism today, illuminating Peter Davies’ claim that “Counter-Revolution is not just a period, but an idea” that has “remained a battleground throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into the twenty-first” (Davies 2002, 28). Significantly, as we will demonstrate, the counter-Revolutionary spirit, much like the Enlightenment it opposed, was not confined to France but spread around the globe, adapting itself to local cultural circumstances and political structures (see Berlin 2001; McMahon 2000; Sternhell 2010).

    For instance, in Germany, historians and critics have traced a lineage of conservatism in the aesthetic nationalism of Johann Gottfried Herder, the philosophical idealism of G.W.F. Hegel, the cultural criticism of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the proto-fascism of the German Romantics of the Bayreuth circle, particularly Richard Wagner. Likewise, German conservatism was given a more radical, fascist orientation after the First World War with the conservative revolution that included the likes of Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt among others. Though there are undoubtedly great differences between Herder, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wagner, not to mention Carl Schmitt, these thinkers offer common criticisms of the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment liberalism, the mechanistic and materialistic logics of the radically autonomous individual, and the historical rootedness of a people within a given cultural and linguistic system.[2] Inflections of this critique of liberal economism in German thought can be found in left-leaning political thought, as well, for instance in the criticism of mass society found in Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, and Jurgen Habermas. What separates the left from the right, however, is largely a commitment to Enlightenment ideals rather than their denunciation in defense of an organic vision of a stratified and hierarchical social order.

    While German thought offers a particular iteration of conservatism tailored to its history and culture, so too does England, primarily in the counter-revolutionary thought of Thomas Hobbes,  the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and most notoriously Edmund Burke . Indeed, Burke is a central figure in the history of conservatism in the Anglo-Saxon world, becoming a great inspiration in many regards for the development of conservatism in the United States. Russell Kirk, a prominent conservative intellectual in the US, deifies Burke in the pantheon of conservativism, arguing that it was Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France who “defined in the public consciousness, for the first time, the opposing poles of conservation and innovation” (1953, 5). In this way, Burke was responsible for the birth of something like modern conservatism as a conscious and self-aware political position. Distinguishing between the “aristocratic liberalism,” rebuke of “equalitarianism,” and defense of legal order that undergirded Burke’s conservatism and the metaphysical abstractions of Hegelian and German idealism, for Kirk only Burke can wear the mantle of the true conservative (13).

    A pragmatic statesman, rigid parliamentarian, and reluctant theorist, Burke voiced his concerns about the spirit of the Revolution and its promise of social levelling from a uniquely British perspective. Writing against the Revolution in France, Burke condemned with ferocity claims regarding the “rights of man” and the mechanistic rationalism of the philosophes that he viewed as leading naturally to the violence, bloodshed, and destruction of institutions of French civil society. Appealing to natural and divine order, for Burke the equalitarianism and levelling of the Revolutionary spirit would destroy social order and stability, as well as nullify the eternal contract between those who are deceased, the presently living, and those yet to be born. Society, from this perspective, is a delicate organism that binds together all persons in a harmonious contractual relationship perfectly designed and authored by God. To meddle with its inner-workings, to render it susceptible to human fancy and whim, and to reduce to rubble its institutions is thus to go against the wishes of providence. The act of Revolution here is figured as voiding the contract between God and man, consecrated in the office of the king, and also as uprooting society and tearing apart its very fabric. As Burke (1966) claims, the “levelers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground” (61). The Enlightenment of the French Revolution, then, renders impossible any sense of stability and order to the affairs of government, replacing tradition and the supposed wisdom of prejudice with continual progress and a cold, scientistic rationalism. Conservatism in Burke thus emerges as a means of preserving and conserving traditions and established political order from reckless innovation and calls for egalitarian social leveling.

    Not confined to a simple political nostalgia, however, the early Right was much more sweeping in its critique of the liberal Enlightenment’s vision of modernity. Writing on the emergence of the political Right, Darrin McMahon (2001) reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that “the early Right was in fact radical, striving far more to create a world that had never been than to recapture a world that was lost” (14). This latent radicalism of the conservative early Right was perhaps captured most vociferously by Joseph de Maistre. Born to an aristocratic family in Chambery, Maistre’s father was a Judge on the high court, and Maistre followed suit, attaining a degree in law. A committed Catholic monarchist, Maistre was abhorred by the Enlightenment liberalism of the philosophes, seeing it foremost as a “satanic revolt” against God’s divine order (see Lively 1971, 9). Influenced by the writings of Burke, Maistre often took Burkean insights to their extreme, castigating the very idea of democracy as farce, repudiating the abstract principle of rights without duties, and proclaiming the inherent virtues of violence and prejudicial irrationality.

    Viewing the violence of the Revolution as a form of providential retribution for the hubris of man, death functioned for Maistre as national regeneration through corporal punishment. Illustrating this providential view of the Revolution, Maistre (1971) argues that “when the human spirit has lost its resilience through indolence, incredulity, and the gangrenous vices that follow an excess of civilization, it can be retempered only in blood” (62). Utilizing the metaphor of the tree to emphasize both the organic nature and rootedness of society in a natural order, Maistre articulates this regenerative bloodshed as akin to pruning by the divine hand of God. For just as a rose bush needs to be properly pruned and cared for in order to ensure its vitality and blossoming in the coming season, society, too, must be ridded of its excesses in order to assure its continued health and well-being (62).

    Rooted as society is in religious and cultural custom, it also dependent upon an earthly sovereign for its continued security and stability. In this way, society is constituted by a sovereign, and a people owe their existence to this sovereign power much as a hive to its queen (de Maistre, 98). Arising from the natural relationship of sovereignty and society is the nation itself, which Maistre portrays as possessing “a general soul and a true moral unity,” which is “evidenced above all by language” (99). The personality of the state, embodied by its ruler, and its particular form of government, is a product of this moral unity. This leads Maistre to proclaim that “From these different national characteristics are born the different modifications of government,” and that to impose a universal mode of government upon all peoples and nations is to do violence to their inherent moral character and cultural customs (99). It is for these reasons—the primacy of sovereignty to society, the particular moral characters of nations, and the maintenance of ethno-cultural pluralism—that Maistre opposes the democratic Revolution of the French Enlightenment. Indeed, these principles led Maistre to denounce democracy as an idea, for as he maintains one cannot have a nation, a people, or any form of political stability without the anterior existence of the sovereign, while the heart of democracy, as Maistre describes it, is an association of men governing themselves in the absence of a unified sovereign (127).

    While there are many ways of reading Maistre’s works, it is significant that many find in his writings early strains of something resembling a latent fascism. For instance, while we may identify resonances between Maistre’s arguments and the relatively moderate positions of Burke, we may also identify a more radical set of ideas that influenced subsequent far-right thinkers in France and beyond. Writing on this tendency, Lively (1971) argues that Maistre’s fetishization of violence, his rebuke of the autonomous individual, and his glorification of sovereignty provides more than enough textual evidence to warrant an “interpretation of Maistre as one of the first in the modern fascist tradition” (7). Thus, while some may read Maistre as a more moderate conservative concerned with social order and cohesion, we may not simply wish away his more radical tendencies. It is doubtless that for these reasons that someone like Kirk seeks to so ardently distinguish Burkean conservatism from German and French articulations of Right-wing conservatism, as it provides a way of drawing firmer boundaries between conservatism on the one hand and fascism on the other. While there are certainly important distinctions between the two, a point we will return to in our conclusion, we maintain that we may nevertheless find in the early-Right and its counter-Revolutionary spirit a common line of argument that connects these thinkers to present day far-right ideologies and to Richard Spencer more specifically.

    Indeed, stemming from Maistre’s early defense of monarchical rule, religious order, and the ancient regime, the subsequent development of a newer French Right was found in the populist appeals of Georges Boulanger, Maurice Barres, and Charles Maurras. Writing on the rise of this amorphous far-right populist strain of French politics, Davies (2002)  argues that the “Franco-Prussian War and the birth of the Third Republic had brought a political realignment, and nationalism transferred from left to right a whole combination of ideas, sentiments, and values. In fundamental terms, the nation had replaced traditional religion as the focal-point of far-right discourse” (78). This growing concern with nationalism as opposed to the monarchy, as well as populist appeals to popular sovereignty rather than a defense of the aristocracy on the far-right, drew from and reinvigorated fascist ideologies in France in order to combat the bourgeois humanism of the Third Republic.

    Significantly, however, it was not just the far-right that challenged the liberal humanism of the Third Republic following the War. Indeed, as Stefanos Geroulanos (2010) meticulously demonstrates, a “battleground of humanisms” emerged in France after the War which saw Communists, Catholics, and political non-conformists, alike, offering alternative visions of a post-humanist anthropology capable of dealing with the failings of political liberalism (28). Significantly, this assault on bourgeois humanism from across the political spectrum in French political and intellectual culture was heavily influenced by leading thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger (Geroulanos 2010). Thus, the far-right and the far-Left borrowed from one another and exchanged ideas in the creation of a Third Way political position that called for a reinvigorated nationalism and the birth of a “New Man” that emphasized the rootedness of the individual. These calls for national and intellectual rebirth often verged on a kind of “spiritual fascism” which grounded many reactionary and counter-Revolutionary movements in France (Geroulanos 2010, 123).

    This kind of spiritual fascism was perhaps given its clearest articulation by Charles Maurras, founder of Action Francaise (AF), a monarchist and anti-Semitic movement that emerged from the tribulations and political turmoil of the Dreyfus Affair. Evincing the admixture of far-right and far-Left thought that marked the inter-war period, Maurras’s project married together nationalism, non-Marxist iterations of socialist economic thought, and populism refracted through a Darwinian understanding of the nation as a vital organism—one that was under attack by a virus of a growing non-rooted Jewish population, communism, and republicanism. Thus, what emerges in Maurras is “an unusual synthesis of de Maistre’s conservatism, Barres’ nationalism, and fin-de-siecle revolutionary syndicalism” that undergirded a proto-fascist vision of a reinvigorated monarchy couched within a rhetoric of civic nationalism (Davies 2002, 86). Far-Right proto-fascism did not end with Maurras and the AF, however, finding its doctrines extended and altered in the collaborationist policies of Petain and Laval’s Vichy Regime during the Second World War, by the French Algerian movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and the formation of the Front National (FN) by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972. Though each of these movements is distinct in their goals and aims, they maintain significant political and ideological overlap in their commitment to moral order, a fear of national decadence and decline, and the call for national rebirth and regeneration. Indeed, Le Pen–a former supporter of Maurras’ AF and member of the Poujadist movement for a French Algeria—and his FN party has become a bastion of far-right politics in France. Writing on the nature of the FN, Davies (2002) states that it is “a coalition of interests,” that is composed of “Neo-fascists, hardened Algerie Francaise veterans, ex-Poujadists, new right activists, disillusioned conservatives, integrist Catholics,” and others who found in the party a new ideological home amid the shifting political grounds of the 1970s (125). Maintaining similar concerns and principles of other far-right movements before it, FN discourse prioritizes nation and identity as its primary points of emphasis.

    These emphases have remained central to the FN, yet other far-right actors once affiliated with the party have fractured from its rank and file membership, founding other, more extreme far-right groups that bring together identity and nationalism in a rhetoric of identitarianism. Central amongst these individuals are Alain de Benoist, founder of the extreme Right group the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) and GRECE defector and radical conservative intellectual Guillaume Faye. Benoist, a former journalist and intellectual, established a theoretical project premised upon the concepts of ethno-pluralism and organic democracy, which taken together formed an alternative vision of modernity that drew from the wisdom of tradition and Western culture in order to articulate a vision of democracy not tethered to egalitarianism or libertarianism, but rather to the notion of fraternalism. Indeed, fraternity, the supposedly forgotten piece of the triptych of Revolutionary democratic aspirations, provides for Benoit a way of reimagining democracy in a post-modern, globalized, pluralistic moment.

    Opposed to direct democracy, to (neo)liberal democratic projects, and to the social democracy of welfare state politics, organic democracy returns to classical Greek understandings of democracy and re-appropriates, “adapting to the modern world—a notion of people and community that has been eclipsed by two thousand years of egalitarianism, rationalism, and exaltation of the rootless individual” (Benoist 2011, 29). Drawing from traditional conservative critiques of liberalism, Benoist recognizes the radical particularity, historically embedded, and linguistically bounded nature of a people in order to argue for the inherent differences between ethnic groups and nations. It is from this idea that Benoist elaborates his principle of ethno-pluralism, the Maistrean notion that each people or nation possesses a distinct national and moral character which must be protected against the universalism of liberal thought and economic imperialism. Yet, while pluralism of peoples and cultures is a good to be protected and valued, pluralism within the bounds of the nation is an enemy to be guarded against. As Benoist claims, “Pluralism is a positive notion, but it cannot be applied to everything. We should not confuse the pluralism of values, which is a sign of the break-up of society, with the pluralism of opinions, which is a natural consequence of human diversity” (70-1). Pluralism of values stems naturally from the distinct culture, history, and language of a people, such that multicultural societies themselves, and state policies that encourage diversity and inclusion, set the stage for their own dissolution by encouraging the proliferation and confrontation of radically opposed value systems in the heart of society. Thus, the only viable democratic vision for Benoist is an organic democracy capable of allowing “a folk community to carve a destiny for itself in line with its own founding values” (71). Fraternity, in this sense, stresses the familial and spiritual nature of community and ethnic identity, placing belonging to the nation within the realm of biological and folk understandings of shared heritage.

    A former member of GRECE and associate of Benoist, Guillame Faye’s work carries clear resonances of organic understandings of identitarian democracy. However, Faye, along with fellow far-right intellectual Piere Vial, left the think-tank as they perceived Benoist’s commitments to extremist far-right principles began to waiver. Likewise, Benoist has since critiqued the extremism and political aspirations of Faye’s so-called archeofuturist project. Drawing inspiration from the intellectuals of the German Conservative Revolution of the 1920s and spiritual fascism of Italian theorist Julius Evola, Faye’s archeofuturism maintains that we are living in a world of convergent catastrophes that will ultimately destroy the contemporary global political-economic order. Proclaiming that “Modernity has grown obsolete,” and humanity is presently “living in the interregnum” between political regimes (Faye 2010, 12, 28), the only solution for Faye is to turn to an archeofuturism that “envisage[s] a future society that combines techno-scientific progress with a return to the traditional answers that stretch back into the mists of time” (27). Such a project demands political revolution and restoration, with revolution understood ultimately as an act of restoration in and of itself. Such a temporality moves away from liberal understandings of linear progress and toward a spherical temporality premised upon Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same (44).

    Indeed, Nietzsche figures prominently in Faye’s work as he demands a post-human epistemology that embraces an “inegalitarian philosophy of will to power” in order to overcome the supposedly emasculating philosophy of universal tolerance and compassion of the discourse multiculturalism (65). This is imperative for Faye, as multiculturalism, much as in Benoist, paves the road to national dissolution and global disorder in an era of shifting geopolitical realities. An age in which tired arguments of East v. West no longer hold, Faye proclaims that the new geopolitical order pits North v. South, with Islamic cultures posing the greatest threat to European civilization and White identity. However, it is not enough to identify a common enemy of European culture—the shortcoming of Schmitt’s philosophy according to Faye—but to in fact create a recognition of political friendship. This positive “spiritual and anthropological” project places identity at the center of politics, and moves identitarianism into a metapolitical theoretical position. This is to say that before one becomes concerned with ideological or doctrinal differences one ought to recognize a shared worldview that is rooted in a spiritual and anthropological identity which constitutes them as an organic folk. It is only after this organic folk gains political self-awareness that the archeofuturist project of the creation of a new European federal empire can be created as a power-bloc of geo-political force and ethnic solidarity against the global south. As we will demonstrate later, this line of argument is taken up by Spencer, anchoring the alt-right in a soft, pseudo-intellectual ground regarding the primacy of racial identity in contemporary politics. Significantly, this point is ultimately reached, yet through a different trajectory, by Spencer’s other primary influence—the US paleoconservative movement.

    A Budding US Conservatism

    While we can trace a genealogy of far-right thought in France from the traditionalism of Maistre, likewise we maintain that we can trace a through line from a nascent conservative attitude in the early days of the US Republic through to the alt-right. Significantly, this history demonstrates that conservatism cannot simply be understood as a unified historical movement, but as Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming (1988) argue, as a series of movements that at times conflict with one another regarding the proper relationships among individuals, community, industry, and government. Rather than speak of a unified vision of conservatism in the US, then, we will speak of various conservatisms that at times conflict and at others converge with one another.

    Such a family history of conservatism in the US is offered by Russell Kirk in his momentous 1953 text The Conservative Mind. Describing the American Revolution as born of conservative principles, for Kirk conservatism first comes to the shores of the Atlantic from the works and speeches of Burke and his exchanges with Thomas Paine on the nature freedom, rights, and democratic self-rule. As Kirk (1953) writes, Burke “had set the course for British conservatism, he had become a model for Continental statesmen, and he had insinuated himself even into the rebellious soul of America” (12). This conservative spirit of rebellion he then follows from the rule-of-law conservatism of John Adams, the romantic conservatism of George Canning, the southern conservatism of John C. Calhoun and John Randolph, through to the so-called critical conservatism of Irving Babbit, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. A larger umbrella that encompasses a host of ideological and philosophical positions as wide as pro-slavery arguments regarding state’s rights to pragmatic metaphysics, conservatism for Burke is a flexible “working premise” that at bottom maintains a core belief in the idea that “society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution,” and as such is something that “cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine” (7). While conservatives could agree on this basic premise, there were many other issues that created conflict in early US conservative discourse, namely a conflict between the Federalism of the north and the Southern strand of conservatism that sought to maintain agrarian life and an independent political authority.

    This rift within the heart of the early conservative spirit in the US remained a polarizing force into the twentieth century, when conservatism bloomed into not simply a rebellious spirit in US politics but into a full-blown insurgent political force to combat the New Deal policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Phillips-Fein 2010). While the New Deal did not do away with the fissures and cleavages that marked the conservative Right, it did however unite a vast array of intellectuals committed to defining, defending, and conserving more traditional systems of thought against the centralizing forces of technocracy, managerialism, and state power. A reactionary force bent on fighting the perceived creeping statism and egalitarianism of the social welfare state, the conservative movement brought together a traditional, Old Right consisting of Southern conservatives and monarchists one the one hand and a budding libertarian New Right on the other, in order to defend principles of law, order, and decentralized government (Rothbard 1994).

    Indeed, as Michael Lee (2014) has argued, from its very inception, conservatism in the US has consisted of competing argumentative frames that have produced fusion and fracture at different historical moments. Conceiving of conservatism as a political language with which to create and describe society, Lee maintains that this language consists of both libertarian and traditionalist dialects. Holding between them inherent contradictions, conservatism’s dialects embody a larger prescriptive dialectic between embracing modernity and returning to pre-modern modes of life. Stemming from deep-rooted, conflicting epistemological and ontological viewpoints on history, human nature, and rationality, the libertarian and traditionalist dialects consist of opposing value systems and rhetorical “God-terms” to organize their political projects. While libertarian conservatives stress the importance of concepts such as “freedom,” “liberty,” “reason,” “individual,” and “markets,” in the continued development of modernity and unfettered capitalism, traditionalists emphasize the centrality of “tradition,” “hierarchy,” “order,” and “transcendence” to social cohesion and stability in the face of change (Lee 2014, 43).

    Of particular interest to us in this essay are those traditionalist conservatives of the US Old Right. While those on the libertarian Right have largely become synonymous with conservatism in the US, the traditionalist dialect has re-emerged as a legitimate political force since the close of the Cold War. Drawing their inspiration from Burke and others, post-War traditionalists such as Kirk had been largely committed to isolationism, nativism, and Americanism throughout the Second World War, with some openly embracing biologically deterministic theories of white racial superiority, anti-Semitism, and pro-Nazi ideology (Bellant 1991; Diamond 1995, 22-25).

    Writing on the origins of conservatism and the defining principles of the Old Right, Sara Diamond (1995) portrays this diverse group of intellectuals as men who “viewed with trepidation the expansion of the welfare state and some seemingly related trends: racial minorities’ nascent demands for civil rights, the spread of secularism, and the growth of mass, popular culture” (21). Not simply detesting the increasing power of the state over individual freedom, US conservatism also feared progressive policy measures from Reconstruction onward that sought to radically level hierarchies of race, class, and gender that were thought to be part of the natural order of an organic conception of white, Western culture.[3]

    Representative of this Old Right traditionalism are writers such as Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, and Richard Weaver. Grounding conservatism in neo-Platonist conceptions of transcendent, metaphysical truths regarding the wisdom of tradition, history, and ancestral knowledge, Kirk (1989) writes in his essay entitled “The Question of Tradition,” “The traditions which govern private and social morality are set too close about the heart of a civilization to bear much tampering with” (63). To Kirk tradition represents a transhistorical contract that binds past, present, and future, standing as “transcendent truth expressed in the filtered opinions of our ancestors” (63). Searching for a higher order based on spiritual bonds to guard against the decadence and rootlessness of the modern world, tradition, for Kirk, represents a spiritual bedrock upon which cultures create natural social structures of political governance. Attempts to legislate against economic inequality, to level racial disparities, or to encourage women to enter into the workforce tamper with this spiritual bedrock, untethering us from traditional wisdom and social structures, leading a path toward decadence and decline. In this sense, as Corey Robin argues, conservatives see in liberal policies and democratic movements “a terrible disturbance in the private life of power” that disrupts the supposed natural order of the social world (13).

    Though a prominent line of conservative thought throughout the 1940s and 1950s, traditionalism faded into the background in the political landscape of the 1960s and the burgeoning politics of the Cold War. The post-War effort, primarily on the libertarian Right, to transform conservatism into a broad coalition that sought political victories and action, rather than intellectual cohesion saw the retreat of the intellectual treatises of Kirk and others. Additionally, the identification of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater as the conservative candidate to challenge liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller rebranded conservatism with libertarian principles of free trade in the minds of the broader American public. Thus, as Gottfried and Fleming (1988) note, though the 1964 campaign of Goldwater placed conservatism within mainstream political discourse, it also proved detrimental to the movement by reducing conservatism to a narrow social philosophy of free markets and a pragmatic politics that eschewed intellectual rigor. Led by individuals such as Phyllis Schlafly, Paul Weyrich, and most notably William F. Buckley, this New Right network created a vast array of think tanks, magazines, and other print media that nonetheless sustained American conservatism in the mid-20th century.[4]

    Coalescing ideologically on principles of combatting domestic democratic movements for social equality, fighting the spread of communism at home, and spreading the gospel of liberal democracy abroad, a rough consensus was formed that united conservatives, old and new, in a battle against the perceived threats of a growing state apparatus that threatened individual liberty and communal authority. Capable of articulating the economic, cultural, and spiritual concerns of conservatives across the spectrum, Ronald Reagan proved capable, at least tenuously, of fusing the libertarian and traditionalist dialects of conservatism. Uniting the conservative vanguard and the Republican Party against communism through his rhetorical prowess, Ronald Reagan rose to political prominence, and gained the presidency in 1981. Yet, as Diamond (1995) has argued, if Reagan represented a moment of conservative fusion and ushered in a neoconservative consensus throughout the 1980s, “The end of Soviet-style Communism coincided with the Right’s renewed focus on traditional moral order and ethnic-cultural homogeneity inside the borders of the United States” (2). Championing an intellectual backlash against neoconservative and libertarian philosophies, a group of committed paleoconservatives called for a renewed commitment to traditionalist concerns.

    Paleoconservatism and the Return to Conservative Roots

    The renewed focus on tradition was the product of a careful campaign by a group of self-identified paleoconservative intellectuals that were unhappy with conservatism’s abandonment of its foundational philosophical commitments. Writing to this effect, paleoconservatives Paul Weyrich and William Lind (2009) argue that “one of the casualties of the Bush administration was the conservative movement” (134). Having become recalcitrant in its political successes throughout the 1970s and 1980s, post-Cold War Republican conservatism left behind many of its founding principles in an embrace of consumerism and global free-markets. Returning to and radicalizing the traditionalist idiom of conservatism championed by Kirk, the paleoconservatives refit traditionalism to a new set of political realities, targeting the so-called globalism and cultural Marxism of the left as the primary enemies of a Western, Judeo-Christian culture in decline. An amorphous and seemingly all-encompassing ideological assault on the West, paleoconservatives find the origins of cultural Marxism in the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, whose intellectual project they argue has taken over academia, the entertainment industries, and the state itself (see Weyrich and Lind, ch. 2). Striving to move beyond politics, to undo the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and to restore traditional American values, paleoconservatives understand themselves as in a war for the very existence of Western culture.

    Led in many regards by long-time conservative figure and former member of both the Nixon and Reagan administrations Patrick Buchanan, the paleoconservative camp had its political headquarters in the Rockford Institute, a traditionalist think tank in Rockford, Illinois. Producing and distributing a monthly magazine entitled Chronicles of Culture, the Rockford Institute was founded by Thomas Fleming. Fleming, like many in the paleoconservative camp, was a professor of the humanities and an acolyte of Kirk (Diamond 1995; Gottfried and Fleming 1988). Denouncing the supposed end of ideology espoused by Francis Fukuyama and other neoconservatives, these paleocons saw in the heightened attention to the “political issues of morality, security, and nationalism” in a post-Cold War climate a rallying cry for a renewed nationalism (Dahl 1999, 7).

    Dressed in the guise of Right-wing populism, Buchanan’s (1998) America First politics and his economic nationalism rebuked the supposed triumph of liberal democracy and its narrow association with free-market capitalism. Critiquing large, multinational corporations and the structures of late capitalism, Buchanan advocated for economic protection of vital industries, fixed markets, and protective tariffs to maintain a competitive US economy in a globalizing world. Ushering in an era of global free trade, it was the Cold War mission of exporting liberal democracy abroad that led to the slow erosion of manufacturing jobs in the U.S; as Buchanan argues, “In the global economy, money no longer follows the flag. Money has no flag” (54). Taken further, the global economy of unfettered trade dissolves national bonds of loyalty and patriotism in the name of liberal cosmopolitanism. An extension of traditional conservative and cultural nationalist critiques of the Enlightenment, Buchanan adds that “Free trade ideology is thus a product of a shift in perspective, from a God-centered universe to a man-centered one” (201). Cast as a logical extension of French Enlightenment sentiments, global free trade is an assault on the nation and on traditional Western values. What a post-Cold War political culture illustrated, Buchanan maintained, was that politics was less about a divide between left and right, capitalism and communism, and more so about nationalists and the liberal globalists.

    If the dog-whistle of Buchanan’s calls for a new economic nationalism was carefully masked in a veneer of middle-class protectionism, other paleoconservatives have drawn from Old Right lines of argument that more explicitly invoked biological notions of racial superiority. For example, in his book Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow (1995) espouses openly nativist and racist arguments regarding the assault on the supposedly inherent white ethnic core of American national identity. Conceiving of the nation as “an ethnocultural community that . . . speaks one language,” Brimelow calls for a return to a white tribalism to defend western culture from state-sanctioned erasure (203). Though the sovereignty of the nation, the customs of western civilization, and the white ethnic core of the US are under attack from many angles, for Brimelow the primary driver of these problems is immigration policy. In his formulation, post-1965 immigration policy is inevitably leading to an “ethnic revolution” in which efforts at racial equality are rendered a power grab to subvert the historical legacy of white racial hegemony in the US (203). Eschewing the colorblind and post-racial narratives of the center-Right establishment of the Republican Party, Brimelow embraces whiteness as a marker of political identity. Within his recognition of whiteness, race is conceived of as biological, naturalizing the separation of cultures and knowledges. As he renders whiteness a visible political position in debates on immigration, there’s an explicit rejection of the structural inequalities that shape opportunities for newly arrived non-white immigrants. Instead, Brimelow acknowledges structural barriers that limit opportunities for white Americans and uses overtly racial arguments on culture and behavior to explain the criminal nature of immigrants of color.

    Within Buchanan and Brimelow’s critiques of the welfare state and immigration policy is an implicitly proposed solution of crafting a middle-American white identity politics capable of challenging the hegemonic center of US politics. Articulating these concerns and potential solutions in a more precise and academic tone, Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis have called for a conservatism that would move beyond preservationism toward a revolutionary cultural and racial populism. This paleoconservative move to an explicitly racial rhetoric ties together opposing forces in white racial ideology, and highlights what Omi and Winant (2015) define as the ‘racial reaction’ among whites since the advent of the civil rights movement. In Omi and Winant’s view, white racial reaction draws from racial ideologies that, depending on the context, recognize and erase racial difference and works to undercut the political successes of the civil rights movement. Paleoconservatives blur rhetorical lines and bring together recognition and erasure simultaneously, using traditionalist appeals to veil the contradictions embedded with their arguments.

    As seen in the paleoconervative call to fortify the racial and cultural makeup of the US, their recognition and erasure of racial difference is undergirded by a glorified view of Western culture. In what can be taken as a two-part work on the loss of bourgeois culture, a sense of ethnic heritage, and localized self-government, Paul Gottfried’s After Liberalism (1999) and his Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002) represent the evolving politics of the paleoconservative position. Offering a narrative of decline of national sovereignty, regional cultures, and western society at the behest of a global managerial “new class,” Gottfried argues that a commitment to Enlightenment ideals of rational planning, global cosmopolitanism, and open borders are destroying Western culture.

    In his trenchant, if misguided, works of academic critique, Gottfried maintains that liberalism’s original architects held “deep reservations about popular rule” (39). Taking liberalism to be a unique cultural product, not simply a set of abstract theoretical principles and commitments, Gottfried argues that liberalism “designates not just liberal ideas but also their social setting” and political context (35). This cultural context and heritage, as Gottfried alludes to, is found in a bourgeois political culture that maintained a sense of hierarchy in the face of demands for radical egalitarianism. This primordial sense of liberalism, however, has been eroded and ultimately lost in the name of liberal democracy, technocratic reason, and state planning.

    Giving rise to the modern, managerial welfare state, liberalism’s demise was driven not primarily by economic forces nor by laissez-faire values and policies, but by a cultural logic of multiculturalism. Assuming that cultures are incompatible and engaged in a zero-sum game for survival, these attacks against multiculturalism also presume that people of color “are actually, or even disproportionately benefiting from its [multiculturalism’s] experimental largess” (Lentin and Titley 2011, 110-111). For example, Gottfried (2002) uses the rhetoric of atonement and guilt to argue that multiculturalism is indicative of a logical progression of liberal Protestantism that fashions slavery as the original sin of white Americans. Culminating in a secular religiosity that debases theology and feminizes Christianity, Gottfried claims that multiculturalism is the product of a “fusion of a victim-centered feminism with the Protestant framework of sin and redemption” (56). Domestically, pluralism legitimates the managerial state’s efforts to impose a doctrine of political correctness, and is said to divide society into victims and victimizers. Globally, pluralism warrants, in the name of the welfare state, open borders for trade, lax immigration policies, transnational bureaucracy, and a global mission to make the world safe for democracy, ultimately eroding national sovereignty and the decline of Western society in pursuit of a cosmopolitan agenda (78-88).

    The answer for combatting the so-called therapeutic welfare state, for Gottfried, lies in a resurgent Right-leaning populist nationalism. This program entails an “identitarian politics and appeals to a cultural heritage,” premised upon a “traditional communal identity” (Gottfried 2002, 118). Additionally, Gottfried sees hope in the emergent European “postmodernist Right,” and its political ideology of ethno-pluralism which “speaks on behalf of the distinctiveness of peoples and regions and upholds their inalienable right not to be “culturally homogenized” (129). His political project entails a rejection of Enlightenment notions of a rational world government in defense of localized, communal traditions and shared ethnic identity rooted in bourgeois culture.

    Arguing in a similar vein, Samuel Francis, in his collected volume of essays entitled Revolution From the Middle (1997), paints a picture of what he calls Middle American Radicals (MARs) that have been left behind by the welfare state. The culmination of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, MARs are described by Francis as the former “backbone” of George Wallace’s political constituency, as well as a combination of Reagan Democrats, and supporters of the candidacies of a broad swath of “outsiders” including Ross Perot, David Duke, Ralph Nader, and Pat Buchanan. Portrayed as a “combination of culturally conservative moral and social beliefs with support for economically liberal policies such as Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and economic nationalism and protectionism,” MARs represent a disaffected group of white, middle-class workers who feel they are being squeezed from above by a corporate and governmental managerial elite, and from below by an unassimilated and unassimilable lower class of migrant laborers and peoples of color that are wresting jobs, political power, and tax dollars from middle Americans (12). Calling again upon the Immigration Act of 1965, the act is cast as a publicly subsidized erasure of white, middle-American culture through the lowering of national borders that links together managerial policy leaders and migrant laborers through the force of state policy.

    As an insurgent counter-force against the state, MARs seek to build a “Middle American counter-culture” that can “overcome the divisive, individuating, and purely defensive response offered by traditional conservatism and to forge a new and unified core from which an alternative subculture and an authentic radicalism of the right can emerge” (Francis 1997, 73). Largely driven by Rust-Belt states, MARs are bent on collapsing the center of US politics and creating a space in which a radical alternative may emerge. Creating a space for collective action in the form of a resistant, white ethnic community, MARs attempt to hold on to their political and economic power by defending what they view as traditional American values and culture.

    Seeking to rearticulate conservatism as a political program devoted to the “total redistribution of power in America,” Francis urges his compatriots to look beyond traditional conservative canons. Indeed, Francis writes that “if the cultural right in the United States is to take back its culture from those that have usurped it, it will find Gramsci’s ideas rewarding” (176). Recognizing the primacy of culture to the development of political power and institutions, Francis calls for fellow conservatives to take lessons from the counter-cultural tactics of the left in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as far-right European politics, to engage in the frontlines of the war for cultural hegemony in the United States.

    The shared philosophical and political commitments of Buchanan, Brimelow, Gottfried, and Francis derive from their shared commitments to Old Right conservative traditionalism, as well as a shared infrastructure of political and media outlets that link them not only with each other but with the rise of the alt-right. In 1999, Peter Brimelow founded the website VDare, a white-nationalist news site that publishes political and social criticism on contemporary public affairs. Affiliated with the site are Buchanan, Francis, and alt-righter Jared Taylor. Six years later, Francis co-founded, with William Regnery, the National Policy Institute (NPI). A white-nationalist think tank operating under the slogan “For Our People, Our Race, Our Future,” the NPI has taken up the call for a metapolitical, identitarian far-right conservatism in the US, becoming the ideological and political core of the alt-right under the leadership of Richard Spencer.

    Spencer, who holds a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago and dropped out of a PhD program in European intellectual history at Duke University to lead the cause of the NPI, along with Gottfried, coined the term “alternative right” and has gained public notoriety as a figurehead of the movement. In 2012, Spencer founded Radix Journal, a publication that describes itself as publishing “original work on culture, race, tradition, meta-politics, and critical theory (About Radix Journal).” Comprised of three “interrelated components,” including “an online magazine, RadixJournal.com, a biannual print journal, and a publishing imprint,” Radix is operated by, and distributes writings through, the auspices of the NPI. Though closely affiliated with paleoconservative thinkers and institutions, Spencer’s vision seeks to push the American Right further by offering a radical conservatism that marries together US traditionalism with the archeofuturism of Faye, and the insights of the German conservative revolution in order to openly embrace white supremacy, vehement nationalism, and biological theories of race. If conservative traditionalists in the past have taken great pains to distinguish their cultural nationalist positions from the more far-right white supremacist groups they helped create, the alt-right under Spencer strips away all the rhetorical veneers of more mainstream conservatism in the creation of a radical conservatism.

    The Alt-Right’s (Pseudo)Philosophical Core: Richard Spencer, Metapolitics, and Identity

    Connecting paleoconservative traditionalism with the far-right thought of Benoist and Faye as well as German conservatism, the intellectual foundation of Spencer’s political project is metapolitics. A self-proclaimed fan of the work of Richard Wagner and German Romanticism, Spencer’s metapolitics is a nod to both the proto-fascism of the Bayreuth circle in late-nineteenth century Germany and to Faye’s archeofuturist identitarianism (Harkinson 2016). A kind of spiritual politics of myth—with myth understood here as a kind of “necessary faith, or inspiration, or unifying mass yearning”—metapolitics stood as a driving force of hope for the national racism of Germany. Consisting of an amalgamation of romanticism, the so-called “science” of race, a loosely defined economic socialism, and a faith in the mystical forces of the volk, the metapolitics of Wagner was crafted as a response to the political atomization and legal structures that marked modernization and liberal society (Viereck, 1941, 19). Likewise, for Faye, metapolitics becomes a way of placing racial and ethnic identity at the core of French rebirth, and as the primary means of combatting the spread of Islamic faiths and peoples from the global south.

    A commitment to metapolitics for Spencer is thus a means of rhetorically positioning himself within the shared mythology of history, wisdom, and culture afforded by the “science” of race, while also standing as a call to continuing the evolutionary process and the dynamic becoming of white peoples across the globe. This emphasis in alt-right thought is placed front and center, as the NPI annual conference bares the Nietzschean title “Become Who We Are.” Yet if Wagner adapted his romanticism to the political atomization, economic displacement, and political crises of modernity, Spencer is recrafting romanticism and mixing it with French far-right thought in order to adapt its core tenets to the age of neoliberalism and global governance.in order to legitimize neo-fascism and white supremacist politics. This project, Spencer writes, requires a replacement of the political pragmatism that marks establishment politics with a “ruthless idealism” capable of radical, structural change (Spencer 2015a).

    As Spencer argues elsewhere, “Politics is the art of the possible. But today the impossible is necessary. And the art of the impossible is exactly the reason our movement should exist” (Spencer 2015f). The art of the impossible, for Spencer, entails moving beyond the structures and strictures of political liberalism to a higher metapolitics regarding identity and racial biology. Indeed, Spencer writes that while “liberalism is about how and what, that is, it is about ‘rights,’ ‘procedures,’ and ‘mechanisms,’ with elected representatives tasked with making judgment calls,” identitarianism is “fundamentally about who (and not how). How a society is to be governed—whether it be a parliamentary democracy, dictatorship, constitutional monarchy, or any other form—is of secondary importance” (Spencer, 2016a). Metapolitics, then, is about a cultural project of consciousness raising, of crafting a narrative, or better, a myth that stands capable of unifying the race and comprising a general will for becoming something greater. An alt-right metapolitical project, thus, displaces questions of governance with questions of biology and racial difference.

    This conception of racial biology leads Spencer to the concept of identitarianism. As the practical manifestation of metapolitics, identitarianism, as its name suggests, “posits identity as the center—and central question—of a spiritual, intellectual, and political movement” (Spencer 2015c). Moving not only beyond questions of left and right, it also seeks to move beyond the nation state, operating globally. Thus, importantly, Spencer argues that identitarianism “avoids the term ‘nationalism’ and its history and connotations. Indeed, one of identitarianism’s central motives is the overcoming of the nationalism of recent historical memory, which was predicated on hatred of the European ‘Other’ (2015c). Rooted in a pre-Boasian racial anthropology, Spencer’s identitarianism heralds the work of American eugenicist Madison Grant who championed a theory of Nordic racial biology as the primary agent of historical change. In this schema, the primordial sense of political identification and belonging is not bound by nation, but of shared history, blood, and ethnic identity. Repackaging his white supremacist politics in a kind of Pan-Europeanism, Spencer can avoid the label of white nationalism and its inherently racist connotations. Approaching a kind of white-internationalism, the shared mythological history of Nordic peoples is not confined by geography but is a kind of hereditary trait that transcends national borders in the creation of a latent, yet unifiable white racial family.

    In the so-called race realism of his identitarianism, Spencer inverts constructionist theories of race making culture as a product of biology. Yet, when determining the borders of whiteness and of Nordic inclusion the racist and flawed nature of Spencer’s pseudoscience of race becomes strikingly clear. While race stands as the primary agent in historical development, the primary agent in the development of racial biology is comprised of a strange admixture of geography, culture, history, blood, and myth (Harkinson 2016). For Spencer, the white race is always in a state of becoming which is at once conditioned and shaped by ethnic heritage, cultural mores, genetics, space and place, and a tribalist sense of collective belonging. Spencer’s race realism, then, is not as static or deterministic as he would claim. Indeed, Spencer’s theory of race is a complex of seemingly conflicting ideas, ultimately comprising an inconsistent and non-developed articulation of the primacy of biology in the unfolding of history (Spencer 2015d). Importantly, however, the power of metapolitics lies not in scientific fact or rationality but rather in the irrational and symbolic powers of myth. To this point, the work of Fields and Fields (2014) illuminates the layers of authority embedded into Spencer’s arguments. Fields and Fields’ work suggests that Spencer’s rhetoric connects to the founding myth of America, the structure that preconditions our conscious or unconscious attitudes and behaviors about groups and individuals. In this sense, Spencer’s arguments are authoritative and made legitimate not because he stands opposed to mainstream political culture as an embattled organic pseudo-intellectual, but because his arguments resonate with the “mental and social terrain” of the US (Fields and Fields 2014, 19). This terrain is mapped by a magical belief structure, what Fields and Fields label ‘racecraft,’ which influences human action and imagination. Racecraft is the massage that kneads race and racism into American cultural consciousness through informal codes, rituals of power, ancestral ties, and blood. In this view, Spencer’s racial arguments and racism are embraced by conservatives, then, not only through supposed academic thinking, evidence, or scientific truths, but through irrational passions; an obligation to traditional spirit; a ritual that purifies American culture for white folks.

    The rationalistic and reflexive nature of contemporary geopolitics thus stands as two factors in stymieing a revolutionary Right. Following Faye, Spencer calls for a pan-European movement, as struggles between the US and Russia are viewed by Spencer as a relic of an “Atlanticist” paradigm of politics that is outdated and ill-equipped to meet the demands of Post-Cold War politics. Viewing current US- Russia relations as a kind of familial infighting between two power blocs of European racial identity, Spencer writes that “the history of the 20th century has been a history of a long civil war, a Brother’s War” (2016d). Rather than calling for what he sees as a “petty nationalism,” Spencer sees the only way to save the certain demise of Western culture in a Pan-European project of preserving and protecting white masculinity (2016a).

    This familial understanding of global politics offered by the alt-right also underlies Spencer’s and the NPI’s repudiation of NATO in a post-Cold War landscape. In a NPI published paper titled “Beyond NATO,” Spencer and the board of the NPI argue that “the geopolitical enemies that justified the creation of NATO—National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union—have long since disappeared from the world stage,” and have been replaced by new enemies that threaten Western culture (The National Policy Institute 2016). In the realities of this altered political arena, Spencer writes that “‘Freedom vs. Socialism’ is no longer a useful model for describing the ideological and political divisions” of international affairs (The National Policy Institute 2016). Rebuffing claims of the end of ideology, Spencer posits that a new geopolitical rift has emerged that marks a radical split between the West and Islamic Terrorism, Turkish radicals, a Chinese economic superpower, and Mexican immigrants. Importantly, this reconfiguration fashions foreign threats as exclusively racialized non-Western others (Goldberg 2009; Hall 1997; Lentin and Titley 2011). These perceived threats to the Pan-European family necessitate, for the NPI, replacing NATO with a defense program premised on three principles: cooperation with Russia, a program of Western European revival, and recognition of common interests and threats among Western nations. These foreign policy measures are meant to help create a metapolitical consciousness capable of unifying white peoples globally against geopolitical threats.

    Yet, the family figures centrally not only as a metaphor for understanding global politics, but also as the fundamental building block for a white tribal culture domestically. The family, here, is figured under the norms of a patriarchal heteronormativity that posits the stability of the institution of marriage as crucial to maintaining racial health. In an essay entitled “The End of the Culture War,” the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage is portrayed as a further indication of the decline of Western culture. As Spencer writes, “Marriage must, indeed, be re-founded on a much more radical level than that imagined by the egalitarian ‘Religious Right’ and various ‘Constitutionalists;’ marriage must not merely be ‘between a man and woman;’ the family must become an integral part of the health of our race—of our charge to birth a strong, intelligent, beautiful, and productive people” (Spencer 2015e). In this formula, homosexuality is rendered unnatural and counterproductive to the continued evolution of the race. Indeed, homosexual behavior becomes biologically inefficient, a further usurpation of white masculine supremacy, and antagonistic to the metapolitical goals at the heart of identitarianism.

    Dovetailing with lines of fundamentalist evangelicalism, this position proffers a deterministic understanding of the role of biological reproduction to the strength and preservation of the nation state. As Melinda Cooper (2008) demonstrates, evangelicals have long understood sexual politics and reproduction “to be a project of national restoration,” figuring unborn life of the fetus as a metonym for the potentially aborted future of the waning sovereign nation” (169). While both evangelicals and the alt-right deny agency and bodily autonomy to women in the name of the (re)production and maintenance of the nation, ultimately making “a claim to the bodies of women,” the alt-right does not advocate a right-to-life political stance (Cooper 2008, 171). Rather, alt-right theology is of a political rather than millenarian variety. This political theology argues not for individual but “collective salvation . . . that is both down-to-earth and fixed on eternity” through the continual renewal, advancement, and rebirth of the white race (Spencer 2015f). Eschewing evangelical concerns with the holy sanctity of life as a sovereign gift, the alt-right understands the value of life and sexual politics along an ethno-nationalist logic, enacting a kind of autoimmunitary politics that seeks to rid the body politic of infectious and dangerous elements within its borders.[5] Crucial to this political project, then, is the protection of national borders and Western values from the erosive forces of cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, and open immigration policy.

    Similar to paleoconservatives before him, Spencer sees cultural Marxism, alongside contemporary geo-politics, as a central force behind the erosion of Western civilization, and what those in the alt-right call white genocide. Paradoxically, Spencer also sees an indispensable tool for articulating his metapolitics in the works of Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. Using so-called cultural Marxism against itself, Gramsci’s theories of state power, hegemony, and culture as a driver of political change stand as a useful counterpoint to his and identitarianism. Claiming that the political left has stumbled upon the great truth of the importance of race in contemporary politics, Spencer vehemently argues against social constructionist theories of race and structural racism. However, Spencer’s identitarianism actively rearticulates critical theories of race and appropriates them in the name of the oppression and demise of white peoples.

    In this sense we come to perhaps the critical paradox of Spencer’s politics: Marxism, critical cultural theory, and systemic racism are fictions of leftist social justice warriors and academics of color, except when applied to whites. As we saw with the paleoconservatives, when these theories are applied to white folks, they explain how the liberal welfare state, managerial policy elites, and structures of global governance are systematically engaging in the genocide of the white race and western, European culture. Thus, there is a through line between paleoconservatism and the alt-right in their expression of racial reaction as suggested by the work of Omi and Winant (2015); Both paleoconservatives and the alt-right move between recognition and erasure of racial difference depending on their rhetorical situation. Moreover, both rely on traditionalist rhetoric to smooth over the contradictions in their arguments. Race and racism is something that ‘they do;’ white folks do it so as not to fall behind in the multicultural welfare state that is structured to work against white people.

    Indeed, in his November 2016 keynote address at the “Become Who We Are” conference, hosted by the NPI, Spencer follows the works of Gottfried and Francis, and argues that a leftist hegemony in US politics is driven ideologically by a politics of anti-white hatred and guilt. These logics are buttressed by the press, entertainment and popular culture, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and a public policy system that, according to Spencer, amount to a “colonization effort” in which “Western governments go out of their way to seek out the most dysfunctional immigrants possible and relocate them at taxpayer expense” (Spencer 2016e). Any who wish to challenge this hegemonic discourse are punished through censorship and stigmatization, deeming dissidents as racist, politically incorrect, and violent. In Spencer’s metapolitics, the primary enemy, then, stands not as the state apparatus per se, but white folks who have, in his eyes, either failed to recognize or have openly rebuked their biological and cultural supremacy through the internalization of the discourse of white guilt.

    As Spencer states in a published version of an April 23, 2015 speech delivered at the 2015 American Renaissance Conference entitled “Why Do They Hate Us?,” “Before we have a Left problem or a Social Justice Warrior problem, or a Black or Jewish problem, we have a white problem. While Guilt is, indeed, so pervasive that it’s difficult to pinpoint, or say where it ends and begins. For millions, who don’t want to think about White Guilt, White Guilt is thinking for them” (Spencer 2015b; emphasis in original). These individuals, commonly referred to as “cucks” in online alt-right forums, stand as the primary obstacle to consciousness raising for an identitarian movement. Rather than embodying the agential, history-making position of white masculinity inherent to the identitarian project, these “cucks” deny their agency and allow the discourse of White Guilt to speak for them, submitting to the forces of the so-called white genocide rather than actively resisting it.

    For Spencer, Trump’s rebuke of “the System” represents a first step in overturning the discourse of white guilt and establishing an identitarian movement of Middle Americans. Indeed, Spencer identifies the most powerful component of this system as its “Narrative and Paradigm” that promulgates hatred and oppression of white men through the cultural logic of white guilt (Spencer 2016d). Trump’s rhetoric is figured as capable of toppling the system’s narrative from the inside, using its discourses against itself. Never having “went through the gauntlet, which impresses the ‘right opinions’ upon potential leaders,” Trump is able to buck the system from within (2016d). Transforming oligarchy into populism, spouting vulgar and incendiary hyperbole, and utilizing his celebrity to run a political campaign, represents, for Spencer, the contradictions that have cracked the totalizing structure of the welfare state apparatus and its discursive force. As Spencer argues “Public relations—and postmodern ‘image production’—is, as Baudrillard observed, all about signs without references . . . words without meaning . . . sound and fury signifying nothing . . . bullshit within bullshit. But Trump’s genius is to embed truth within his vulgar and stupid bullshit: deep truths, sometimes hard or harsh truths . . . dangerous truths” (2016d). Calling to Spencer’s famous metaphorical deployment of the film the Matrix—notorious for its play on Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra— and its depiction of Neo as a Platonic Gadfly who climbs out of the cave, seeing the world as it really is after swallowing the red pill, Trump has seen reality and stands as the leader capable of liberating the masses.

    The rhetorical force of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is representative of this phenomenon for alt-righters. A vacuous soundbyte of postmodern campaign PR, the enthymematic structure of the slogan holds a powerful and harsh truth for followers of the alt-right, one that harkens to the erasure of white European culture and the decline of Western civilization, calling for metapolitical action. The insistence on building a wall on the US-Mexico border, his conciliatory position with Putin and Russia, and his rampant political incorrectness represent the higher idealism of metapolitics—the art of the impossible capable of breaking “the System” and reconfiguring the geopolitical landscape.

    Despite his idiocy, self-absorption, vulgarity, and propensity for “bullshit,” then, Trump represents for Spencer an evolutionary step forward, an unleashing of the dynamic power of becoming, “a first stand of European identity politics” (2016d). Styled as an unwitting vehicle for the alt-right, perhaps an evolutionary accident of sorts, Trump is the missing link that pushes conservatism beyond itself. He embodies a Nietzschean will to power and a desire to move beyond political liberalism to a new phase of Western civilization premised on white identity.

    The telos of Spencer’s metapolitics, then, is not simply resistance to liberalism but its overthrow in the creation of a white, pan-European ethnostate in North America. This project is not just a return to some glorified past, as it also figures as a necessary step in the continued development and evolution of European peoples. In this sense, the ethnostate imagined by Spencer would be an “Altneuland–an old, new country” (Spencer 2016b). To bring about this state would be to build a territory to protect against the perceived threats of globalism and its attendant cultural logics wherein whites could both “rival the ancients,” and engage in the process of “fostering a new people, who are healthier, stronger, more intelligent, more beautiful, more athletic” (2016b). Advocating for what he calls a peaceful ethnic cleansing, or ethnic redistribution, wherein the powers of the state are utilized to redraw maps according to an ethno-political logic, Spencer strips the politics of diaspora and state power of its violence on peoples of color.

    Indeed, ethnic cleansing is unfathomable outside of genocide or radical exclusionary policy measures that utilizes the state to make certain populations live while letting others die. Here we see the inherently biopolitical nature of Spencer’s alt-right vision. Regardless of its rhetorical packaging within the language of separatism, peaceful ethnic redistribution, and identitarianism, Spencer’s project maintains a commitment to upholding national sovereignty in the legitimation of a racial politics of letting die. As Roberto Esposito (2008) writes on the relationships among sovereignty, race, and biopolitics, “Once racism has been inscribed in the practices of biopolitics, it performs a double function: that of producing a separation within the biological continuum between those that need to remain alive and those, conversely, who are to be killed; and that more essential function of establishing a direct relation between the two conditions, in the sense that it is precisely the death of the latter that enable and authorize the survival of the former” (110, italics in original). Figuring the racialized other as infectious pathogen, this negative biopolitics operates within an autoimmunitary logic in which the body politic wars against itself. In this sense, the state seeks to save its vital nature and potentialities from erosion and degeneration by attacking and removing infected areas to preserve the integrity and sovereignty of the body politic. Under this calculus of power, as Achille Mbembe (2003) writes, politics operates “as the work of death” wherein “sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (16, 27). The forced displacement of peoples of color from the US through a so-called peaceful ethnic cleansing becomes another means through which sovereign power dictates, values, and normalizes the parameters of valuable life within a racial hierarchy, legitimizing the physical and social death of peoples of color in the name of the biological preservation of whiteness. Indeed, for Mbembe, the central feature of a politics of death is that of territorial fragmentation in which segments of the population are separated and rendered immobile via racial terror.

    Spencer’s call for the foundation of white ethno-state illustrates the imbrication of radical, paleoconservative tribal politics with European far-right thought regarding identitarianism and German arguments on metapolitical action, evincing the complex histories and migrations of conservatism discussed above. Reformulating and coupling the rhetoric of radical traditionalist conservatism and critical theory to fit the exigencies of neoliberal capitalism and global governance in the US, Spencer naturalizes social inequality, and pushes conservatism beyond itself in the formulation of a fascist politics that legitimizes state violence against people of color.

    Conclusion

    Through a sustained analysis of the rhetorical strategies and structures of argumentation of Richard Spencer, we are offered a clearer vision of the purposes, aims, and functions of the alt-right. Additionally, by tracing the political roots of the alt-right to traditionalist idioms of conservatism and their reemergence in more contemporary paleoconservative thought, we can see how the alt-right is a uniquely American political project. However, this is not to deny its connection to a global network of proto-fascist politics, but rather to say that traditionalist conservative thought in the US provides not only clear sites of rhetorical overlap and a veneer of academic legitimacy, but also ideological warrants for white supremacy, anti-egalitarianism, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment in unique and important ways.

    By tracing the history of the alt-right and its dominant rhetorical forms we hope to better situate it within its rhetorical context. As we have argued, the ascendancy of the alt-right is a response by a swath of disaffected and resentful white people in the United States, and across the globe, who have grown weary of the establishment politics of the welfare state and the promises of multiculturalism. In a post-Cold War political landscape, the political cleavages of Right v. Left, capitalism v. communism no longer hold. Additionally, the collapse of the neoconservative, fusionist Republican Party politics of Reagan, its attempted revival post-9/11 in the compassionate conservatism of Bush, and the subsequent disarray of the Republican Right have created a space for a new, populist Right to emerge. No longer content to be mere reactionaries, the alt-right stands, to paraphrase Spencer, as a kind of conservatism with nothing left to conserve.

    Premised upon metapolitics and identitarianism, Spencer’s articulation of the alt-right seeks to legitimize white supremacist ideology as a part of mainstream political discourse. Fusing German proto-fascism, European New Right discourse, and US paleoconservatism, Spencer appropriates and rearticulates central tenets of Gramsci’s thought to use leftist critique against itself. Denying the culturally constructed nature of race and the systemic workings of racism for peoples of color, he simultaneously offers an underdeveloped theory of race that sees whiteness, in many regards, as a constructed product of culture and argues that the state and its ideological apparatuses maintain a hegemonic discourse of white guilt and hate. Yet, these argumentative cracks in his rhetorical world are sealed over by the power of myth—a central component of metapolitics—as a generative force in a unified, organic will of European peoples around the world. The desire and longing for a new politics and a white ethnostate largely calls to the passions, not reason.

    Eschewing liberal rationality, then, attempts to utilize rational argumentation and historical evidence against Spencer is doubtless a futile project. As a project premised on highlighting the limits and contradictions of reason in political culture, the alt-right diminishes the possibilities for resistance within the bounded norms of civil discourse. To meet their hate with reason is thus to miss the point of how their rhetoric functions. Yet, demanding more radical forms of political resistance, alt-right rhetoric simultaneously polices the possibilities of political violence.

    We can see the rhetorical double-bind placed upon protest and dissent, particularly from the left, by turning to the case of Richard Spencer’s visit to Texas A&M. Students, faculty, and community members gathered to create a counter-event intended to demonstrate an atmosphere of inclusion on campus and to drown out the hate speech of Spencer with their own protest. Rather than engaging in dialogue or debate with Spencer and his acolytes, such a rhetorical move engages in an affective strategy geared toward creating spaces of solidarity, radical equality, and inclusion. Eschewing hate, as well as symbolic and material violence, this approach avoids attacking Spencer and rather seeks to protect those most vulnerable to his vitriol. An important and necessary tactic, it can also be easily appropriated into an alt-right narrative that demeans SJWs and liberal snowflakes that need safe spaces to protect themselves from the supposed free speech rights of white men who feel left out and oppressed by the multicultural state. However, it’s not difficult to imagine that a more aggressive and militant response to Spencer’s speech would have fueled the narrative of liberal hypocrisy and intolerance of free speech; a narrative which played out when violent protests shut down a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos at University of California-Berkeley.

    The alt-right’s de-legitimization of reasoned debate, and more radical forms of resistance against Spencer’s call for ethnic cleansing, exemplifies a shift in how white privilege operates following white racial reactions to the civil rights movement. In this context, white privilege is most productively viewed as more than a knapsack of entitlements (McIntosh 1988, Frankenberg 1993), or a social norm (Du Bois 1920); but as a political project. As we show in this essay, Spencer’s white privilege politics is a key rhetorical tool that mediates the contradictions involved with white racial reactions to the limited successes of movements for social justice. Along with other entitlements of whiteness, Spencer exemplifies how white privilege can rise to the level of a political project by giving owners of white skin the right to create, perceive, understand, and circulate structural critiques on the welfare state that call attention to ongoing white genocide, but to dismiss actual existing structural inequalities as politically motivated. Further, this privilege gives white folks the right to accuse people of color who call attention to actual existing structural inequalities of ‘playing the race card.’ In other words, white privilege politics is a project that gives white folks the right to see and not see race simultaneously when pursuing white supremacist policies. White privilege politics helps to legitimate the contradictions of the varied white racial reactions to policies designed to increase equity in society, and strengthen American democracy.

    How alt-right rhetoric transforms white privilege and constrains resistance strategies would be confined to the fringe of US politics. However, beyond Spencer, the alt-right made itself present—at least temporarily– in the Trump Administration (Stephen Bannon), and is responsible for two of the most popular websites in conservative media networks, Brietbart.com and Inforwars.com. These outlets traffic in conspiracy and contempt, and pushed the news cycles of establishment media during the 2016 election cycle (Benkler et al. 2017). More research is needed to understand the role of alt-right media platforms in shaping alt-right rhetoric, as well as how opponents of the alt-right can effectively disrupt their rhetoric. The rise in the alt-right to positions of power in politics and media is exponentially more troubling when we confront the question of what to do next. If resistance to their agenda from the left is watered down, or made complicit, then what’s left is for conservatives to meaningfully and honestly combat attempts to undermine the institutions of American democracy. By tracing the links of alt-right rhetoric to earlier movements in conservatism, we show that the alt-right is not an aberration or deviation from conservatism but an ever-present component of its historical trajectory. Conservatives must confront this fact in in order to engage in more honest conversations about their complicity in alt-right politics, to draw parameters around racism, and to call out contradictions in alt-right rhetoric.

    _____

    Kevin Musgrave is an Assistant Professor in the Southeast Missouri State University Department of Communication Studies and Modern Languages

    Jeff Tischauser is a PhD Candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] For instance, while Milo Yiannopolous is often touted as a leading figure of the alt-right Spencer labels Milo and other figures associated with Breitbart’s brand of extremism and cultural nationalism the alt-light. This term denotes a sense of fracture in defining the central goals, purposes, and aims of the alt-right project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Spencer heralds his own vision and that of those affiliated with the NPI as the true alt-right position.

    [2] Indeed, one may read in Hegel a similar call for the total subservience of the individual to the state in a kind of organic unity, while we may read in Nietzsche a rebuke of the state in the individual will to power, as well as a renunciation of Wagner’s nationalism, while in Schmitt we receive a defense of absolute sovereignty in the preservation of divine order and inherent biological difference.

    [3] See, for instance, Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln (2002).

    [4] For more detailed accounts see Viguerie and Franke (2004) and Viguerie (2006). For a critical account of the role of right-wing think tanks in the reconfiguration of US politics see Stahl (2014).

    [5] Cooper (2008, 71), holds that such a position is a fairly common trait of neonationalist reactions against neoliberalism across the globe.

    _____

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  • Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan — Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth

    Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan — Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth

    Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    “You know, I hear all these rich guys, for some reason they love space. So they’re rich. I said, ‘let them send the rockets up. What the hell do we have to do it, right?’”

    — US President Donald Trump, Aug 15 2019 campaign rally,
    Manchester NH (quoted in FOXBusiness 2019)

    1. Preppers, the Rapture and on Being “Left Behind”

    At the turn of the millennium, an unexpected success took the mainstream publishing industry completely off-guard. A series of science fiction novels published by a tiny Christian press and depicting the end of the world from a distinctly Christian fundamentalist perspective became a massive, best-selling hit (McAlister 2003). Its themes of survival following a catastrophic global event were not foreign to the universe of science fiction literature; doomsday scenarios resulting in flight from one’s home planet to a celestial otherworld via space travel have served as plot devices in countless books, films and video games. Yet something about the Left Behind series (LaHaye and Jenkins 1995) was distinct.

    That novelty in this case hinged upon the fact that the dystopian doomsday scenario in question was taken directly from an evangelical Christian Biblical interpretation of the Rapture, the New Testament prophecy that says that believers of Christ would be delivered en masse to Heaven while non-believers would be left to fend for themselves in a ravaged, evil-infected world. Despite, or perhaps because of, its overt Christian Evangelical bent, the series was both a massive commercial success and a cultural phenomenon. Drawing on its Evangelical underpinnings, the series located evil at a point of origin true to its theology and politics: as reported by SF Gate at the height of the its popularity, in 2006, “in [the Left Behind series], set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine ‘Sexiest Man Alive’” (Lelchuk and Writer 2006).

    The series went on to spawn a popular, albeit technically flawed, video game (and sequels), in which the conceit is to convert as many non-believers as possible and save them from post-Armageddon eternal terrestrial doom. It also led to the production of several films, the first batch starring former sitcom actor and Evangelical Christian Kirk Cameron, followed by an attempted 2014 reboot featuring Nicolas Cage. Whatever the medium, the heroes of the franchise were no Luddites; indeed, as American Studies scholar Melani McAlister remarked in her expansive essay on the cultural meaning of Left Behind:

    LaHaye and Jenkins establish their characters as more modern than modern. Making the most of the fact that the events they describe must necessarily be the future (though a rather near-term future, in their view), the novels present a world in which our Tribulation Force members are unfailingly knowledgeable about, and outfitted with, an impressive array of the best possible equipment, from guns to high-end SUVs, from Gulfstream jets to the ‘computer without limitations’ ordered by the Tribulation Force from an underground dealer. (McAlister 2003, 783)

    The Rapture is a religious event, key to understanding Evangelical Christian theology and practice. But in the Left Behind series, it is also a secular global disaster, which requires skill, determination, tech and ideological dedication to survive. Those who remain on Earth wait for their own opportunity to be spirited away, newly transformed into fully committed believers, to a Christian heaven.

    Figure 1. Box art for the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game, depicting the Christian Rapture over New York City.
    Figure 1. Box art for the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game, depicting the Christian Rapture over New York City.

    While the Left Behind franchise reflects a profoundly sectarian Evangelical Christian eschatology, preoccupation with the coming of end times, whether Christian or secular versions, has become more commonplace and concomitantly more socially acceptable in 21st century American culture—on the rise, however, since the mid-20th century’s preoccupation with escape from nuclear annihilation by a paradoxical technological arms race. This new social acceptability has been enhanced by worsening economic, environmental and social conditions, and bolstered by technological developments designed to accommodate a dystopian, resource-poor future marked by global war, environmental chaos, famine, and/or the end of sustainable human life.

    What Left Behind did to prepare the Evangelical American psyche for coming horror has been replicated in material form: to prepare for a variety of nightmarish end-times eventualities, people have built bunkers, stockpiled food, hoarded weapons and created structures (many in the form below-ground bunkers, but also silos, geodesic domes and other improbable architectural masterworks) intended to offer the latest technological innovations that can support inhabitants in a variety of post-apocalyptic scenarios.[1] Many are elaborate and spare no innovation or expense to provide for the inhabitants’ creature comforts and well-being as the world above disintegrates into chaos and ruin.

    There is historical precedence for this new end-of-days prepping, grounded in the mid-20th century Cold War nuclear fallout shelters. A recent article in The Atlantic on the new luxury prepping phenomenon begins with this historical observation: “On July 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the American people of a need ‘new to our shores’ for emergency preparedness, including fallout shelters. The bunkers of that era—Brutalist, cement, with foldout beds and stockpiled food—were designed to protect families in the event that the Cold War turned hot” (Rowen 2017). Decades on, these early escape rooms, and the anxieties that had provoked them, had largely melted away, their remnants anachronistic oddities of another time.

    One of this article’s authors recalls childhood afternoons in the 1980s playing in a bomb shelter built off a friend’s basement, which had fallen into disuse, never having been deployed in the context of the man-made disaster scenario of post-nuclear holocaust survival. It was a physically and emotionally uncomfortable reminder from another era, lined in cold concrete cinder blocks and plywood bunks. Nonetheless, its builders had gone to pains to decorate and had painted on the cement walls, cheerily but ominously, a wooded nature landscape scene that, aboveground, would have been all but assuredly vaporized, were its builders actually ensconced inside it for the long haul and using it for its intended purpose.

    Figure 2. A friendly cartoon turtle provides advice to the American public during the Cold War era in a film for school-aged children, “Duck and Cover” (Rizzo 1951)
    Figure 2. A friendly cartoon turtle provides advice to the American public during the Cold War era in a film for school-aged children, “Duck and Cover” (Archer Productions 1951)

    In the post-9/11, economically depressed and socially divided America, disaster preparedness has been experiencing a comeback. A new prepper phenomenon has even become the fodder of media empires: Doomsday Preppers, a reality program, airing on cable’s National Geographic Channel from 2011 through 2014, was a ratings hit (National Geographic Channel 2014), which subsequently spawned a number of lookalikes on other networks (Genzlinger 2012). As depicted on these programs, the preppers of the paranoid post-millennium come in all orientations and political persuasions, but lean toward the right of the political spectrum, with strains of individualism and lack of faith in government the predominating common threads among them. A fondness for weaponry of all kinds—but particularly for guns— and means of self-defense are often at the center of the preparations and infrastructure, so that the prepared may defend themselves not only against an enemy, but also against those who were not so well prepared for calamity and unwisely attempt to seek material support or other assistance from their neighbors.

    Indeed, it is the very preparation involving the arming of one’s self and family in the face of impending disaster that serves as a culture of its own; the gun culture prevalent in the United States is frequently overlaid with prepper culture and, itself, serves as a focal point of strong community formations. The group known as “America’s Largest Right-Wing Militia,” the Georgia III% Security Force, is depicted intimately in VICE’s “Guns in America” series (III% Security Force nd). As explained by VICE, this group “is inspired by the unfounded claim that only three percent of colonists fought against the British in the American Revolution” (VICE 2017). The Georgia Three Percenters fight against what they perceive as attacks on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, protecting the people’s right to bear arms. To prepare for what they believe is an imminent war, they gather monthly to train and discuss strategies. This group, led by White, rural working-class people, was especially active in the months leading up to the 2016 US elections, convinced that Hillary Clinton was “plotting to take them [their guns] away” (Zucchino 2016), a likelihood that had no basis in demonstrable fact.

    Despite its overwhelming association with White culture and people, the group has complicated racial politics, as often eluded to by the militia’s leader Chris Hill in the VICE profile. On camera, Hill explains: “we’re not racist, we’re against racism… we’re against supremacy of all kind—fuck it all—we’re all created equal, but until people can get that fucking message we must be prepared to defend ourselves and each other” (VICE 2017). Who the enemy is remains forever ideological, conceptual, and a perfect opportunity to play with guns to protect a future imaginary of their own making.

    The hoarding of guns and a lust to use them are the organizing principles of Mel Bernstein’s life; he is described in numerous media accounts (and also self-styled) as the “most armed man in America” (Koenigs 2017). Bernstein collects, rents and sells military-style vehicles and weapons from his 260-acre compound (called “Dragonland”) in Colorado Springs. He also runs a paintball park, motocross park, military museum, gun shop and shooting ranges.

    One of the 3 percent of Americans who own half the country’s guns (Ingraham 2016). ABC News recently aired a short profile on Bernstein (Koenigs 2017), focusing on his extreme nostalgia and sense of loneliness: five years ago, his wife was killed by a smoke bomb on their property during the filming of reality-TV pilot for the Discovery Channel. He now lives with four human-sized dolls, all of which he has named (Jennifer, Betty, Jill, and one unnamed in the clip), dressed in feminine attire, and posed in the nostalgic 1950s-style diner that is his kitchen. Bernstein legally owns more than 4000 weapons; his bedroom is lined with M16s and assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns, and handguns—but it is the mannequins that push people to question his sanity.

    Figure 3. Bernstein in his home with one of four doll companions (clip from Koenigs 2017)
    Figure 3. Bernstein in his home with one of four doll companions (clip from Koenigs 2017)

    The appeal of groups and individuals like the III% militia, Bernstein, and reality TV preppers as the subjects of programs—and their shared overlapping interest in and certainty of near-future impending global calamity—is due in part to the ingenuity with which they conceive and execute their survival goals. Enjoyment, however, often comes with that dose of schadenfreude or superiority endemic to reality TV, undergirded by a tacit mocking of its subjects at all times (Papacharissi & Mendelson 2007; Reiss & Wiltz 2004). In aggregate, a great deal of the appeal lies in looking in on crazy zealots, ridiculous obsessives, and eccentrics who spend their families’ life savings and all of their time burrowing in their backyards or hoarding non-perishables. The unresolved issue at the root of the entire enterprise, as the New York Times preppers TV article points out, is the question of who would even want to survive the disasters for which the preppers are prepping (Genzlinger 2012). For many of the preppers, it is the singular focus on prepping itself from which they derive the satisfaction that blurs so easily into religious fervor. The TV preppers’ solutions to anxieties for the future must always be counterbalanced for viewers by a sense of ridicule and unease provoked by the necessary obsessiveness it takes to plan for disasters that may never come—a global electromagnetic pulse, alien invasion, total environmental collapse, or the need to survive until the rapturous wave arrives to call them to the next stage of existence.

    While these eccentric, yet mostly unheralded (prior to their profiles on TV) people are easily made the object of humor or scorn through programs like Ultimate Preppers or ABC’s feature on Bernstein, stories about social and financial elites’ machinations in these directions are offered up without the same sort of skepticism. From Steve Bannon to Elon Musk, or from Biosphere 2 to SpaceX, the elite can afford passion projects of immense scale unavailable to even the most ingenious TV prepper. Rather than resolve issues on earth, they look to the stars and into our cells. Perhaps they know something others do not. Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti offers a diagnosis:

    The new necro-technologies operate in a social climate dominated by a political economy of nostalgia and paranoia on the one hand, and euphoria or exaltation on the other. This manic-depressive condition enacts a number of variations: from the fear of the imminent disaster, the catastrophe just waiting to happen, to hurricane Katrina or the next environmental accident. (Braidotti 2012, 9-10)

    Braidotti draws our attention to the contexts of disaster and how they shape lived experiences in imagined geographies and temporalities—tangible, but made-up; real, but fabricated. For Braidotti, and for philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, ecological crises induce a cold panic that can be harnessed by technologically and economically élite “Guardians” (Stengers 2015, 27) to offer up a series of seemingly viable non-choices as choices and non-solutions as solutions. Technocratic problem-solving continues to adhere foremost to free-market ideology, which endeavors to maintain or deepen status quo power dynamics, unequal global economies, and to allow for social collapse, all due to a pathological resistance to state- or community-imposed regulation and limits. Because American culture equates money and power with morality and leadership, Stengers suggests that the outcome is a no-choice choice ultimately “between barbarism and barbarism” (Wark 2015), with people and planet held hostage to corporations and those who benefit from them.

    Whether Earth’s collapse will come due resource extraction, environmental destruction, or war (or a combination thereof), the technocratic élite are not only both predisposed and poised to start anew somehow and somewhere else well beyond the backyard bunker but may even welcome or initiate it by way of inaction in the face of destruction on Earth. The outcome of any such cataclysmic, Earth-destroying catastrophes would yield a Rapture of its own, with the secular believers delivered to a futuristic beyond, and the rest who did not believe, or could not afford to, left behind.

    2. The Worse the Better: Accelerationism and Nihilism

    Accelerationism (from the right) is a theoretical counter-proposal to resistance (from the left); a destabilizing force for fighting the ills of capitalism. As Benjamin Noys summarizes it in his Malign Velocities (2014):

    Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production [proponents] argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. We haven’t seen anything yet as regards what speed can do. Such a counsel seems to be one of cynicism, suggesting we come to terms with capitalism as a dynamic of increasing value by actively becoming hyper-capitalist subjects. What interests me is a further turn of the screw of this narrative: the only way out of capitalism is to take it further, to follow its lines of flight or deterritorialization to the absolute end, to speed-up beyond the limits of production and so to rupture the limit of capital itself. (Noys 2014, i)

    Accelerationism proposes that we collectively let things unravel to their full extent – socially, politically, economically, environmentally–by stoking, rather than seeking to mitigate–the forces that drive us toward devastation. In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame of the totalizing undoing of capitalism by capitalism.

    Accelerationism locates resistance to capitalism as a byproduct of capitalism itself that by its nature reproduces it, and that such resistance can never fully stand outside of it to fight it, or really even be complete. It also suggests a foregone and nihilist conclusion to the contemporary status of global humanity, which, it asserts, was completely and inextricably captured within the capitalist orbit. It is thus an ideology offering no new ideas or no possibility for meaningful change beyond the total, inevitable collapse of the global system. In its early instantiations, accelerationism was a declaration about capitalism as a kind of alien invader from the future (Mackay 2012). It sees the outcome of late-stage capitalism as pushed by growth and profit to the point of spectacular self-destruction, an outcome that it welcomes.

    Accelerationism as a political philosophy, with its goal of bringing about the end of the status quo (capitalism) by accelerating the world into full-blown crisis, has adherents on the left. Some leftists identify with the anti-capitalist endgame and see accelerationism as a means to implement a radical call for anti-work, full automation, and so on (Terranova 2014).[2] Yet, more significantly, it seems to have been taken up by the right, the outcome of a certain nihilism rooted in a sense of inevitability about the end of the world as we know it—due to environmental failures, natural (man-made) disasters and global warming, and so on—and a science fiction-influenced, technologically-driven fascination with concepts of spaceward expansionism, extraction and conquest. This right-wing strain is most commonly identified with Nick Land, once of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or Ccru, at the University of Warwick (UK).

    As his editor and onetime student Robin Mackay explains in the introduction to a collection of Land’s writings, “Marxists in particular were outraged by Land’s aggressive championing of the sociopathic heresy urging the ‘ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field’—[hence] the acceleration, rather than the critique, of Capitalism’s disintegration of society” (Land 2017, 3).

    Capitalism demands competition, which, in turn, relies on technological deployments, which, in turn, rely on the exploitation of cheap nature and labor, and reliable but unequal global flows (Moore 2014). Humans are not at the center, they merely serve toward the rendering of a technofuture, and then become superfluous. According to Alex Williams, in Nick Land’s envisioning of a post-capitalist future, “the human can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilisations” (Williams 2013, 2). As for Land, he left his university post and has retreated to Shanghai to ruminate and produce paranoid speculative fiction with an accelerationist bent, his erstwhile right-curious politics having fully morphed into open and unabashed fascism.

    In sum, what accelerationism as a political philosophy offers its adherents is a profoundly nihilistic view that suspends any hope in the ability of humans to intercede meaningfully in the world as it is. Instead, it hangs its hopes on an End Times of its own, awaiting a sort of secular Rapture that compels acolytes to not only await, but celebrate, the inevitable unravelling of the social order and collapse of the world as we know it For many, its proponents would claim, the worse things get, the better. Sound familiar?

    When viewed through the dual lens of prepperdom and nihilistic accelerationism—both of which hold out for global disaster with a certain amount of titillation and glee—the large-scale projects for which techno-élites like Musk have become famous can be seen in another light entirely: as dismal, fatalistic projects that have given up any faith (pun intended) in the ability to resolve the human condition or life on Earth, in general, or perhaps, even more specifically, that there would be inherent value in such an effort at all. Indeed, the projects promoted by this technocratic élite do not scope into something favorable for a majority of the world’s inhabitants or life as we now know it; instead, they are so narrowly aimed as to solve very little about the ruinous conditions for vast swaths of the world’s population and, in many cases, quite literally seek to abandon Earth entirely.

    Examples such Musk’s investments in SpaceX, his ruminations that we are all likely living in a computer simulation, or the desire to colonize Mars, all point toward his belief that life on Earth is largely unsalvageable; his billions of dollars of wealth and his unfettered access to resources therefore follow suit. In this regard, a recent musing from him on Twitter takes on an ominous undertone; his idle, passive musing about migrant children placed in cages in detention centers by the Trump Administration proposes no solution, no alternative, no call to act. Perhaps, in accordance with his world view, he sees no reason to. The game has already been lost and those in the know have moved on.

    Figure 4. Elon Musk makes non-committal remarks on the situation of migrant children placed in detention, removed from parents and, in some cases, housed in cages and pens, under Trump Administration policy. In subsequent tweets, he defends his tweet by stating that he is one of the ACLU’s top donors (Musk, 2018)
    Figure 4. Elon Musk makes non-committal remarks on the situation of migrant children placed in detention, removed from parents and, in some cases, housed in cages and pens, under Trump Administration policy. In subsequent tweets, he defends his tweet by stating that he is one of the ACLU’s top donors (Musk, 2018)

    3. Dreaming of Post-Earth

    In the billionaire kingmaker class, Musk is not alone in his post-Earth predilection. Indeed, he is one of several of his echelon looking cynically to science fiction and the après-apocalypse, fantasizing about outlandish ways to spend–and make–profits via projects that deepen long-standing commitments to Western supremacy and colonization, albeit with a futuristic bent. At the 2016 Republican National Convention that heralded the political ascendency of Donald Trump, PayPal billionaire and Gawker/journalism foe Peter Thiel (Thompson 2018) hailed the conquest of Mars as a worthier endeavor than wars in the Middle East. In doing so, Thiel inadvertently showed his ideological hand by invoking both as equivalent games of conquest (Daily Beast 2016). Other projects in this vein include Biosphere 2 (once the province of former Trump advisor and professional propagandist Steve Bannon), HI-SEAS, Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters, and the NSA’s Star Trek-inspired control room, all of which posit various offworld-oriented technological solutions to a dying future. It is a future in which capitalism has already played out the dissolution of democracy and social equalities, favoring a libertarian fend-for-yourself approach for those who remain– and those who remain, according to these projects, are overwhelmingly White, wealthy able-bodied people of the Global North.

    Figure 5. NSA’s Star Trek-inspired “Information Dominance Center” (see Greenwald, 2013)
    Figure 5. NSA’s Star Trek-inspired “Information Dominance Center” (source: Greenwald 2013)

    Biosphere 2 was an architectural and ecology project launched in the early 1990s, privately funded by the Texas oil billionaire “ecopreneur” Edward Bass, who, given his industry, likely had certain expertise and foresight related to impending ecological collapse (Atlas Obscura 2013; “Biosphere 2” 2003). Based on science-fiction and architectural futurist concepts of fully-enclosed and self-sufficient human habitation environments known as “arcologies” (Plunkett 2011), Biosphere 2 was an attempt to create Earth-like living conditions within a container–what some early media reports described as “life in a bottle” (Turner 2011). The underlying conceit was that such living habitats would become necessary on Earth or on other planets, after life on this one could no longer be sustained.

    Figure 6: An array of arcologies for players to build, as depicted in the video game SimCity 2000, released in 1993 by game publisher Maxis. http://simcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arcology
    Figure 6. An array of arcologies for players to build, as depicted in the video game SimCity 2000, released in 1993 by game publisher Maxis (Source: Simcity wiki)

    The project quickly failed on many fronts, at which point future Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Steven Bannon, at the time a former Goldman Sachs investment banker specializing in media and entertainment investments, was asked to come in to financially salvage the project (Jardin 2016). During this period, Biosphere 2 spiraled down from a quasi-legitimate scientific endeavor into a tourist spectacle, sharing more in common with Xanadu Computerized Houses of the Future (Dells Travel 2014) than legitimate empirical scientific research; lawsuits ensued in short order (Murphy 2016).

    While Bannon claimed publicly that the Biosphere 2 experiment had been to study the effects of CO2 emissions and climate change in real-time, rather than merely through computer simulation, the entire project became one of fake science, with its focus repeatedly shifting to any story of innovation that could be packaged for the media.

    Figure 7. One of several foam futuristic dome structures known as “Xanadu House of Tomorrow” located in tourist destinations across the United States from 1980 until the mid-1990s; this one was located in Kissimmee, Florida. Photo credit: Wollewoox, under Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
    Figure 7. One of several foam futuristic dome structures known as “Xanadu House of Tomorrow” located in tourist destinations across the United States from 1980 until the mid-1990s; this one was located in Kissimmee, Florida. (Source: Wikipedia)

    In a similar case of earthbound arcologies meant to imagine a future framed by offworld life, the volunteer crew of the latest NASA Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission remained cloistered for eight months as part of a study to learn how astronauts might interact and problem-solve during long deployments. In HI-SEAS, six volunteers inhabited a fake Mars colony, playing the part of astronauts. Project chronicler Lynn Levy described the project as planning “for the day when the dress rehearsals are over, and we blast off for real” (Gimlet Media, 2018). Here too, however, participants were kept busy with scientific homework: “The HI-SEAS site has Mars-like geology which allows crews to perform high-fidelity geological field work and add to the realism of the mission simulation” (HI-SEAS, n.d.).

    It is worthy of note that the HI-SEAS site was chosen for its environmental similarities to Mars, but seemingly without any acknowledgment of the irony that the make-believe colony is located on the very much contested and already colonized island of Hawai’i, where active protests are now underway to impede the placement of further telescopic equipment used for astronomical observation atop sacred mountains.

    Figure 8. A HI-SEAS "fake Mars" project astronaut. (Source: Hersher 2016)
    Figure 8. A HI-SEAS “fake Mars” project astronaut. (Source: Hersher 2016)

    A nod to offworld architecture and otherworldly craft was resonant too, in the design of both Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters and the NSA’s control room. Both structures were characterized by design demonstrating the desire to have not only control over but also a front row seat to the apocalypse . The new Apple campus, shaped like a flying saucer (or perhaps the ouroboros-like literal form of its longtime “infinite loop” street address) has all the amenities of a city, becoming, much like Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise or a fully-enclosed archology, its own world-within-a-vessel. It operates like a spaceship that has landed on earth rather than one about to take off, and by design uses its surroundings to anchor itself for future generations. The spaceship is surrounded by a thick layer of trees, mostly apricot, maintains a thousand bikes on the site for workers to get around, and has its own energy center that runs mostly off-grid. The spaceship aesthetic and panoptic/open floor work spaces reinstate order and hierarchy through structural and embedded surveillance while suggesting freedom of movement and action. Ample amenities are designed to keep workers on-site and productive, ideally for longer than an eight-hour workday, recalling the company towns of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Not to be outdone, both Google and Facebook have announced employee housing near their expansive campuses (Stangel 2017), in partial response to extraordinary housing costs in Silicon Valley (created by the demand from their own workers).

    Figure 9. Concept drawing of Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. (Source: Techboss24, http://techboss24.blogspot.com/2013/11/apples-new-spaceship-campus-see-unseen.html
    Figure 9. Concept drawing of Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. (Source: Techboss24)

    The unbroken circle design of the building creates an inside vs. outside protected space for Apple employees in much the same way that projects from 1950s fallout shelters to Biosphere 2 have sought to seal off a group of the chosen from the others who must remain outside the walls. Indeed, just as the skies part to allow ascendency to Heaven of God’s anointed on the cover of the Left Behind video game (as seen in figure 1), the artistic rendering of the Apple Spaceship shows a similar break in the clouds and sunlight beaming down on its infinite loop.

    The appeal of science fiction fantasy has been taken up by government agencies, too. In contrast to the Chilean “Synco” or “Project Cybersyn” of the 1970s, which used cybernetic aesthetics to create a work room to respond to economic crises in real time (Medina 2011), the former National Security Agency (NSA) Chief Keith Alexander’s had constructed an “Information Dominance Center” war room (Greenwald 2013). For Chile’s socialist President, Salvador Allende, ‘revolutionary computing’ meant putting workers in control of decisions (Medina 2006, 574–575). This socialist project stands in contrast to the “Information Dominance Center” designed to allow the USA’s NSA virtually one-man control over an increasingly vast network of surreptitious surveillance and data gathering.

    In the case of both Big Tech and governmental surveillance agencies, undergirding a commitment to the inevitable and imminent time after Earth is the appeal of science fiction aesthetics, concepts and projects, all aimed toward the new goal of having new places and opportunities to conquer, colonize and dominate post-Earth. SpaceX’s goal is to land a person on Mars; closer to home are other instantiations of futuristic fantasy, from the NSA’s Star Trek-inspired control room to Apple’s Spaceship. Hermetically-sealed scientists and volunteers roleplay in extreme environments to ready themselves for off-world living. In all of these examples, the playing out of “accelerationism” is both a chronological and technological acceleration, as well as the strategic buying and use of remaining time–to hide, prepare and come up with exit strategies.

    What makes these cases so compelling is that they often inadvertently show the élites’ cynical, hubristic and pessimistic hand, a tell that gives away the fact that their technological propositions cannot salvage life on Earth for the masses, and, even worse, that they are no longer interested in trying. These projects all cater to the right’s accelerationist rationale that it is too late to act, too late to come together for collective decision-making, and too late to care, all while disavowing the powerful agency that has gone into making those beliefs into fact (such as in the case of the fossil fuel magnate who bankrolled Biosphere2). The investment is therefore into a future for the prepared and worthy few, and damnation for the rest.

    Conclusion: Prepping for Pleasure and for Profit

    For this special issue of b2o, we have explored Musk’s SpaceX, the NSA’s control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. In them, we find deep political, ideological and even theological deployments of technology concerned with escape from planet Earth. These projects and structures necessarily downplay and deny their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. The common throughline to these projects is the often unarticulated and disturbing conceit that the viability of Earth to sustain a high quality of life for élites, and, by extension, for the vast majority of the population is no longer assured. In such a scenario, escape to the stars, as best imagined in Cold War-era pulp science fiction, should not only be welcomed but perhaps hastened; a secular Rapture or “Left Behind” for Dawkins-esque technofetishists who pray at the altar of “disruption” and “innovation.”

    Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged or obfuscated ideological origins in accelerationism and nihilism, these endeavors, and their proponents in government and technology sectors, represent the ultimate preppers, ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else: in a self-contained unit like Biosphere 2 or HI-SEAS, on the newly discovered “habitable” planets, or on Mars.

    Nick Land’s accelerationist vision of society is one already lost to any means of human intervention ; as such, we should let the process unfold as society proceeds toward inevitable collapse, in order to start anew. It is a grim End Times vision of Biblical proportions; what it lacks in evangelical Christianity it makes up for in a totalizing world view demanding adherence rising to zealotry.

    For those who are not solely hypercapitalist zealot-purists of a Landian variety and yet are attracted to futurist projects (but a few of which we have catalogued here), acceleration towards cataclysm, as articulated through large-scale prepper projects for an off-World future, has its own draw and proposes its own alluring rewards: the economic incentives of colonization, resource control and a rush to develop, own and extract post-Earth is expected to pay off, financially and figuratively. Woe be unto the rest of us who do not heed the signs and find ourselves left behind.

    _____

    Sarah T. Roberts is assistant professor in the department of information studies at UCLA. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, is out now from Yale University Press.

    Mél Hogan is assistant professor of Environmental Media at the University of Calgary. She is writing a book about genomic media and DNA data storage in the cloud.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] It is worth noting that geodesic domes were the province and product of Buckminster Fuller, whom Stewart Brand, early Silicon Valley champion and counterculture hero, credited as the inspiration behind his Whole Earth Catalog. Fred Turner, in his chronicle of this period and culture, writes “in retrospect, it is easy to understand Fuller’s appeal to cold war American youth…he simultaneously embraced the pleasures and power associated with the products of technocracy and offered his audiences a way to avoid becoming technocratic drones. Moreover, according to Fuller, the proper deployment of information and technology could literally save the human species from annihilation” (Turner 2010, 57)

    [2] See also Shukaitis (2009): “one could argue that through much of leftist politics runs the notion of an apocalyptic moment, of some magical event (usually revolution), followed by the creation of a new and better world” (97).

    _____

    Works Cited

  • “Dennis Erasmus” — Containment Breach: 4chan’s /pol/ and the Failed Logic of “Safe Spaces” for Far-Right Ideology

    “Dennis Erasmus” — Containment Breach: 4chan’s /pol/ and the Failed Logic of “Safe Spaces” for Far-Right Ideology

    “Dennis Erasmus”

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    Author’s Note: This article was written prior to the events of the deadly far-right riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11-12, 2017. Footnotes have been added with updated information where it is possible or necessary, but it has otherwise been largely unchanged.

    Introduction

    This piece is a discussion of one place on the internet where the far right meets, formulates their propaganda and campaigns, and ultimately reproduces and refines its ideology.

    4chan’s Politically Incorrect image board (like other 4chan boards, regularly referred to by the last portion of its URL, “/pol/”) is one of the most popular boards on the highly active and gently-moderated website, as well as a major online hub for far-right politics, memes, and coordinated harassment campaigns. Unlike most of the hobby-oriented boards on 4chan, /pol/ came into its current form through a series of board deletions and restorations with the intent of improving the discourse of the hobby boards by restricting unrelated political discussion, often of a bigoted nature, to a single location on the website. /pol/ is thus often referred to as a “containment board” with the understanding that far-right content is meant to be kept in that single forum.

    After deleting the /new/ – News board on January 17, 2011, /pol/ – Politically Incorrect was added to the website on November 10, 2011. 4chan’s original owner (and current Google employee) Christopher Poole (alias “moot”) deleted /new/ for having a disproportionately high proportion of racist discussion. In Poole’s words:

    As for /new/, anybody who used it knows exactly why it was removed. When I re-added the board last year, I made a note that if it devolved into /stormfront/, I’d remove it. It did — ages ago. Now it’s gone, as promised.[1]

    “/stormfront/” is a reference to Stormfront.org, one of the oldest and largest white supremacist forums on the internet. Stormfront was founded by a former KKK leader and is listed as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (Southern Poverty Law Center 2017c).

    Despite once showing this commitment to maintaining a news board that was not dominated by far-right content, /pol/ nevertheless followed suit and gained a reputation as a haven for white supremacist politics (Dewey 2014).

    While there was the intention to keep political discussion contained in /pol/, far-right politics is a frequent theme on the other major discussion boards on the website and has come to be strongly associated with 4chan in general.

    The Logic of Containment

    The nature of 4chan means that for every new thread created, an old thread “falls off” of the website and is deleted or archived. Because of its high worldwide popularity and the fast pace of discussion, it has sometimes been viewed as necessary to split up boards into specific topics so that the rate of thread creation does not prematurely end productive, on-topic, ongoing conversations.

    The most significant example of a topic requiring “containment” is perhaps My Little Pony. The premiere of the 2010 animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic led to a surge of interest in the franchise and a major fan following composed largely of young adult males (covered extensively in the media as “bronies”), 4chan’s key demographic (Whatisabrony.com 2017).

    Posters who wished to discuss other cartoons on the /co/ – Comics and Cartoons board were often left feeling crowded out by the intense and rapid pace of the large and excited fanbase that was only interested in discussing ponies. After months of complaints, a new board, /mlp/ – My Little Pony, was opened to accommodate both fans and detractors by giving the franchise a dedicated platform for discussion. For the most part, fans have been happy to stay and discuss the series among one another. There is also a site-wide rule that pony-related discussion must be confined in /mlp/, and while enforcement of the rules of 4chan is notoriously lax, this has mostly been applied (4chan 2017).

    A similar approach has been taken for several other popular hobbies; for instance, the creation of /vp/ – Pokémon for all media—be it video games, comics, or television—related to the very popular Japanese franchise.

    A common opinion on 4chan is that /pol/ serves as a “containment board” for the neo-Nazi, racist, and other far-right interests of many who use the website (Anonymous /q/ poster 2012). Someone who posts a blatantly political message on the /tv/ – Television and Film board, for instance, may be told “go back to your containment board.” One could argue, as well, that the popular and rarely moderated /b/ – Random board was originally a “containment board” for all of the off-topic discussion that would otherwise have derailed the specific niche or hobby boards.

    Moderators as Humans

    Jay Irwin, a moderator of 4chan and an advertising technology professional, wrote an article for The Observer.[2] The piece was published April 25, 2017, arguing that unwelcome “liberal agenda” in entertainment was serving to inspire greater conservatism on 4chan’s traditionally apolitical boards. Generalizations about the nature of 4chan’s userbase can be difficult, but Irwin’s status as a moderator means he has the ability to remove certain discussion threads while allowing others to flourish, shaping the discourse and apparent consensus of the website’s users.

    Irwin’s writing in The Observer shows a clear personal distaste for what he perceives as a liberal political agenda: in this specific case, Bill Nye’s assertion, backed up by today’s scientific consensus regarding human biology, that gender is a spectrum and not a binary:

    The show shuns any scientific approach to these topics, despite selling itself—and Bill Nye—as rigorously reason-based. Rather than providing evidence for the multitude of claims made on the show by Nye and his guests, the series relies on the kind of appeals to emotion one would expect in a gender studies class…The response on /tv/ was swift. The most historically apolitical 4channers are almost unanimously and vehemently opposed to the liberal agenda and lack of science on display in what is billed as a science talk show. Scores of 4chan users who have always avoided and discouraged political conversations have expressed horror at what they see as a significant uptick in the entertainment industry’s attempts to indoctrinate viewers with leftist ideology. (Irwin 2017)

    As Irwin believes the users of /tv/ are becoming less tolerant of liberal media, he expects them to also become warmer to far-right ideas and discussions that they once would have dismissed as off-topic and out of place on a television and film discussion board. Whether or not this is true of the /tv/ userbase, his obvious bias in favor of these ideas is able to inform the moderation that is applied when determining just how “off-topic” an anti-liberal thread might be.

    On the other end of the spectrum, a 4chan moderator was previously removed from the moderation team after issuing a warning against a user with explicitly political reasoning. In the aftermath of the December 2, 2016 fatal fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse, an artist’s space and venue in Oakland, California that killed thirty-six people, users of /pol/ attempted to organize a campaign to shut down DIY (“Do-it-yourself”) spaces across the United States by reporting noncompliance with fire codes to local authorities, in order to “crush the radical left” (KnowYourMeme 2017). As another moderator confirmed in a thread on /qa/, the board designed for discussions about 4chan, the fired moderator clearly stated their belief that the campaign to shut down DIY spaces is an attack on marginalized communities by neo-Nazis. (Anonymous##Mod 2016).

    The anti-DIY campaign is a clear example of the kind of “brigading”—use of /pol/ as an organizational and propaganda hub for right-wing political activities on other sites or in real life—that regularly occurs on the mostly-anonymous imageboard. The fired moderator’s error was not having an political agenda—as Irwin’s writing in The Observer demonstrates, he has an agenda of his own—but expressing it directly. They could have done as Irwin has the capacity to do, selectively deleting threads not to their liking with no justification required, so as to continue to maintain a facade of neutrality that is so important for the financially struggling site’s brand.

    He Will Not Divide Us

    Another such example of brigading activities would be the harassment surrounding the art project “He Will Not Divide Us” (HWNDU) by Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö & Luke Turner. Launched during the inauguration of President Trump on January 20, 2017, the project was to broadcast a 24-hour live stream for four years from outside of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. LaBeouf was frequently at the location leading crowds in relatively inoffensive chants: “he will not divide us,” and the like.

    LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner, HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US (2017)
    LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner, HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US (2017). Image source: Nylon

    Within a day, threads calling for raids against the exhibit on /pol/ were amassing hundreds of replies, with suggestions ranging from leaving booby-trapped racist posters taped on top of razor blades so as to cut people who tried to remove them, to simply sending in “the right wing death squads” (Anonymous /pol/ poster 2017). Notably, in part because it was noted by the /pol/ brigaders, two of the three HWNDU artists, LaBeouf and Turner, are Jewish.

    Raid participants who coordinated on /pol/ and other far-right websites flashed white nationalist paraphernalia, neo-Nazi tattoos, and within five days of opening, directly told LaBeouf “Hitler did nothing wrong” while he was present at the exhibit (Horton 2017). LaBeouf was later arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault against one of the people who went to his art exhibit with the intent of disrupting it, though the charges were later dismissed (France 2017).

    On February 10, less than a month into the intended four-year run of the project, the Museum of the Moving Image released a statement declaring its intent to shut down HWNDU, perhaps at the urging of the NYPD, which had to dedicate resources to monitoring the space after regular clashes:

    The installation created a serious and ongoing public safety hazard for the museum, its visitors, its staff, local residents and businesses. The installation had become a flashpoint for violence and was disrupted from its original intent. While the installation began constructively, it deteriorated markedly after one of the artists was arrested at the site of the installation and ultimately necessitated this action. (Saad 2017)

    High-profile liberal advocates of free speech causes did not draw attention to the implications of a Jewish artist’s exhibit being cancelled due to constant harassment by neo-Nazis and other far-right elements. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, one of the most high-profile liberal opponents of “politically correct” suppression of speech, spent his time policing the limits of discourse by criticizing anti-fascist political activists (Chait 2017). The American Civil Liberties Union spent its energy defending former right-wing celebrity and noted pederasty advocate Milo Yiannopoulos against his critics (NPR 2017).

    Containment Failure

    Among those who sincerely believed themselves to be politically neutral or at least not far-right, 4chan’s leadership was mistaken to view far-right politics as simply another hobby, rather than the basis of an ideology.

    Ideology is not easily compartmentalized. Unlike a hobby, an ideology has the power to follow its adherents into all areas of their lives. Whether that ideology is cultivated in a “safe space” that is digital or physical, it is nonetheless brought with its possessor out into the world.

    Attempting to contain far-right ideology in physical and virtual spaces provides its followers with one of the essential requirements it needs to thrive and contribute to society’s reactionary movements.

    By way of comparison, the users of /mlp/ or other successful containment boards do not use their discussion space to organize raids and targeted harassment campaigns because, basically, hobbies do not traditionally have antagonists (with Gamergate being a notable exception). Adherents to far-right ideology, on the other hand, see liberal protesters, Hollywood activists, “cultural Marxists,” “globalist Jews,” white people comfortable with interracial marriages, black and brown people of all persuasions, and anti-fascist street fighters to be in direct opposition to their interests. When gathered with like-minded people, they will discuss the urgency of combating these forces and, if possible, encourage one another to act against these enemies.

    It seems obvious that a board which has been documented organizing campaigns to harass a Jewish artist until his art exhibit is shut down, or to attempt to force the closure of spaces they believe belong to the “far left,” is anything but contained.

    If anything, the DIY venue example shows exactly how the average /pol/ user views designated ideological spaces: leftists will use those venues to organize, they assert, and if we take that away, we can decrease their capacity. If a DIY venue meant the leftists would be contained, then it would be advantageous for them to remain and let leftists keep talking among themselves. Rather, the far-right /pol/ userbase demonstrates through their actions that they believe leftists use their political spaces in the same way as they do, as a base for launching attacks against their enemies.

    Countdown: What Comes Next

    The political right in the United States remains divided in tactics, aesthetics, and capacity.

    Footage surfaced of a June 10, 2017 rally in Houston, Texas, of an alt-right activist being choked by an Oath Keeper—a member of a right-wing paramilitary organization—following a disagreement (Kragie and Lewis 2017). The alt-right activist is clearly signaling his affiliation with the internet-fueled right one might find in or inspired by /pol/, displaying posters that represent several recognizable 4chan memes (Pepe, Wojak/”feels guy”, Baneposting), in addition to neo-Nazi imagery (a stylized SS in the words “The Fire Rises,” an American flag modified to contain the Nazi-associated Black Sun or Sonnenrad). Which element of his approach provoked the ire of the Oathkeepers—identified by the SPLC as one of the largest anti-government organizations in the country—is not clear (Southern Poverty Law Center 2017b). The differences between the far-right inspired by 4chan and the paramilitary far-right mostly derived from ex-military and ex-police may be mostly aesthetic, but these differences nonetheless matter.[3]

    None of this is to discount the threat to life posed by the young and awkward meme-spouting members of the far-right. Brandon Russell, aged 21, was found in possession of bomb-making materials including explosive chemicals and radioactive materials, and arrested by authorities in Florida. He admitted his affiliation with an online neo-nazi group called Atom Waffen, German for “Atomic weapon,” an SPLC-identified hate group (Southern Poverty Law Center 2017a).

    Russell was not found due to an investigation into terroristic far-right groups, but because of a bizarre series of events in which one of his three roommates, who claimed to have originally shared the neo-Nazi beliefs of the others, allegedly converted to Islam and murdered the other two for disrespecting his new faith. Police only found Russell’s bomb and radioactive materials while examining this crime scene (Elfrink 2017).

    The Trump regime and its Department of Justice, then headed by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, indicated that it plans to cut off what little funding has been directed towards investigating far-right and white supremacist extremist groups, instead focusing purely on the specter of Islamic extremism (Pasha-Robinson 2017).

    By several metrics, far-right terrorism is a greater threat to Americans than terrorism connected to Islamism, and seems on track to maintain this record (Parkin et al. 2017).

    A federal judge ruled that Russell, who was found to own a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh—whose ammonium nitrate bomb killed 168 people in 1995—may be released on bond, writing that there was no evidence that he used or planned to use a homemade radioactive bomb (Phillips 2017). Admitted affiliation with neo-Nazi ideology, which glorifies a regime known for massacring leftists, minorities, and Jews, was not taken as evidence of a desire to maim or kill leftists, minorities, or Jews.

    Just like the well-intentioned 4chan moderators who believed in the compartmentalization or “containability” of ideology, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas McCoun III seemed to believe that neo-Nazi ideology is little more than a hobby that can be pursued separately from one’s procurement and assembly of chemical bombs. McCoun did not consider that far-right politics is not a simple interest, but produces a worldview that generates answers to why one assembles a dirty bomb and how it is ultimately used.

    Judge McCoun only changed his mind and revoked the order to grant Russell bail after seeing video testimony from Russell’s former roommate, who claimed Russell planned to use a radioactive bomb to attack a nuclear power plant in Florida with the intention of irradiating ocean water and wiping out “parts of the Eastern Seaboard” (Sullivan 2017). Living with other neo-Nazis, it seems, gave Russell the confidence and safe space he needed to plan to carry out a McVeigh-style attack to inflict massive loss of life.[4]

    Finally, one should note that Russell, who may still be free were it not for the brash murders allegedly committed by his roommate, is also a member of the Florida National Guard. The internet far-right may look and sound quite differently from the paramilitary Oathkeepers today, but that difference may change in time, as well.

    _____

    Dennis Erasmus (pseudonym) (@erasmusNYT) lived in Charlottesville, Virginia for six years prior to 2016. He has studied political theory and was active on 4chan for roughly eight years.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes
    [1] Statement posted by moot on Nov at the /tmp/ board at http://content.4chan.org/tmp/r9knew.txt, and previously archived at the Webcite 4chan archive http://www.webcitation.org/6159jR9pC, and accessed by the author on July 9, 2017. The archive was deleted in early 2019.

    [2] The New York Observer, now a web-only publication, came under the ownership of Jared Kushner, President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, in 2006. The Observer is one of relatively few papers to have endorsed Trump during the 2016 Republican primary.

    [3] The alt-right activist who said “these are good memes” is supposedly William Fears, who was present at the Charlottesville 2017 riot and was arrested later that year in connection with a shooting directed at anti-racist protesters in Florida. While Fears’ brother plead guilty to accessory after the fact for attempted first degree murder, charges were dropped against Fears so he could be extradited for Texas for hitting and choking his ex-girlfriend. See Brett Barrouquere, “Texas Judge Hikes Bond on White Supremacist William Fears” (SPLC, Apr 17, 2018) and Brett Barrouquere, “Cops Say Richard Spencer Supporter William Fears IV Choked Girlfriend Days Before Florida Shooting” (SPLC, Jan 23, 2018).

    [4] Russell pled guilty to possession of a unlicensed destructive device and improper storage of explosive materials. He was sentenced to five years in prison. U.S. District Judge Susan Bucklew said “it’s a difficult case” and that Russell seemed “like a very smart young man.” See “Florida Neo-Nazi Leader Gets 5 Years for Having Explosive Material” (AP, Jan 9, 2018).
    _____

    Works Cited

     

  • Leif Weatherby — Irony and Redundancy: The Alt Right, Media Manipulation, and German Idealism

    Leif Weatherby — Irony and Redundancy: The Alt Right, Media Manipulation, and German Idealism

    Leif Weatherby

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    Take three minutes to watch this clip from a rally in New York City just after the 2016 presidential election.[i] In the impromptu interview, we learn that Donald Trump is going to “raise the ancient city of Thule” and “complete the system of German Idealism.” In what follows, I’m going to interpret what the troll in the video—known only by his twitter handle, @kantbot2000—is doing here. It involves Donald Trump, German Idealism, metaphysics, social media, and above all irony. It’s a diagnosis of the current relationship between mediated speech and politics. I’ll come back to Kantbot presently, but first I want to lay the scene he’s intervening in.

    A small but deeply networked group of self-identifying trolls and content-producers has used the apparently unlikely rubric of German philosophy to diagnose our media-rhetorical situation. There’s less talk of trolls now than there was in 2017, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone.[ii] Take the recent self-introductory op-ed by Brazil’s incoming foreign minister, Ernesto Araùjo, which bizarrely accuses Ludwig Wittgenstein of undermining the nationalist identity of Brazilians (and everyone else). YouTube remains the global channel of this Alt Right[iii] media game, as Andre Pagliarini has documented: one Olavo de Carvalho, whose channel is dedicated to the peculiar philosophical obsessions of the global Alt Right, is probably responsible for this foreign minister taking the position, apparently intended as policy, “I don’t like Wittgenstein,” and possibly for his appointment in the first place. The intellectuals playing this game hold that Marxist and postmodern theory caused the political world to take its present shape, and argue that a wide variety of theoretical tools should be reappropriated to the Alt Right. This situation presents a challenge to the intellectual Left on both epistemological and political grounds.

    The core claim of this group—one I think we should take seriously—is that mediated speech is essential to politics. In a way, this claim is self-fulfilling. Araùjo, for example, imagines that Wittgenstein’s alleged relativism is politically efficacious; Wittgenstein arrives pre-packaged by the YouTube phenomenon Carvalho; Araùjo’s very appointment seems to have been the result of Carvalho’s influence. That this tight ideological loop should realize itself by means of social media is not surprising. But in our shockingly naïve public political discussions—at least in the US—emphasis on the constitutive role of rhetoric and theory appears singular. I’m going to argue that a crucial element of this scene is a new tone and practice of irony that permeates the political. This political irony is an artefact of 2016, most directly, but it lurks quite clearly beneath our politics today. And to be clear, the self-styled irony of this group is never at odds with a wide variety of deeply held, and usually vile, beliefs. This is because irony and seriousness are not, and have never been, mutually exclusive. The idea that the two cannot cohabit is one of the more obvious weak points of our attempt to get an analytical foothold on the global Alt Right—to do so, we must traverse the den of irony.

    Irony has always been a difficult concept, slippery to the point of being undefinable. It usually means something like “when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning,” as Ethan Hawke tells Wynona Ryder in 1994’s Reality Bites. Ryder’s plaint, “I know it when I see it” points to just how many questions this definition raises. What counts as a “complete opposite”? What is the channel—rhetorical, physical, or otherwise—by which this dual expression can occur? What does it mean that what we express can contain not only implicit or connotative content, but can in fact make our speech contradict itself to some communicative effect? And for our purposes, what does it mean when this type of question embeds itself in political communication?

    Virtually every major treatment of irony since antiquity—from Aristotle to Paul de Man—acknowledges these difficulties. Quintilian gives us the standard definition: that the meaning of a statement is in contradiction to what it literally extends to its listener. But he still equivocates about its source:

    eo vero genere, quo contraria ostenduntur, ironia est; illusionem vocant. quae aut pronuntiatione intelligitur aut persona aut rei nature; nam, si qua earum verbis dissentit, apparet diversam esse orationi voluntatem. Quanquam id plurimis id tropis accidit, ut intersit, quid de quoque dicatur, quia quoddicitur alibi verum est.

    On the other hand, that class of allegory in which the meaning is contrary to that suggested by the words, involve an element of irony, or, as our rhetoricians call it, illusio. This is made evident to the understanding either by the delivery, the character of the speaker or the nature of the subject. For if any one of these three is out of keeping with the words, it at once becomes clear that the intention of the speaker is other than what he actually says. In the majority of tropes it is, however, important to bear in mind not merely what is said, but about whom it is said, since what is said may in another context be literally true. (Quintilian 1920, book VIII, section 6, 53-55)

    Speaker, ideation, context, addressee—all of these are potential sources for the contradiction. In other words, irony is not limited to the intentional use of contradiction, to a wit deploying irony to produce an effect. Irony slips out of precise definition even in the version that held sway for more than a millennium in the Western tradition.

    I’m going to argue in what follows that irony of a specific kind has re-opened what seemed a closed channel between speech and politics. Certain functions of digital, and specifically social, media enable this kind of irony, because the very notion of a digital “code” entailed a kind of material irony to begin with. This type of irony can be manipulated, but also exceeds anyone’s intention, and can be activated accidentally (this part of the theory of irony comes from the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel, as we will see). It not only amplifies messages, but does so by resignifying, exploiting certain capacities of social media. Donald Trump is the master practitioner of this irony, and Kantbot, I’ll propose, is its media theorist. With this irony, political communication has exited the neoliberal speech regime; the question is how the Left responds.

    i. “Donald Trump Will Complete the System of German Idealism”

    Let’s return to our video. Kantbot is trolling—hard. There’s obvious irony in the claim that Trump will “complete the system of German Idealism,” the philosophical network that began with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and ended (at least on Kantbot’s account) only in the 1840s with Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. Kant is best known for having cut a middle path between empiricism and rationalism. He argued that our knowledge is spontaneous and autonomous, not derived from what we observe but combined with that observation and molded into a nature that is distinctly ours, a nature to which we “give the law,” set off from a world of “things in themselves” about which we can never know anything. This philosophy touched off what G.W.F. Hegel called a “revolution,” one that extended to every area of human knowledge and activity. History itself, Hegel would famously claim, was the forward march of spirit, or Geist, the logical unfolding of self-differentiating concepts that constituted nature, history, and institutions (including the state). Schelling, Hegel’s one-time roommate, had deep reservations about this triumphalist narrative, reserving a place for the irrational, the unseen, the mythological, in the process of history. Hegel, according to a legend propagated by his students, finished his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit while listening to the guns of the battle of Auerstedt-Jena, where Napoleon defeated the Germans and brought a final end to the Holy Roman Empire. Hegel saw himself as the philosopher of Napoleon’s moment, at least in 1807; Kantbot sees himself as the Hegel to Donald Trump (more on this below).

    Rumor has it that Kantbot is an accountant in NYC, although no one has been able to doxx him yet. His twitter has more than 26,000 followers at the time of writing. This modest fame is complemented by a deep lateral network among the biggest stars on the Far Right. To my eye he has made little progress in gaining fame—but also in developing his theory, on which he has recently promised a book “soon”—in the last year. Conservative media reported that he was interviewed by the FBI in 2018. His newest line of thought involves “hate hoaxes” and questioning why he can’t say the n-word—a regression to platitudes of the extremist Right that have been around for decades, as David Neiwert has extensively documented (Neiwert 2017). Sprinkled between these are exterminationist fantasies—about “Spinozists.” He toggles between conspiracy, especially of the false-flag variety, hate-speech-flirtation, and analysis. He has recently started a podcast. The whole presentation is saturated in irony and deadly serious:

    Asked how he identifies politically, Kantbot recently claimed to be a “Stalinist, a TERF, and a Black Nationalist.” Mike Cernovich, the Alt Right leader who runs the website Danger and Play, has been known to ask Kantbot for advice. There is also an indirect connection between Kantbot and “Neoreaction” or NRx, a brand of “accelerationism” which itself is only blurrily constituted by the blog-work of Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug and enthusiasm for the philosophy of Nick Land (another reader of Kant). Kantbot also “debated” White Nationalist thought leader Richard Spencer, presenting the spectacle of Spencer, who wrote a Masters thesis on Adorno’s interpretation of Wagner, listening thoughtfully to Kantbot’s explanation of Kant’s rejection of Johann Gottfried Herder, rather than the body count, as the reason to reject Marxism.

    When conservative pundit Ann Coulter got into a twitter feud with Delta over a seat reassignment, Kantbot came to her defense. She retweeted the captioned image below, which was then featured on Breitbart News in an article called “Zuckerberg 2020 Would be a Dream Come True for Republicans.”

    Kantbot’s partner-in-crime, @logo-daedalus (the very young guy in the maroon hat in the video) has recently jumped on a minor fresh wave of ironist political memeing in support of UBI-focused presidential candidate, Andrew Yang – #yanggang. He was once asked by Cernovich if he had read Michael Walsh’s book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West:

    The autodidact intellectualism of this Alt Right dynamic duo—Kantbot and Logodaedalus—illustrates several roles irony plays in the relationship between media and politics. Kantbot and Logodaedalus see themselves as the avant-garde of a counterculture on the brink of a civilizational shift, participating in the sudden proliferation of “decline of the West” narratives. They alternate targets on Twitter, and think of themselves as “producers of content” above all. To produce content, according to them, is to produce ideology. Kantbot is singularly obsessed the period between about 1770 and 1830 in Germany. He thinks of this period as the source of all subsequent intellectual endeavor, the only period of real philosophy—a thesis he shares with Slavoj Žižek (Žižek 1993).

    This notion has been treated monographically by Eckart Förster in The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, a book Kantbot listed in May of 2017 under “current investigations.” His twist on the thesis is that German Idealism is saturated in a form of irony. German Idealism never makes culture political as such. Politics comes from a culture that’s more capacious than any politics, so any relation between the two is refracted by a deep difference that appears, when they are brought together, as irony. Marxism, and all that proceeds from Marxism, including contemporary Leftism, is a deviation from this path.


    This reading of German Idealism is a search for the metaphysical origins of a common conspiracy theory in the Breitbart wing of the Right called “cultural Marxism” (the idea predates Breibart: see Jay 2011; Huyssen 2017; Berkowitz 2003. Walsh’s 2017 The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, which LogoDaedalus mocked to Cernovich, is one of the touchstones of this theory). Breitbart’s own account states that there is a relatively straight line from Hegel’s celebration of the state to Marx’s communism to Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s communitarianism—and on to critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse (this is the actual “cultural Marxism,” one supposes), Saul Alinsky’s community organizing, and (surprise!) Barack Obama’s as well (Breitbart 2011, 105-37). The phrase “cultural Marxism” is a play on the Nazi phrase “cultural Bolshevism,” a conspiracy theory that targeted Jews as alleged spies and collaborators of Stalin’s Russia. The anti-Semitism is only slightly more concealed in the updated version. The idea is that Adorno and Marcuse took control of the cultural matrix of the United States and made the country “culturally communist.” In this theory, individual freedom is always second to an oppressive community in the contemporary US. Between Breitbart’s adoption of critical theory and NRx (see Haider 2017; Beckett 2017; Noys 2014)—not to mention the global expansion of this family of theories by figures like Carvalho—it’s clear that the “Alt Right” is a theory-deep assemblage. The theory is never just analysis, though. It’s always a question of intervention, or media manipulation (see Marwick and Lewis 2017).

    Breitbart himself liked to capture this blend in his slogan “politics is downstream from culture.” Breitbart’s news organization implicitly cedes the theoretical point to Adorno and Marcuse, trying to build cultural hegemony in the online era. Reform the cultural, dominate the politics—all on the basis of narrative and media manipulation. For the Alt Right, politics isn’t “online” or “not,” but will always be both.

    In mid-August of 2017, a flap in the National Security Council was caused by a memo, probably penned by staffer Rich Higgins (who reportedly has ties to Cernovich), that appeared to accuse then National Security Adviser, H. R. McMaster, of supporting or at least tolerating Cultural Marxism’s attempt to undermine Trump through narrative (see Winter and Groll 2017). Higgins and other staffers associated with the memo were fired, a fact which Trump learned from Sean Hannity and which made him “furious.” The memo, about which the president “gushed,” defines “the successful outcome of cultural Marxism [as] a bureaucratic state beholden to no one, certainly not the American people. With no rule of law considerations outside those that further deep state power, the deep state truly becomes, as Hegel advocated, god bestriding the earth” (Higgins 2017). Hegel defined the state as the goal of all social activity, the highest form of human institution or “objective spirit.” Years later, it is still Trump vs. the state, in its belated thrall to Adorno, Marcuse, and (somehow) Hegel. Politics is downstream from German Idealism.

    Kantbot’s aspiration was to expand and deepen the theory of this kind of critical manipulation of the media—but he wants to rehabilitate Hegel. In Kantbot’s work we begin to glimpse how irony plays a role in this manipulation. Irony is play with the very possibility of signification in the first place. Inflected through digital media—code and platform—it becomes not just play but its own expression of the interface between culture and politics, overlapping with one of the driving questions of the German cultural renaissance around 1800. Kantbot, in other words, diagnosed and (at least at one time) aspired to practice a particularly sophisticated combination of rhetorical and media theory as political speech in social media.

    Consider this tweet:



    After an innocuous webcomic frog became infamous in 2016, after the Clinton campaign denounced its use and the Anti-Defamation League took the extraordinary step of adding the meme to its Hate Database, Pepe the Frog gained a kind of cult status. Kantbot’s reading of the phenomenon is that the “point is demonstration of power to control meaning of sign in modern media environment.” If this sounds like French Theory, then one “Johannes Schmitt” (whose profile thumbnail appears to be an SS officer) agrees. “Starting to sound like Derrida,” he wrote. To which Kantbot responds, momentously: “*schiller.”



    The asterisk-correction contains multitudes. Kantbot is only too happy to jettison the “theory,” but insists that the manipulation of the sign in its relation to the media environment maintains and alters the balance between culture and politics. Friedrich Schiller, whose classical aesthetic theory claims just this, is a recurrent figure for Kantbot. The idea, it appears, is to create a culture that is beyond politics and from which politics can be downstream. To that end, Kantbot opened his own online venue, the “Autistic Mercury,” named after Der teutsche Merkur, one of the German Enlightenment’s central organs.[iv] For Schiller, there was a “play drive” that mediated between “form” and “content” drives. It preserved the autonomy of art and culture and had the potential to transform the political space, but only indirectly. Kantbot wants to imitate the composite culture of the era of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel—just as they built their classicism on Johann Winckelmann’s famous doctrine that an autonomous and inimitable culture must be built on imitation of the Greeks. Schiller was suggesting that art could prevent another post-revolutionary Terror like the one that had engulfed France. Kantbot is suggesting that the metaphysics of communication—signs as both rhetoric and mediation—could resurrect a cultural vitality that got lost somewhere along the path from Marx to the present. Donald Trump is the instrument of that transformation, but its full expression requires more than DC politics. It requires (online) culture of the kind the campaign unleashed but the presidency has done little more than to maintain. (Kantbot uses Schiller for his media analysis too, as we will see.) Spencer and Kanbot agreed during their “debate” that perhaps Trump had done enough before he was president to justify the disappointing outcomes of his actual presidency. Conservative policy-making earns little more than scorn from this crowd, if it is detached from the putative real work of building the Alt Right avant-garde.



    According to one commenter on YouTube, Kantbot is “the troll philosopher of the kek era.” Kek is the god of the trolls. His name is based on a transposition of the letters LOL in the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. “KEK” is what the enemy sees when you laugh out loud to someone on your team, in an intuitively crackable code that was made into an idol to worship. Kek—a half-fake demi-God—illustrates the balance between irony and ontology in the rhetorical media practice known as trolling.


    The name of the idol, it turned out, was also the name of an actual ancient Egyptian demi-god (KEK), a phenomenon that confirmed his divine status, in an example of so-called “meme magic.” Meme magic is when—often by praying to KEK or relying on a numerological system based on the random numbers assigned to users of 4Chan and other message boards—something that exists only online manifests IRL, “in real life” (Burton 2016). Examples include Hillary Clinton’s illness in the late stages of the campaign (widely and falsely rumored—e.g. by Cernovich—before a real yet minor illness was confirmed), and of course Donald Trump’s actual election. Meme magic is everywhere: it names the channel between online and offline.

    Meme magic is both drenched in irony and deeply ontological. What is meant is just “for the lulz,” while what is said is magic. This is irony of the rhetorical kind—right up until it works. The case in point is the election, where the result, and whether the trolls helped, hovers between reality and magic. First there is meme generation, usually playfully ironic. Something happens that resembles the meme. Then the irony is retroactively assigned a magical function. But statements about meme magic are themselves ironic. They use the contradiction between reality and rhetoric (between Clinton’s predicted illness and her actual pneumonia) as the generator of a second-order irony (the claim that Trump’s election was caused by memes is itself a meme). It’s tempting to see this just as a juvenile game, but we shouldn’t dismiss the way the irony scales between the different levels of content-production and interpretation. Irony is rhetorical and ontological at once. We shouldn’t believe in meme magic, but we should take this recursive ironizing function very seriously indeed. It is this kind of irony that Kantbot diagnoses in Trump’s manipulation of the media.

    ii. Coding Irony: Friedrich Schlegel, Claude Shannon, and Twitter

    The ongoing inability of the international press to cover Donald Trump in a way that measures the impact of his statements rather than their content stems from this use of irony. We’ve gotten used to fake news and hyperbolic tweets—so used to these that we’re missing the irony that’s built in. Every time Trump denies something about collusion or says something about the coal industry that’s patently false, he’s exploiting the difference between two sets of truth-valuations that conflict with one another (e.g. racism and pacifism). That splits his audience—something that the splitting of the message in irony allows—and works both to fight his “enemies” and to build solidarity in his base. Trump has changed the media’s overall expression, making not his statements but the very relation between content and platform ironic. This objective form of media irony is not to be confused with “wit.” Donald Trump is not “witty.” He is, however, a master of irony as a tool for manipulation built into the way digital media allow signification to occur. He is the master of an expanded sense of irony that runs throughout the history of its theory.

    When White Nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017, leading to the death of one counter-protester the next day, Trump dragged his feet in naming “racism.” He did, eventually, condemn the groups by name—prefacing his statements with a short consideration of the economy, a dog-whistle about what comes first (actually racism, for which “economy” has become an erstwhile cipher). In the interim, however, his condemnations of violence “as such” led Spencer to tweet this:

    Of course, two days later, Trump would explicitly blame the “Alt Left” for violence it did not commit. Before that, however, Spencer’s irony here relied on Trump’s previous—malicious—irony. By condemning “all” violence when only one kind of violence was at issue, Trump was attempting to split the signal of his speech. The idea was to let the racists know that they could continue through condemnation of their actions that pays lip service to the non-violent ideal of the liberal media. Spencer gleefully used the internal contradiction of Trump’s speech, calling attention to the side of the message that was supposed to be “hidden.” Even the apparently non-ironic condemnation of “both sides” exploited a contradiction not in the statement itself, but in the way it is interpreted by different outlets and political communities. Trump’s invocation of the “Alt Left” confirmed the suspicions of those on the Right, panics the Center, and all but forced the Left to adopt the term. The filter bubbles, meanwhile, allowed this single message to deliver contradictory meanings on different news sites—one reason headlines across the political spectrum are often identical as statements, but opposite in patent intent. Making the dog whistle audible, however, doesn’t spell the “end of the ironic Nazi,” as Brian Feldman commented (Feldman 2017). It just means that the irony isn’t opposed to but instead part of the politics. Today this form of irony is enabled and constituted by digital media, and it’s not going away. It forms an irreducible part of the new political situation, one that we ignore or deny at our own peril.

    Irony isn’t just intentional wit, in other words—as Quintilian already knew. One reason we nevertheless tend to confuse wit and irony is that the expansion of irony beyond the realm of rhetoric—usually dated to Romanticism, which also falls into Kantbot’s period of obsession—made irony into a category of psychology and style. Most treatments of irony take this as an assumption: modern life is drenched in the stuff, so it isn’t “just” a trope (Behler 1990). But it is a feeling, one that you get from Weird Twitter but also from the constant stream of Facebooks announcements about leaving Facebook. Quintilian already points the way beyond this gestural understanding. The problem is the source of the contradiction. It is not obvious what allows for contradiction, where it can occur, what conditions satisfy it, and thus form the basis for irony. If the source is dynamic, unstable, then the concept of irony, as Paul de Man pointed out long ago, is not really a concept at all (de Man 1996).

    The theoretician of irony who most squarely accounts for its embeddedness in material and media conditions is Friedrich Schlegel. In nearly all cases, Schlegel writes, irony serves to reinforce or sharpen some message by means of the reflexivity of language: by contradicting the point, it calls it that much more vividly to mind. (Remember when Trump said, in the 2016 debates, that he refused to invoke Bill Clinton’s sexual history for Chelsea’s sake?) But there is another, more curious type:

    The first and most distinguished [kind of irony] of all is coarse irony; to be found most often in the actual nature of things and which is one of its most generally distributed substances [in der wirklichen Natur der Dinge und ist einer ihrer allgemein verbreitetsten Stoffe]; it is most at home in the history of humanity (Schlegel 1958-, 368).





    In other words, irony is not merely the drawing of attention to formal or material conditions of the situation of communication, but also a widely distributed “substance” or capacity in material. Twitter irony finds this substance in the platform and its underlying code, as we will see. If irony is both material and rhetorical, this means that its use is an activation of a potential in the interface between meaning and matter. This could allow, in principle, an intervention into the conditions of signification. In this sense, irony is the rhetorical term for what we could call coding, the tailoring of language to channels in technologies of transmission. Twitter reproduces an irony that built into any attempt to code language, as we are about to see. And it’s the overlap of code, irony, and politics that Kantbot marshals Hegel to address.

    Coded irony—irony that is both rhetorical and digitally enabled—exploded onto the political scene in 2016 through Twitter. Twitter was the medium through which the political element of the messageboards has broken through (not least because of Trump’s nearly 60 million followers, even if nearly half of them are bots). It is far from the only politicized social medium, as a growing literature is describing (Philips and Milner, 2017; Phillips 2016; Milner 2016; Goerzen 2017). But it has been a primary site of the intimacy of media and politics over the course of 2016 and 2017, and I think that has something to do with twitter itself, and with the relationship between encoded communications and irony.

    Take this retweet, which captures a great deal about Twitter:

    “Kim Kierkegaardashian,” or @KimKierkegaard, joined twitter in June 2012 and has about 259,00 followers at the time of writing. The account mashes up Kardashian’s self- and brand-sales oriented tweet style with the proto-existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard. Take, for example, an early tweet from 8 July, 2012: “I have majorly fallen off my workout-eating plan! AND it’s summer! But to despair over sin is to sink deeper into it.” The account sticks close to Kardashian’s actual tweets and Kierkegaard’s actual words. In the tweet above, from April 2017, @KimKierkegaard has retweeted Kardashian herself incidentally formulating one of Kierkegaard’s central ideas in the proprietary language of social media. “Omg” as shorthand takes the already nearly entirely secular phrase “oh my god” and collapses any trace of transcendence. The retweet therefore returns us to the opposite extreme, in which anxiety points us to the finitude of human existence in Kierkegaard. If we know how to read this, it is a performance of that other Kierkegaardian bellwether, irony.

    If you were to encounter Kardashian’s tweet without the retweet, there would be no irony at all. In the retweet, the tweet is presented as an object and resignified as its opposite. Note that this is a two-way street: until November 2009, there were no retweets. Before then, one had to type “RT” and then paste the original tweet in. Twitter responded, piloting a button that allows the re-presentation of a tweet (Stone 2009). This has vastly contributed to the sense of irony, since the speaker is also split between two sources, such that many accounts have some version of “RTs not endorsements” in their description. Perhaps political scandal is so often attached to RTs because the source as well as the content can be construed in multiple different and often contradictory ways. Schlegel would have noted that this is a case where irony swallows the speaker’s authority over it. That situation was forced into the code by the speech, not the other way around.

    I’d like to call the retweet a resignificatory device, distinct from amplificatory. Amplificatory signaling cannibalizes a bit of redundancy in the algorithm: the more times your video has been seen on YouTube, the more likely it is to be recommended (although the story is more complicated than that). Retweets certainly amplify the original message, but they also reproduce it under another name. They have the ability to resignify—as the “repost” function on Facebook also does, to some extent.[v] Resignificatory signaling takes the unequivocal messages at the heart of the very notion of “code” and makes them rhetorical, while retaining their visual identity. Of course, no message is without an effect on its receiver—a point that information theory made long ago. But the apparent physical identity of the tweet and the retweet forces the rhetorical aspect of the message to the fore. In doing so, it draws explicit attention to the deep irony embedded in encoded messages of any kind.

    Twitter was originally written in the object-oriented programming language and module-view-controller (MVC) framework Ruby on Rails, and the code matters. Object-oriented languages allow any term to be treated either as an object or as an expression, making Shannon’s observations on language operational.[vi] The retweet is an embedding of this ability to switch any term between these two basic functions. We can do this in language, of course (that’s why object-oriented languages are useful). But when the retweet is presented not as copy-pasted but as a visual reproduction of the original tweet, the expressive nature of the original tweet is made an object, imitating the capacity of the coding language. In other words, Twitter has come to incorporate the object-oriented logic of its programming language in its capacity to signify. At the level of speech, anything can be an object on Twitter—on your phone, you literally touch it and it presents itself. Most things can be resignified through one more touch, and if not they can be screencapped and retweeted (for example, the number of followers one has, a since-deleted tweet, etc.). Once something has come to signify in the medium, it can be infinitely resignified.

    When, as in a retweet, an expression is made into an object of another expression, its meaning is altered. This is because its source is altered. A statement of any kind requires the notion that someone has made that statement. This means that a retweet, by making an expression into an object, exemplifies the contradiction between subject and object—the very contradiction on which Kant had based his revolutionary philosophy. Twitter is fitted, and has been throughout its existence retrofitted, to generalize this speech situation. It is the platform of the subject-object dialectic, as Hegel might have put it. By presenting subject and object in a single statement—the retweet as expression and object all at once—Twitter embodies what rhetorical theory has called irony since the ancients. It is irony as code. This irony resignifies and amplifies the rhetorical irony of the dog whistle, the troll, the President.

    Coding is an encounter between two sets of material conditions: the structure of a language, and the capacity of a channel. This was captured in truly general form for the first time in Claude Shannon’s famous 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in which the following diagram is given:

    Shannon’s achievement was a general formula for the relation between the structure of the source and the noise in the channel.[vii] If the set of symbols can be fitted to signals complex or articulated enough to arrive through the noise, then nearly frictionless communication could be engineered. The source—his preferred example was written English—had a structure that limited its “entropy.” If you’re looking at one letter in English, for example, and you have to guess what the next one will be, you theoretically have 26 choices (including a space). But the likelihood, if the letter you’re looking at is, for example, “q,” that the next letter will be “u” is very high. The likelihood for “x” is extremely low. The higher likelihood is called “redundancy,” a limitation on the absolute measure of chaos, or entropy, that the number of elements imposes. No source for communication can be entirely random, because without patterns of one kind or another we can’t recognize what’s being communicated.[viii]

    We tend to confuse entropy and the noise in the channel, and it is crucial to see that they are not the same thing. The channel is noisy, while the source is entropic. There is, of course, entropy in the channel—everything is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, without exception. But “entropy” is not in any way comparable to noise in Shannon, because “entropy” is a way of describing the conditional restraints on any structured source for communication, like the English language, the set of ideas in the brain, or what have you. Entropy is a way to describe the opposite of redundancy in the source, it expresses probability rather than the slow disintegration, the “heat death,” with which it is usually associated.[ix] If redundancy = 1, we have a kind of absolute rule or pure pattern. Redundancy works syntactically, too: “then” or “there” after the phrase “see you” is a high-level redundancy that is coded into SMS services.

    This is what Shannon calls a “conditional restraint” on the theoretical absolute entropy (based on number of total parts), or freedom in choosing a message. It is also the basis for autocorrect technologies, which obviously have semantic effects, as the genre of autocorrect bloopers demonstrates.

    A large portion of Shannon’s paper is taken up with calculating the redundancy of written English, which he determines to be nearly 50%, meaning that half the letters can be removed from most sentences or distorted without disturbing our ability to understand them.[x]

    The general process of coding, by Shannon’s lights, is a manipulation of the relationship between the structure of the source and the capacity of the channel as a dynamic interaction between two sets of evolving rules. Shannon’s statement that the “semantic aspects” of messages were “irrelevant to the engineering problem” has often been taken to mean he played fast and loose with the concept of language (see Hayles 1999; but see also Liu 2010; and for the complex history of Shannon’s reception Floridi 2010). But rarely does anyone ask exactly what Shannon did mean, or at least conceptually sketch out, in his approach to language. It’s worth pointing to the crucial role that source-structure redundancy plays in his theory, since it cuts close to Schlegel’s notion of material irony.

    Neither the source nor the channel is static. The scene of coding is open to restructuring at both ends. English is evolving; even its statistical structure changes over time. The channels, and the codes use to fit source to them, are evolving too. There is no guarantee that integrated circuits will remain the hardware of the future. They did not yet exist when Shannon published his theory.

    This point can be hard to see in today’s world, where we encounter opaque packets of already-established code at every turn. It would have been less hard to see for Shannon and those who followed him, since nothing was standardized, let alone commercialized, in 1948. But no amount of stack accretion can change the fact that mediated communication rests on the dynamic relation between relative entropy in the source and the way the channel is built.

    Redundancy points to this dynamic by its very nature. If there is absolute redundancy, nothing is communicated, because we already know the message with 100% certainty. With no redundancy, no message arrives at all. In between these two extremes, messages are internally objectified or doubled, but differ slightly from one another, in order to be communicable. In other words, every interpretable signal is a retweet. Redundancy, which stabilizes communicability by providing pattern, also ensures that the rules are dynamic. There is no fully redundant message. Every message is between 0 and 1, and this is what allows it to function as expression or object. Twitter imitates the rules of source structure, showing that communication is the locale where formal and material constraints encounter one another. It illustrates this principle of communication by programming it into the platform as a foundational principle. Twitter exemplifies the dynamic situation of coding as Shannon defined it. Signification is resignification.

    If rhetoric is embedded this deeply into the very notion of code, then it must possess the capacity to change the situation of communication, as Schlegel suggested. But it cannot do this by fiat or by meme magic. The retweeted “this anxiety omg” hardly stands to change the statistical structure of English much. It can, however, point to the dynamic material condition of mediated signification in general, something Warren Weaver, who wrote a popularizing introduction to Shannon’s work, acknowledged:

    anyone would agree that the probability is low for such a sequence of words as “Constantinople fishing nasty pink.” Incidentally, it is low, but not zero; for it is perfectly possible to think of a passage in which one sentence closes with “Constantinople fishing,” and the next begins with “Nasty pink.” And we might observe in passing that the unlikely four-word sequence under discussion has occurred in a single good English sentence, namely the one above. (Shannon and Weaver 1964, 11)

    There is no further reflection in Weaver’s essay on this passage, but then, that is the nature of irony. By including the phrase “Constantinople fishing nasty pink” in the English language, Weaver has shifted its entropic structure, however slightly. This shift is marginal to our ability to communicate (I am amplifying it very slightly right now, as all speech acts do), but some shifts are larger-scale, like the introduction of a word or concept, or the rise of a system of notions that orient individuals and communities (ideology). These shifts always have the characteristic that Weaver points to here, which is that they double as expressions and objects. This doubling is a kind of generalized redundancy—or capacity for irony—built into semiotic systems, material irony flashing up into the rhetorical irony it enables. That is a Romantic notion enshrined in a founding document of the digital age.

    Now we can see one reason that retweeting is often the source of scandal. A retweet or repetition of content ramifies the original redundancy of the message and fragments the message’s effect. This is not to say it undermines that effect. Instead, it uses the redundancy in the source and the noise in the channel to split the message according to any one of the factors that Quintilian announced: speaker, audience, context. In the retweet, this effect is distributed across more than one of these areas, producing more than one contrary item, or internally multiple irony. Take Trump’s summer 2016 tweet of this anti-Semitic attack on Clinton—not a proper retweet, but a resignfication of the same sort:



    The scandal that ensued mostly involved the source of the original content (white supremacists), and Trump skated through the incident by claiming that it wasn’t anti-Semitic anyway, it was a sheriff’s star, and that he had only “retweeted” the content. In disavowing the content in separate and seemingly contradictory ways,[xi] he signaled that he was still committed to its content to his base, while maintaining that he wasn’t at the level of statement. The effect was repeated again and again, and is a fundamental part of our government now. Trump’s positions are neither new nor interesting. What’s new is the way he amplifies his rhetorical maneuvers in social media. It is the exploitation of irony—not wit, not snark, not sarcasm—at the level of redundancy to maintain a signal that is internally split in multiple ways. This is not bad faith or stupidity; it’s an invasion of politics by irony. It’s also a kind of end to the neoliberal speech regime.

    iii. Irony and Politics after 2016, or Uncommunicative Capitalism

    The channel between speech and politics is open—again. That channel is saturated in irony, of a kind we are not used to thinking about. In 2003, following what were widely billed as the largest demonstrations in the history of the world, with tens of millions gathering in the streets globally to resist the George W. Bush administration’s stated intent to go to war, the United States did just that, invading Iraq on 20 March of that year. The consequences of that war have yet to be fully assessed. But while it is clear that we are living in its long foreign policy shadow, the seemingly momentous events of 2016 echo 2003 in a different way. 2016 was the year that blew open the neoliberal pax between the media, speech, and politics.

    No amount of noise could prevent the invasion of Iraq. As Jodi Dean has shown, “communicative capitalism” ensured that the circulation of signs was autotelic, proliferating language and ideology sealed off from the politics of events like war or even domestic policy. She writes that:

    In communicative capitalism, however, the use value of a message is less important than its exchange value, its contribution to a larger pool, flow or circulation of content. A contribution need not be understood; it need only be repeated, reproduced, forwarded. Circulation is the context, the condition for the acceptance or rejection of a contribution… Some contributions make a difference. But more significant is the system, the communicative network. (Dean 2005, 56)

    This situation no longer entirely holds. Dean’s brilliant analysis—along with those of many others who diagnosed the situation of media and politics in neoliberalism (e.g. Fisher 2009; Liu 2004)—forms the basis for understanding what we are living through and in now, even as the situation has changed. The notion that the invasion of Iraq could have been stopped by the protests recalls the optimism about speech’s effect on national politics of the New Left in the 1960s and after (begging the important question of whether the parallel protests against the Vietnam War played a causal role in its end). That model of speech is no longer entirely in force. Dean’s notion of a kind of metastatic media with few if any contributions that “make a difference” politically has yielded to a concerted effort to break through that isolation, to manipulate the circulatory media to make a difference. We live with communicative capitalism, but added to it is the possibility of complex rhetorical manipulation, a political possibility that resides in the irony of the very channels that made capitalism communicative in the first place.

    We know that authoritarianism engages in a kind of double-speak, talks out of “both sides of its mouth,” uses the dog whistle. It might be unusual to think of this set of techniques as irony—but I think we have to. Trump doesn’t just dog-whistle, he sends cleanly separate messages to differing effect through the same statement, as he did after Charlottesville. This technique keeps the media he is so hostile to on the hook, since their click rates are dependent on covering whatever extreme statement he’d made that day. The constant and confused coverage this led to was then a separate signal sent through the same line—by means of the contradiction between humility and vanity, and between content and effect—to his own followers. In other words, he doesn’t use Twitter only to amplify his message, but to resignify it internally. Resignificatory media allows irony to create a vector of efficacy through political discourse. That is not exactly “communicative capitalism,” but something more like the field-manipulations recently described by Johanna Drucker: affective, indirect, non-linear (Drucker 2018). Irony happens to be the tool that is not instrumental, a non-linear weapon, a kind of material-rhetorical wave one can ride but not control. As Quinn Slobodian has been arguing, we have in no way left the neoliberal era in economics. But perhaps we have left its speech regime behind. If so, that is a matter of strategic urgency for the Left.

    iv. Hegelian Media Theory

    The new Right is years ahead on this score, in practice but also in analysis. In one of the first pieces in what has become a truly staggering wave of coverage of the NRx movement, Rosie Gray interviewed Kantbot extensively (Gray 2017). Gray’s main target was the troll Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) whose political philosophy blends the Enlightenment absolutism of Frederick the Great with a kind of avant-garde corporatism in which the state is run not on the model of a corporation but as a corporation. On the Alt Right, the German Enlightenment is unavoidable.

    In his prose, Kantbot can be quite serious, even theoretical. He responded to Gray’s article in a Medium post with a long quotation from Schiller’s 1784 “The Theater as Moral Institution” as its epigraph (Kanbot 2017b). For Schiller, one had to imitate the literary classics to become inimitable. And he thought the best means of transmission would be the theater, with its live audience and electric atmosphere. The Enlightenment theater, as Kantbot writes, “was not only a source of entertainment, but also one of radical political education.”

    Schiller argued that the stage educated more deeply than secular law or morality, that its horizon extended farther into the true vocation of the human. Culture educates where the law cannot. Schiller, it turns out, also thought that politics is downstream from culture. Kantbot finds, in other words, a source in Enlightenment literary theory for Breitbart’s signature claim. That means that narrative is crucial to political control. But Kantbot extends the point from narrative to the medium in which narrative is told.

    Schiller gives us reason to think that the arrangement of the medium—its physical layout, the possibilities but also the limits of its mechanisms of transmission—is also crucial to cultural politics (this is why it makes sense to him to replace a follower’s reference to Derrida with “*schiller”). He writes that “The theater is the common channel through which the light of wisdom streams down from the thoughtful, better part of society, spreading thence in mild beams throughout the entire state.” Story needs to be embedded in a politically effective channel, and politically-minded content-producers should pay attention to the way that channel works, what it can do that another means of communication—say, the novel—can’t.

    Kantbot argues that social media is the new Enlightenment Stage. When Schiller writes that the stage is the “common channel” for light and wisdom, he’s using what would later become Shannon’s term—in German, der Kanal. Schiller thought the channel of the stage was suited to tempering barbarisms (both unenlightened “savagery” and post-enlightened Terrors like Robespierre’s). For him, story in the proper medium could carry information and shape habits and tendencies, influencing politics indirectly, eventually creating an “aesthetic state.” That is the role that social media have today, according to Kantbot. In other words, the constraints of a putatively biological gender or race are secondary to their articulation through the utterly complex web of irony-saturated social media. Those media allow the categories in the first place, but are so complex as to impose their own constraint on freedom. For those on the Alt Right, accepting and overcoming that constraint is the task of the individual—even if it is often assigned mostly to non-white or non-male individuals, while white males achieve freedom through complaint. Consistency aside, however, the notion that media form their own constraint on freedom, and the tool for accepting and overcoming that constraint is irony, runs deep.

    Kantbot goes on to use Schiller to critique Gray’s actual article about NRx: “Though the Altright [sic] is viewed primarily as a political movement, a concrete ideology organizing an array of extreme political positions on the issues of our time, I believe that understanding it is a cultural phenomena [sic], rather than a purely political one, can be an equally valuable way of conceptualizing it. It is here that the journos stumble, as this goes directly to what newspapers and magazines have struggled to grasp in the 21st century: the role of social media in the future of mass communication.” It is Trump’s retrofitting of social media—and now the mass media as well—to his own ends that demonstrates, and therefore completes, the system of German Idealism. Content production on social media is political because it is the locus of the interface between irony and ontology, where meme magic also resides. This allows the Alt Right to sync what we have long taken to be a liberal form of speech (irony) with extremist political commitments that seem to conflict with the very rhetorical gesture. Misogyny and racism have re-entered the public sphere. They’ve done so not in spite of but with the explicit help of ironic manipulations of media.

    The trolls sync this transformation of the media with misogynist ontology. Both are construed as constraints in the forward march of Trump, Kek, and culture in general. One disturbing version of the essentialist suggestion for understanding how Trump will complete the system of German Idealism comes from one “Jef Costello” (a troll named for a character in Alain Delon’s 1967 film, Le Samouraï)

    Ironically, Hegel himself gave us the formula for understanding exactly what must occur in the next stage of history. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel spoke of freedom as “willing our determination.” That means affirming the social conditions that make the array of options we have to choose from in life possible. We don’t choose that array, indeed we are determined by those social conditions. But within those conditions we are free to choose among certain options. Really, it can’t be any other way. Hegel, however, only spoke of willing our determination by social conditions. Let us enlarge this to include biological conditions, and other sorts of factors. As Collin Cleary has written: Thus, for example, the cure for the West’s radical feminism is for the feminist to recognize that the biological conditions that make her a woman—with a woman’s mind, emotions, and drives—cannot be denied and are not an oppressive “other.” They are the parameters within which she can realize who she is and seek satisfaction in life. No one can be free of some set of parameters or other; life is about realizing ourselves and our potentials within those parameters.

    As Hegel correctly saw, we are the only beings in the universe who seek self-awareness, and our history is the history of our self-realization through increased self-understanding. The next phase of history will be one in which we reject liberalism’s chimerical notion of freedom as infinite, unlimited self-determination, and seek self-realization through embracing our finitude. Like it or not, this next phase in human history is now being shepherded by Donald Trump—as unlikely a World-Historical Individual as there ever was. But there you have it. Yes! Donald Trump will complete the system of German Idealism. (Costello 2017)

    Note the regular features of this interpretation: it is a nature-forward argument about social categories, universalist in application, misogynist in structure, and ultra-intellectual. Constraint is shifted not only from the social into the natural, but also back into the social again. The poststructuralist phrase “embracing our finitude” (put into the emphatic italics of Theory) underscores the reversal from semiotics to ontology by way of German Idealism. Trump, it seems, will help us realize our natural places in an old-world order even while pushing the vanguard trolls forward into the utopian future. In contrast to Kantbot’s own content, this reading lacks irony. That is not to say that the anti-Gender Studies and generally viciously misogynist agenda of the Alt Right is not being amplified throughout the globe, as we increasingly hear. But this dry analysis lack the lacks the manipulative capacity that understanding social media in German Idealist terms brings with it. It does not resignify.

    Costello’s understanding is crude compared with that of Kantbot himself. The constraints, for Kantbot, are not primarily those of a naturalized gender, but instead the semiotic or rhetorical structure of the media through which any naturalization flows. The media are not likely, in this vision, to end any gender regimes—but recognizing that such regimes are contingent on representation and the manipulation of signs has never been the sole property of the Left. That manipulation implies a constrained, rather than an absolute, understanding of freedom. This constraint is an important theoretical element of the Alt Right, and in some sense they are correct to call on Hegel for it. Their thinking wavers—again, ironically—between essentialism about things like gender and race, and an understanding of constraint as primarily constituted by the media.

    Kantbot mixes his andrism and his media critique seamlessly. The trolls have some of their deepest roots in internet misogyny, including so-called Men Right’s Activism and the hashtag #redpill. The red pill that Neo takes in The Matrix to exit the collective illusion is here compared to “waking up” from the “culturally Marxist” feminism that inflects the putative communism that pervades contemporary US culture. Here is Kantbot’s version:

    The tweet elides any difference between corporate diversity culture and the Left feminism that would also critique it, but that is precisely the point. Irony does not undermine (it rather bolsters) serious misogyny. When Angela Nagle’s book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, touched off a seemingly endless Left-on-Left hot-take war, Kantbot responded with his own review of the book (since taken down). This review contains a plea for a “nuanced” understanding of Eliot Rodger, who killed six people in Southern California in 2014 as “retribution” for women rejecting him sexually.[xii] We can’t allow (justified) disgust at this kind of content to blind us to the ongoing irony—not jokes, not wit, not snark—that enables this vile ideology. In many ways, the irony that persists in the heart of this darkness allows Kantbot and his ilk to take the Left more seriously than the Left takes the Right. Gender is a crucial, but hardly the only, arena in which the Alt Right’s combination of essentialist ontology and media irony is fighting the intellectual Left.

    In the sub-subculture known as Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOW, the term “volcel” came to prominence in recent years. “Volcel” means “voluntarily celibate,” or entirely ridding one’s existence of the need for or reliance on women. The trolls responded to this term with the notion of an “incel,” someone “involuntarily celibate,” in a characteristically self-deprecating move. Again, this is irony: none of the trolls actually want to be celibate, but they claim a kind of joy in signs by recoding the ridiculous bitterness of the Volcel.

    Literalizing the irony already partly present in this discourse, sometime in the fall of 2016 the trolls started calling the Left –in particular the members of the podcast team Chapo Trap House and the journalist and cultural theorist Sam Kriss (since accused of sexual harassment)—“ironycels.” The precise definition wavers, but seems to be that the Leftists are failures at irony, “irony-celibate,” even “involuntarily incapable of irony.”

    Because the original phrase is split between voluntary and involuntary, this has given rise to reappropriations, for example Kriss’s, in which “doing too much irony” earns you literal celibacy.

    Kantbot has commented extensively, both in articles and on podcasts, on this controversy. He and Kriss have even gone head-to-head.[xiii]




    In the ironycel debate, it has become clear that Kantbot thinks that socialism has kneecapped the Left, but only sentimentally. The same goes for actual conservatism, which has prevented the Right from embracing its new counterculture. Leaving behind old ideologies is a symptom for standing at the vanguard of a civilizational shift. It is that shift that makes sense of the phrase “Trump will Complete the System of German Idealism.”

    The Left, LogoDaedalus intoned on a podcast, is “metaphysically stuck in the Bush era.” I take this to mean that the Left is caught in an endless cycle of recriminations about the neoliberal model of politics, even as that model has begun to become outdated. Kantbot writes, in an article called “Chapo Traphouse Will Never Be Edgy”:

    Capturing the counterculture changes nothing, it is only by the diligent and careful application of it that anything can be changed. Not politics though. When political ends are selected for aesthetic means, the mismatch spells stagnation. Counterculture, as part of culture, can only change culture, nothing outside of that realm, and the truth of culture which is to be restored and regained is not a political truth, but an aesthetic one involving the ultimate truth value of the narratives which pervade our lived social reality. Politics are always downstream. (Kantbot 2017a)

    Citing Breitbart’s motto, Kantbot argues that continents of theory separate him and LogoDaedalus from the Left. That politics is downstream from culture is precisely what Marx—and by extension, the contemporary Left—could not understand. On several recent podcasts, Kantbot has made just this argument, that the German Enlightenment struck a balance between the “vitality of aesthetics” and political engagement that the Left lost in the generation after Hegel.

    Kantbot has decided, against virtually every Hegel reader since Hegel and even against Hegel himself, that the system of German Idealism is ironic in its deep structure. It’s not a move we can afford to take lightly. This irony, generalized as Schlegel would have it, manipulates the formal and meta settings of communicative situations and thus is at the incipient point of any solidarity. It gathers community through mediation even as it rejects those not in the know. It sits at the membrane of the filter bubble, and—correctly used—has the potential to break or reform the bubble. To be clear, I am not saying that Kantbot has done this work. It is primarily Donald Trump, according to Kantbot’s own argument, who has done this work. But this is exactly what it means to play Hegel to Trump’s Napoleon: to provide the metaphysics for the historical moment, which happens to be the moment where social media and politics combine. Philosophy begins only after an early-morning sleepless tweetstorm once again determines a news cycle. Irony takes its proper place, as Schlegel had suggested, in human history, becoming a political weapon meant to manipulate communication.

    Kantbot was the media theorist of Trump’s ironic moment. The channeling of affect is irreducible, but not unchangeable: this is both the result of some steps we can only wish we’d taken in theory and used in politics before the Alt Right got there, and the actual core of what we might call Alt Right Media Theory. When they say “the Left can’t meme,” in other words, they’re accusing the socialist Left of being anti-intellectual about the way we communicate now, about the conditions and possibilities of social media’s amplifications of the capacity called irony that is baked in to cognition and speech so deeply that we can barely define it even partially. That would match the sense of medium we get from looking at Shannon again, and the raw material possibility with which Schlegel infused the notion of irony.

    This insight, along with its political activation, might have been the preserve of Western Marxism or the other critical theories that succeeded it. Why have we allowed the Alt Right to pick up our tools?

    Kantbot takes obvious pleasure in the irony of using poststructuralist tools, and claiming in a contrarian way that they really derive from a broadly construed German Enlightenment that includes Romanticism and Idealism. Irony constitutes both that Enlightenment itself, on this reading, and the attitude towards it on the part of the content-producers, the German Idealist Trolls. It doesn’t matter if Breitbart was right about the Frankfurt School, or if the Neoreactionaries are right about capitalism. They are not practicing what Hegel called “representational thinking,” in which the goal is to capture a picture of the world that is adequate to it. They are practicing a form of conceptual thinking, which in Hegel’s terms is that thought that is embedded in, constituted by, and substantially active within the causal chain of substance, expression, and history.[xiv] That is the irony of Hegel’s reincarnation after the end of history.

    In media analysis and rhetorical analysis, we often hear the word “materiality” used as a substitute for durability, something that is not easy to manipulate. What is material, it is implied, is a stabilizing factor that allows us to understand the field of play in which signification occurs. Dean’s analysis of the Iraq War does just this, showing the relationship of signs and politics that undermines the aspirational content of political speech in neoliberalism. It is a crucial move, and Dean’s analysis remains deeply informative. But its type—and even the word “material,” used in this sense—is, not to put too fine a point on it, neo-Kantian: it seeks conditions and forms that undergird spectra of possibility. To this the Alt Right has lodged a Hegelian eppur si muove, borrowing techniques that were developed by Marxists and poststructuralists and German Idealists, and remaking the world of mediated discourse. That is a political emergency in which the humanities have a special role to play—but only if we can dispense with political and academic in-fighting and turn our focus to our opponents. What Mark Fisher once called the “Vampire castle” of the Left on social media is its own kind of constraint on our progress (Fisher 2013). One solvent for it is irony in the expanded field of social media—not jokes, not snark, but dedicated theoretical investigation and exploitation of the rhetorical features of our systems of communication. The situation of mediated communication is part of the objective conjuncture of the present, one that the humanities and the Left cannot afford to ignore, and cannot avoid by claiming not to participate. The alternative to engagement is to cede the understanding, and quite possibly the curve, of civilization, to the global Alt Right.

    _____

    Leif Weatherby is Associate Professor of German and founder of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. He is working on a book about cybernetics and German Idealism.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes
    [i] Video here. The comment thread on the video generated a series of unlikely slogans for 2020: “MAKE TRANSCENDENTAL IDENTITY GREAT AGAIN,” “Make German Idealism real again,” and the ideological non sequitur “Make dialectical materialism great again.”

    [ii] Neiwert (2017) tracks the rise of extreme Right violence and media dissemination from the 1990s to the present, and is particularly good on the ways in which these movements engage in complex “double-talk” and meta-signaling techniques, including irony in the case of the Pepe meme.

    [iii] I’m going to use this term throughout, and refer readers to Chip Berlet’s useful resource: I’m hoping this article builds on a kind of loose consensus that the Alt Right “talks out of both sides of its mouth,” perhaps best crystallized in the term “dog whistle.” Since 2016, we’ve seen a lot of regular whistling, bigotry without disguise, alongside the rise of the type of irony I’m analyzing here.

    [iv] There is, in this wing of the Online Right, a self-styled “autism” that stands for being misunderstood and isolated.

    [v] Thanks to Moira Weigel for a productive exchange on this point.

    [vi] See the excellent critique of object-oriented ontologies on the basis of their similarities with object-oriented programming languages in Galloway 2013. Irony is precisely the condition that does not reproduce code representationally, but instead shares a crucial condition with it.

    [vii] The paper is a point of inspiration and constant return for Friedrich Kittler, who uses this diagram to demonstrate the dependence of culture on media, which, as his famous quip goes, “determine our situation.” Kittler 1999, xxxix.

    [viii] This kind of redundancy is conceptually separate from signal redundancy, like the strengthening or reduplicating of electrical impulses in telegraph wires. The latter redundancy is likely the first that comes to mind, but it is not the only kind Shannon theorized.

    [ix] This is because Shannon adopts Ludwig Boltzmann’s probabilistic formula for entropy. The formula certainly suggests the slow simplification of material structure, but this is irrelevant to the communications engineering problem, which exists only so long as there are the very complex structures called humans and their languages and communications technologies.

    [x] Shannon presented these findings at one of the later Macy Conferences, the symposia that founded the movement called “cybernetics.” For an excellent account of what Shannon called “Printed English,” see Liu 2010, 39-99.

    [xi] The disavowal follows Freud’s famous “kettle logic” fairly precisely. In describing disavowal of unconscious drives unacceptable to the ego and its censor, Freud used the example of a friend who returns a borrowed kettle broken, and goes on to claim that 1) it was undamaged when he returned it, 2) it was already damaged when he borrowed it, and 3) he never borrowed it in the first place. Zizek often uses this logic to analyze political events, as in Zizek 2005. Its ironic structure usually goes unremarked.

    [xii] Kantbot, “Angela Nagle’s Wild Ride,” http://thermidormag.com/angela-nagles-wild-ride/, visited August 15, 2017—link currently broken.

    [xiii] Kantbot does in fact write fiction, almost all of which is science-fiction-adjacent retoolings of narrative from German Classicism and Romanticism. The best example is his reworking of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “A New Year’s Eve Adventure,” “Chic Necromancy,” Kantbot 2017c.

    [xiv] I have not yet seen a use of Louis Althusser’s distinction between representation and “theory” (which relies on Hegel’s distinction) on the Alt Right, but it matches their practice quite precisely.

    _____

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