In “God Bless the Right-Wing Social Justice Warriors”, Gavin McInnes perfectly distills the effectiveness of trolling tactics of the Alt-Right. It is a major new front in the ongoing Culture Wars, a cultural appropriation of Saul Alinsky:
We’ve taken Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and turned it into our guidebook. We are the Social Justice Warriors now, and we’re way better at it than they ever were.
Right now, a man in a MAGA hat is suing a bar in New York called The Happiest Hour for booting him out solely because he loves Trump. Getting kicked out of bars is pretty common for people in MAGA hats above the Mason–Dixon line. The old right would venerate the entrepreneur and quietly take the high road out of the bar. Not anymore. Since the lawsuit was announced, Trump supporters have been flooding the bar. One MAGA woman was just paid $150 to get lost.
The new right wing does more than just get petty when the going gets rough. We appropriate. When you attack us, we turn it into a slogan. Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” made us into The Deplorables. Her “fake news” now defines all the news that lies about us. We even got her freaking out about a green frog. Since then, we’ve convinced them that everything from an “OK” gesture to a bobbing purple dove to a glass of milk is a secret Nazi code. It’s so easy to turn them into a dizzy Chihuahua frantically chasing his own tail that it’s almost cruel—almost…
We did the exact same thing to Shia LaBeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” art installation. Every time he puts it up, we show up in MAGA hats and sing stupid songs until the Moonies chanting, “He will not divide us” have a nervous breakdown. Shia became so apoplectic about the direction it took, the police had to take him away. What was meant to be a symbol of resistance to the Trump movement has gone down in history as the exact opposite…
When Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently called me a Nazi, my first thought wasn’t “We should debate.” Those days are gone. Today I think, “I’m going to sue them all” and got myself a lawyer. Amanda quoted me saying the Treaty of Versailles was facilitated by Jews but left out the part where I said this is what “right-wing nutjobs” believe. She is going to pay for that and I don’t care how much it costs…
We’re the snarky little bitches now and we’re way better at it than they ever were. I honestly don’t know why we wasted so much time taking the high road. The low road is way more effective and it’s way more fun.
It’s a new game, with new rules.