Logical Meme

Vice is wringing its hands about the appeal that Alt Right ideas are having with Generation Z:

The extreme right is increasingly sophisticated, globalized and actively recruiting young people, a grim new study says.

The once perpetually fractured eco-system of the far-right, from white nationalists in the US to anti-migrant groups in Europe, has become cohesive and highly adaptable. The Fringe Insurgency, a study published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, shows that while these movements may differ in ideology and scope, they are increasingly working together. Essentially, the extreme right—many of which state isolationism and nationalism as key ideologies—has globalized…

“There was really a need to start figuring out what was causing this explosion in extreme right activism globally,” Davey told VICE. “There was really a need to start getting data behind all of that and see what mechanism is allowing this to happen.

“They’re not all knuckleheads… The big thing here is that they are increasingly becoming more and more sophisticated. It’s a continuously growing and expanding process, if you look closely, they’re constantly learning from each other. They’re becoming more aware of the fact that they can have this greater impact.”

There are numerous goals for the far right—the election of populist leaders, removing hate speech laws, among them—but one of the major shared goals of the groups is to push what is known as the “Overton window.” The Overton window is the range of ideas that are acceptable in public discourse and the extreme right would like more of their fringe ideas to fall under this…

The study paints a bleak view of just how sophisticated the far right has become as the authors suggest the extreme right is a full step ahead of policies set up to counter them. The duo writes, that “analysis illustrated that the extreme right is currently ahead of the curve on at least three levels:” they are early tech adopters, they know how to work together, and they know how to speak to the young. Furthermore, the various far right groups are teaching and learning from each other.

“What we’re seeing, especially from the coalition building from the European Identitarians and the Americans, is that they’ve tried to leverage those different comparative advantages each of them have,” said Ebner. “The Americans have the advantage of the trolling and [online activities] and the Europeans have more of the intellectual backbone of the movement, but also more experience in staging media stunts and rallies.”

Anatoly Karlin has an interesting post on “The State of the Altsphere (October 2017)”. He writes:

The defining feature of the Alt Right-sphere in the past year has, of course, been the meteoric rise of Andrew Anglin’s The Daily Stormer – and its near complete oblitration in the wake of Charlottesville.

When you need to change domains every other week in between confinements to the deep web, you can’t have much of a popular readership. I suspect visitorship has plummeted by an order of magnitude.

This hasn’t helped the old-school Neo-Nazis of Stormfront, long in terminal decline, to recover. They have been overtaken by The Right Stuff podcast – apparently, the recent scandal about one of their members Mike Enoch having a Jewish wife did nothing but attract them publicity and more visitors – and now joins a bevy of other sites such as Amren and Heartiste at around the one million mark.

AltRight.com has disappointed to date. Apart from some of Vincent Law’s longer pieces, their content is much less intellectual than that of Radix Journal – some of the latter’s best writers such as Guillaume Durocher and Gregory Hood failed to make the move to the new venue – so visitorship numbers should be much higher. But they’re failing to accelerate.

As with the “Dissident Right”, the influence of the Alt Right should not be overestimated, even within the general Tea Party Plus/Alt Lite/pro-Trump movement. Visitorship is capped at around 5 million. The eponymous website of the movement has no more than a million. In contrast, just Breitbart/The Daily Caller/Infowars have around 150 million monthly visits between them. There is a similar gap on Twitter, with Richard Spencer having only 80,000 followers – that’s less than Alt Lite parvenus like Laura Loomer, to say nothing of the many hundreds of thousands following Mike Cernovich, Baked Alaska, and Jack Posobiec.

I wholeheartedly concur with Karlin’s above characterization of the AltRight.com site and am sad to see the apparent demise of Radix Journal.

Karlin’s post includes a few graphs, including this one: