Following the election of Donald Trump, the alt-right has come to play a significant role in American political discourse. They are an upstart political movement that rejects traditional conservatism and championed Trump and his opposition to political correctness.
But how did a movement rooted in online and video game culture come to be so influential? Angela Nagle (@angnagle) is an Irish writer and academic who has written extensively on the rise of anti-feminism and the revitalised culture wars. She’s recently written a new book called Kill All Normies, in it she documents how fringe online politics and discussion boards have become mainstream.
 

Alex Burd spoke to Angela to discuss the book. He started by asking when the alt-right became a mainstream force.

Angela Nagle: It has to be the election of Donald Trump. I know that's very recent. Maybe you could say something like Gamergate brought a lot of different right leaning movements and forums and things that weren't very overtly political ended up much more closely mingling over Gamergate. Those are the younger ones. The more serious people like American Renaissance and Richard Spencer and people like that, they're a bit older and have been around for years. They've been taking things much more seriously and have been for a long time. But it's only when all these geeky online sub cultures started to come together that it started to be more legitimate to call them the Alt-Right rather than just the far right.

Alex Burd You reference the Gamergate movement. How is that it went from something that was about 'ethics in games journalism' to a political ideology built around the twin pillars of misogyny and white supremacy?

AN: Well essentially, depending on who you ask. Gamergate - the gamers say it's about 'ethics in games journalism', the people on the other side say they were merely pointing out sexism in gaming and ended up getting viciously attacked. The people involved in it love endlessly having these competing stories about the precise details of particular attacks which I don't find remotely interesting. Even if you take the most conservative estimate of the levels of attack that were going on they were really bad. Even the ones that are out there for the public to see. And you know a critic should be able to argue that gaming is dominated by sexist attitudes, but essentially it was viewed by gamers - where they got the 'ethics in games journalism' line from is a very long, boring story - essentially it was over political correctness. What they perceived to be feminists and anti-racists and liberals trying to change the culture and take away their fun hobby and destroy everything through liberal censorship. One of the reasons I'm not very sympathetic to that is I just think that, as in film, there's room for different viewpoints. These people were not saying games containing sexism should be banned. They were just saying that the kind of style that dominates has an attitude towards women that they had an issue with. It became basically, for whatever reason, it brought together all these different groups from the Daily Stormer, which is a Nazi website, through to apolitical vaguely sort of pro-free speech types. It brought together a whole range of people that saw themselves in different ways as opposing political correctness.

AB: And they were politicised by the fact that a largely white male space was becoming invaded leftist politics and women in particular?

AN: Yeah, definitely. Leftist cultural politics, yeah.

AB: How did it go from a misogynist reaction to that to something that has become heavily based around white supremacy and racial politics?

AN: Well when I started looking at reactionary forums of different types, I started my PHD about seven years ago, I finished about two years ago, I was looking at anti-feminist forums and at that time opposition to feminism was the main issue that really animated these kind of forums.

Ver todos los episodios