![]() Everyone knows the most basic rule of the internet: don’t feed the trolls, and don’t take tricksters at their word. When I first saw luridly ugly memes like this, in 20, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take them. They referred to all liberals and traditional conservatives as communists, or “degenerates” they posted pro-Pinochet propaganda they baited normies into arguments by insisting that “Hitler did nothing wrong”. Many alt-right trolls started calling themselves “fashy”, or “fash-ist”. On Reddit and 4chan and 8chan, where the content moderation was so lax as to be almost non-existent, the memes were more overtly vile. On Twitter, the alt-right trolled and harassed mainstream journalists, hoping to work the referees of the national discourse while capturing the attention of the wider public. ![]() On Facebook, they posted Photoshopped images, or parody songs, or “countersignal memes” – sardonic line drawings designed to spark just enough cognitive dissonance to shock normies out of their complacency. The Right Stuff ’s founders came up with talking points – narratives, they called them – that their followers then disseminated through various social networks. As with everything the alt-right said, it was hard to tell whether they were joking, half-joking or not joking at all. These young men often referred to The Right Stuff, approvingly, as a key part of a “libertarian-to-far-right pipeline”, a path by which “normies” could advance, through a series of epiphanies, toward “full radicalisation”. ![]() They developed a countercultural tone – arch, antic, floridly offensive – that appealed to a growing cohort of disaffected young men, searching for meaning and addicted to the internet. By 2014, they’d started to self-identify as “alt-right”. They soon began calling themselves “post-libertarians,” although they weren’t yet sure what would come next. In 2012, a small group of young men, former supporters of the libertarian Republican congressman Ron Paul, started a blog called The Right Stuff. ![]()
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