REJECT PLEAS FOR CIVILITY

REJECT PLEAS FOR CIVILITY: a sincere call for unbridled, shameless, hostility with the online Alt-Right
John David Card, 5/6/2022
www.youtube.com/c/johndavidcard
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"Alt-Right" is a term that we've unfortunately seen become more and more common in political discourse worldwide over the past several years, although some people might still be slightly unclear on exactly what it means.

In short, the so-called Alternative-Right isn't a political party or singular school of thought. It's a nebulous pile of reactionary social views, right-wing talking points, and surreptitious in-jokes that organises and operates mostly online. Although 'The Alt-Right' it isn't one singular group, and therefore lacks any central leadership or explicitly defined doctrines - it's most telling feature is an ideological leaning towards outright racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, Western Chauvinism, open quote "anti-wokeness", and the rest of the usual gamut of culture war topics we've seen become hotbeds of reactionary grievance filing over the past decade or so.

Reactionary culture uses humour to project an image of power and supremacy. Often turning young and politically-inexperienced peoples' alienation in the face of our modern Capitalist society into a deep, irrational, hatred of women, immigrants, foreigners, queer people, and so on. Alt-Right "recruiters" leverage the largely-online nature of their movement with the ability to spread their content anonymously on social media sites, blogs, and imageboards without repercussion.

As a decentralised ideological movement, people aren't ever officially "in the Alt-Right", per se,  - although cells of Alt-Right individuals or more formal fascistic organisations might certainly be present within a community.

The exact degree to which each Alt-Right sympathizer will loudly or openly proclaim their views can vary wildly - and that's because it's a very disparate group. Within their sphere of influence sits everyone from hardcore, out-and-proud Neo-Nazis, more optics-focused wannabe fascists like the Proud Boys, through the most recent generation of internet-enabled shock-jock grifters, all the way to the now-early-twenty-somethings that grew up in this toxic online culture and have decided to try and bring their malignant views into the realm of organising within more mainstream and reputable Conservative groups.

To lump such a vast array of people together - regardless of how comparably noxious their views are - might at first seem reductive or wrong. To that, I say simply, but it's easy and it works. And make no mistake, at this point - anyone, explicitly or otherwise, even remotely that far to the reactionary Right ought to be denounced just the same.
Regardless of how much they maintain a public-facing facade of decency.
Regardless of how much they try to argue their views should be given a platform.
Regardless of how much they might seem like a decent mate at uni or a good bloke down at the pub.

The element most successfully binding all of these different strains of regressive dogma has been the uncanny ability of those in the Alt-Right to propagandise their beliefs online and communicate among one another through obsfucatory jokes and memes. The reactionary Right isn't trying to engage in civil discourse or good faith discussions with anyone. Online and offline political engagement is nothing but jumping from one hot-button topic to the next - simply trying to rile up bystanders, antagonise their opposition, and recruit more people to help in doing so all the while.

Everyone opposed to the hardline Right can sit around decrying this all day - and it's never going to change a thing.

At this point, the progressive Left needs to just start appropriating the same tactics shamelessly.
The potential for boundry-pushing online humor has been ignored by most on the Left, often citing appeals to optics-centric civility.
The line "When they go low, we go high" often gets trotted out. Quite frankly, that sort of thinking isn't doing anyone any good.

People on the Left, particularly those who hope for better than the current Capitalist electoral system can ever provide, have to start comprehensively fighting the Far-Right's online propaganda machine just as viciously as it is so readily used against the most marginalised on our own side. We ought to acknowledge both the inherent act of solidarity and community defence that doing so is, and the practical means of countering Alt-Right recruitment tactics it could be.

To some of us used to organising on the Left, it might seem immaterial or downright immature to give any amount of importance to something like simply encouraging people to be a bit more combative online. And I understand, and appreciate, where those sorts of comments would come from. However, I have to make clear that we are not just talking about making a few more funny pictures of all the most notable Right-Wingers to circulate among ourselves for the sake of a good laugh. I am speaking to the necessity of shifting the entire conceptual framework by which the grassroots Hard-Anti-Authoritarian Left approaches online propaganda.

The coming of the Twenty-First Century has irreversibly heralded in an new digital age of political discussion, debate, and dissemination worldwide. For better or for worse, the modern Propaganda of the Deed involves less derailing a cargo train's worth of Imperialist small arms and more derailing your local Conservative MPs' Facebook comments section.
As the Reactionary Right agitates us, so must we agitate back.

Recent developments have seen openly giving credence towards far-right talking points that would make any columnist's head spin as little as twenty years ago become what is considered acceptable to joke about on mainstream online platforms. Never before have hardline Conservative, so-called, entertainers been able to easily and blatantly lurch the state of discourse further and further towards the Far Right. All the while, online Alt-Right-sympathetic grifters have an unpreceded level of access to distribution platforms which will promote them algorithmically, opportunities to cross into mainstream entertainment, and the capacity to monetise their propaganda. All while they claim an unseen Progressive conspiracy is somehow "cancelling" an immutable supposed right of theirs' to Free Speech - a narrative so patently untrue, we've heard it parroted throughout the Murdoch Media Empire's near-monopoly on print and broadcast news throughout the English-speaking world for at least a decade straight now.

These people cry "So much for the tolerant Left!", even as they lash out at everyone unlike themselves, and openly laugh about how happy they'd be to see most people in this world be deprived of countless civil liberties, especially hard-won rights like reproductive- and gender-affirming healthcare treatments. To covert fascists, these are jokes right up until they're not.

If such a large contingent of people online see fit to normalise this type of rhetoric, and as the websites hosting and enabling this have neither the capacity, nor any incentive, to prevent Fascists proselytizing on their platforms, those of us decidedly on the Left must make mainstream the idea of using these tactics against them in response just as viciously, if not moreso.

On any and every platform in which they have a presence - frankly, they must be targeted with the exact same dehumanising attitude they themselves have employed for so long. All attempts at good faith discussion with these types of people on the Left's part have proven to be less than useless. Even attempts to drown out the Alt-Right's campaigns of misinformation with extensive, concrete, counter-arguments while still trying to uphold one half of an imagined agreement of civility with these people have not- and will never- work.

Even if some small percent of those currently aligned with the Far-Right could, theoretically, be rehabilitated - no committed Leftist has any responsibility to try to change the minds of these people kindly. I council you today, that we on the Left ought to feel free to deride, denigrate, and browbeat all those who readily embrace Alt-Right leanings.
For far too long now, the milquetoast status quo thinking of optically-minded organisers and our elected officials has been to call for polite and bipartisan discourse among political opponents - even with those who all-but-explicitly call for the disempowering, disenfranchisement, and death of those members of our society who are already the most vulnerable.

Both our tolerance of, and our patience with, Alt-Right apologists, their hangers-on, and everyone online who makes a conscious decision to remain in their media orbit, must have a hard limit. You and I owe people like this no amount of politesse. On any platform you see them - be it; personal social media page, discussion page, forum, imageboard or the like: bully them.
Mock them.
Treat the Right with nothing but open hostility at every turn - be prepared and willing to cross any and every so-called "appropriate limits" to shame these people. Not just their political tendencies, but the people who hold them.

These formally unaffiliated reactionaries of all stripes will not cease until they've had their mouths forcibly shut.
Meanwhile, the window of acceptable discourse among elected officials has shifted so far to the Right that each and every day, more and more innocent peoples' very lives, and livelihoods are being held up for debate should they have the sheer temerity to have been born poor.
Or disabled.
Or queer.
Or female.
Or a Person-of-Colour.
Or foreign.

We need now, as we have ever, the inculcation of the simple idea that the Left ought to lean into an absolute, intersectional, culture of maximal hostility with the Right.
Revel in the ability to antagonise deserving people from your office desk or the phone in your hands. Agitating in this way is one of the most accessible means of spreading information to every corner of the internet and the impressionable minds found there.
With a fun and imminently sharable idea, you can go anywhere.

Come to find the immense joy and the creative liberty that can lie in freely treating these people with nothing but contempt.
And make no apologies for it.

The hip, edgy, online Alt-Right that have been recruiting alienated young people for years with these sorts of tactics have more than just usernames and hosting addresses, they do have lives - such as they are. And by definition, these Right-Wing grifters always need to publicise themselves to an above-average extent, so it's never too hard to find out all the most mockery-worthy parts of their lives.

This sort of person - one that thrives off of repeating dogwhistle in-jokes with other cretins and creating a spectacle in the online space - can only ever be cowed down in kind.
They need to be called out by those of us who oppose their views and driven from any community discourse and platform whatsoever.
The people who have so sorely been hungering for total "Culture War" will be given it.

Find out who your most local reactionary figures are, and make a point to unabashedly antagonise them with increasingly objectionable material. Do so on their own platforms, appropriate their own methods, remind them that it was the nascent online Far-Right who barracked for the freedom to be so wantonly offensive in the name of "free speech" in the first place.

Shame can be a powerful motivator for change - but no earnest appeal can be made to their conscience, they can only be made to feel the social consequences of their decisions and their position.

Anyone trying to make their name in their camp deserve scorn.
It works.

Take, for example, the case of arch-Reactionary theorist and self-described White Supremacist Richard B. Spencer. A man so responsible for the modern Alt-Right it's plausible he created the very term itself.

To most, he is now remembered as little more than the Nazi who got punched.
While he was giving an impromptu street interview in 2017, an anonymous bystander recognised him, stepped forward, and did nothing wrong in physically striking him right then and there - on camera.

What subsequently turned Spencer into a figure of worldwide ridicule almost overnight wasn't the punch itself, however. It was how mercilessly the online Left was able to satirise just how quickly the posturing Neo-Nazi turned tail and fled when confronted.
Most peoples' first ever exposure to this man was this image of him. The all-talk Fascist undeniably exposed as the coward they all are at their core.
The militant Leftists who saw this were all the more emboldened by it.
Even among the Hard Right, Spencer lost almost all of his social caché and was pretty quickly drummed out as a spokesman of sorts for their cause.
A few days' worth of online shaming irrevocably turned one of the most articulate and dangerous Reactionary organiser's legacies into a joke.

Similarly, take cases like that of French hardline, seventy-eight-year-old, Right-Wing author Dominique Venner. Venner was a highly controversial, unceasingly homophobic writer and radio personality, - who, in the wake of the 2013 legalisation of gay marriage in France and subsequent torrent of humiliating mockery he rightfully received, three days later published a seething manifesto denouncing, quote, “the professional Marxist trolls who had ruined his reputation” -  before fatally shooting himself on the grounds of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Or of the UK's Elliot Johnson,  a twenty-one-year-old staffer in the youth wing of the Conservative Party who, in 2015, threw himself under an incoming train in response to mounting public backlash and calls for his dismissal over the laundry list of scandals within the Young Conservatives he was implicated in becoming more and more publicly known.

We don't have to weep for these people, or anyone like them. They were awful people who's only legacy should be as the punchline to the occasional off colour joke. If those on the Right, young and old, are incapable of empathising with others or dealing with the fallout of their actions, respond with a lack of empathy a thousand fold.
In the case of Venner, Johnson, and so many who fit the exact same mold:
Simply laugh at them until they die.
Then laugh about them dying.

Remind the other Reactionaries they leave behind to mop up the red stains where their political aspirations used to be exactly how much we feel the same way about them too.

When the corporate media - like Sky News or any tentacle of the Fox network - next picks up a story like this to spin it into some vacuous memorial piece about how the lifelong Nationalist brought a gun into a crowded place of worship for totally innocuous reasons, or how the private school yuppie-turned-sneering Tory vanguard was actually just a misunderstood little lamb, simply laugh it off.

They'll bring all sorts of ghoulish media commentators out of the woodwork while the bodies are still warm to scold "Leftist bullies" and "Antifa thugs" all day long as if they're not all too happy to rake one fresh corpse after another over the coals of their own outrage for the sake of spouting a narrative. In the case of a young one like Johnson, they'll probably even trot out their friends, their family, and whatever bloated local Tory hack groomed them into a position in their party in the first place too.

Despite these maudlin little display pieces, I reject all pleas for civility with these people and their cause.
Seeing the current generation of Alt-Right worms and their toadie allies in electoral politics completely collapse like that under the slightest pushback is hilarious, actually.
Call it a form of memetic accelerationism if you want. I just call it having a bit of fun at some awful peoples' expense.

Disillusionment with electoral politics in the West, this side of the New Millennium once gave rise to so-called "Brocialists" - people more concerned a vogue Leftist aesthetic  than readily embracing social-justice issues.
Next, the ascent of Identitarian Populists across the world, created in response to them, a wave of irreverent online comedians. Dubbed 'The Dirtbag Left', they've since enriched themselves off of making relatively mild critiques of Conservative posturing.
Evidently, neither framework of critique has done much to meaningfully change the digital zeitgeist.
The ability of the Alt-Right, and of Alt-Right-sympathisers to recruit and spread online has not been stemmed.

We need to begin properly hating these people just as much as they hate us.
We need now a line of Leftist thought that unrepentantly counters what the Alt-Right has been doing for years.
I dream of a militant Progressiveism that is remorselessly, and righteously, toxic to anything that opposes it - in our means of agitation.
In our propaganda.
In our culture of organising.

And beyond.