You
might think you know the full story of the so-called alt-right, known
for their venomous racism and
virulent anti-feminism. But a new documentary is shedding light on
what it says is one of the most surprising roots of the movement:
Sexual frustration.
Author
Angela Nagle spent more than a year exploring the online origins of
the current "alt-right" movement, which she says included
communities of single men looking for advice on “picking up”
women. She said many of these so-called pick-up artists argued that
feminism was part of what made attracting women so difficult.
Nagle’s
report can be found in the new Fusion documentary, “Trumpland: Kill
All Normies.”
“It
definitely did start out with the picking up women stuff,” Nagle
told ABC News’ “Nightline.”
It’s
a world that appears riddled with extensive and seemingly innocuous
terminology, like “manosphere,” “men’s rights” and
“incels.”
“[Incels]
are involuntarily celibate men. And so, the incel kind of forum world
was very much about expressing your frustration about being celibate.
That was really the place where the endless conversations about
essentially, ‘Why am I still celibate,’ turned into
civilizational and racial and kind of big questions about the idea
that essentially the whole sexual liberation project was a mistake,”
said Nagle.
The
documentary traces a community of men who act on their frustrations,
which began with their grievances against women but later expanded
and found footing on social media.
Twitter,
as shown in the documentary, has been particularly useful to help
these individuals organize and to speak up when they felt their voice
wasn’t being heard.
In
the documentary, Nagle explained how the idea of “trolling” on
Twitter and other social media channels turned out to be clever on
the part of the community. “Internet trolls” are known for their
social media posts on divisive issues. Nagle said this tactic may be
one of the reasons that people didn’t see the "alt-right"
movement forming.
As
Nagle says in “Trumpland: Kill All Normies,” “There was for
years beforehand this idea of trolling and this idea that it's all
irony. It's all playful. That was the most clever thing they did
because it allowed them to actually kind of hide their politics.”
This
guise of irreverence online towards others who didn’t share their
views allowed the burgeoning "alt-right" movement to push
back at an increasingly vocal community that seemed to emphasize
being politically correct.
“I
think what happened ... with millennials essentially, who, you know,
came of age online and became political online, [is that] they came
into contact with these kind of ultra [politically correct] highly
sensitive cultures online, which actually allowed them to be quite
funny, you know, and to kind of poke fun at the earnestness of these
kind of ultra-sensitive language policing online cultures,” Nagle
explained to “Nightline.”
In
a way, the self-described "alt-right" also gained momentum
from its enemies on the left, Nagle said.
“You
also had a culture that was on the cultural left, which was about
gender fluidity and kind of taking the cultural gains of the left to
the next stage,” Nagle said in the documentary. “These kind of
online environments, you could say, of the left were both kind of
ultra-sensitive and incredibly cruel and inclined towards sort of
quite mob like behavior [that] people needed [in order] to show that
they were virtuous.”
The
"alt-right" also appeared to receive an enormous injection
of energy after Trump’s election.
“And
when Donald Trump is
nasty ... [he] is a magnificent internet troll,” Tolito said in the
documentary. “He is an expert at trafficking and outrage and
committing outrage and being outraged himself.”
And
some members of the "alt-right" took their movement from
online into real life in at Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer,
when far-right extremists gathered for a “Unite the Right” event.
“I
think Charlottesville you know revealed the really hard right
politics behind it that wasn't ironic and that that wasn't a joke,”
Nagle said in the documentary.
Nagle
said the so-called alt-right is “quite strategically clever” and
knows that they can potentially drive a wedge into where there is
already tension on the left.
The
solution, Nagle said, lies not on the ideological extremes, but
instead with the rest of us, the so-called “normies,” and finding
a way to co-exist.
“For
generations it has been the countercultures of the left that have
assumed the posture of anti-establishment rebellion against the
hectoring moralism of the conservative right,” Nagle said. “Today
those roles have been reversed. It is now the left that is the
gatekeeper of conventional morality the alt right the agent of
subversion.”
