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> He would be offline for a month and would need other mods to cover for him. To ask for help, he had to out himself as a kid. I wonder to what extent the alt-

> He would be offline for a month and would need other mods to cover for him. To ask for help, he had to out himself as a kid. I wonder to what extent the alt-right actually is a young teen movement, with adults mixed in (being the ones who show in person). Is there any at least semi-reliable data on this?

mirimir 7y ago
I've watched the so-called alt-right develop online over the past 2-3 decades. Usenet, Live Journal, Encyclopedia Dramatica, the chans, etc. At least at the start, it was mostly about trolling and lulz. The anger of TFWNG. But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. That's frightening. There's a lotta young male angst out there.
- smrtinsert 7y ago
  This is literally connected to Steve Bannon.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Maybe so. I don't recall seeing his name, back in the day, but Wikipedia tells me that he's done lots that I would have agreed with. Biosphere2, for example, SF fan that I am. And that movie about Ronald Reagan. But the rest of it is batshit insane, like something out of Hunter Thompson. A right-wing Wavy Gravy.
- ashleyn 7y ago
  I can't quite tell if I simply grew out of racial humour or it's genuinely taken on this propagandist, explicitly political subtext it didn't have before. Whichever, I don't really appreciate it nowadays.
- will4274 7y ago
  > young male angst Tbh, it's this sort of thing that fuels the alt right. I'm a young male and I have some political concerns. I don't consider myself alt-right. But, when you dismiss my concerns as "angst" - I'm far more likely to continue talking to them than to you.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    I apologize. I didn't mean to dismiss or criticize your concerns. So perhaps I ought to have used less loaded language. Something like being angry about how screwed up things are. Or however you might describe your political concerns. Indeed, it worries me how much such concerns are being dismissed and suppressed. Also, one of my favorite lines is "Still angry." And my favorite fantasy hero is Stover's Caine, who says that a lot.
  - mmierz 7y ago
    I see people trot it out in online arguments as an excuse, or in think-pieces as a justification. But if white male identity politics is very important to someone, important enough to find common cause with literal neo-nazis, I think their conversion already happened.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Maybe. However, as TFA shows, "conversion" isn't irreversible.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  >But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. You can thank Stormfront forums raiding 4chan for that.
  - mrguyorama 7y ago
    Raiding is underselling it. It's significantly coordinated and thoroughly planned, long running campaigns to further radicalize the younger people who thought they were just getting "Edgy memes" on 4chan and haven't learned/realized yet that maybe, just maybe, making jokes about hanging black people because they are black isn't cool. /pol/ is a shitshow
- dragonsngoblins 7y ago
  > There's a lotta young male angst out there See this is exactly the problem the article talks about. A young man got so heavily invested in a community because they weren't dismissive of him. Maybe a lot of young men feel people are treating them dismissively and that a lot narratives other people espouse don't resonate with their personal experience. Maybe we should consider why this anger is so much more common in young men. The narrative of "equality looks like aggression when you've always been the one on top" doesn't really apply to kids who are only 13, because no matter who was on top it wasn't kids.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    I'm not arguing that young men's anger is unjustified. But I am arguing that it's being dismissed by some, and exploited by others. And actually taken seriously by hardly anyone.
    - dragonsngoblins 7y ago
      Ah, my apologies. I see a lot of people reading articles like this and then talking about how young men's anger is being exploited without ever really asking about why young men are angry and I guess I extrapolated a meaning from your comment that I shouldn't have
    - SkyBelow 7y ago
      >There's a lotta young male angst out there. It's kinda odd, because nothing you say in this line is dismissive at all. But because of the everyday association with 'young male angst' that many encounter, merely mentioning it like this is enough to lead some to conclude you are being dismissive. Almost as if the concept has been put down so much that merely mentioning it has become a form of dismissive slang.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  This is a bit tangential, but you sharing your experience with the term before it became widely-known reminds me of something interesting about the way we group and label ideologies. I still remember 5+ years ago having periodic exposure to the term alt-right and having it more or less exclusively refer to relatively languid writings like Mencius Moldbug and NRx[1], in sharp contrast to the rowdier, meme-ier aesthetic it has today (eg /r/The_donald, from what little I've seen of it). I didn't see it come to refer to white-supremacy and other more well-known forms of the far-right until Hillary Clinton made the term a household name. After that point of course, it was a self-fulfilling Schelling point that coalesced around what she said it was: white supremacists et al flocked to it, and everyone not willing to be associated with them had to stop associating with the term, now that "everyone knew" what it referred to. Fascinating dynamic. (Not that I'm suggesting that she created the movement, but rather that from my skewed sample, it seems that she made the _term_ well-defined, by bringing it into the limelight). OTOH, this may have been a consequence of the fact that I had little exposure to chan or white supremacist subcultures et al and lots of exposure to often-iconoclastic longform blogs talking about every random topic, including politics. It's entirely possible that my sample of encounters with the term describes my filter more than it does the term. It's a fascinating window into language, to see a term become widely-known, and by doing so, change its meaning. It's particularly interesting that it's difficult to know how close to how far off you were in your role as one of the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Thanks for sharing your data point! [1] I'm referring to the aesthetic and energy here, not the content, which wasn't quite "languid..".
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Just to be clear, it didn't call itself the "alt-right" back then. GamerGate was a turning point, I think. And yeah, it hit mainstream in the 2016 US presidential cycle. But until maybe 2015, I really had no clue that this was a political thing.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      Oh haha, ok. Then never mind, my comment is somewhat irrelevant
- bifrost 7y ago
  I think you're spot on here. I always saw a lot of one-upsmanship in terms of harassment and being offensive, but eventually it got real. A friend of mine jokes that "weev won the election" and I'm not sure how wrong he is.
sushisource 7y ago
Fascinating question. I certainly wouldn't be surprised at all if they account for a substantial portion of online participants, but I don't know of any data on the matter.
razakel 7y ago
It should also be noted that the far-right does actually have a high number of paedophiles in senior positions. Shall we see what Milo has to say on the subject?
- XaoDaoCaoCao 7y ago
  I'm sure beyond the curtain, you'll find a disproportionate amount of psychopathy and malingant paraphilias in senior positions of any political spectrum. The wolves of politics don't thrive in virtue...
KODeKarnage 7y ago
Almost every "movement" is a teen movement. They're the ones who feel most passionate about, well ... anything, the ones who have had the least life experience countering what's being "revealed" to them, the ones with time on their hands, the ones with few other distracting responsibilities, and the ones most likely to believe in simple solutions to problems they don't fully comprehend. Teens are the ideal foot soldiers for any movement. Yes, on both sides.
iron0013 7y ago
Regardless of how it started, it’s seemed pretty clear to me that the alt-right has been a very deliberate vehicle for the radical right to recruit young people for quite some time now.
- woofie11 7y ago
  The damning thing is the alt-right is very occasionally right. This one stuck out at me: > I trained myself to freeze my facial expression into something neutral so that when I countered Sam’s remarks—“Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective. A big chunk of the alt-right is precisely divorced dads drawn in, or people drawn to their stories, and the insane racist, sexist, and other baggage comes along. Much of the far-left is precisely people drawn to horror stories from LGBTQ members or African Americans who join a community and bring along similarly insane baggage for the ride. I'm pretty convinced that unless the left manages to find a way to dive into alt-right ideology, with an open mind, and bring in the very few sane pieces, and change their opinions about the places that their reasoning is wrong, the alt-right will be able to keep recruiting.
  - darpa_escapee 7y ago
    > “Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective. Except that feminism actively derides both the gender norms that say mothers are better caregivers and the US court system's bias against fathers in child custody rulings. There is literally decades of literature and other sources on these points. A old, common talking point and accusation is that feminism is equivalent to female supremacy, and antifeminist groups recruit men who feel emasculated by women[1]: > A second set of texts presents varieties of the contemporary masculinist response. Like its earlier incarnation, contemporary masculinist response is split between efforts to dislodge women's supremacy in the private sphere and support for men who are "wounded" in the struggle to exude an aura of masculinity in the public sphere. > Men's challenges to women's perceived parental monopoly come from men's rights groups such as the Coalition for Free Men, Men's Rights International, and Men Achieving Liberation and Equality (MALE), as well as numerous fathers' support groups. These groups often deny that men have power in society, arguing that male supremacy is an illusion, along the lines of the illusion of the chauffeur: "he's dressed in the uniform and he looks like he's in the driver's seat," noted Warren Farrell, "but from his perspective someone else is giving the orders" (cited in Woldenberg 1986, p. 10). Masculinist texts claim that women and men are "equally oppressed" (Baumli 1986) and rail against perceived institutionalized female privileges, such as exemptions from the draft and advantages in alimony, child custody, and child support (Goldberg 1976; Haddad 1979). One critical review of these texts summarized their claims as follows: > > Men, they say, are emotionally and sexually manipulated by women, forced into provider roles where they work themselves to death for their gold-digger wives, kept from equal participation and power in family life, and finally dumped by wives only to have courts and lawyers give all the property, money, and child custody to the women. (Messner 1986, p. 32) [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/189564 https://www.jstor.org/stable/189564
anigbrowl 7y ago
Not much (I'd estimate <20%) and no.
CydeWeys 7y ago
Earlier on in its history, the English Wikipedia (at least the cultural/administrative side of it) was a lot like this. The average age has increased over time as people have aged up, but when I was most involved around 2004 it was a pretty young crowd. I was in college at the time, and there were plenty of other college students involved and even some high schoolers.

mirimir 7y ago

I've watched the so-called alt-right develop online over the past 2-3 decades. Usenet, Live Journal, Encyclopedia Dramatica, the chans, etc. At least at the start, it was mostly about trolling and lulz. The anger of TFWNG. But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. That's frightening. There's a lotta young male angst out there.

smrtinsert 7y ago
This is literally connected to Steve Bannon.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Maybe so. I don't recall seeing his name, back in the day, but Wikipedia tells me that he's done lots that I would have agreed with. Biosphere2, for example, SF fan that I am. And that movie about Ronald Reagan. But the rest of it is batshit insane, like something out of Hunter Thompson. A right-wing Wavy Gravy.
ashleyn 7y ago
I can't quite tell if I simply grew out of racial humour or it's genuinely taken on this propagandist, explicitly political subtext it didn't have before. Whichever, I don't really appreciate it nowadays.
will4274 7y ago
> young male angst Tbh, it's this sort of thing that fuels the alt right. I'm a young male and I have some political concerns. I don't consider myself alt-right. But, when you dismiss my concerns as "angst" - I'm far more likely to continue talking to them than to you.
- mirimir 7y ago
  I apologize. I didn't mean to dismiss or criticize your concerns. So perhaps I ought to have used less loaded language. Something like being angry about how screwed up things are. Or however you might describe your political concerns. Indeed, it worries me how much such concerns are being dismissed and suppressed. Also, one of my favorite lines is "Still angry." And my favorite fantasy hero is Stover's Caine, who says that a lot.
- mmierz 7y ago
  I see people trot it out in online arguments as an excuse, or in think-pieces as a justification. But if white male identity politics is very important to someone, important enough to find common cause with literal neo-nazis, I think their conversion already happened.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Maybe. However, as TFA shows, "conversion" isn't irreversible.
faissaloo 7y ago
>But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. You can thank Stormfront forums raiding 4chan for that.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  Raiding is underselling it. It's significantly coordinated and thoroughly planned, long running campaigns to further radicalize the younger people who thought they were just getting "Edgy memes" on 4chan and haven't learned/realized yet that maybe, just maybe, making jokes about hanging black people because they are black isn't cool. /pol/ is a shitshow
dragonsngoblins 7y ago
> There's a lotta young male angst out there See this is exactly the problem the article talks about. A young man got so heavily invested in a community because they weren't dismissive of him. Maybe a lot of young men feel people are treating them dismissively and that a lot narratives other people espouse don't resonate with their personal experience. Maybe we should consider why this anger is so much more common in young men. The narrative of "equality looks like aggression when you've always been the one on top" doesn't really apply to kids who are only 13, because no matter who was on top it wasn't kids.
- mirimir 7y ago
  I'm not arguing that young men's anger is unjustified. But I am arguing that it's being dismissed by some, and exploited by others. And actually taken seriously by hardly anyone.
  - dragonsngoblins 7y ago
    Ah, my apologies. I see a lot of people reading articles like this and then talking about how young men's anger is being exploited without ever really asking about why young men are angry and I guess I extrapolated a meaning from your comment that I shouldn't have
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    >There's a lotta young male angst out there. It's kinda odd, because nothing you say in this line is dismissive at all. But because of the everyday association with 'young male angst' that many encounter, merely mentioning it like this is enough to lead some to conclude you are being dismissive. Almost as if the concept has been put down so much that merely mentioning it has become a form of dismissive slang.
wutbrodo 7y ago
This is a bit tangential, but you sharing your experience with the term before it became widely-known reminds me of something interesting about the way we group and label ideologies. I still remember 5+ years ago having periodic exposure to the term alt-right and having it more or less exclusively refer to relatively languid writings like Mencius Moldbug and NRx[1], in sharp contrast to the rowdier, meme-ier aesthetic it has today (eg /r/The_donald, from what little I've seen of it). I didn't see it come to refer to white-supremacy and other more well-known forms of the far-right until Hillary Clinton made the term a household name. After that point of course, it was a self-fulfilling Schelling point that coalesced around what she said it was: white supremacists et al flocked to it, and everyone not willing to be associated with them had to stop associating with the term, now that "everyone knew" what it referred to. Fascinating dynamic. (Not that I'm suggesting that she created the movement, but rather that from my skewed sample, it seems that she made the _term_ well-defined, by bringing it into the limelight). OTOH, this may have been a consequence of the fact that I had little exposure to chan or white supremacist subcultures et al and lots of exposure to often-iconoclastic longform blogs talking about every random topic, including politics. It's entirely possible that my sample of encounters with the term describes my filter more than it does the term. It's a fascinating window into language, to see a term become widely-known, and by doing so, change its meaning. It's particularly interesting that it's difficult to know how close to how far off you were in your role as one of the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Thanks for sharing your data point! [1] I'm referring to the aesthetic and energy here, not the content, which wasn't quite "languid..".
- mirimir 7y ago
  Just to be clear, it didn't call itself the "alt-right" back then. GamerGate was a turning point, I think. And yeah, it hit mainstream in the 2016 US presidential cycle. But until maybe 2015, I really had no clue that this was a political thing.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Oh haha, ok. Then never mind, my comment is somewhat irrelevant
bifrost 7y ago
I think you're spot on here. I always saw a lot of one-upsmanship in terms of harassment and being offensive, but eventually it got real. A friend of mine jokes that "weev won the election" and I'm not sure how wrong he is.

sushisource 7y ago

Fascinating question. I certainly wouldn't be surprised at all if they account for a substantial portion of online participants, but I don't know of any data on the matter.

razakel 7y ago

It should also be noted that the far-right does actually have a high number of paedophiles in senior positions. Shall we see what Milo has to say on the subject?

XaoDaoCaoCao 7y ago
I'm sure beyond the curtain, you'll find a disproportionate amount of psychopathy and malingant paraphilias in senior positions of any political spectrum. The wolves of politics don't thrive in virtue...

KODeKarnage 7y ago

Almost every "movement" is a teen movement. They're the ones who feel most passionate about, well ... anything, the ones who have had the least life experience countering what's being "revealed" to them, the ones with time on their hands, the ones with few other distracting responsibilities, and the ones most likely to believe in simple solutions to problems they don't fully comprehend. Teens are the ideal foot soldiers for any movement. Yes, on both sides.

iron0013 7y ago

Regardless of how it started, it’s seemed pretty clear to me that the alt-right has been a very deliberate vehicle for the radical right to recruit young people for quite some time now.

woofie11 7y ago
The damning thing is the alt-right is very occasionally right. This one stuck out at me: > I trained myself to freeze my facial expression into something neutral so that when I countered Sam’s remarks—“Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective. A big chunk of the alt-right is precisely divorced dads drawn in, or people drawn to their stories, and the insane racist, sexist, and other baggage comes along. Much of the far-left is precisely people drawn to horror stories from LGBTQ members or African Americans who join a community and bring along similarly insane baggage for the ride. I'm pretty convinced that unless the left manages to find a way to dive into alt-right ideology, with an open mind, and bring in the very few sane pieces, and change their opinions about the places that their reasoning is wrong, the alt-right will be able to keep recruiting.
- darpa_escapee 7y ago
  > “Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective. Except that feminism actively derides both the gender norms that say mothers are better caregivers and the US court system's bias against fathers in child custody rulings. There is literally decades of literature and other sources on these points. A old, common talking point and accusation is that feminism is equivalent to female supremacy, and antifeminist groups recruit men who feel emasculated by women[1]: > A second set of texts presents varieties of the contemporary masculinist response. Like its earlier incarnation, contemporary masculinist response is split between efforts to dislodge women's supremacy in the private sphere and support for men who are "wounded" in the struggle to exude an aura of masculinity in the public sphere. > Men's challenges to women's perceived parental monopoly come from men's rights groups such as the Coalition for Free Men, Men's Rights International, and Men Achieving Liberation and Equality (MALE), as well as numerous fathers' support groups. These groups often deny that men have power in society, arguing that male supremacy is an illusion, along the lines of the illusion of the chauffeur: "he's dressed in the uniform and he looks like he's in the driver's seat," noted Warren Farrell, "but from his perspective someone else is giving the orders" (cited in Woldenberg 1986, p. 10). Masculinist texts claim that women and men are "equally oppressed" (Baumli 1986) and rail against perceived institutionalized female privileges, such as exemptions from the draft and advantages in alimony, child custody, and child support (Goldberg 1976; Haddad 1979). One critical review of these texts summarized their claims as follows: > > Men, they say, are emotionally and sexually manipulated by women, forced into provider roles where they work themselves to death for their gold-digger wives, kept from equal participation and power in family life, and finally dumped by wives only to have courts and lawyers give all the property, money, and child custody to the women. (Messner 1986, p. 32) [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/189564 https://www.jstor.org/stable/189564

anigbrowl 7y ago

Not much (I'd estimate <20%) and no.

CydeWeys 7y ago

Earlier on in its history, the English Wikipedia (at least the cultural/administrative side of it) was a lot like this. The average age has increased over time as people have aged up, but when I was most involved around 2004 it was a pretty young crowd. I was in college at the time, and there were plenty of other college students involved and even some high schoolers.