CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The alt-right and appropriation

The term ‘alt-right’ was popularised by the American white-nationalist leader Richard Spencer, who achieved a degree of international notoriety when, after the 2016 election, he urged his saluting followers to perform a ‘Heil Trump’. Stylistically, Spencer differentiated himself from other American fascists. He wasn’t a tattooed skinhead; he prided himself on his fashion, his elocution, and his perfectly coiffured hair. Moreover, he harboured intellectual aspirations, completing a masters degree and then enrolling for several years as a PhD student at Duke University.

Spencer’s media profile never correlated with his actual political influence, with his racist thinktank the National Policy Institute remaining very much a fringe outfit. Nevertheless, Spencer mattered as one of a number of figures who helped create a sense of radicalism around the 2016 result. He also illustrated, with particular clarity, the growing willingness of the far right to adopt, either explicitly or implicitly, ideas associated with the delegated and smug politics of the left, something that would become very important for Trumpism.

In November 2015, a minor furore erupted when the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Students with Disabilities decided to discontinue classes in yoga on the basis that they were culturally appropriative. Yoga, explained a representative of the centre, came from ‘cultures that have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and Western supremacy’, and that made their presentation outside such a context problematic.1

Predictably, the students’ decision ended up in the media around the world, lambasted by conservatives as another instance of political correctness gone mad. Yet, in the midst of the usual outrage, the Ottawa activists received an endorsement from an unexpected (and no doubt unwelcome) source: Richard Spencer.

The bizarre intervention — an avowed bigot supporting anti-racists — made, on its own terms, a kind of sense, though an explanation requires an extended detour into the politics of ‘cultural appropriation’.

Throughout 2014 and 2015, progressive activists had been agitating against attendees at American music festivals wearing so-called ‘tribal headdresses’. The semiotics of faux-Indian costumes (invariably based on old-fashioned movie tropes) were obvious — a college student camping out for a festival donned a headdress and painted his face because, consciously or not, he associated Native American culture with the free life of the ‘noble savage’.

In this context, the outfits were clearly racist, since they reinforced stereotypes about oppressed people. Yet many activists — and festivals — explained their opposition to the headdresses not by invoking racism, but, like the students at Ottawa, by denouncing ‘cultural appropriation’.

As with many ideas associated with identity politics, ‘cultural appropriation’ meant different things to different people. The legal scholar Susan Scafidi provided the most widely cited gloss. For her, cultural appropriation entailed ‘taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artefacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.’2

The festival fans were not Indigenous. This meant that, by wearing the costumes, they were using something that was not rightfully theirs, just as the Canadian yoga practitioners were doing with their classes.

The term ‘cultural appropriation’ spread because it described an obvious (and obviously pernicious) phenomenon, in which art and culture associated with the powerless and the oppressed became the plaything of the wealthy and the privileged, who generally enriched themselves through its use. Jazz, blues, rock, hip-hop: many African-American masters of these genres lived and died in poverty, even as second-rate white imitators grew tremendously wealthy using their material.

Yet the example of popular music also illustrated the difficulty with a simple, one-way model of appropriation. The theorist Andrew Ross offered many instances of the interpenetration of ‘black’ and ‘white’ modes. Ragtime, he says, was ‘a “clean” black response to white imitations of the “dirty” black versions of boogie-woogie piano blues’, while ‘the cakewalk’ was a blackface minstrel imitation of ‘blacks imitating highfalutin white manners’. The ‘moldy figs’ were ‘white middle-class jazz revivalists’ doing their best to sound like ‘wizened, old New Orleans musicians who were themselves trying to sound like the real thing for the benefit of their white discoverers’. Dizzy Gillespie mockingly copied the white players who were copying his imitations of white hipsters; Howlin’ Wolf got his name from mimicking Jimmie Rodgers, whose yodelling was influenced by African-American blues. When Elvis greased back his hair into a rockabilly quiff, he was, Ross said, ‘emulating the black “process” of straightening and curling, itself a black attempt to look “white”’.3

Influence, then, went both ways, even if racism ensured that the interactions did not benefit white and black musicians equally. The differing career trajectories of artists from different races could be explained, fairly obviously, by reference to the prejudices of the music industry and of those who consumed its output. So what was at stake in using ‘cultural appropriation’ rather than ‘racism’ to describe the treatment of musicians and other art-makers?

Scafidi’s definition rested on concepts taken from intellectual property law. They made unlikely foundations for radical theory, given that they presupposed a commodification normally associated with neoliberalism. Western art had, of course, been bought and sold for profit for centuries. But Scafidi was arguing to apply the same framework to collective forms (folklore, cuisine, or even cultures as a whole), something that in other circumstances the left would instinctively resist.

The problem wasn’t merely philosophical. If the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’ was to inform political practice, activists needed to differentiate legitimate and illegitimate claimants to ownership. But this was not easy. The assertion that white festival attendees should not appropriate native American costumes might have been relatively simple. After this, however, the complexities multiplied. Indigenous communities were, after all, as internally divided as any other population. Who, then, possessed the ‘right’ to speak for a culture as a whole?

In practice, the argument almost led to white liberals embracing ‘authenticity’, a deeply problematic (if not implicitly racist) term that obscured the social divisions and complex history of living cultures with an anthropological fetishisation of idealised tradition.

The furore at the University of Ottawa illustrated the difficulties. It wasn’t merely that assigning ‘ownership’ over yoga — something performed in various ways by millions of very different people — made little sense. It was also that the students’ assumption about yoga as an ‘authentic’ representation of traditions on the subcontinent was historically wrong. Modern yoga was, in fact, deeply influenced by the theosophy of the Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky.4 The very word ‘yoga’ was, according to Slate’s Michelle Goldberg, repurposed from a totally different context, deliberately chosen to describe a conscious synthesis derived from ‘facets of medieval tantric practices [combined] with elements from Indian wrestling exercises, British army calisthenics, and Scandinavian gymnastics’.5

The political relationship between colonialism and yoga was, accordingly, much more complex than the students’ statement implied. In fact, Indian nationalists saw the spread of their culture as a tool to undercut British rule. To this end, they sent the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda to America to teach, surmising (correctly) that Western interest in Indian traditions would build support for independence. They weren’t, in other words, passive victims but political agents, using yoga’s appeal to popularise their struggle.

None of this changed the reality that white people in the imperial centres made more money from yoga than practitioners in India did. But the disparity — a typical manifestation of the colonial relationship — didn’t, in the eyes of the nationalists, invalidate yoga’s spread. Quite correctly, they recognised that cultural isolation wouldn’t bring economic justice. This, they knew, depended on something more material — the political defeat of the British.

Why, then, did the student argument appeal to Spencer?

Spencer enthused about cultural appropriation because he recognised that the development of delegated and smug politics opened opportunities for the right. Unlike other far-right activists, he didn’t simply denounce multiculturalism. Instead, he said that he accepted cultural diversity — and that he advocated ‘identity politics for white people’.6

‘So long as we avoid and deny our identities, at a time when every other people is asserting its own, we will have no chance to resist our dispossession, no chance to make our future, no chance to find another horizon,’ he declared.7

In the wake of 9/11, according to Neil Davidson, outsider anti-elitism had implicitly adopted ‘a politics of identity’ based on what he called ‘that most pernicious of invented categories, the ‘white working class’.8 The original neoconservative presentation of workers as a patriotic, traditionalist counterweight to the effete and disloyal elites came, over time, to function as a right-wing mirror of progressive rhetoric, with pundits and politicians of the right presenting themselves as advocates for a ‘working-class’ identity (generally defined through an aggregation of cultural clichés pertaining to white, male, rural, blue-collar workers). They claimed authority through lived experience, prefacing their interventions with an invocation of a (real or invented) childhood in a hardscrabble neighbourhood. They demanded speaking rights on the basis of their background; they revelled in a dubious victimhood; and they embraced most of the rhetorical moves associated with a politics they claimed to despise.

As Phoebe Maltz Bovy recognised, conservatives thus drew from the same well that produced left-wing ideas of privilege.9 Yet, for the most part, they did so without realising how closely they mimicked what they derided, with, for instance, the conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly mocking identity politics — and then unselfconsciously claiming that his Irish-Catholic working-class background gave him an especial insight into the ‘real America’.

But Spencer was different. He understood the left’s rhetoric, and quite deliberately embraced it. For instance, when he advocated the creation of an ethnostate, a racially segregated homeland for white people similar to Rhodesia or apartheid-era South Africa, he eschewed the oratorical style associated with the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) (which had long put forward a similar demand). Instead, he drew parallels with the Zionist support for Israel as a Jewish ethnostate, and declared he wanted ‘a safe space for whites’.10 His co-thinkers in the European fascist group symptomatically named Generation Identity went so far as to describe their plans for white homelands as ‘ethno-pluralism’, an idea echoing progressive enthusiasm for an array of diverse but separate identities.

Spencer’s identification with the Ottawa students came from a similar place. By presenting yoga as an Indian practice that whites should not access, the students were accepting the existence of an ‘authentic’ Indian culture. This meant that they were also positing an authentic ‘white’ culture, and then insisting that whites should stick to that culture. Whether they knew it or not, they thus validated the key assumptions of Spencer’s ‘identity politics for white people’, expressing what he called a nascent form of racial consciousness.

‘[T]he reality,’ he said, ‘is that leftists are engaging in the kind of ideological project that traditionalists should be hard at work on — the formation of ‘meta-politics,’ consciousness that transcends and precedes any political issue. Put simply, thinking racially — and by that I mean thinking spiritually, historically, and mythologically.’11 Spencer’s enthusiasm for the left’s embrace of ‘cultural appropriation’ reflected his sense of the difference between such ideas and those once held by anti-fascist activists.

The socialists who had led the struggle against fascism after its emergence in the 1920s generally identified themselves as cultural eclectics who were positively enthusiastic about the intermingling of artistic tendencies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels celebrated the dissolution of national traditions as part of the process that gave their famous slogan, ‘Workers of the world, unite’ meaning.

‘The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property,’ they wrote. ‘National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.’12

It was the ideologues of fascism and national socialism, not their opponents, who advocated cultural authenticity. For the far right, protecting the boundaries of their particular culture was an important component of the racial and ethnic pride they valorised.

‘All great art is national,’ declared Hitler. ‘… Great musicians, such as Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, created German music that was deeply rooted in the very core of the German spirit and the German mind … That is equally true of German sculptors, painters, architects.’13

The same divisions emerged a generation later when post-war fascists advocated cultural purity in the face of anti-fascists supporting cosmopolitanism. In Britain during the mid-1970s, the National Front declared itself to be protecting the homogeneity of culture against a purported influx of foreigners. For a while, the fascists seemed on the verge of an electoral breakthrough in the UK. They were holding large rallies, and they were winning alarming support among young people and the musicians to whom those young people listened.

In response, leftists formed the Anti-Nazi League to confront the NF with both demonstrations and concerts.14 The massive multi-racial protests effectively isolated and demoralised the fascists. But they also led to a hybridisation of the music enjoyed by white and black youth. The experience led Bob Marley to sing about a ‘punky reggae party’ — a fertile collision between musicians ‘rejected by society’, regardless of their differing traditions.

As Shuja Haider pointed out, ‘cultural appropriation’ was coined during this time by intellectuals of the so-called Birmingham School to convey precisely the opposite of what the term signifies today.15 They wanted to celebrate the cultural borrowings through which subaltern groups subverted oppression, the different ways in which (mostly) young people repurposed traditions not their own. In the words of Steel Pulse’s singer David Hinds, the ANL and its Rock Against Racism events meant that ‘white people started going to gigs with black performers. People started to learn about different languages, dances, foods and cultures.’16

From Spencer’s perspective, the Ottawa students’ stance against yoga was something to be welcomed, simply because it made his job easier. The old Hitlerite argument about a biological Aryan supremacy had been widely discredited. Even claims about the superiority of ‘white’ culture sounded dubious, given the enthusiasm of most white Americans for cultural forms associated with African Americans. By contrast, the popularisation of ‘cultural authenticity’ by leftists — in the name of anti-racism, no less — provided a context in which the ideas of the far right could germinate and grow.

Again, Spencer’s importance pertained less to his actual influence than what he represented — a genuine fascist embracing key ideas associated with the left. Spencer’s personal extremism — his willingness, for instance, to espouse racial nationalism publicly — kept him on the margins of American politics, even during the Trump campaign.

But others were able to adopt a similar approach with far more success.

The unlikely process by which Donald Trump — an old, Republican billionaire — became an icon in a youthful counterculture centred on the far right deserves closer scrutiny, as an example of just what was possible. It’s best understood by looking at the evolution of Breitbart, the publication that, for a time, became the voice of Trumpism.

Andrew Breitbart — the founder of Breitbart — claimed to have begun life as a liberal before embracing the outsider anti-elitism he absorbed from Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Substantially younger than Limbaugh, Breitbart played a role in two early online successes, working with (the then Republican) Ariana Huffington to establish The Huffington Post and with Matt Drudge to build The Drudge Report. He developed his own profile as a Fox News commentator and Tea Party activist, before founding Breitbart in 2007 as a pro-Israel site influenced by (and linked to) European far-right populist movements.

From early on, Breitbart said he was committed to ‘the destruction of the old media guard’, challenging CNN and the ‘liberal media’ both stylistically (with a sophisticated understanding of the online space) and politically (with an aggressive outsider anti-elitism).17

But it was only after Breitbart’s death that his successor, Steve Bannon, declared the site to be ‘the platform for the alt-right’. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart cohered a younger, mostly male audience around a far-right version of identity politics — building, in particular, through a strange intervention into the world of video games.

Bannon, whom Breitbart had once described admiringly as ‘the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement’, had been a naval officer, investment banker. and Hollywood entrepreneur (he acquired the lucrative rights to the sitcom Seinfeld).18 At one stage, however, he had worked for the Hong Kong tech company Internet Gaming Entertainment. The experience, he later explained, exposed him to a gaming culture ‘populated by millions of intense young men’. The gamers were socially awkward, but they were also, Bannon concluded, ‘smart, focused, relatively wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them’. As executive chairman of Breitbart, Bannon reoriented his platform to these ‘rootless white males’.19

He was able to do so because of Gamergate, an intense culture war among video-game players.

In 2014, the ex-boyfriend of a games developer called Zoe Quinn had written a 10,000-word blog post about their breakup, which was understood by gamers congregating on Reddit, 4chan, and other platforms as establishing that Quinn had slept with a journalist from Kotaku in order to gain favourable reviews of her work.

In reality, Kotaku had never reviewed Quinn’s game Depression Quest, an idiosyncratic exploration of mental illness. Nevertheless, right-wing gamers, already convinced that feminists were imposing themselves on a supposedly apolitical hobby, became consumed with rage.

‘If I ever see you are doing a panel at an event I am going to, I will literally kill you,’ read one of the message sent to Quinn. ‘You are lower than shit and deserve to be hurt, maimed, killed, and finally, graced with my piss on your rotting corpse a thousand times over.’20

Trolls hacked Quinn’s social-media accounts. They published her address. They leaked nude photos of her across the internet. They harassed her on her home number. They called her father and other family members. They discussed means by which she might be driven to suicide.

The vitriol directed at Quinn soon extended to the feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian, developer Brianna Wu, and to many, many others — mostly, though not exclusively, women.

To outsiders, the intensity and scope of Gamergate was difficult to comprehend. Anita Sarkeesian had produced a Youtube series delivering a mild feminist critique of some popular video games. In response, angry men insisted that gaming wasn’t sexist — and then threatened to kill her.

Yet the history of computing — and computer gaming — revealed parallels between Gamergate and other manifestations of culture war. Perhaps surprisingly, women had played an important role in the early development of computing. In 1984, 37 per cent of American computer-science graduates were women — a figure that compared favourably with many other professions. Yet, from then on, the percentage dropped precipitously, even as other fields became more female-friendly. By 2016, it was only 18 per cent.

Many of the earliest games were gender-neutral — and some even featured female protagonists. But the industry endured a devastating crash in 1983. The recovery was led by Nintendo, which identified its games as toys, and marketed them overwhelmingly to boys.

NPR journalist Steve Henn suggested, counterintuitively, that the involvement of women also suffered when the first personal computers found their way into American homes: ‘This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.’21

Research by Jane Margolis among computer-science students at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s established that families were far more likely to purchase computers for sons than daughters, which meant that boys arrived at university with a degree of knowledge and experience that their female counterparts lacked.22

Technology — and tech culture — became thoroughly gendered. Yet this gendering was contradictory. The geek milieu of the 1980s and 1990s was unambiguously male, but the geeks themselves were depicted by broader society as feminised: effete, socially awkward loners embracing tech because they couldn’t play sport or get girlfriends.

The ubiquity of information technology in the 21st century changed the equation, in several interesting ways. Rather than an idiosyncratic hobby, computing became an everyday activity — and, moreover, for some entrepreneurs, a route to stupendous wealth. The growth of Silicon Valley mainstreamed geek culture, with comic books and sci-fi novels and role-playing games that had once been the preserve of self-identifying nerds reinvented as TV series and Hollywood blockbusters.

The critic Brendan Keogh noted:

Masculine computer culture thus occupies a complex position: a field traditionally inaccessible to those who aren’t male or upper middle class, but dominated by those teased and bullied for not being macho, has now obtained a privileged status. The hacker remains an alternative identity to the masculinity of sporting jocks, but it continues to exclude women, even as it has grown in power and influence.23

Yet material power and influence was by no means necessarily the majority experience. A tiny number of start-ups became hugely successful, but many tech aficionados remained unemployed or stranded in dead-end jobs. The resulting stew of resentments and entitlements manifested themselves on platforms like 4chan: a repurposed Japanese-style bulletin board created in 2003 by a 15-year-old called Christopher Poole.

Originally pandering to fans of anime, comics, games, and the like, 4chan’s inbuilt anonymity encouraged pornography, insider jokes, random arguments, and a distinctive culture. Dale Beran, an early user, suggested the site essentially invented the ‘meme’, popularised terms such as ‘win’, ‘epic’, and ‘fail’, established conventions for the use of gifs and images in messaging, and so left ‘a profound impression on how we as a culture behave and interact’. This impression was a decidedly mixed blessing, given the nature of 4chan, which was ‘a bullying and anarchic society of adolescent boys — or at least, men with the mindset of boys — particularly lonely, sex-starved man-boys, who according to their own frequent jokes about the subject, lived in their parents’ basement’.24

4chan also became synonymous with trolling — online pranks that were sometimes funny, sometimes strange, and often unbelievably cruel (such as the harassment campaign directed at the parents of a child who’d killed himself). Most obviously, trolling reflected aspects of the online experience that, as academic Andrew Jakubowicz put it, enhanced ‘the psychological dimensions of anonymity, disengagement, and dis-inhibition’.25 But the technology didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Rather, the internet developed in a dialectical relationship with a neoliberal economic system that it both served and shaped. As a result, 4chan absorbed the peculiar ethics of neoliberalism — in particular, a sense of the individual as entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions.

Grieving parents, for instance, attracted 4chan’s ire because trolls judged their mourning to be maudlin and phoney. In the online space, as in the marketplace more generally, losers — merely by being losers — deserved whatever they got. If you secretly feared that you might be among their number, the obvious way to protect yourself was by dishing out some spectacular punishment to others.

The 4channers might have been younger and more technologically adept than the traditional constituency of outsider anti-elitism. Yet, like Hanson’s ‘battlers’, basement-dwelling trolls felt themselves alone and subjected to forces they could not defeat. Like the Hansonites, they were deeply nostalgic, not so much for the society of the 1950s as for a tech culture they perceived as being under threat from women.

Not coincidentally, the main 4chan troll factory was called /pol/ (for politically incorrect). For the young men of 4chan, ‘political correctness’ manifested itself less through the actions of humanities academics and more in the form of games critics slating a title the 4channers particularly liked. But the structure of anti-PC was identical: a rejection of the progressives deemed to be censoring, castigating, or otherwise talking down to ordinary people.

Gamergate brought 4chan’s sensibility to a much wider audience. Gaming was, after all, an immensely popular hobby: according to a 2015 study, over 40 per cent of Americans gamed for at least three hours a week. Gamergate might have remained either invisible or incomprehensible to journalists from an older generation, but it resonated widely with those for whom computer games had become the pre-eminent cultural form.

Paradoxically, Gamergate could be understood as a backlash against precisely the popularity that made the whole fracas matter. Just as the middle-class white Trump voters yearned for a vanished American greatness, the male gamers aggrieved at Anita Sarkeesian wanted to protect a version of geekdom they associated with a time that had now passed. Beran noted that ‘these are men without jobs, without prospects, and by extension (so they declaimed) without girlfriends … [and] in the one space they feel they can escape the realities of this, the world of the video game, here (to them, it seems) women want to assert their presence and power’.26

It was easy, then, to dismiss, as many progressives did, Gamergate as a curious internet psychodrama, an extended tantrum that would inevitably end when male gamers acknowledged a changed world. Yet, like a nostalgia for white Australia, the male yearning for a vanished online space could be weaponised — and the person who recognised this was Milo Yiannopoulos.

Prior to Gamergate, Yiannopoulos was a relatively little-known provocateur working for Breitbart who’d previously lambasted gamers as ‘unemployed saddos living in their parents’ basements’.27 Nevertheless, he wrote a piece summarising Gamergate as a clash between ‘journalists and activists, who care more about gender politics than the video games they are supposed to be reporting on, and gamers, mocked, derided and bullied … but unbowed’.28

Most mainstream publications sympathised (for obvious reasons) with the women being harassed by the Gamergaters. Yiannopoulos, however, correctly concluded that he could attract clicks from the Gamergaters themselves. Later, Breitbart editor Alex Marlow subsequently attributed the growth of his publication’s younger demographic to the readers who arrived via Gamergate.29

But Yiannopoulos was interested in more than mere numbers. Perhaps better than anyone else, he recognised how the Gamergaters were deploying identity politics for the right.

Between August and September 2014, several review sites (Gamasutra, Kotaku, Polygon, and others) published articles arguing that the ‘gamer was dead’: that, because of the expansion and diversity of the gaming audience, no single idea of a player could be taken for granted. The outpouring of rage in response to this fairly anodyne suggestion lifted (or perhaps sunk) Gamergate to a new level. It also revealed how deeply invested right-wingers were in a ‘gamer identity’ — and the extent to which they shared ideas with the so-called Social Justice Warriors they derided.

Gamergaters might, and frequently did, denounce identity politics. But they also insisted that that a distinctive gamer culture existed, and was under threat. As their campaign against the SJWs escalated, they began to celebrate that identity. They wrote and published Gamergate songs, stories, and poems. They created the character ‘Vivian James’ (an auburn-haired woman wearing a headband with the 4chan logo) as a Gamergate mascot. They became obsessed with representation, complaining bitterly about how their ‘culture’ was portrayed in the media. In a typical post, the gamer behind The Ralph Retort, a blog, responded to a Gamergate-themed episode of Law and Order by huffing, ‘It definitely was offensive as fuck.’30

Most of all, they argued that those — like Anita Sarkeesian — who weren’t ‘real gamers’ had no right to speak about gaming. ‘[S]o many SJWs throw up their arms about cultural appropriation,’ one Gamergater wrote, ‘[but] it seems like they’re fine to do it when they believe they should have control of a culture … They aren’t part of the culture, they don’t understand the culture and as such they lash out and claim gaming is harmful or promotes toxic behaviour. Many SJWs just don’t get not everything is for them.’31

This was identity politics — but identity politics repurposed for the far right.

Pitching Breitbart to Gamergaters as a sympathetic outlet, Yiannopoulos deliberately appealed to the gamer identity, addressing his readers as if they belonged to a suffering minority.

‘If you have ever felt bullied,’ he wrote, ‘or victimised, or harassed, or marginalised — not by bullshit imaginary concepts like the “patriarchy” but by people who want to stop you expressing yourself and who call you a loser, a manbaby, a shitlord, a privileged cishet white male — then Milo Yiannopoulos is for you.’32

The rhetoric reflected the prevalence of identity politics, so ubiquitous as to be taken for granted by the right as well as the left. Yet, unlike an older generation of outsider anti-elitists, the trolls of Gamergate understood — and could exploit — the ideas developed out of the delegated politics of the left.

To counter progressive arguments about representation in gaming, right-wingers launched the #notyourshield, a hashtag under which social-media users allegedly belonging to minorities denounced the left and pledged their support for the status quo. A video-game trope didn’t, of course, become any less sexist because a female gamer said she liked it, nor less racist because of approval from a black gamer. Yet the Gamergaters knew that progressives (especially white, male progressives) would struggle to respond to conservative African-American women — which was why they assiduously manufactured sockpuppet accounts on 4chan and the similar 8chan.

A version of this tactic later became a part of Yiannopoulos’s own political persona. As he maneouvred himself into position as a spokesperson for gamers, he stressed — as per #notyourshield — that he was gay, of Jewish ancestry, and fond of sleeping with black men.

‘We might not look much alike, the average gamer and me,’ he wrote. ‘But, when you think about it, we’re natural ideological bedfellows — and we’ve both been cast out by the people who ought to have been our defenders …’

Yiannopoulos was, for a time, the most high-profile exponent of the troll sensibility that gave Trumpism its distinctive sheen. With speaking tours across American universities, he reprised the culture-war skirmishes out of which anti-PC emerged. He sought institutions in which the kind of speech codes that led to Nina Wu’s exclusion might be applied to him. Yet where Wu was banned for mocking ‘homos’, Yiannopoulos announced himself as a ‘Dangerous Faggot’ — and dared the left to exclude him.

He invited his fans to identify as oppressed, launching the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant, a college scholarship exclusively for white men. Like many Yiannopoulos initiatives, it came to nothing, with the fund never paying out. But that didn’t matter. Like the 4channers, and like a growing number of right-wing provocateurs, Yiannopoulos worried less about outcomes than the lulz — and the best lulz came from the reaction of your targets.

In May 2016, Yiannopoulos wrote enthusiastically about the support for Trump among 4channers and other trolls. ‘[W]hat begins on /pol/ and leaks out into Twitter,’ he said, ‘has a way of colouring media coverage and, ultimately, public perception, even among people who don’t frequent message boards.’33

This was pretty much what happened.

In her book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle made a comparison between the iconography of Obama’s first victory and that of Trump’s win eight years later.34 The 2008 campaign was associated with Shepard Fairey’s striking ‘Hope’ poster. Fairey’s depiction of Obama was the work of a talented professional designer. Though many progressives adopted it as a personal avatar, the image was very much an official one, endorsed and promulgated by the campaign.

By contrast, the image that defined the Trump election was the Pepe meme — the green frog used to identify the alt-right and, eventually, Trump supporters. Unlike ‘Hope’, Pepe, a character created by Matt Furie for his Boy’s Club cartoon, was rendered in a deliberately crude and childlike fashion. Furthermore, the Pepe memes were generated more or less spontaneously by Trump supporters (against the wishes of Furie), not by the Republican campaign itself.

In other words, in 2016, the Republican Party, an organisation not normally considered hip or edgy, had developed a genuine grassroots aesthetic, one that contrasted markedly with the bland, corporate imagery associated with Clinton.

The infrastructure of the Republican Party had not changed appreciably. Nor, indeed, had the voter base — or, at least, not as much as was commonly thought. Yet the election felt particularly shocking because of the vicious troll culture that Breitbart and other, similar platforms brought into the mainstream. Later, leaked emails revealed Yiannopoulos and his ghostwriter Allum Bokhari to have been corresponding with representatives of the major elements of the alt-right: the identitarians like Spencer; the strange tech-inspired autodidacts who developed their own anti-liberal theories of ‘The Dark Enlightenment’; the white nationalists associated with the American Renaissance; and overt Nazis such as the Daily Stormer’s Andrew ‘Weev’ Auernheimer.35

Echoes of those figures resonated throughout the campaign, with Trump and his family circulating 4chan-style material on Twitter and elsewhere. In August 2016, of course, Bannon himself went to work for Trump, an appointment that directly linked the future president with a publication that had promoted the far right and its newly weaponised version of identity politics.

Because both Bannon and Yiannopoulos were later discredited and marginalised, it’s easy to forget the cultural impact they had. In many ways, Gamergate should be understood not so much as anomalous but as exemplary, a paradigmatic example of how the far right can use culture war to develop online before bursting into the mainstream. The more recent emergence of the clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson as an alt-right hero followed a very similar pattern, with Peterson building his initial fan base on Reddit, YouTube, and similar platforms by appealing to angry young men who simultaneously embraced and abhorred elements of identity politics. Like more traditional outsider anti-elitists, such figures are liable to collapse as quickly as they rise. There will, however, always be more in the wings.