Some thoughts on Alt-right Trolling.

[JHan]

23. Good points.

Feelings of isolation are normal for young people. I feel it, felt it when I was a teen. Found healthy outlets to express whatever frustration I had. Even in gaming I was careful about the guilds I joined. I started to game when I was 8, joined MMORPGs ( Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) when I was 12. The gaming guilds I always had a mix of people.

But I also saw the emerging affinity for right-wing ideology in chat rooms. Some players felt they were being "edgy" by saying sexist and racist things. Anti-political correctness fueled their desire to be rebels bucking the status quo.

We also can't ignore how successful Breitbart propaganda became. Bannon's organization hugely impacted a lot of white males ( even some conservative non-white people) I've known, in sinister ways. The tool is fear - whip people up with fear and this can pollute the minds of even the well-educated.

We can even trace it back to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, where they managed to equate truth with falsehoods and equate facts with conspiracy theories. The inevitable result was "alternative facts". This is a powerful concept for anti-establishment types who don't trust establishment publications or suspicious of authority in general ( David Brin has a great blog post about this ) If you can reconfigure reality with a set of alternative facts and lies, it's easy to exploit confirmation bias and create silos of disinformation, attracting discontented sorts who want to lash out against society. In the process, they become devoted to these alternative facts, and institutions which propagate them, such as Breitbart. They cut themselves off from any other information source, and absorb more information to confirm their perspectives. The further they isolate themselves from the real world, the more vulnerable they are to propaganda.

Breitbart whipped up fears of a Mexican and Muslim invasion, also fears of a black vs white "race war" which has been around for over 50 years. The publication also allied itself with Republican interests ( naturally) because of "conservative" delusions about the job market and immigration. Underpinning the modern expression of "conservatism" birthed as a backlash against civil rights is an aggrieved sense of entitlement which plays on ethnic resentment ( or white fragility). For average Republicans who feel the effects of bad "conservative" policies, they can't get past the manipulation of racial resentment to focus on ways Republicans game the system to their disadvantage.

To ensure that they can continue gaming the system, they wage a war on reality, try to legitimize historical revisionism, a whole new political reality driven by fear and false narratives. Disenchanted, angry, antisocial white males are ripe for the picking in this project.