Breitbart’s former executive chairman Steve Bannon offered a nuanced take on the alt-right to the Wall Street Journal, defining it as, “Younger people who are anti-globalism, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment.”25 Unfortunately, nuance doesn’t play well in the mainstream media. Breitbart was repeatedly pigeonholed by the press as an “alt-right” platform. Yes, Breitbart, where virtually the entire management team and most senior editors are Jewish, the same Breitbart that publishes the Breitbart Jerusalem vertical, is supposedly a platform for a movement that, according to the mainstream media, hates Jews and Israel.
The media’s ultimate target was the incoming Trump administration, which is why they stepped up their attacks on Breitbart after Steve Bannon was appointed to the campaign team. Huffington Post and The Intercept published mind-bending “explainers” on how Bannon was somehow both anti-Semitic and pro-Israel at the same time. According to The Independent, Bannon was an “alt-right media baron” with “the ear of the president.” According to the LA Times, the alt-right was actually “Steve Bannon’s fringe brand of conservatism.”
Once again, the Fake News Media displayed its talent for spinning a web of lies across multiple publications.
But this was 2016, a year that unlike any other proved just how absurd, powerless, and morally bankrupt the press had become. Donald Trump ignored the media pressure and named Bannon his Chief Strategist.
THE FRINGE TAKES OVER
Alt-right is dead. It was killed by the media.
You see, if you call something neo-Nazi long enough, it will invariably attract actual Neo-Nazis and—this may surprise you—scare off normal people.
The alt-right has always had a fringe element of Reich-loving basement-dwellers who describe the Holocaust as a “Holohoax” and want to ban “race-mixing.” When Bokhari and I wrote our alt-right guide, these were just one of many factions in it, alongside dissident intellectuals, taboo-breaking kids, and instinctive social conservatives.
An Israel-supporting former Tea Party member was, in those days, just as likely to be drawn to the alt-right as a Richard Spencer devotee, because it was the most exciting, dynamic, and effective right-wing movement to emerge since the Tea Party. Even leftist outlets like BuzzFeed acknowledged its power to dominate the internet and influence the news cycle.
One week in September, shortly after Hillary Clinton read out several of my headlines in a speech on the alt-right, the national broadcast media spoke of little besides Pepe the Frog. Pepe, for the uninitiated, is a cartoon frog from a web comic that went viral in the mid-noughties. Originally used as a reaction image to signify a poster’s emotional response to something (there are “Sad Pepes, Happy Pepes, Angry Pepes and Smug Pepes—a lot like emojis), the frog inexplicably evolved into something of a mascot for the alt-right and for Trump supporters.
Following the classic media playbook of “if you don’t understand it, call it racist,” the media branded this innocent cartoon frog a “symbol of white supremacy.”
We should give thanks to NPR, CNN and the Southern Poverty Law Center for identifying the real causes of racial tension in America. It isn’t terrible schools, or black fatherlessness, or constant race-baiting from hucksters like Al Sharpton. No. It’s a cartoon frog.
If you’re wondering why largely apolitical trolls are attracted to the alt-right, this is it—nothing tickles them more than getting the entire world to discuss one of their memes and desperately try to make sense of it. Double points if it makes people angry and they start calling it names on cable news!
Thanks to the willingness of old-school conservatives to march in lockstep with the mainstream media, the alt-right gradually came to be dominated not by friends of Pepe, but by actual white nationalists. A turning point came shortly after Donald Trump’s election victory, when Richard Spencer encouraged a room full of his supporters to “Hail Trump,” which about three people promptly did—with so-called “Roman salutes.”
Even nominal white identitarians like Paul “RamZPaul” Ramsey decided they’d had enough with the movement after that, and promptly disavowed it.26
It increasingly looks like the only people left in the alt-right movement are Holocaust-deniers, Richard Spencer fans and Daily Stormer readers. If that’s the case, I want nothing to do with the movement—and, as I’ve made clear, the movement wants nothing to do with me. Still, I can guarantee CNN will continue to refer to me as the alt-right’s leader anyway.
The tragedy of the alt-right is that it has some legitimate grievances: demographic transformation, popular anti-white rhetoric, affirmative action, identity politics for some but not others and enforced diversity, to name just a few. But the alt-right won’t continue to receive attention for these things. It will continue to be painted as another word for neo-Nazi.
Pepe, I am happy to report, has escaped the redefinition of “alt-right” mostly unscathed, and is still a mascot on college campuses, where he is used as a symbol of dissidence and resistance to progressive Left orthodoxy.
If leftists continue to ignore sensible moderates, like me, the frustrations that animate alt-righters will grow stronger. There is no rampant anti-Semitism in America today—except from Muslims—and there is no widespread white nationalist movement. But one day there might be, if the media keeps calling people like me “white supremacists” because they can’t work out how to beat a gay version of Anna Nicole Smith in an argument about campus rape culture. Kimmie!
3
WHY TWITTER HATES ME
In May 2016, Facebook was embroiled in that year’s second-biggest tech controversy. The first was my suspension from Twitter. But more about that in a bit.
Facebook had been caught in a lie: its “Trending News” feature, ostensibly designed to provide users with a list of the most popular topics being discussed on the platform that day, was being manipulated.
Despite heralding a new age of free, unfiltered information in its early days, the differences between new media and old media were not so great after all. Both were spoon-feeding information to their readers, deciding for the public what they should and shouldn’t see.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
In the early years of Facebook, the idea of an editor deciding what information you most needed to see was laughable. Equally, there was no algorithm deciding who saw what posts, when, and where. The system was simple: users followed other users, and saw a list of their posts, updated in real-time. Beyond the block button, there was no filtering. If your friend made a post at 6:15 PM, you saw it at 6:15 PM. The present system, where Facebook chooses what you see, when you see it, and how you see it, is a radical departure from its early, democratic ideals.
Facebook says their Trending list is meant to highlight “major events and meaningful conversations;” politically neutral metrics. But it’s not hard to predict what will happen when a company in one of the most progressive industries (tech), located in the most progressive city in America (San Francisco), trusts its staff (censors) to implement policies neutrally.