It just makes more sense and seems less online than vidya games, also that was the year I started avoiding comment sections cause of all the racism
I don't think you can really pinpoint a "beginning" for American fascism. It's been here all along. You may have just noticed it then. The "alt-right" is a term that was coined by Richard Spencer in 2010 but even then it was just one of many attempts to rebrand fascism. I would highly recommend checking out the book Bring The War Home by Kathleen Belew.
It’s been here all along.
FFS this needs repeating over and over again. A lot of people think Hitler started it all, but his work is literally a fanfiction rip off of the United States.
A lot of people think Hitler started it all, but his work is literally a fanfiction rip off of the United States.
More people need to learn this. They also need to take a more critical eye towards what the USA's interest in occupying Europe and having a foothold in asia against communism was.
Some scholars point to the KKK as the first fascist organization
Robert Evans' The War On Everyone is a really good summary since I can't find a free source for Bring The War Home, they have a lot of overlap but the latter is much much more thorough. Here's a good interview from Sam Seder with Kathleen Belew.
Thanks for that! I've enjoyed RE for years but I didn't know he has an audiobook.
Yes, that's definitely true, but American fascism has always had distinct "flavors" some more noxious than others, like I remember the bigotry of the post-911/Iraq War era even as a kid, and saw how that morphed into the new Tea Party flavor after 2008
2001-2008, 2009-2011, 2012-2015, and 2016-present seems to me like a reasonable breakdown of the majors trends in American fascism, each one triggered by new events that pierced the cultural membrane
Even "white power" was a slogan adopted as a reactionary response to black power movements beginning in the 60s. That and white Christian nationalism are the earliest origins of the modern organized militant racist movements we see now. Seriously though check out that book, I've done a lot of reading on this specific topic trying to understand how we got where we are (and how one of my friends became a Nazi) and while I knew a lot of the broad strokes Belew is very thorough and it includes a lot of details I had not found elsewhere.
I think it's important to try to figure out the distinct forms and origins of the different kinds of fascism we see in america. To truly defeat an enemy, you have to understand their history, ideology, motivations, and concerns. nwoing what caused different people to be actively fascist rather than passively accept fascism will make it easier to know how to deradicalize them or fight active radicalization.
That's why I recommend reading that book. It details the history and evolution of American fascism.
If you're gonna place the foundation of the alt-right as a cultural phenomenon before gamergate then you gotta at least go back to the 2008 election. I watched Stormfront's membership at least double in the hours after Ocrumbo won.
But as Nakoichi said, the term itself goes back to 2010.
:obama-drone: is the best answer here, for a few reasons.
People talk about Obama breaking chuds' brains, and that's exactly what happened -- the very existence of a popular, charismatic, highly-educated black president was one of the biggest imaginable contradictions to white supremacy, whether conscious or unconscious. His victory was so overwhelming that you had overconfident libs talking about "permanent majorities" in Congress, and the looming shift away from a white-majority voting base made that as plausible as it could ever be. Further, the fact that the neocons couldn't stop Obama (and the disastrous end the the Bush administration more generally) meant that they could no longer be trusted to maintain existing power structures or deliver any of the associated benefits to their base.
So the right needed a new strategy, which led to a bunch of novel right-wing experiments, including the alt-right.
Yeah I was going to say the tea party shit under Obama was the start but Nakoichi is right.
Roissy/Heartiste, Roosh, and Cernovich all started posting around 2007, and they've been at least as influential as GamerGate.
Gamergate was much more global and specifically targeted the young gamer crowd- you could immediately see a huge right-wing lurch in gamer culture
Most of us are overly online nerds which is why it stuck out to us so much
Yeah, the global spread of gamergate is a delayed reaction but when it made landfall, it hits hard. In facebook days in the SEA internet circle around 2016-2017 the internet landscapes changes drastically from mostly chill internet people into incel shitheads. Another example when in America weebs have always been shit since before 2014, I think Indonesian weebs only becomes chuds during the Trump years.
I certainly think it's a big one. Personally, I would also add that the refugee crisis(es) in Europe that happened around that time and a little after were also huge. While the alt-right has gone mainstream, it definitely started out in the white nationalist / stormfront circles. For Europeans, it's obvious how that would become a starting point for the rise of the alt-right. And in the US, white nationalists here pay close attention to European news, and I would go as far as to say that in my observation, they care even more about what happens in Europe vis-a-vis race issues than they do the US.
Yeah, this I noticed is when Atheist circles started to go really fashist when it was just standard NeoCon, which led me to have a weird Islamophobic phase because I was an internet atheist at the time (still am atheist tho, just a socialist)
Don't sleep on Dark Money involvement as well. Koch brothers and their ilk were still spending a lot of money on think tanks and non-profits before the tea party came onto the scene.
America has always had a deep-seated racist core, they just concealed it behind a thin veneer of liberty and prosperity like how a Tootsie pop conceals that vile waxy blob behind that sweet candy outside
The emergence of the alt-right is merely the result of the failure of neoliberal policies to address even the barest minimum of human needs
Just like how the Great Depression led to the emergence of the Nazis and other assorted flavors of Fascism, so too has the last 60 years led to now
The internet just makes it easier for those types to be irritating at all times instead of just when the ACLU helps them do parades
I think the right initially started to change when Bush fell out of favor and Obama got elected. The 2008 financial crisis also probably influenced this. Seems like fascist behavior stepped up a notch after traditional conservatism failed and an uptake in explicit racism filled the void.
I probably should have used the term "reached critical mass" instead of "began" c'est la vie
I knew a guy that defended Zimmerman because he thought Zimmerman was a cop in training and then upon finding out he was wrong changed his opinion 0%. There was definitely the early inklings of Blue Lives Matter bubbling up in the discourse, but a lot of it was the media reframing the story towards it about Martin being black as a way of avoiding talking about that the original protests began in response to the local police flat out letting Zimmerman off the hook from the very beginning.
Two sides of the same coin. Both events served as recruitment drives for fascists.
