They're frozen earlier in my opinion, Gamegate was simply the rollout of the more populist forms of NRx philosophical frameworks, which developed in response to the tech crash and the credit crunch invalidating Libertarianism and Republican Evangelicalism.
So I'm gonna take a standard explanation, when the PB is under stress, Chud ideologies grow. This means as the Covid crisis deepens we'll see new stuff develop.
And I think we are, We're seeing the beginning of a new one in the Anti-Vax movement as the Alt-Right attempt to co-opt and absorb individualist anarchist and left-lib tendencies without strong socialist groundings. On the other side, the TERF movement is trying to pull away nominally left-leaning people with the appeal to squick that characterised anti-irish/italian/black/brown/LGBT/etc movements. It's hard to remember how split the Left was over AIDS, but it wasn't good, and many on the "conservative" side ended up founding Spiked and other proto NRx/Alt-Right movements.
Note how these are movements with far more offline presence and holds on the establishment. It's deeply concerning.
It's almost as if you ground your political tendencies around individual freedom as opposed to collective labor, it lands you with strange bedfellows.
The Petit Bourgoisie. Your local chud car salesman or techbro grifter basically.
The peanut butter supply chain. It's left the jelly industry in shambles.
woppa! woppa! woppa!
I scream into the mic as I spin furiously with my arms out.
I think if you've seen it all then you can spot them for yourself. A perfect example is "let's go Brandon"
The strategy/tactics don't change just some of the words. Cultural Marxism is another example.
Hell Qanon is just a rehashing of the protocols of the elders of zion.
This is something that I'm still working on a longer effort post on but the major evolutions have occurred as it pingponged between the US and Europe.
The concept of manifest destiny was itself rooted in early notions of white supremacy and European colonialism
The first modern fascists were people like Leopold, the "founding fathers", Cecil Rhodes, etc. The Nazis were inspired by eugenics and race science as well as the aforementioned colonizers and the ideas of American exceptionalism (which was and is just white supremacy) manifest destiny, and Jim Crow laws.
As we can see now post WW2 and especially post Vietnam war the American far right has, in turn, taken inspiration from and admiration of past Nazi groups. Azov Battalion is another example of fascism mutating within various cultures.
I don't see them as "plays" but "flags" to advertise to others what club they are a part of.
Like, biker clubs with their leather jackets covered in patches. Usually those patches are there to look cool, they're supposed to mean something if you're "in the know".
So, I'm thinking these things are more like a "wink and nod" to potential allies/confederates that might not be vocal about which side of things they are on in the same way that wearing a rainbow flag pin nowadays or a highly visible safety pin used to be.
Worth pointing out that the 👌 was in use among fascist prison gangs long before the "4chan psy-op"
The whole point of the 4chan "prank" was to mainstream the signal to the public, and it worked.
Are the Let's Go Brandon people really the same crowd as your average online chud? I thought the former were exclusively American, slightly more offline GOP-voting Trump rally attender types, where as the latter are alienated single white guys aged 15-35 who are into video games and hentai from across the world
I was under the impression the influx of boomers on 4chan was a relatively recent phenomenon (2016-ish?)
I know, I was using boomer in its internet slang sense to mean "old person"
From what I recall hearing, there was an influx of distinctly Facebook-style boomer posters onto 4chan in the past five years who were very much not steeped in chan culture and hated by the natives
Wasn't the big movement towards 4chan by boomers and other oldies entirely a function of Qanon? Since Qanon radicalized a whole bunch of people via Facebook, and only later started banning them, they ended up going somewhere "uncensored", where nobody minded their insane ramblings. I very distinctly remember a few posts from theDonald or some other Reddit shithole, where they were talking about their 70+ year old relatives who lived in the middle of nowhere, who would go to the local library and demand that librians help them get on 4chan, so that they could see the latest Q post.
Hard to tell. They're heavily censored, so honestly they're pretty hard to find these days. Where do you get their stuff from?
I have some theories.
The mass adoption of new right wing tactics is driven by material changes. The largest driver of this are the boom and bust cycle of capitalism as a response to financial crises. When crises occurs new policy is required and when new policy is required it throws into whack the balancing of the contradictions that former policy was achieving to sustain the ruling class.
Major strategy changes begin development following a new financial crisis and then begin implementation after a year or so. It then takes several years to find its feet as it goes through many revisions before finally figuring out a way to explode into popular usage. In this respect they go through a process of testing a tactic and revising it over and over again until they find the right way to make things work.
Covid has been a change in material conditions changes that required new policy though, so I agree with others suggesting that what we're seeing right now with the growth of the anti-vax movement is a major strategy change in the right. I do not think that it has fully formed yet though, it is still going through waves of testing what works.
All chud and chud related playbooks are out-stemming from base reactionary language and thought that has existed since ur-fascism. Because it only reacts to trends it can only create playbooks based on or around reacting to or co-opting parallel offensive statements. Because of this base way of building outrage it means that there is no actual growth outside of going "ewwww gross" or using offensive language to "trigger the sjws/cucks/libs/whatever".
It's the only value chuds have since they probably aren't organ donors. Finding some new Willy Wonka-ass way to throw rocks at the monkey until it does something.
It's kinda running out of steam though. They're not gonna get any more libs with that kind of rhetoric.
They're gonna have a field day once climate refugees start amassing at the border though.
Unfortunately they don't need to update their playbook because it works, but because it doesn't matter. As the dominant class they can play a shit game and still win easily. Meanwhile we gotta play perfect, and even then, if the material conditions aren't right, we can still 'lose.'
Conservatives not being progressive with updating their language? :shocked-dino:
there have been significant, if mostly aesthetic developments in far right culture even within the past 3 years. it may not appear so to normal people who aren't watching closely, but right small-government libertarianism is waning in popularity as an ineffective compromise with the liberal majority in favor of an explicitly religious minoritarian "trad" conservatism. gamergate itself began waning in popularity after the first year, and now the adherents to that kind of mewling nerd identity politics form a small but obnoxious bloc on social media primarily. the ones who didn't realize the whole thing was bogus mostly decided that trying to simply consume their children's toys in peace wasn't an option as long as there was a conspiracy of [insert usual suspects here] trying to destroy all that is good and noble in the world.
