Kill All Normies

>It was amid this ironical in-jokey maze of meaning that the online culture wars played out, that Trump got elected and that what we now call the alt-right came to prominence. Every bizarre event, new identity and strange subcultural behavior that baffles general audiences when they eventually make the mainstream media, from otherkin to far right Pepe memes, can be understood as a response to a response to a response, each one responding angrily to the existence of the other. Trumpian meme-makers ramped up their taboo-breaking anti-PC style in response to gender-bending Tumblr users, who themselves then became more sensitive, more convinced of the racism, misogyny and hetero-normative oppression of the world outside of their online subcultures. At the same time, the ‘deplorables’, from the Trumpian trolls to the alt-right, view the Hillary loyalists – the entrenched identity politics of Tumblr and the intersectional anti-free speech campus left – as evidence of their – equally bleak view of a rapidly declining Western civilization, as both sides have become increasingly unmoored to any cultural mainstream, which scarcely resembles either bleak vision.

>The once obscure call-out culture of the left emanating from Tumblr-style campus-based identity politics reached its peak during this period, in which everything from eating noodles to reading Shakespeare was declared ‘problematic’, and even the most mundane acts ‘misogynist’ and ‘white supremacist’. While taboo and anti-moral ideologies festered in the dark corners of the anonymous Internet, the de-anonymized social media platforms, where most young people now develop their political ideas for the first time, became a panopticon, in which the many lived in fear of observation from the eagle eye of an offended organizer of public shaming. At the height of its power, the dreaded call-out, no matter how minor the transgression or how well intentioned the transgressor, could ruin your reputation, your job or your life. The particular incarnations of the online left and right that exist today are undoubtedly a product of this strange period of ultra puritanism. These obscure online political beginnings became formative for a whole generation, and impacted mainstream sensibilities and even language.

>Before the overtly racist alt-right were widely known, the more mainstream alt-light largely flattered it, gave it glowing writeups in Breitbart and elsewhere, had its spokespeople on their YouTube shows and promoted it on social media. Nevertheless, when Milo’s sudden career implosion happened later they didn’t return the favor, which I think may be setting a precedent for a future in which the playfully transgressive alt-light unwittingly play the useful idiots for those with much more serious political aims. If this dark, anti-Semitic, race segregationist ideology grows in the coming years, with their vision of the future that would necessitate violence, those who made the right attractive will have to take responsibility for having played their role.

>One of the things that linked the often nihilistic and ironic chan culture to a wider culture of the alt-right orbit was their opposition to political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, etc., and its encroachment into their freewheeling world of anonymity and tech. In the US, one of the early cases of orchestrated attacks against such encroaching women was aimed at Kathy Sierra, a tech blogger and journalist. Sierra had been the keynote speaker at South by Southwest Interactive and her books were top sellers. The backlash against her was sparked when she supported a call to moderate reader comments, which at the time was seen as undermining the libertarian hacker ethic of absolute Internet freedom, although it has since become standard. Commenters on her blog began harassing and threatening her en mass, making the now routine rape and death threats received by women like Sierra. Personal details about her family and home address were posted online and hateful responses included photoshopped images of her with a noose beside her head, a shooting target pointed at her face and a creepy image of her being gagged with women’s underwear. The personalized backlash against her was so extreme that she felt she had to close down her blog and withdraw from speaking engagements. When she explained on her blog why she had to step back from public life, writing that she was terrified that her stalkers might go through with their threats, it sparked a whole new wave of geek hatred against her.

>One can feel the life draining out of the body at the thought of retelling or rereading the story of the gamergate controversy, one which involved internal controversies, hit pieces, hate campaigns, splits and a level of sustained high emotion more fitting for a response to a genocide than a spat over videogames. But for the sake of introduction here is a synopsis, which will undoubtedly satisfy neither side. In the lead-up to the gamergate controversy, feminist games critic Anita Sarkeesian found herself at the receiving end of a hate campaign like the Sierra case, but this time involving hundreds of thousands of participants and a level of vitriol utterly baffling to those outside of the gaming world, which lasted for several years. Her offence was creating a series of YouTube videos introducing viewers to some elementary concepts from feminist media criticism in an accessible and pretty mild-mannered style.

>>130052516
>Her level of criticism, as a self-identified games fan and someone who sought to reform rather than censor games, would be considered quite normal in literary or film criticism. These other audiences and critics are used to debate and to a relatively civilized adult kind of discourse, in which one can describe an old Hollywood classic as sexist without doubting its aesthetic value and one can disagree without going straight to the rape and death threats. Her videos feature no calls for video games to be censored or banned. They also offer no criticisms more harsh than what you might read from other pop-culture critics like Charlie Brooker or Mark Kermode on some very obviously retrograde depictions of women in some video games. For this intolerable crime, Sarkeesian has endured years of jaw-droppingly dark and disturbing personal abuse. Typical online commentary has included things like: ‘I’ll rape you and put your head on a stick’, ‘It would be funny if five guys raped her right now’, ‘I violently masturbate to your face’ and the old 4chan standard ‘Tits or get the fuck out’. Her Wikipedia page was vandalized with pornographic images and hateful messages. There was also a campaign to mass report all of her social media accounts as spam, fraud or even terrorism.

>In an interview with Esquire, weev/Auernheimer, who has a swastika tattoo on his chest, explained his sensibility to the journalist: I’m at a restaurant with Auernheimer and his friend Jaime Cochrane, who is a softly spoken transgender troll from the group Rustle League, so-called because ‘that’s what trolling is, it’s rustling people’s jimmies’. They’re explaining to me their version of what trolls do. ‘It’s not bullying,’ says Cochrane. ‘It’s satirical performance art.’ Cyberbullies who drive teenagers to suicide have crossed the line. However, trolling is the more high-minded business of what Cochrane calls ‘aggressive rhetoric’, a tradition that goes back to Socrates, Jesus and the trickster god Loki, from Norse mythology. Auernheimer likens himself to Shakespeare’s Puck. Cochrane aspires to Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman. They talk of culture jamming, the art of disrupting the status quo to make people think. They talk of Abbie Hoffman.

>Gavin McInnes’ subscriber show on Rebel called How’s It Goin’, Eh? mixed politics and comedy. His free-to-view shows typically featured a 10-minute piece about current events in the culture wars. McInnes, who was born in England to Scottish parents, has a kind of South Park conservative political sensibility. He started his creative life in a punk band called Anal Chinook and now calls himself a ‘free-market capitalist’ and ‘anarchist’ with a somewhat unconvincing or at least conflicted moral conservative streak. He advocates porn abstinence and traditional marriage, despite using the kind of vulgar sexual language that many of his conservative role models would have had his show banned for in previous culture wars. His role as an editor at Vice led to him being referred to as one of the ‘primary architects of hipsterdom’, but he went on to make his name on the right through his anti-feminist arguments that life in the modern workplace had made women miserable and that the dominant media ideology teaches women to be fat, single and childless. He had to step down as chief creative officer of Rooster, an advertising agency start-up he cofounded, following the publication of an essay entitled ‘Transphobia is Perfectly Natural’.

>Lauren Southern, the other major star of Rebel who later went independent, rose to fame when she attended a SlutWalk in Vancouver with the sign ‘There Is No Rape Culture In The West’. She was perfect for Vox Pops as a telegenic young blonde woman with a sarcastic disapproving tone of voice. At another protest, Southern shouted ‘there are only two genders’, before a protester poured a container of urine over her head. Southern was also heavily involved in ‘The Triggering’ in response to International Women’s Day, in which anti-feminist Twitter users posted intentionally offensive content to assert their right to free speech online. At the time of writing, one reposted version of her protest footage that popped up in my YouTube recommendations called ‘Skeleton Warriors Piss On Your Free Speech – Lauren Southern Attacked’ had nearly 500,000 views. She has 235,000 followers on Twitter and occasionally appears on mainstream news media like Sky News, where she was kicked off live on air for saying: I don’t know why legal immigration even exists any more. I could just put on some bronzer, get on a dingy boat and show up on the border of Sicily or the beaches of Sicily with a Koran in hand and be accepted as an immigrant. Or go across the border with caracas and be accepted as an immigrant.

>Ben Shapiro was a key media figure to leave Breitbart over its flirtations with the anti-Semitic hard alt-right. Shapiro wrote that under Bannon’s leadership, ‘Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website… pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.’ This sparked an anti-Semitic hate campaign against Shapiro, which he strongly implied was actively encouraged by Milo. After his second son was born, Shapiro received tweets and comments with wishes that ‘all 4 of you will go to the ovens’. Among Milo’s many digs at Shapiro, he tweeted a photo of a black baby at him after his son was born and wrote, ‘Prayers to Ben who had to see his baby come out half-black. And already taller than he is!’ – a reference to his new status as a ‘cuckservative’.

>The conservative culture war of the 90s had tried to push back against the enormous gains of the cultural left over abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, evolution, family values, feminism, pornography and the Western canon. Buchanan’s style was more pugilistic than most of the Republican mainstream was willing to risk and his culture war speech remains an undeniably brilliant piece of writing and oratory, as well as one of the most important speeches in US history. The speech was a defense of Ronald Reagan and, after losing the presidential nomination himself, a defense of the Republican nominee George Bush senior. But primarily it was really a call to engage in a larger culture war: ‘There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.’

>Recent online culture wars have reopened many fault lines within the right as well as the left. Anti-Trump conservatives of today are deemed ‘cuckservatives’ by the alt-right, the passive cuckolding husband to the rapacious non-white foreign enemy at the gates. The neocon and old-fashioned Christian right is hated in this way by the alt-right for, in one way or another, failing to protect the nation aggressively enough, by playing too nicely and thus not being up to the job of defeating feminism, Islamification, mass immigration and so on. In stark contrast to the Pepe-posters and potty-mouthed Milo fans would be someone like British conservative columnist Peter Hitchens, for example, who called Trump ‘this yahoo, this bully, this groper, a man who threatened his opponent with jail… I loathe Mr. Trump for his coarseness, his crudity, and his scorn for morals, tradition and law.’ In this sense Trump remains closer to the sensibilities of Yiannopoulos and the trolling online right than he does to conservatism or to something like National Review magazine, founded by William F. Buckley, which came out against him. During his campaign whole cross-sections of conservatives came out as ‘Never Trump’.

>Yiannopoulos’s main enemy throughout his period of popularity in the US has been, above all else, feminism, so much so that he gained attention when he ran a quiz on Twitter asking his followers if they’d prefer to have (a) feminism or (b) cancer. Later, he adopted the slogan ‘Feminism is cancer’, which became available as a line of T-shirts. He regularly describes feminists as fat and his favorite choice of insult, ‘lesbianic’. Here, he and Buchanan would find some common ground, but Buchanan and his fellow culture warriors believed that women’s liberation and gay liberation were part of the same disease. This twin enemy loomed large in Buchanan’s culture-wars speech as a measure of the moral decline of US society. Wrongly regarding Hillary Clinton as a radical, as opposed to a thoroughly establishment baby boomer, he attacked her as well as Bill, saying: This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants.

>>130052982
>And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.

>There are many potential explanations for the emergence of a new right sensibility among a younger generation, which rapidly shifted the range of acceptable discourse further to the right than anyone could have imagined. One is that long before it bubbled up to the surface of college campuses, and even Twitter and YouTube, it developed, in oppositions to its enemy online culture of the new identity politics typified by platforms like Tumblr. They tried to move the culture in the opposite direction by restricting speech on the right but expanding the Overton window on the left when it came to issues of race and gender, making increasingly anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric normal on the cultural left. The liberal online culture typified by Tumblr was equally successful in pushing fringe ideas into the mainstream. It was ultra-sensitive in contrast to the shocking irreverence of chan culture, but equally subcultural and radical.

>Mainstream newsreading audiences were baffled when Facebook revealed it was offering over 50 gender options for its members to choose from in 2014 and around the same time the campus wars over safe spaces, trigger warnings, no-platforming and gender pronouns emerged. But the social media corporation was merely taking its cue from online subcultures that had been emerging for years before, and the youth political subcultures that had created them and emerged out of them. The main preoccupation of this new culture (the right named them skeletons and snowflakes, let’s call it Tumblr-liberalism) was gender fluidity and providing a safe space to explore other concerns like mental ill-health, physical disability, race, cultural identity and ‘intersectionality’ – the now standard academic term for recognition of multiple varieties of intersecting marginalizations and oppressions. While the roots of this whole political sensibility may be found in academia and activist culture, its emergence into the mainstream that led to Hillary using terms like ‘check your privilege’ and ‘intersectionality’ was the culmination of years of online development on Tumblr, in fan cultures, on previous platforms like LiveJournal and on a mixture of social media.

>One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,’ wrote French feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in 1949. By 1990, Judith Butler had taken this several steps further, or perhaps more literally, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, in which she argued that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality were entirely culturally constructed through the repetition of styled and cultivated bodily acts, which created the appearance of an essential ontological ‘core’ gender. By the early 2010s, Tumblr had put Butler’s theory into practice and created an entire subcultural language, set of slogans and style to go with it. The most marked preoccupation of Tumblr’s cultural politics has been identity fluidity, typically but not exclusively around gender. It was the subcultural digital expression of the fruition of Judith Butler’s ideas. For years, the microblogging site filled up with stories of young people explaining and discussing the entirely socially constructed nature of gender and potentially limitless choice of genders that an individual can identify as or move between.

The strangest feature of this online ‘call-out culture’ was this mixture of performative vulnerability, self-righteous wokeness and bullying. The online dynamics of this call-out culture were brilliantly described by Fisher as, ‘driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.’ I would add to this that the key driving force behind it is about creating scarcity in an environment in which virtue is the currency that can make or break the career or social success of an online user in this milieu, the counterforce of which was the anonymous underworld from which the right-wing trolling cultures emerged.

>To give one of countless examples of this simultaneous victimhood and callousness, in 2016 it was reported in the news that an alligator snatched a 2-year-old boy at a Disney resort in Florida and dragged him into a lagoon. Despite the father’s efforts to rescue him, the boy died – a devastatingly sad story to any normal mainstream audience. A Twitter user known on Twitter as ‘Brienne of Snarth’ with more than 11,000 followers and an influential Tumblr page criticized the grieving father of the toddler for his ‘white privilege’. Evidence of her online life conformed to all the hallmarks of the Tumblr style of identity politics and like many of the loudest callers out of white privilege turned out to be white herself. She wrote: ‘I’m so finished with this white privilege lately that I’m not even sad about a 2yo being eaten by a gator because his daddy ignored signs’ and ‘You really think there are no fucking consequences to anything. A goddam sign told you to stay out of the water in Florida. FUCK A SIGN.’ Mainstream audiences were outraged when the consequent Twitter storm was reported, and the alt-right and alt-light were sharing it as evidence of the modern left’s degeneracy, while in response many online Tumblr-liberals leaped to her defense.

>After the Orlando shooting, in which a man who pledged allegiance to Al Baghdadi had opened fire on a gay nightclub, millions rushed to Twitter, to publicly share their sadness and despair. In this moment of mass expression of pro-gay sentiment, this scarcity-creating purging process went into overdrive, to ensure that virtue could not be spread too thinly. One Twitter-famous intersectionalist admonished those who had called it the worst mass shooting in US history by reminding them that ‘the worst was wounded knee’. Other similar tweeters raged against the use of the term Latina/o instead of Latinx in the reporting, while still others made sure to clarify that it was the shooter’s mental illness, not his allegiance to ISIS and the caliphate, that caused the shooting. Not to be outdone, others then tweeted back angrily about the ableism of those who said the shooter had a mental illness. At one vigil to the atrocity where hundreds showed up, a young woman lashed out at the crowd: ‘There are so many white people here. That wasn’t a joke… Who are you really here for?’

>In 2015, Iranian socialist and feminist Maryam Namazie was invited to speak at Goldsmiths University, London. Because of her militant secularism and open apostasy as an ex-Muslim, a style that makes Western leftists uncomfortable, controversy followed. The Islamic Society objected to her presence on campus and when she spoke anyway, a gang of men from the society sat in the front row of her talk trying to intimidate her. They shouted over her, squared up to her, turned off her projector, turned off the lights and for much of the talk she had to shout in order to be heard over them. Video evidence of the talk shows a level of intimidation that would be unthinkable if Namazie or her Islamist intimidators were white and western, and yet she not only didn’t receive solidarity from her Wester comrades, but she was also further condemned and attacked by them over the incident.

>Goldsmiths Feminist Society came out in support of the Islamic Society against Namazie, and Goldsmiths LGBT Society released a statement in support of them also. To put in context those who the liberal students were defending at the expense of Namazie, the President of Goldsmiths Islamic Society, Muhammed Patel, was a supporter of hate-preacher Haitham al-Haddad, who in an article titled ‘Standing up against Homosexuality and LGBTs’ wrote, ‘In order to combat the scourge of homosexuality Allah has ordained us to speak out, and that we should co-operate with others in righteousness and God-consciousness.’

>This crop of forum dwelling-obsessives would be horrified to learn that the original men’s movement grew out of and alongside the feminist movement and the sexual liberation movement as a critique of rigid traditional sex roles, according to masculinities scholar Michael Kimmel. Men’s liberation later grew apart from the feminist movement as second-wave feminism became increasingly antagonistic towards men, criticizing men as a whole in its rhetoric around rape and domestic violence. Splits and tendencies developed as the question of men’s experience of their societal role took different thinkers and factions in radically different directions. It was by the 90s that the men’s movement became primarily focused on institutions in which men were excluded or discriminated against.

>To an outsider there may seem to be total coherence within the anti-feminist Internet, but it is actually wracked with as much infighting as you find among any political subculture. A few important sites in the manosphere throughout the online culture wars, some now defunct or banned, included Reddit’s PhilosophyOfRape, in which you could find topics like the promotion of ‘corrective rape’ against feminists, The Counter-Feminist, Love-shy.com, /r/mensrights, The Anti-Feminist, SlutHate.com and /r/incel for the involuntarily celibate beta male. Advice seeking in anti-feminist and pickup artist (PUA) forums often comes from self-identifying ‘nice guys’, whose commentary on women suggests their sense of self may be a little lacking in honest reflection. There are also PUA-hate forums, for those who are critical of pickup artistry as a scam that places too much of the responsibility on men to change their own behavior through bodybuilding and learning ‘game’ just to impress ‘stupid sluts’, by which they simultaneously always seem to mean women who they’re angry at because they won’t put out.

>The Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement is a straight male separatist group whose members have chosen (ahem) to avoid romantic relationships with women in protest against a culture destroyed by feminism, and to focus instead on individual achievement and independence from women. The rhetoric suggests punishment and revenge are at the heart of their motivations, as their advice is usually peppered with references to a ‘bitch’ who will cheat, leave, use you for your money and so on. They like to discuss women ‘riding the cock carousel’ throughout their twenties, and then entering their thirties and finding that their ‘stocks’ on the dating scene have started to fall.

>An article by Milo in Breitbart on ‘the Sexodus’ helped make MGTOW famous. In it, he wrote encouragingly about men’s flight from women, romance, sex and marriage as a consequence of pervasive feminism – something he seems to change his mind about, sometimes arguing feminism is ubiquitous, sometimes arguing it’s deeply unpopular with women because of its misandry. MGTOW are not to be conflated with other militantly anti-feminist movements, however. An article on Return of Kings called ‘Virgins Going Their Own Way’ described MGTOW as ‘The creeping cult of male loserdom’, resulting in much internal squabbling within the anti-feminist Internet. In the many YouTube videos devoted to MGTOW, usually under a pseudonym and with no images of the speaker, a strangely common feature is a kind of robotic voice, almost like a newsreader, an unconvincing voice of ultra-rationality to conceal what seems like a great deal of bitterness and hurt at rejection.

>After the killing, one reporter was contacted by a fellow online community member of PUAhate on Reddit, an incel forum used regularly by Rodger, who explained that the community was wrongly ‘being depicted as a place where bitter men sat around discussing their hatred of women.’ In a typical type of response one is always faced with when trying to describe how jaw-droppingly hate-filled these spaces can be, the journalist was assured that the forum was ‘more light-hearted than violent’. He also noted that the forum user’s chosen pseudonym right after the killing spree was ‘ElliotRodgerIsAGod’.

>Although the idea that ordinary people felt alienated by political correctness was not uncommon in right-wing rhetoric, there was also quite a remarkable shift from a subcultural elitism to a sudden proletarian righteousness, or even a bit of noblesse oblige, as though the right had been making Thomas Frank’s argument all along. In reality they had been making pro-inequality, misanthropic, economically elitist arguments for natural hierarchy all along. As I noted previously in a 2017 piece for The Baffler, Ann Coulter had long drawn upon the elite fear of the hysterical and easily led crowd. In her book Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America explaining how ‘the liberal mob is destroying America’ she drew upon Gustave LeBon, the misanthropists’ favorite theorist of the masses. Her writing on overbreeding, overcrowding swarms of immigrants is a direct continuation of this theme, which has been consistent in elite circles since the beginning of industrialized urbanized mass society, first applied to their multiplying native proletariat and later to new waves of immigrants.

>Before the ‘ordinary people’ narrative became suddenly ubiquitous on the new online right after the election results, Milo could be seen in photo shoots wearing a ‘Stop Being Poor’ T-shirt, a quote from the heiress Paris Hilton, one of his idols. After the election results he was giving talks about the white working class. The hard alt-right had also rejected the idea that the masses were their naturally traditionalist allies any longer, as the conservative establishment had typically believed. Instead, they had argued that the great mass of society had been tainted and indoctrinated by liberal feminist multiculturalism, and were close to beyond redemption. It was no longer ‘five minutes to midnight’ as the anti-immigration right had long claimed but well past midnight. While the Trumpians are busy quickly rewriting history, it is important to remember that behind the ‘populist’ president, the rhetoric of his young online far-right vanguard had long been characterized by an extreme subcultural snobbishness toward the masses and mass culture.

>Although it had since become less influential, one geeky online subculture that started to move to the right and shared many characteristics of the contemporary alt-right was ‘new atheism’. It was one of the predecessors to the alt-light, with an underlying Christopher Hitchens style of hitting out at the irrational and the faithful. All the ‘Milo OWNS stupid feminist’ type of videos today are made with much the same style as the new atheist videos that were equally numerous on YouTube a few years before with titles like ‘HITCHSLAP. Hitchens OWNS stupid Christian woman’. It also had the same Nietzschean, anti-mainstream, non-conformist sensibility running through it.

>During the period examined in this book, Mark Fisher stood out as one of the few voices not on the right who had spoken out against the anti-intellectual, unhinged culture of group hysteria that gripped the cultural left in the years preceding the reactive rise of the new far right online. In January 2017, when news broke that Fisher had committed suicide, those in the same online milieu that had slandered and smeared him for years responded as you might expect—by gloating. Stavvers (aka Another Angry Woman), an influential Twitter figure among what the alt-right call skeletons, had already written ‘Vampires Castle’ sarcastically down as her Twitter location and responded to the news of his death by tweeting: ‘Just because Mark Fisher is dead, doesn’t make him right about “sour-faced identitarians”. If only left misogyny would die with him,’ with the follow-up: ‘*dons vampire cape, flies off into the night*,’ This response is a fairly typical example of precisely the sour-faced identitarians who undoubtedly drove so many young people to the right during these vicious culture wars. The left’s best critic of this disease of the left had just died and dancing on his grave was a woman who once blogged about baking bread using her own vaginal yeast as a feminist act.

>The problem with the contemporary style of Tumblr-liberalism and a purely identitarian self-oriented progressivism that fomented in online subcultures and moved on to college campuses is that the very idea of winning people over through ideas now seems to anguish, offend and enrage this tragically stupefied shadow of the great movements of the left, like the one that began on campuses like Berkeley in 1964. Milo may be vanquished but not through a battle of ideas. The online culture wars of recent years have become ugly beyond anything we could have possibly imagined and it doesn’t look like there is any easy way out of the mess that has been created. Suddenly, how far away the utopian Internet-centric days of the leaderless digital revolution now seem, when progressives rejoiced that ‘the disgust’ had ‘become a network’ and burst suddenly into real life. Now, one is almost more inclined to hope that the online world can contain rather than further enable the festering undergrowth of dehumanizing reactionary online politics now edging closer to the mainstream but unthinkable in the public arena just a few short years ago.