The Intellectual Dark Web is working as designed! Young white men are being deradicalized! The world is safe for degeneracy and Empire!
The third segment of the AIN are Conservatives who, in another media era, may have started conservative talk radio shows or hosted a show on Fox News. These include Steven Crowder, famous for setting up booths at college campuses challenging people to “change his mind” about a conservative/pro-Trump belief; Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart reporter known for criticizing the left for their use of “feelings over facts”;and Dennis Prager, host of “PragerU,” a channel that expresses conservative viewpoints with an educational motif. Like the Skeptics, they often lampoon the use of identity politics and de-platforming by mainstream progressive social movements, but unlike skeptics, they also disagree with mainstream liberals in principle. They tend to have more traditional pro-market and socially conservative beliefs. They are different from further-right segments of the AIN, however, in that they explicitly oppose anti-semitism and open appeals to race.
The fourth and fifth groups are the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right, which are often conflatedwith one another. However, there are key distinctions in how they appeal to their audiences. The Alt-Lite is a mixed bag ideologically. Some, like Paul Joseph Watson,an InfoWars affiliate, argue for mainstream conservatism. Others, like Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, espouse more explicitly white nationalist messages. However,they all enjoy antagonizing and upsetting (“triggering”) liberals and leftists, and use racist and otherwise offensive humor as a means to transgress what they describe as authoritarian boundaries set by the left-of-center. The Alt-Lite is also strongly pro-Trump.
In contrast, the Alt-Right is wa rmly committed to a far-right ideology. Common features include strong anti-semitism and the belief that white people are are genetically superior (race realism”). They advocate for an all-white ethnostate and an end to all(or at the very least, all non-white) immigration. Well-known YouTubers in the Alt-Right include Richard Spencer, coiner of the term; Red Ice TV, an alien conspiracy-turned-Alt-Right talk show; and Jean-Francois Gariepy, a former neuroscientist who is virulently anti-feminist and uses his scienti c background to increase the perceived credibility of race realism. Unlike the Alt-Lite, these YouTubers are not concerned with transgressing perceived social boundaries set by mainstream progressives, and do not disagree in principle with identity politics or deplatforming. They argue instead that mainstream progressives are bolstering the wrong identities and deplatforming the wrong people. They also tend not to support Trump, believing he has been compromised by an international Jewish conspiracy due to Trump’s pro-Israel sentiment and closeness to his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
It’s certainly a fascinating methodology. The idea appears to be that because of the false alternative offered by a few neoclowns on YouTube, the viewership of other Fake Right YouTube channels, half of which have been disappeared, has declined.
Then again, proving that the Intellectual Dark Web is not “a gateway drug” to the Nationalist American Right, but instead act in a gatekeeping capacity against it, is akin to proving that water is wet. It doesn’t really matter how you try to “prove” it because the conclusion is always going to be correct.