Donald Trump’s hostile takeover over of the Republican Party in the mid-2010s was aided and abetted by an internet culture that posted such vile, racist, and often violent words and imagery that the only rational response was disgust.
“But it was all for the Lulz,” the right-wing trolls who spawned this culture would say. “You’re triggered, snowflake! The right’s just getting better at comedy and you can’t handle it.”
Whether it was Milo Yiannopoulos on mainstream social-media platforms or one of the many anonymous shitposters on 4chan—some horrible things were said and done in the service of “owning the libs.” But it was all harmless “trolling,” they’d insist.
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This past weekend’s horrible mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo (an attack that specifically targeted Black Americans) shows just how dangerous these ideas can be.
In a purported manifesto published online, the alleged shooter says he was radicalized on the anonymous web bulletin board 4chan, which he sought out as a result of pandemic-generated boredom. And what is the content like on these forums?
“It’s openly racist. It is ideas and memes about the inferiority of Black people, about the violence, supposedly, of Black people. And a ton of anti-Semitism,” The New York Times’ Nicholas Confessore said on Monday’s The Daily podcast.
But here’s the seductive thing about these violent and racist memes. As Confessore notes, “It’s done with irony and humor.”
In his alleged manifesto, the Buffalo shooter repeatedly references the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooting. Both massacres were live streamed, and according to NBC News’ Ben Collins, the New Zealand shooter, like this one, “was also a frequent visitor to 4chan.”
The manifesto also mentions the mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Writing about that shooter back in 2015, The Daily Beast’s Jacob Siegel noted that his motivations were “well known under the auspices of ‘trolling’ and well hidden by its pretense of trickstersism.”
Siegel went on to add that most people don’t want to be thought of as fascists, so online racists overcome that challenge by “radicalizing the center and moving the discourse on to their own grounds. That effort has been aided invaluably by the anonymous shock troops on Internet message boards.”
That seems to be exactly what happened when COVID ennui led one misguided young man to these forums and, ultimately, to infamy.
One way to suck people into radical ideas is to make the water warm. You can do this by giving people plausible deniability to tell others (and themselves) that the evil they are dabbling in is merely irreverent satire. In other words, it’s about being rebellious and revolutionary and outrageous. It’s all a game. It’s all about freaking out the normies.
“Nominally, the trolls, like punk rockers, Dadaists, and countless others before them, were reveling in breaking taboos,” writes Siegel. “It was never clear to what end. Were those bad words and old slanders being bandied around as a kind of satire, demystifying ingrained prejudices, or were they the sharp points at the edge of free speech, a way of insisting that no idea could be off limits? No one was quite sure, perhaps not even the trolls.”
But what happens when teenage rebellion becomes violent racism? For those who are “very online,” this has been a long time coming. Let’s take the slur “cuckservative” for example, which emerged online about seven years ago. The term had been weaponized by racists and right-wing “identitarians” to attack pro-immigration conservatives, while simultaneously normalizing ideas and rhetoric that were racist and vulgar.
But—like the more recent term “groomer” (or “pedo grifter”)—the person lodging the slur could always plausibly say, “Lulz, I don’t mean it literally. I’m just trolling!”
Why am I bringing this up? Because this same sort of “owning the libs” trope that can be casually confused as internet humor often serves as a pathway to radicalization. That appears to be what happened with the alleged Buffalo shooter.
Troll culture should not be used as an excuse to forgive or forget the political rhetoric now occurring in more mainstream places, such as cable TV, podcasts, or tweets from some Republican politicians.
“We’ve seen enough white supremacy for enough years to know that violence was inevitable the instant its latest ideas gained wider currency,” tweeted Never Trump conservative and Atlantic writer David French. “How many more racist mass shootings must we endure before the modern right emphatically and finally rejects ‘replacement’ rhetoric?”
Likewise, Rep. Liz Cheney should be commended after she called out Republican leadership for looking the other way and enabling “white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism.”
As a society, we must condemn mainstream political figures and commentators who promote racist conspiracy theories, while we simultaneously avoid censoring legitimate political expression. This is a vital (if daunting) task that may well take generations to achieve.
But if you’re asking me, as a father and a citizen, what concerns me most, it’s not even close. Cable news is merely laundering these pernicious ideas. I’m more concerned about the so-called jokes and ironic message board memes that even I (someone who is fairly internet literate) cannot always suss out.
Cable news is for old people. If you want to stop the next generation from being radicalized into violence, keep your eye on the breeding ground and fever swamps of the internet forums.
