I tried to summarize it in this tl;dw:

    [To the alt-righters, it looks like he's] always making the accusations; always in the dominant position; that he's always acting and you're always reacting. Regardless of what is said he displays all the outward signs of winning so on a purely emotional level he leaves the impression of being right.

    Over the last several years the far right has pushed hard on a number of reductive categories: the cultural marxism box, the reverse

    racism box, even terms like 'beta' and 'mangina' are just short hands for the veiled masculinity box. What's most valuable to the alt-right isn't who wins or loses any individual arguments - it's the mechanics of the argument itself. It's the boxes. [It] subtly suggests that maybe they don't have to listen to [someone] because they've got this handy box.

    The alt-right is a veritable box factory putting huge swathes of leftist rhetoric, most especially that that would rebut their core positions, into categories where they can be summarily ignored. And these myths have power if and only if they are immediately recognizable to a lot of people.

It's not that these ideas are entirely novel, but I think this is an interesting way to bring a bunch of ideas together.

posted by veen: 629 days ago