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To cite this article: Edwin Hodge & Helga Hallgrimsdottir (2019): Networks of Hate: The Alt-
right, “Troll Culture”, and the Cultural Geography of Social Movement Spaces Online, Journal of
Borderlands Studies, DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2019.1571935
Article views: 98
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The “alternative right” or “alt-right” is a quintessentially twenty-first Alt-right; cultural borders;
century phenomenon: a radicalized far right ideology that is culturescapes; bordering
proliferated and disseminated almost exclusively online with
members drawn from all over the world. This paper argues that
online debates within alt-right online communities about the
acceptability of alt-right language and imagery are claims-making
exercises that constitute examples of bordering processes. These
debates establish cultural borders around online communities and
foster new virtual geographies of counter-hegemonic movements
of the far right, that transcend and challenge the role and
relevance of the physical border as a container for these
movements. The paper concludes by placing these findings within
current theoretical framings of the a-territorial border, with
particular attention to what implications these have for the Pacific
Northwest.
Introduction
In August of 2016, the Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States,
Hillary Clinton, delivered a speech in Reno, Nevada in which she denounced a fringe ideo-
logical movement known as the “alt-right”. For many listeners, this was the first introduc-
tion they might have had to an ideological movement that has existed online since at least
2012 and was known largely for its virulent racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia
and xenophobia. Rather than serve as a nail in the ideology’s coffin, Clinton’s speech
instead catapulted the alt-right from obscurity into the national spotlight and its suppor-
ters could not have been more thrilled (Rappeport 2016). Instead of burying the alt-right
under a tsunami of scrutiny and criticism, Clinton’s speech enabled alt-right supporters to
broadcast themselves to mainstream audiences. With the subsequent victory of Donald
Trump and his ascendance to the White House, the alt-right found an even more suppor-
tive platform from which to recruit others and, through their associations with organiz-
ations like Breitbart and personalities like Steve Bannon finding themselves at the
center of political power in America (Lyons 2017). Whereas before President Trump’s
victory, alt-right participants remained isolated in liminal online spaces, in subsequent
CONTACT Helga Hallgrimsdottir hkbenedi@uvic.ca Associate Professor, School of Public Administration, Uni-
versity of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
© 2019 Association for Borderlands Studies
2 E. HODGE AND H. HALLGRIMSDOTTIR
months, their activism spilled over into offline spaces as well, culminating in often-violent
university campus protests and in a massive protest in Charlottesville, Virginia that
resulted in several injuries and the death of Heather Heyer, an anti-racist activist.
Alt-right communities espouse politics and modes of action that pose significant threats
to safety and security within states, but they do so in a space that is relatively free from
surveillance and state interference. This “free space” transcends physical borders
through the transnational and cross-border dissemination of ideas. This paper argues
that the online activism that occurs within the free space of virtual interaction poses
additional challenges to territorial and spatial understandings of borders.
Drawing on social movement literature, border scholarship, and following Wellman’s
(2001) observations on how the role of space in social interaction is transformed in
virtual settings, we argue the on-line debates and discussions of the alt-right on-line com-
munity constitute a type of bordering activity that has great significance for the resilience
of the alt-right as a form of social movement. On-line debates draw cultural borders or
demarcations that establish virtual spaces for alt-right mobilization and are constitutive
of imagined communities within a virtual geography of the alt-right. These virtual geogra-
phies form a kind of third space (Konrad and Nicol 2011) that simultaneously straddles
and obscures the physical territoriality of the border, while enhancing their cultural
demarcations.
Both space and borders take on a whole different meaning in the on-line context. To
begin with, the geographical and temporal scope of on-line activism is both broader,
more amorphous, and more fluid (Bennett 2003; Olesen 2005). In addition, the stakes of
engagement in activism shift because of the anonymity available in on-line spaces (see for
instance McDonald 2015). Yet, on-line activist communities must also same function as
those of social movements writ-large (Milan 2015): they articulate the worthiness of a grie-
vance, broadcast to insiders and outsiders a message about numbers and unity of movement
activists and foster collective identities (Polletta and Jasper 2001). We argue that beyond
that, the ideational activities of online activist communities take on the additional function
of creating space, and in particular, free space, for movement adherents. As Anahita (2006)
has argued, virtual communities that lack spatial boundaries compensate by creating and
amplifying the cultural borders that demarcate their community from others. At the
same time, the fluidity of virtual spaces, their amorphous boundaries, and the anonymity
accorded to voices inside them, gives significance to virtual space- (or place) making.
Cultural borders can be thought of as “imagined phenomena” (Shimoni 2006) at the
edges of spaces in which cultural objects and artefacts are intelligible or meaningful to
those who encounter them. While by no means rigid or sharply drawn, cultural borders
are transitional spaces of intercultural interaction that come into being at the limits of
social or virtual networks, where culturally generated objects cease to be intelligible by
those that encounter them. On one side of a cultural border, a certain image or
“meme” is deeply flexed with meanings specific to in-group understandings; on the
other side of the border, the same image may be devoid of meaning. As this paper will
show, the image macros and memes2 generated within the alt-right community are shib-
boleths; they are the object-ification (Berger and Luckmann 1967) and reification of com-
monly-held values, and their correct interpretation is taken as evidence of belonging; they
form a cultural bulwark around in-groups, while identifying – and often mystifying – their
ideological opponents.
While they may coincide with them, cultural borders transcend the physical and juridical
structures associated with traditional geopolitical borders. Cultural borders exist easily in
virtual, disembodied spaces in such spaces, geophysical and geopolitical borders are little
more than simulacra; pale shadows of the hardened borders of the Real. While national
borders continue to exert some influence in online communities (Internet Service Providers
are generally governed by the jurisprudential regimes associated with traditional nation-
states for example), but in most online spaces, nationality takes a back seat to (sub)cultural
identification and as such, cultural objects become more important as signifiers of which
side of the border one occupies (Futrelle and Simi 2004).
This discussion of cultural borders is thus an important one for researchers whose
primary focus lays in the analysis of online communities and movements. Occupy and
the Arab Spring illustrated how online movements facilitated the cross-border spread of
ideas and discourse and paved the way for off-line mobilization – real-world activism
within and across borders (Salmon, Fernandez, and Post 2010). The contingent and
tenuous connections between virtual activism and the physical locations of activists, as
well as the power of virtual communication in creating conceptions of community and
shared space are also illustrated through the use of social media as a recruitment tool
by the Islamic State (Berger 2015; Torok 2013). Online movements pose thus both theor-
etical as well as empirical challenges to state borders.
4 E. HODGE AND H. HALLGRIMSDOTTIR
Methodology
Critical Discourse Analysis of Alt-right Sources and Community Archives
To gain a solid picture of the alt-right movement, this research drew on several different
sources, from several online communities spread across multiple mediums.3 The primary
sources for analysis were drawn from websites including reddit, altright.com, Proudboy
(and its affiliated Facebook pages for its chapters in Toronto and Vancouver), The
Daily Stormer and Stormfront, the 4chan message board known as /pol/, and the 8chan
message boards /pol/ and /baphomet/, and the website voat, specifically its “subverse”
known as /v/altright. Posts dating back to 2012 were selected, with a focus on posts that
were “calls to action” (often labeled as such on sites like reddit). These sites, while repre-
senting a large amount of material, are nevertheless only a small cross-section of alt-right
and alt-right-friendly websites and communities; the ideology is so widely spread online
that cataloguing most or even many of the associated websites would be extremely chal-
lenging, especially given that new pages, communities, and websites emerge daily.
On each of these websites, we made note of common terms or phrases used by content
creators and commenters that were closely associated with the alt-right, as evidenced by
their frequent appearance on alt-right websites. These included terms like “cuck” or “cuck-
servative”, “cultural Marxism”, “Globalists”, and any term enclosed in triple brackets, such as
(((globalists))) or (((New York))) to compile a glossary of terms that could be used to identify
when alt-right posters or ideologies were appearing in other communities (such as white
supremacist or misogynist communities, or even among liberal, “free speech” communities).
In some alt-right and white supremacist communities, the triple bracket is used to both ident-
ify Jewish users or people associated with the “Jewish agenda”, and to circumvent search
algorithms designed to identify white supremacist terms or phrases (Williams 2016). 4
In addition to identifying key terms, concepts, and memes generated by alt-right partici-
pants, the researchers also sought to identify the preferred targets of the alt-right, both in
terms of who they sought to oppose, and who they targeted for recruitment. To accomplish
this, the researchers adopted an interpretive heuristic device developed by Wendy Griswold
called the cultural diamond, which helps to identify the social context of cultural objects
(memes, images, arguments, etc.), their creators and their intended receivers (Griswold
2013). This model was further adapted by sociologist Jesse Daniels in her examination of
white supremacist online communities (Daniels 2009). The cultural diamond highlights
how cultural objects emerge from socio-cultural context to be deployed for specific purposes.
In the case of the alt-right, some material (both memes and text-based objects) was developed
with the aim of ridiculing and undermining the arguments of their ideological opponents
(such as through the creation of caricatures of feminist activists or arguments), while
others – including some examples discussed below (figures two and three) – were designed
to illustrate some central claims of the movement. By using this heuristic, the researchers
could examine both the textual and sub textual messaging of alt-right cultural objects.
Through an examination of the content of alt-right calls to action, and by following the
trail of linked and cross-linked posts and websites, the goal of this research was to con-
struct an understanding of what the alt-right is to its members and how it operates in
online spaces. Below we explore further how these activities reflect how its ephemeral
status as a cultural object enables alt-right ideology to ignore traditional societal and geo-
political borders, while assisting in the buttressing of cultural borders. In turn, these
JOURNAL OF BORDERLANDS STUDIES 5
cultural borders have the potential to deepen the way in which these virtual spaces act as
free spaces and as mobilizing constructs for off-line activism.
Findings
Like many online groups or movements, the alt-right is nebulous, fluid, sometimes anar-
chic, and almost always coy about the limits of its membership and scope (Steinmetz 2017;
Wilson 2016). While some alt-right sites like voat or altright.com were popular in the early
years of the ideology, they have since been eclipsed by more traditionally conservative –
and often explicitly white supremacist – websites that have adopted the ideology and
terms of the alt-right, and embraced some of its leadings personalities (Ambedkar 2017;
Borchers 2016; Marwick and Lewis 2017).
Of these sites, by far the most influential has been Breitbart.com, which has adopted a
great deal of the alt-right’s terminology and has provided platforms for some of the alt-
right’s most vocal supporters, such as Milo Yiannapoulos (Feldman 2016; Lyons 2017).
Breitbart’s visibility and proximity to the center of American political power since the elec-
tion of President Trump has made it the de facto mainstream face of the alt-right. Through
contributors like Milo Yiannapoulos (who has since resigned from the website after he
made comments that appeared to make light of – and even defend – pedophilia), conser-
vative readers were introduced to terms like “cuck” and “cuckservative”, alongside
defenses and endorsements of alt-right patterns of behavior such as “trolling5”, and
“doxing6” (Yiannapoulos 2015). Through Breitbart and its stable of conservative, alt-
right influenced writers, the ideology was also connected to the ultranationalist group
Generation Identitaire, a European nationalist and anti-immigration movement that
bills itself as “ … la barricade sur laquelle se dresse la jeunesse en lutte pour son identité.”7
It can be confusing to try to piece together the principle values and beliefs of the alt-
right. According to a blog post by Andrew Anglin posted on the white supremacist
website The Daily Stormer, the movement is: anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, anti-multicultur-
alism, anti-post-modernism, anti-political correctness, anti-Afro centrism, pro-white, pro-
Europe, pro-traditional families, pro-scientific racism, pro-free speech, and anti-SJW
(social justice warrior) (Anglin 2016). In practice, Alt-right rhetoric tends to be
opposed to all forms of progressive activism, from immigration reform to campaigns to
address sexual assault rates on university campuses (Lyons 2017).
This dizzying array of positions on such a vast range of topics is part of what makes the alt-
right so appealing to such a diverse group of individuals, and at the same time makes it
difficult to contain within a single definition. As a loosely-formed movement, the alt-right
is bound together by a “politics of negation,” – the rejection of progressive politics, liberalism,
“political correctness,” (Malmgren 2017). Attempts to refute these central claims can result in
the offender being harassed until they leave the site, or they may find their account blocked or
even banned completely. As has been noted by others, the alt-right is at some level more
about a mode of communication rather than the substance of the ideas; as we explore
further below, fluency with memes, and insider cultural signifiers, is a more significant
marker of alt-right belonging than adherence to a specific set of ideas or ideologies (Mal-
mgren 2017). A person can identify with the alt-right without, for example, accepting the
increasingly common claims of the “QAnon” conspiracy theory8; so long as they continue
to accept the shared lexicon they can claim membership without issue.
6 E. HODGE AND H. HALLGRIMSDOTTIR
Cultural Objects
Our findings indicate that many of the objects created on Alt-right websites share a dual
use: to signal a rejection of perceived dominant cultural values (like tolerance, acceptance
and inclusivity, multiculturalism, and equity) and to carry a suite of cultural meanings that
signal to others that spaces where alt-right imagery or language appear are friendly spaces
for like-minded individuals online (Figure 1).
In the image displayed here, the creator and the hosting site are signaling support, or
tolerance, of the presence of Nazi related imagery and content, alt-right content, and dis-
cussions of nationalism, symbolized by the unity of Pepe the frog, the Nazi Swastika, and
the silhouette of the United States. Further, any site that hosts this image is signaling that it
is a “free speech zone”, where objectionable material can be freely expressed without fear
of censor or banning. These cultural objects make use of taboo imagery, but they invert
their meanings as a way of signaling a user’s rejection. On the 8chan board /pol/ for
example, it is not uncommon to see images of the Holocaust, but whereas those images
represent horror, guilt, regret, or sadness in dominant cultural narratives, here the
images are shared for comedic effect, or as part of a larger discussion about defending
“White culture” or “White nations” from outside threats (Figure 2).
Another category of cultural object – linguistic – centers around the use of distinct
jargon, phrases, or idiosyncratic spelling of words to signal adherence to alt-right ideology.
The most readily visible of these linguistic cues is the use of the term “cuck” or “cuckser-
vative”, though this is far from the only example (Yiannapoulos 2015; Roy 2016). Alt-right
supporters also make frequent use of the derogatory term “snowflake”, referring to any
Figure 1. “Once it becomes so widespread that the (((Government))) and their hired zogbots can’t stop it
or won’t stop it. That is the final solution to Terrorism its to get rid of all the Jews and Muslims” (8chan 2016)
(Anonymous 2017).
JOURNAL OF BORDERLANDS STUDIES 7
Figure 2. An Alt-right Meme from the Website Edgy Memes and Fashy Dreams.
person who expresses shock or takes offense at anything the alt-right deems not worth
taking seriously. alt-right. These unique neologisms and turns of phrase serve to signal
acceptance of alt-right ideology, but also to provide members of different ideological
movements with a common lexicon; any group or person seen using those terms in
online discussions or correspondences can be recognized as sharing at least some of the
common core beliefs of the alt-right – kindred spirits in oppositional politics.
In practice, Alt-right memes enable users to combine elements from several different
ideological families into bite-sized pieces of information. The ease by which memes can be
shared across multiple platforms makes them powerful tools in alt-right recruitment and
knowledge dissemination. Images like the one shown here (Figure 2), can be crafted
quickly, and its message understood easily. The image is broken into quadrants, each
one claiming to represent human civilizations at the beginning for the 1st Millennium,
CE. Three of the images, those of “African Civilization”, “Aboriginal Civilization”, and
“Native American Civilization” show simple huts or tents made of grasses, wood, and
mud-and-wattle. The final quadrant shows an artist’s depiction of first-century Rome
under the title “European Civilization 2000 years ago”. The meme’s intent is clear: Euro-
pean civilization (as typified by Rome), was more advanced technologically and culturally
(and, one would presume, morally) than African, Indigenous, or Native American
societies. The implication is that European societies remain culturally and technologically
8 E. HODGE AND H. HALLGRIMSDOTTIR
superior to this day. The image’s small size makes it easy to share across Twitter, Face-
book, reddit, or any other social media platform. Rather than weakening its claims, the
meme’s simplicity is its strength; in the time it might take a person to write a cogent
rebuttal to the image’s claims, users can share the image across dozens of pages and plat-
forms, where it can be deployed as a counter to pro-immigration discussions or claims
with little effort. The image combines xenophobia with racism and ethnic nationalism
to potent effect.
In another example, supporters of Donald Trump equate his presidency with the rule
of the “God Emperor of Mankind”, a godlike being from the science-fiction universe of
Warhammer: 40,000 (Figure 3). In the universe of Warhammer, all of humanity is
united under the rule of the Emperor, a being of such power that he can protect human-
ity from alien invaders through willpower and his billions-strong army of soldiers. The
xenophobic and hypermasculine undertones are unmistakable; indeed, in the Warhammer
universe, xenophobia is considered a moral virtue, as is unquestioning obedience to
authority.9
While some might dismiss such images as examples of ironic humor, others see irony as
a powerful tool for alt-right recruitment. As some scholars have pointed out, irony allows
users to cloak their recruitment behind the expression “it’s just a joke”; if an audience is
receptive to the image’s intent, then they show themselves to be amenable to recruitment,
while hostility can be diverted by claiming the poster was merely “trolling” as a joke
(Marwick and Lewis 2017).
Receivers
A great success of the alt-right is its ability to speak to multiple reactionary groups at the same
time, in a common language, about topics that appeal to those groups. As an example, while
Richard Spencer used his position as an alt-right intellectual and ideological shaper to speak
to white supremacists, Identarians and other ethno-nationalists, Milo Yiannapoulos was speak-
ing to the promoters of “GamerGate”, a reactionary and misogynist online movement aimed at
attacking progressive voices in video games journalism and criticism (Romeo and Daunt 2016;
Spencer 2016). Both Spencer and Yiannapoulos were framing their discussions in language that
appealed to the alt-right’s troll culture ethos – Spencer through his journal Radix and Yianna-
poulos through Twitter and later Breitbart magazine (Southern Poverty Law Center 2016) –
while directing their audience’s anger at the “usual” targets (non-Whites and immigrants for
the white nationalists, feminists, women and left-leaning game developers and commenters
for the GamerGate crowd). Much of the material produced by the alt-right retains a central
focus on in-group communication and network building, but some material – particularly
that which passes through the hands of curators like Yiannapoulos, Spencer and others, is
designed to be received by non-group members and even opponents. While Pepe memes
might be directed towards alt-right receivers for example, “free-speech” marches and protests
are directed at out-group members as both targets and potential recruits (Robertson 2015).
10 E. HODGE AND H. HALLGRIMSDOTTIR
Cultural objects produced by the alt-right are embedded within a dominant cultural
narrative they reject and oppose. They are created by a largely anonymous user base
and the most popular or “viral” of these objects are then curated by alt-right personalities
and projected outward into mainstream culture, both as an attack on progressive activists,
and as recruitment advertisements for potential recruits, who are then invited to partici-
pate in largely online communities that reflect the ideal patterns of speech and behavior
that would be desired should the movement’s goals ultimately be reached.
Implications
Ignoring Geopolitics and Enshrining Cultural Borders
The nation-state is not a closed container for political and social activism. Communication
technologies have eroded the significance of borders as containers or cultural barriers.
However, this does not mean that transnational or cross-border activism is either stateless
or placeless. Rather, as we discuss below, on-line activities of alt-right activists’ function in
part as bordering processes that create new virtual geographies, which transform how a
nation is conceptualized and creates a new imagined community that spans borders.
In the absence of physical connections, cultural connections become even more signifi-
cant (Milan 2015; van Zuylen-Wood et al. 2017). Indeed, the ability of alt-right networks
to transcend geophysical and geopolitical borders illustrates the extent to which the reality
of borders in the 21st Century is to some extent a performed one. Discussions of borders
are of necessity discussions of territoriality (Brambilla 2015) and the management or
control of space; online communities are spaces of a kind and so their virtual territoriality
must be maintained as well. The dissemination of alt-right memes and vocabulary – and
the acceptance and continued recognition of their presence – in online communities is a
matter of performing border maintenance. Those borders are contested in spaces where
community members actively push back against alt-right encroachment through ban pol-
icies, comment moderation, or a hostile administrator presence in forums.
identity and meaning, resulting in a unique or distinct cultural space embedded in a larger
host culture. Culturescapes are a kind of “ephemeral geography”; space without place.
Online culturescapes are ways for ideological activists to escape the “territorial trap” of
borders (Agnew 1994; Newman 2010) by using international data networks to circumvent
them. Aside from the brute facts of infrastructure,12 alt-right communities are aterritorial
by nature, though they retain an abiding preoccupation with geo-political concerns. In the
cultural mythologies of the alt-right, geo-political space (for white Europeans and North
Americans) is a source of heightened anxiety, as defending such spaces as cultural or
ethnic homelands remains a critical element of online discourse. Despite these concerns
however, the alt-right, like many of the more reactionary new social movements of the
21st Century, rely on aterritorial data networks to survive, recruit, and reproduce.
When they move offline, as alt-right activists did in Charlottesville, Virginia in the
summer of 2017, or as they did in Vancouver, British Columbia in August of the same
year (Brend 2017), they illustrate the need for border researchers to consider how
online networks allow social movements to effectively circumvent national-jurisdictional
borders. Indeed, the ubiquity of global social networks and the ease by which they are
accessed makes it highly likely that aterritorial movements will become the norm.
Knowledge produced within online data networks draw upon the creative energies of
participants from all over the world. Participants gather in chat channels, discussion
forums, and blog comment sections to discuss and debate, and the products of those inter-
actions form the basis for collective action that can – and has – emerged into the offline
world. The effect is not unlike the patterns of interactions in other borderlands, where
different cultures and values diffuse across national boundaries to create understandings
and identities (Konrad and Nicol 2011; Prokkola 2009). Yet where such borderlands are
bounded by space, to where participants live and interact, for example, online networks
are not so constrained. In essence, online networks represent a sort of “global borderland”,
where the physicality of borders become abstractions, and where discursive boundaries –
spaces where the acceptance or rejection of patterns of speech are negotiated – become the
new frontiers. As the examples of Charlottesville, Virginia and Vancouver, BC indicate,
online networks allow for alt-right activists to construct coherent ideological identities
and rhetoric, which can then be “tailor-fitted” to the specifics of whatever jurisdictions
activists may wish to deploy them. In Charlottesville, constitutional protections for
speech and bearing arms enabled alt-right protestors to adopt a far more belligerent
stance than was adopted in Vancouver, despite both groups largely speaking about the
same subjects. Effectively, the aterritoriality of online networks allow alt-right activists
to construct micro, situational borderlands, real-world spaces where ideologies from
outside the state penetrate and disrupt non-borderland culture. For people living in the
Pacific Northwest of North America, this may be a familiar concept, as the region features
a particularly vivid culturescape of its own: Cascadia. Conceptually, the online bordering
practices of the alt-right (and other online communities) are like the development of Cas-
cadia as a transnational culturescape in several ways.
Alt-right networks have no fixed address. They are not bound by geography as there is
no fixed geography to claim in virtual spaces. Instead, alt-right participants use cultural
objects to signal membership to the ideology and disseminate those objects through
social networks to establish spaces of semi-permanent residency. The longer any one
website or service (such as 8chan or the alt-right’s alternative to twitter, Gab) remain
12 E. HODGE AND H. HALLGRIMSDOTTIR
popular with alt-right participants, the more deeply established in the movement’s cul-
turescape it becomes. In the eyes of participants and observers alike, the most deeply estab-
lished websites become synonymous with the alt-right, becoming hubs for potential
recruits and observers alike.
In Cascadia, there is similarly no fixed boundary; what it means to be a part of Cascadia
relies more on history and shared cultural – as well as economic and political – values
(Alper 1996; Brunet-Jailly 2008; Smith 2008; Sparke 2000) than on any one definition.
Instead, Cascadia is a cultural imaginary, one strong enough to spark occasional proto-
nationalist sentiments – if only as a means of signaling displeasure to the federal govern-
ments of Canada and America located far to the east (Bjornson 2014; Towards Cascadia
2016). Cascadia, as a concept, is rooted in the history, language, and development of
settler-colonial societies of the regions of North America that lie to the west of the
Rocky Mountains (with some degree of expansion in the prairie provinces and states
immediately to the east). In the absence of established geo-political borders, Cascadia –
like the networks of online communities – roots itself in culture, turning culture into a
mechanism through which identity is constructed and negotiated with the outside. Yet
in both cases, where the physicality of geography is absent, the idea of geography persists.
In discussions of Cascadia, the cultural imaginary embeds itself in the imagery of the
Pacific Northwest; towering trees and rocky, snow-capped peaks; of pristine, almost pre-
ternatural ecological diversity and abundance.
The alt-right, has no physical geography to call home, but it retains an abiding rever-
ence for the idea of geography, for an imagined pan-European culture that serves as the
model for the rest of the world to be measured against. It places xenophobia at the
heart of its ideology and reifies the “black box” notion of the state (Hobson 2000)
which sees each state as a self-contained structure with absolute control over its external
borders. In both cases – Cascadia and the alt-right – geography in abstract remains a
central consideration of in-group identity, but it is through culture that in-group bound-
aries are formed and negotiated.
Finally, and as argued elsewhere in this issue (Magnus et al, n.d) Cascadia has historically
been fertile ground for counter-hegemonic and counter-cultural movements. Beginning in
the 1960s and 70s, when young men fleeing the draft in the United States settled in British
Columbia, and to the present day, where the Washington/BC region represents the only
contiguous border region within which cannabis can be sold and consumed without crim-
inal repercussions. Though Cascadian counter-culture is usually at the progressive end of
the spectrum, the region has also been home to several reactionary, radical, and extremist
movements, including the Aryan Nations and other white supremacist movements in the
1980s and 1990s (Burlein 2002; Levitas 2002; Quarles 2004), and a host of sovereign
citizen-associated groups in the twenty-first century. The region’s geographic remoteness,
coupled with its long history of independent, libertarian-oriented politics (Kaplan 2004) has
long made it a destination for people who wish to live differently, or to simply live away,
which makes it a natural incubator for radical ideas. Therefore, even though the concepts
of space, place, and borders are primarily virtual in the context of the alt-right, the fact
that there are existing physical infrastructures of right-wing counter-hegemonic mobiliz-
ations in the Cascadian region, means that any discussion of the alt-right should be
mindful that despite its largely online status, the movement could be adapted (and has
been) for transmission through pre-existing offline extremist networks.
JOURNAL OF BORDERLANDS STUDIES 13
Conclusions
The alt-right is a product of the blending of anonymous online “troll culture” with virulent
racism, sexism, and xenophobia, but it is also more than that. The alt-right and its suppor-
ters are manifestations of a dismissive attitude towards geopolitical borders that has become
synonymous with activism designed to reify their cultural equivalents. Alt-right ideology
permeates discussions of nationalism and anti-immigration, just as it permeates discussions
about defending the traditional borders of gender and sex roles (Anglin 2016). The alt-right
is an ideology that often ignores national borders to propagate an ideology that roots itself in
culture and the development of virtual geographies rooted in cultural identity and culture-
scapes. Rather than working solely to protect existing cultural borders around national and
cultural identities, the ideology also seeks to facilitate the creation of a pan-national cultural
identity centered on the fetishization of “free speech” and “troll culture”.
This understanding of the alt-right reveals the difficulties implicit in attempting to
counter its spread; how can one shut down a movement with no homeland, no territory
or property to seize, and few recognizable faces to monitor or confront? Shutting down
websites will only cause the ideology’s supporters to set up someplace else, and if a
state agency succeeds in banning a site or a network of sites from operating, they effectively
hand the alt-right a moral victory by proving that the ideology’s warnings about censor-
ship are true. Instead, policy makers ought to take their cues from scholars like Scott
Atran, who have argued that instead of shutting down extremist networks, law enforce-
ment or activist groups ought to learn how they work, join them, and carefully introduce
new information to the users designed to weaken the power of the ideology’s claims and
provide adherents with a new, more positive social identity. As Atran states,
Violent extremism represents not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their collapse, as
young people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity
that gives personal significance and glory. This is the dark side of globalization. They radica-
lize to find firm identity in a flattened world: where vertical lines of communication between
the generations are replaced by horizontal peer-to-peer attachments that can span the globe
… Unless we understand these powerful cultural forces, we will fail to address the threat.
(Atran 2015)
Notes
1. On sites like reddit and voat, frequent commenters and posters are tagged as “top contribu-
tors”, whose comments can be given extra weight or consideration in discussions. Not all
14 E. HODGE AND H. HALLGRIMSDOTTIR
online communities have such labels, but long-term participants and frequent posters are
often recognized by other members through informal accolades for their contributions.
2. A “meme” (sometimes called an “image macro”) is an online artifact used to convey large
amounts of information using a blend of text and images. Memes are ubiquitous in online
spaces; many smartphones now feature meme databases and .GIF (short video or animation
clips) for users to attach to conventional text messaging. Understanding specific memes and
their proper usage is a gatekeeping mechanism in some communities; a person is not truly a
part of the community unless and until they are conversant in the community’s favorite
memes.
3. A cliché in online communities is that “the Internet never forgets”; anything that goes up on a
cacheable website remains searchable for quite some time, and this holds true for materials
posted and then later deleted. Even after a user attempts to remove material from the internet
(by deleting posts or even by deleting user accounts), there remains a window of time where
other users can still access archived versions of those posts by downloading earlier “snap-
shots” of the website in question. These tools are also useful for sociologists who engage in
research online, as it allows them a way to track changes to posted material. Archival tools
allow sociological investigators to take snapshots of these discussions and save them for
later investigation, to freeze them and protect them from subsequent alteration or deletion.
4. Since its adoption sometime around 2013 or 2014, the triple bracket’s use has expanded to
serve as a signal that whatever has been enclosed in these “echoes” is a) an enemy or ideo-
logical opponent, and b) fair game for attacks. In the online version of the “Culture
Wars”, these attacks range from sending grotesque, shocking, or offensive messages,
images or videos to targeted individuals, to death threats or threats of violence, to “swatting”,
the practice of sending armed tactical teams and law enforcement to a person’s home under
false pretenses. These tactics are no longer an uncommon, fringe occurrence. Any researchers
who have decided to attach their names to investigations involving online communities
(among other things) are opening themselves and their families up to this sort of intimidation
(West 2015).
5. Trolling is the practice of writing deliberately inflammatory comments designed to elicit
outrage from one’s targets. Trolls often know they are being offensive or hurtful; indeed,
that is usually the point. An example of trolling behavior would be finding the comment
section on a blog or article about the Holocaust and posting a comment saying, “Hitler
did nothing wrong”. The point of the comment is to anger, offend and hurt the targets.
6. Doxxing is the practice of collecting personal information of opponents, including addresses,
phone numbers and email addresses/passwords, which are then posted online. Users are
encouraged to use the information to harass, bully, and even threaten other users. Most web-
sites have a zero-tolerance policy regarding doxxing, but many groups associated with the alt-
right do little else.
7. “ … is the barricade on which the youth in struggle for its identity stands.”
8. QAnon, also called the “Great Awakening”, or even “The Storm” is a growing conspiracy on
the far right and within alt-right networks. First established on the website 4chan, the con-
spiracy alleges that President Donald Trump is fighting a secret war against the forces of the
“Deep State”, a hostile shadow-government run by Hilary Clinton, John Podesta, George
Soros, and a host of others. In addition to opposing President Trump, these figures are
also thought to be involved in child-sex trafficking and murder. In some versions of the con-
spiracy theory, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his wide-ranging investigation into
Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential elections are part of President Trump’s
overall strategy to counter the forces of the Deep State. Though initially a fringe movement,
the QAnon conspiracy theory has grown to the extent that its members are routinely spotted
at alt-right rallies and increasingly at rallies attended by the President.
9. A common expression in the Warhammer universe is “An open mind is like an open fortress,
with its gates unbarred and unguarded.”
10. A forum raid is a kind of direct action in online spaces, where members of one online com-
munity flood the comments sections or discussion threads of another community (usually an
JOURNAL OF BORDERLANDS STUDIES 15
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant
number 895-2012-1022].
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