THE FORMATION OF ALTERNATIVE RIGHT-WING IDENTITY IN THE 2010S WESTERN INTERNET SPHERE

Abstract

The 2010s are a period of emergence of the alternative right in the West, which is often associated with the migration crisis and dissatisfaction with liberal democracy. In the same years, there is a kind of rise in the use of social networks, and accordingly, the creation of political discourses begins in the Internet space, in which the alternative right will also have a big role. With the launch of Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2015, the role of the Internet as an effective tool for spreading information and therefore an effective identity producer is becoming clearer. Moreover, Donald Trump’s election campaign is accompanied by a parallel political campaign in the Internet space, on social networks, which has had a great impact on the Western political discourse as a whole. During this period, an alternative network is created on the Internet, which I call an alternative right-wing network in this text. This network, as researchers call it, will create the so-called alt right pipe line/alt right rabbit hole, which refers to a certain type of transformation of a person when, by giving certain relatively lighter right-wing narratives to a person, you are pushing this person more and more to go to ultra-right narratives, which ultimately leads to radicalization. The alternative right-wing network begins the process of cultural transformation to a certain extent, and therefore it is not surprising when in this network (along with the mainstream right-wing Media), the narrative of culture wars was created, according to which the West is in the conditions of cultural war, which is taking place within the West, between different socio-cultural and ideological groups. This term comes from the Bismarck period kulturkampf, which meant Bismarck’s confrontation with the Catholic Church, although around the second half of the twentieth century, certain right-wing groups dissatisfied with the cultural revolution of the 60s begin to revive the given term in a new sense, where the narrative of the cultural revolution vs traditional culture is created. It is not surprising that E. Michael Jones, one of the creators of this narrative in the 80s, calls his magazine Culture Wars, and already in the 2010s he begins to spread this narrative on the Internet. However, E. Michael Jones is only one small part of the big movement that we can call an alternative right-wing movement. Andrew Breitbard, who is the founder of Bretibart Media and whose words become a certain theoretical framework for the production of cultural warfare, is considered the godfather of modern American culture wars: “Politics is downstream from culture”. However, in this paper I am less interested in the processes given in the political field itself, but the subject of my research is alternative right-wing discourses on the Internet and the spread of cultural warfare in social networks. According to data&Society research, in 2018, one of the most viewed political contents on the Internet website, YouTube, was created by alternative right-wing channels. The best example of this is the 2018 data, according to which the most popular live (stream) video was a debate between two alternative right-wing influencers (Richard Spencer and Sargon of Akkad), watched live by 100,000 people. This is certainly just one example. In the second half of the 2010s (especially since 2015), YouTube becomes an information battle ground for culture wars, where a network of alternative right-wing influencers begins to show their real power. The unique ability of social networks to make anyone an influencer is used quite effectively by alternative right-wing Internet influencers, which will be followed by their sharp appearance and domina nce in the informational/political field of Western social networks for some time. The opinion makers ope rating in the alternative right-wing network are people of different ideologies, starting with centrist liberals and ending with ultra-nationalist racists. The whole point of alternative Internet space is precisely that their interaction with each other and their specific narratives create a certain type of anti-establishment grand narrative. In these groups, I will consider, for example: Sargon of Akkad (the same as Carl Benjamin, who identified himself as classically liberal), Stefan Molyneux (libertarian social media activist), Ben Shapiro (conservative), Steven Crowder (populist, nationalist), Richard Spencer (far-right white nationalist). This list is just a small group of people that I will focus on in this paper. I specifically focused on their ideological affiliations to make it clear to readers how diverse groups operated in the alternative right-wing Internet space in the 2010s. In this paper, I will try, on the one hand, to analyze the emergence of an alternative right-wing network in the Internet space, where I will explain how complex influencer networks generally are created, on the other hand, I will directly analyze the results produced by the given network. By results, I mean the ana lysis of narratives produced directly by alternative right-wing influencers and the impact of the given alter native narratives directly on the audience, that is, on how a new type of identity is produced by the given alternative right-wing network.