Frequently fatherless and lacking the natural tribes of sprawling extended families that grounded men for generations, many young people are angry and adrift in a society that has overseen the mass rupturing of familial ties, depriving them of a genuine sense of identity. In reality, the alt-right is a perfect case study of what Mary Eberstadt describes in her recent book, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Once you see the alt-right up close, it is obvious that Spencer and his comrades needed the media to give the impression that their sad and sparse group of frustrated men was.
Listening to Spencer and the other alt-right figures, one reaches the inescapable conclusion that there is, as Gertrude Stein once put it, no there there. There is no substance to their rhetoric, just recycled stereotypes shot through with testosterone, anger, and bad haircuts.
The alt-right conferences are remarkable for their near-total absence of ideas - these people aren’t Nietzsche, they’re losers who blame their circumstances on everyone but themselves. Spencer, for all his intellectual pretensions (and they really are pretensions) is an awful speaker with almost nothing interesting to say, his leadership being the result of being the cream of a really sad crop. Indeed, it is impossible to watch White Noise and not be struck by just how pathetic the alt-right is (or was). White Noise provides one microcosmic example of this: Mike Cernovich informing an audience that the hashtag #killallwhitemen was to justify the alt-right theory that “diversity is white genocide.” The opposing sides confirm each other’s worldviews and conveniently provide each other evidence for the extreme premises each use to justify violence, racism, and prejudice. The alt-right and the far left feed off of one another.
With the exception of the murder of Heather Heyer, a protester killed at the white-nationalist rallies in Charlottesville in August 2017 when a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd, much of the alt-right’s battles with Antifa and other leftists isn’t street warfare so much as Weimar Berlin cosplay. Both were willing to flirt with the dark forces to build a following neither fully took the plunge. Mike Cernovich, a lifestyle coach-turned Trumpian conspiracy theorist, and Lauren Southern, the Canadian YouTube star who discovered the lucrative nature of being an attractive right-wing American troll, have been dubbed “alt-light” by the truly dedicated racists of America’s white-nationalist underground. Interestingly, of the three figures followed by filmmaker Daniel Lombroso, only one of them is a self-described white nationalist: Richard Spencer, the alleged thought leader of the alt-right and one of the founders of.
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