The Digital Traces of #whitegenocide:
Contextualizing the Spread of New Extreme Right Digital Culture in the
White Twittersphere
rMA Thesis—Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr. Hanneke Stuit Second reader: Dr. Joost de Bloois 18 June 2018
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 3
i. Depathologizing the new extreme right ... 5
ii. The digital traces of White Twitter ... 8
iii. Chapter breakdown ... 12
Chapter 1. Situating the New Extreme Right: Trace-based Genealogy, Affective Positioning, and Affective Affinities in Top #whitegenocide Retweets ... 14
i. A trace-based genealogy of the new extreme right ... 15
ii. Extreme right axes of transgression: Co-defining whiteness and mainstream political consciousness ... 21
iii. Affective positioning, textual bodies, and the multiplicity of the crowd ... 25
iv. Affective affinities of translocal whiteness ... 28
Chapter 2. The Contagious Leadership of @LadyAodh: Extreme White Feminism and the Gender Politics of the New Extreme Right ... 35
i. @LadyAodh and the digital traces of extreme right femininity... 36
ii. Contagious female leadership on Twitter and crowd reciprocation ... 41
iii. Extreme white feminism and gendered white nationalist affects ... 46
iv. Extreme white feminism and the contestation of extreme right patriarchy ... 51
Chapter 3. Auto-transgression and Viral Ambiguity: The Politics of Amplification During Viral #whitegenocide Peaks ... 58
i. Tracing the viral crowd ... 60
ii. Jan. 22: Trump, retweets, and auto-transgression ... 67
iii. Dec. 26-27: Viral ambiguity and the politics of amplification ... 73
Conclusion: Digital Traces of Legitimacy ... 79
Introduction
The rise of a new extreme right sensibility in both the U.S. and Europe has heightened public scrutiny of social media platforms where racist banter, anonymous abuse, and anti-progressive vitriol seem to propagate unchecked. In this charged environment, the growing consensus that the problem of online hate speech requires either governmental intervention or private regulation implicitly positions the new extreme right as a dangerous contagion from the fringes, one which is penetrating mainstream politics through the viral logics of social media. This pathologization of the new extreme right is enacted at the intersection of a simplistic hate speech schematic and a discourse of contagion tied to popular understandings of the spread of web-based content. With the idea that such perspectives promote a securitizing rationale that threatens to erode freedom of expression online and obscure the mechanisms by which racist bigotry and illiberal attitudes are spreading, this thesis advocates the close contextualization of new extreme right digital culture. Taking the popular white nationalist hashtag #whitegenocide as a field site, I endeavor to situate its spread with respect to platform affordances, conflicting cultural logics, longstanding histories of racial formation, and user practices. To accomplish this, I develop a critical
analytical framework based on a non-essentialist understanding of data as “digital traces” which positions the new extreme right as a relational, sociotechnical phenomenon rather than a self-same, standalone threat. Exploring the potential conceptual and methodological applications of digital traces, this thesis approaches the spread of #whitegenocide through a versatile,
multidisciplinary methodology that works at the limits of datafied social encounters.
The most recurrent and enduring hashtag in the white nationalist and neo-Nazi Twitter milieus (Berger), #whitegenocide reflects the view that white populations across the globe are subject to existential threat as a result of accelerated immigration from non-Western countries.
The contemporary salience of what was once an obscure, fringe concept illustrates how the “problem of immigration” serves as the “lowest common denominator” for an otherwise fractured new extreme right (Davey and Ebner 25). In this thesis, I emphasize the affective resonance of this trope and position #whitegenocide as a dominant extreme right “structure of feeling,” one which comprises an “affective public” at the limits of normative social and political categories (Papacharissi). I argue that the range of sentiments tied to the delineation,
maintenance, and shifting of these limits are bound up in the intersection of larger extreme right affective economies of transgression. As I use it, the construct of affect serves as a means of illustrating the material dynamism of the digital traces of #whitegenocide. Never finished or entirely formalizable, the #whitegenocide structure of feeling is part of a transgressive extreme right sensibility in motion.
While I make frequent reference to new extreme right digital culture and the affective economies that subtend it, my analysis is limited to a single hashtag. In this, my aims are exploratory. I use the case of #whitegenocide to consider the relational nature of the networked new extreme right and rethink the manifold social, historical, and technical significances of data. My analysis takes the form of three separate chapters which together demonstrate how the concept of digital traces allows different access to the same object. Moving from top retweets to leader-like persona to viral peaks of #whitegenocide, the chapters explore the workings of extreme right affective economies of transgression in terms of genealogy, gendered calibration, and an ambiguous politics of amplification. As key mechanisms of #whitegenocide’s spread, these trace-based assemblages indicate sociotechnical contingency rather than self-same extreme right contagion.
i. Depathologizing the new extreme right
The growing consensus that a populist and/or white nationalist far-right is on the rise in both the U.S. and Europe (if not globally) belies the relative unboundedness of the phenomenon. By virtue of a productive symbiosis with social media technologies through which technological affordances and political objectives align, the new extreme right operates more as a loose “amalgam of conspiracy theorists, techno-libertarians, white nationalists, Men’s Rights
advocates, trolls, anti-feminists, anti-immigration activists, and bored young people” (Marwick and Lewis n.p.). This poses an immediate terminological challenge that animates the use of “catch-all phrases” like “the alt-right” (Davey and Ebner 8). Such terms do the work of referencing an emergent political sensibility that resists containment in established parties or formal organizations but nevertheless displays the drive of a semi-unified social movement. In this thesis, I refer to the contemporary radical right-wing phenomenon as the new extreme right. With this, I cite a nonrepresentational, practice-based perspective which I tie to the term
“extreme.”
Critical of binary hate speech designations, Matti Pohjonen and Sahana Udupa propose to treat growing cultures of vitriolic exchange online as “extreme speech.” Making a case for careful ethnographic contextualization of online speech practices, they argue that extreme speech is never a “mere sequence of intentional tit-for-tat actions,” but contributes to framing “the context where meanings of political participation are reconfigured for a growing number of online users entering the debate culture of new media” (1179). Their eye to collective contextual shifts find a parallel in Aristotle Kallis’ claim that the spread of far-right discourse in the West should be understood as a process of “mainstreaming” rather than “contagion.” While far-right
parties may be subject to a political “cordon sanitaire”1 which prevents them from attaining direct political representation, the repackaging of far-right discourse by more mainstream political actors has resulted in exactly the sort of broad contextual transformations that shift the terms of political participation at large (Kallis 225).
According to Kallis, the process of political mainstreaming is tied to the nature of “extreme ideas” themselves which justify the “transgression of widely accepted boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable,” and contribute to “remapping these established
cognitions and subverting the mainstream frames that support them” (226). A similar perspective on the relational interplay of norm and extreme informs Michel Foucault’s claim that “the limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows” (“Preface” 34). In line with these critical conceptualizations, I use the rhetoric of extremity throughout this thesis to connote a transgressive functional unity rather than a static social entity. On a related note, I position #whitegenocide as an instance of extreme speech which traces the bounds of racial, cultural, and political formations rather than simply spreading across them.
This emphasis on encounter rather than essence may be especially important to maintain with respect to the networked new extreme right. In her account of the rise of the American alt-right, Angela Nagle details how alt-right social media users deliberately transgress normative cultural codes of conduct through their derision of leftist “social justice warriors” and “political
1The term “cordon sanitaire,” meaning quarantine in French, is used to describe the political strategy of
containment whereby more mainstream parties across the political spectrum form coalitions to block far-right electoral success. As Kallis describes it, the strategy indirectly enables the diffusion and repackaging of far-right discourse as mainstream politicians are forced (or opportunistically opt) to acknowledge far-right issues as “problems” and incorporate them in a mainstream political agenda (225).
correctness” as well as the “sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterizes it” (9). Besides serving as an easy target for satire and the subject of ironic counter-self performance, liberal mainstream media culture and its sociotechnical underpinnings are also weaponized by a new extreme right seeking to penetrate mainstream political discourse. Deftly harnessing the compound economic logics and technical affordances of social media platforms to their own ends, the new extreme right is all too aware that, in the sensational media climate wrought by the so-called “click economy,” even critical media coverage can serve to amplify its message and stature in the public eye (Gourarie). Under such conditions, processes of far-right mainstreaming are accelerated by news media coverage insofar as “to speak of the alt-right is to make it so they can’t not be discussed” (Phillips n.p.).
Dismantling pathological approaches to the new extreme right, then, depends not only on a situated understanding of user practices, but also on a critical conception of the way things travel in digital environments. The rapid circulation of digital content is often represented in popular discourse via biological metaphors and analogies of infection. A paradigmatic example of this discourse is the notion of the “meme” which evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins originally positioned as the cultural counterpart of the gene. As he understands them, “memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (189). By this logic, memes replicate autonomously; it is the strength of the message itself which effects its own transmission.
Disputing this neo-Darwinian vision of “‘killer’ texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural ‘bloodstream’” (Jenkins n.p.), Henry Jenkins proposes the term “spreadable media” as an alternative to the language of memetics. In a manner similar
to the ethnographic injunction of extreme speech, the notion of spreadable media forwards a contextual view on content sharing. Indeed, from this vantage, memes function more “as a set of social practices” rather than “individual texts” (Milner 3). This critical perspective is further developed in a body of scholarship which has revitalized the non-deterministic crowd theory of Gabriel Tarde for the purpose of situating contemporary cultural contagions and networked social assemblages (Sampson, Brighenti). Moving from a Dawkinsian model of autonomous imitation to a Tardean dynamic of “imitative encounter,” this scholarship positions crowd-like collectives as part of broader fields of social relations. In this thesis, the combined insights of critical approaches to spreadable media and extreme social formations as outlined above serve as key components of the trace-based analytical framework through which I contextualize the spread of #whitegenocide. With this, I depathologize the new extreme right by problematizing monolithic containment efforts and advocating an eye to systemic cultural shifts.
ii. The digital traces of White Twitter
As stated in the introduction, this thesis takes #whitegenocide as a field site. It differs from studies that start from the social media practices of specific far-right politicians, parties, or even users in cutting across an array of actors and content. As potential field sites, hashtags “function semiotically by marking the intended significance of an utterance” and “have the intertextual potential to link a broad range of tweets on a given topic or disparate topics as part of an
intertextual chain” (Bonilla and Rosa 5). In other words, hashtags are not isolated cultural units, but performative frames and narrative devices that work as part of broad cultural patchworks and serve as windows or “entry points into larger and more complex worlds” (Bonilla and Rosa 7). As such, I position #whitegenocide not as a comprehensive representation of the new extreme
right, but rather as a window onto the relational landscape of a sociotechnical compound I refer to throughout this thesis as White Twitter.
Forged at the intersection of the extreme right’s racial politics, digital activist practices, and increased audibility in the mainstream Western political arena, White Twitter is the
materialization of a contemporary white identity politics through the Twitter platform. While the collective performance of Black cultural identity on Twitter (or “Black Twitter”) calls attention to the presumed whiteness of the “generic and generalized user” (Florini 225), White Twitter overtly enacts the digital exclusion of racialized others in a bid for a whites only national space. The stark visibility of whiteness in the White Twittersphere contrasts with a mainstream white racial consciousness, which maintains its dominance via a “structured invisibility” (Frankenberg 6). Kathleen Blee underlines the importance of this distinction in her ethnographic work on the American far-right, but also points out that conspicuous extreme whiteness and unacknowledged mainstream whiteness are united in their reliance on a racializing model of inclusion by
exclusion. A relational concept in its own right, whiteness “can by definition have no meaning: as a normative space it is constructed precisely by the way it positions others at its borders” (Frankenberg 232). In this sense, whiteness bears the traces of racialized others in the same way that extreme social formations bear the traces of the normative limits they transgress.
Treating whiteness and extremism as dynamic, relational categories, this thesis
approaches #whitegenocide, and by extension White Twitter, not as autonomous extreme right pathologies, but as agents in ongoing boundary work. It does so by using “digital traces” as a heuristic for conceiving the eminently material, technocultural character of the data that users leave behind. In this, it follows Tyler Reigeluth’s understanding of data as the “trace of a relationship” between user and digital technology (248). Adapting the term from a body of
francophone literature that investigates the subjective implications of traces numeriques (French for data), Reigeluth holds that digital traces are neither the neutral reflections of a pre-existing reality nor the products of a technologically determined environment. Instead, traces point to the way digital infrastructures play out, not just infrastructure itself, as well as the way users engage with digital technologies rather than users’ inclinations themselves. I use digital traces to make the distillation of the White Twitter assemblage legible. Accounting for a compound
sociotechnical entity in fluid, non-representational terms, my analysis parallels a line of
anthropological inquiry where the trace works as “an analytical tool and an ethnographic site for inquiry,” and emphasizes the material dimension of “the coming into being of the social and its recession” (Napolitano 49). This critical ethnographic orientation undergirds my trace-based analysis of a networked extreme right phenomenon that is situated at the bounds of normative racial and political categories and actively engaged in reworking those boundaries.
Affect is an important component of the fluid anthropology of the trace I am endeavoring to develop here as it provides a non-essential lens on the dynamic materiality of online
engagement. Designating hashtagged user bases as “affective publics,” Zizi Papacharissi calls attention to the ways in which they are “mobilized and connected… through expressions of sentiment, as these expressions of sentiment materialize discursively through the medium of Twitter” (320). According to her, affective publics are in a constant state of transformative materialization insofar as “they become what they are and simultaneously ‘a record or trace’ of what they are” (Papacharissi 310). This fluid materiality of trace-based affective publics suggests it is not only platform architecture that serves as the organizing principle of networked social assemblages, but also the “structures of feeling” that “open up and sustain discursive spaces where stories can be told” (Papacharissi 320). Structures of feeling as Raymond Williams defines
them are “social experiences in solution,” or “practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelated continuity” (133). Treating #whitegenocide as an ascendant extreme right structure of feeling, I enfold the situated fluidity of the affective lens in the trace-based analytical framework I develop throughout this thesis.
This lens is especially useful in tracing the sort of ongoing boundary work that I have argued is characteristic of the networked new extreme right. According to Sara Ahmed, the circulation of affect “generates the surfaces of collective bodies” rather than being contained in any one object or sign (128). These relational transactions comprise “affective economies” in which affective value derives not from an object’s essential character but from its implication in emotionally charged networks of association. In the case of white nationalist anti-immigration politics, an affective economy of fear, which enfolds the emotive registers of love (of the white national collective) and hate (of those that would threaten it), continuously works to police and re-trace the boundaries between white self and racialized others (118). In this thesis, I use the notion of affective economy to picture the expansive range of emotion work and meaning making going on under the heading of #whitegenocide. Recalling my qualification of “extreme” social formations, I argue that top #whitegenocide retweets reflect the functioning of larger extreme right affective economies of transgression which work simultaneously at the limits of whiteness and mainstream political consensus. On the one hand, the affective register of transgression includes the pleasure in being “edgy” and the triumph that accompanies the
successful penetration of mainstream politics. On the other, it includes racial anxieties stemming from the prospect that the limits of an imagined white collective might be transgressed by racial outsiders. Throughout this thesis, I demonstrate how these axes of transgression subtend the
iteration of #whitegenocide and define the White Twittersphere, privileging affect and effect over a simplistic discourse of origins or intent.
iii. Chapter breakdown
I narrow the virtually limitless window #whitegenocide provides onto the White Twitter
construct and the affective economies of transgression that sustain it by delimiting several points of intervention. These include a dataset comprised by the top ten #whitegenocide retweets per month, the Twitter activity and profile of the most retweeted #whitegenocide user, and two viral peaks in #whitegenocide usage, all between January 2016 and December 2016.2 This period is especially interesting as it corresponds with the escalation of a charged migration politics in both the U.S. and Europe, including key political events such as Brexit and the election of U.S. president Donald Trump. I treat the collection of retweets, the top-retweeted user-leader, and the viral trends as varying manifestations of spreadability on White Twitter. My analysis of these traceable assemblages is organized in three chapters.
Chapter 1 delineates what I treat as extreme right axes of transgression and the affective economies they maintain through several analyses of the most retweeted #whitegenocide content. It bases these readings on a trace-based genealogy of the new extreme right which endeavors to contextualize the phenomenon with respect to current cultural trends, histories of racial
formation, technical affordances, and platform milieus. After providing this context, it looks at how individual user practices of self-presentation or “affective positioning” work within and push the limits of existing affective economies of transgression. Finally, it investigates how the
2I isolated this content using Borra and Rieder’s (2014) Twitter Capturing and Analysis Tool (TCAT), a software
locative dimension of these diverse user alignments contributes to building cross-border “affective affinities” which animate a transnational white racial imaginary.
In Chapter 2, I use the non-essentialist lens of digital traces to explore the gendered nature of extreme right affective economies of transgression as they materialize in top #whitegenocide retweets. The chapter revolves around @LadyAodh, the most retweeted
#whitegenocide user during the period I analyzed. @LadyAodh’s leader-like role in the dataset is especially interesting given her identification as a woman in the context of a movement known for its regressive gender politics. I approach @LadyAodh’s digital persona and her leader-like role in the #whitegenocide dataset by combining contemporary interpretations of Tardean crowd theory, ethnographic accounts of the gendered and raced experiences of white women in the West, and postcolonial feminist scholarship. This critical framework allows me to relate gender performance to leadership practices and consider the ways in which “extreme white feminism” both bolsters and contests white nationalist patriarchy.
In Chapter 3, I conduct a “media epidemiography” (Postill) of two major peaks in #whitegenocide usage when the hashtag trended on Twitter and attracted a considerable amount of media attention. Advocating a degree of ethnographic specificity in the investigation of viral phenomena, the media epidemiography approach allows me to further develop my trace-based analytical framework with respect to the compound technocultural logics that foster virality. Treating the viral proliferations of #whitegenocide as digital traces of legitimacy, I conclude a thesis-wide effort to shift focus from the contagious threat posed by the new extreme right to the effects of its materialization through sociotechnical encounters.
Chapter 1. Situating the New Extreme Right: Trace-based Genealogy, Affective
Positioning, and Affective Affinities in Top #whitegenocide Retweets
In the introduction to this thesis, I used the language of digital traces as a means of situating the digital production of the new extreme right with respect to the wider sociotechnical landscape in which it is couched. This chapter picks up where the introduction left off, locating the new extreme right at the intersection of cultural trends, platform logics, and analog histories of racial formation, and setting this contextual framework in motion through several trace-based analyses of top #whitegenocide retweets. It begins by tying the critical conception of digital traces I forward in this thesis to the non-essentialist lens of Michel Foucault’s genealogical method. Indeed, I treat the contextual framework I lay out in the first section of this chapter as a trace-based genealogy of the new extreme right which eschews essentialist origins myths and
simplistic schematics of contagion. Seeing the subject as a relational process rather than a fixed form, the genealogical approach draws out the analytical potential of digital traces and informs the analyses of the most retweeted #whitegenocide content that follow.
The analysis in this chapter centers on a small dataset of 120 #whitegenocide retweets collected between January 2016 and December 2016. Drawing examples from this pool of highly circulated content, I introduce readers to the themes, imagery, and discourse that set the tone of the #whitegenocide structure of feeling and zero in on varying aspects of the larger text (and subtext) of digital traces generated by the hashtag’s iteration. In the first of these analytical sections, I illustrate the interrelated functioning of what I identified as the central axes of extreme right affective economies of transgression within top retweets themselves. In the second, I
“affective positionings” of individual retweeters within larger retweet chains. In the third, I analyze the locative traces embedded in top retweet chains and discuss the transnational circulation of #whitegenocide in terms of affective affinity. Throughout these analytical exercises, the digital trace figures as a genealogical construct which serves in a conceptual and methodological sense to contextualize, relationalize, and particularize the distillation of
sociotechnical collectivity.
i. A trace-based genealogy of the new extreme right
Foucault’s understanding of subjectivity as a historically and technologically situated process helps to dispel the illusions of objectivity and truth that characterize normative data discourse. Recognizing this, Tyler Reigeluth draws his framing of the relational character of datafied subjectivity from Foucault’s claim that, “Self is evidently not, in this context, the name of an identity or a position, it is the very matter of the experimentation of the tekhne— and it is also the result, the product which is constantly reworked, modified, folded to the creative logic of an endless becoming” (Reigeluth 247). This radical articulation of subjectivation in terms of self-formulation rather than static identification serves as the basis of Foucault’s genealogical method, a historiographic reorientation towards a subject “that is not definitely given, that is not the thing on the bases of which truth happens to history— rather a subject that constitutes itself within history and is constantly established and re-established by history” (Foucault, Essential Works 3). The situated perspective of genealogy and its eye to historical emergence parallels a trace-based paradigm which includes “seeing digital technology in continuity with ‘previous’ or existing social, political, and economic structures, and not only in terms of change, revolution or novelty” (Reigeluth 249). My endeavor to “trace” the new extreme right— narrating the
alignments— enacts the Foucaultian genealogical imperative of context over content in order to picture White Twitter as a liminal, sociotechnically contingent phenomenon.
The practice-based perspective on “extreme” social formation I introduced previously supports the trace-based genealogy I carry out in this section. Underlining this conceptual convergence, I consider Angela Nagle’s account of an alt-right subcultural politics of
transgression in more detail. Nagle herself forwards an alternative genealogy of the alt-right in highlighting the influence of writers and thinkers like the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche as well as cultural trends from Surrealism to the transgressive leftist culture of the 1960s over other right-wing, conservative, and even racist movements (29). By her logic, the proliferation of in-jokes, countercultural aesthetics, and telltale lingo across social media platforms indicates the burgeoning of a transgressive extreme right subculture free “from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII” (Nagle 38). The alt-right’s deft repurposing of the transgressive subcultural framework typically associated with progressive political aims points to the ideological flexibility and moral
neutrality of the dynamic of transgression as described by Foucault. Approached as a stronghold of subcultural capital, alt-right identity is more a reaction to an equally exclusive, immunitary left-wing call out culture than a self-sustained racist outgrowth.
Given the ways in which the new extreme right invokes and delineates whiteness in addition to mainstream political consensus, however, I argue that it is equally important to consider the historical bases of its racializing worldview in organized white nationalist
movements as well as larger histories of racial formation in the West. The American alt-right in particular often reproduces an explicitly racial discourse that places it in a continuum with an earlier generation of neo-Nazis, KKK members, Holocaust deniers, and Christian Identitarians
that comprise “Alt-America” in the long durée (Neiwert). The hashtag that serves as both the subject of this thesis and the most popular hashtag amongst this extremist milieu is one of the most visible ties between this long-standing tradition of white nationalism and the contemporary extreme right. The term “white genocide” was popularized in the late 1980s after American neo-Nazi activist David Lane published his “White Genocide Manifesto.” The notion of whiteness under siege served handily as a rallying point for a fragmented white nationalist movement perennially besieged by in-group conflicts (Berger). More recently, white nationalist politician Bob Whitaker installed himself as figurehead of an anti-white genocide movement in creating the “Mantra,” which can be boiled down to the statement, “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white” (Lenz n.p.). Strategically recoding mainstream cultural values, the Mantra and the idea of white genocide itself are forms of extreme speech which endeavor to epistemologically shift the meaning of whiteness in the post-civil rights era (Daniels, Cyber Racism).
Importantly, these epistemological shifts are not limited to the American political sphere. White genocide discourse finds its European counterpart in the notion of “The Great
Replacement.” Describing the demographic threat (white) European populations face due to accelerated immigration from non-Western countries, the term reflects the sensibilities of the French Nouvelle Droit, a postwar school of extreme right political thought, and its founder, right-wing philosopher Alain de Benoist. Benoist is known for employing a leftist
anti-imperialist discourse to make a case for the separation of various populations across the globe, supposedly in the interests of preserving diversity (Williams). Strategically flipping progressive discourse in the interests of opposing immigration, Benoist’s writings resonate with Lane’s reversal of mainstream multicultural consensus in the “White Genocide Manifesto.” While Lane speaks in an explicitly racial register including terms like “racial integration,” “miscegenation,”
and of course “white genocide,” his conclusion— “we must secure the existence of our people”— and dystopian vision of shifting demographics strike a deep chord with Benoist’s oeuvre. By my reading, Benoist’s and Lane’s outputs are historically sympathetic instances of extreme speech, both in the sense of their emergence in a postwar, “post-racial” climate and their active intervention on history, particularly the history of Western colonialism, to effect the “minoritization of whiteness” (Back 131).
Speaking to these sort of transatlantic historical convergences, Nicholas De Genova (2010) argues that the “global fact” of white supremacy works as a “postcolonial cancer” that “metastasizes across distinct historical moments and disparate geopolitical spaces and manifests itself in the discrepant discourses of apparently divergent intellectual and political personalities, throughout the trans-Atlantic body of ‘the West’” (414). Tying current U.S. and European public discourse on migration to the global legacies of empire that brought the West as a unified
cultural and political entity into being, he foregrounds the persistence of a historically-inflected white racial consciousness. His notion of postcolonial discursive metastasis provides a
framework for conceiving how the white genocide structure of feeling is at once a hallmark of American white supremacist movements and a product of far-reaching processes of postcolonial racial formation in the West. Indeed, without reference to colonial histories, resurgent racist movements on both continents appear as “nothing more than populist reaction formations, provoked by the unseemly presence of the migrants themselves” (De Genova 413). By such omissions, the racializing character of extreme right movements seems incidental, a simple byproduct of other larger problems which stand as the primary root of extreme right antagonism.
I see this as a potential shortcoming of Nagle’s account of alt-right transgression which implicates progressive left and liberal establishment alike in the spread of a new extreme right
sensibility. Taken out of the context of the historical delineation of whiteness, her argument could be used to naturalize the responses of populist or far-right groups and obscure the ways in which the extreme right, the “problem of immigration,” and immunitary left-wing identity politics alike are co-articulated in common histories of racial formation. Instead, I suggest that these histories are what set the conditions of possibility for extreme right responses to the incursions of “political correctness,” contemporary immigration, and omnipresent markers of globalization. While I think it is important to contextualize extreme right social formations with regard to the present cultural-political landscape, I maintain that concurrently historicizing the phenomenon can help to account for telling transnational crossovers in the dynamic language of traces rather than the finite language of origins.
Having situated the new extreme right with respect to contemporary cultural logics and historical persistences, I conclude my trace-based genealogy by looking at the movement’s relation to the Twitter platform. Where relatively lesser-known (and less regulated) platforms like 4chan and Reddit are often regarded as hotbeds of nascent extreme right digital culture, Twitter appears to function as an extreme right conduit to the mainstream (Squirrel). Since its creation, Twitter has been construed as a boundless and inclusive public sphere (or in former CEO Dick Costolo’s words, a “global town square”) as well as the domain of politics proper in the digital era. These cultural apprehensions of Twitter’s functionality are easily weaponized by a new extreme right seeking legitimacy in the mainstream political arena. Jessie Daniels
illustrates the extreme right’s instrumental conception of the platform when she writes, “The thinking goes among white supremacists, if today we can get “normies” talking about Pepe the Frog, then tomorrow we can get them to ask the other questions on our agenda: ‘Are Jews people?’ or ‘What about black on white crime?’” (“Twitter and White Supremacy” n.p.). This
aim exists in productive symbiosis with Twitter’s trending algorithms and traffic-based business model where more attention generates more revenue. As mentioned in the introduction, the effects of this attention economy are compounded by news outlets whose coverage of the new extreme right risks “turning a diffuse online subculture into a solid state political movement” (Gourarie n.p.).
For many, the troubling imbrication of extreme right objectives and platform environment points to the need for active intervention on Twitter’s part. Along these lines, George Hawley calls Twitter an “online Wild West” which requires policing in order to put the alt-right “back in its Internet isolation” (161). He takes a favorable stance on Twitter’s decision to suspend a number of extreme right accounts en masse (an action which Breitbart called “The Great Twitter Purge”), and claims that the alt-right Twitter replacement Gab poses little threat given its failure to attract a more mainstream crowd. Still, I would caution that regulation may strengthen the claims of extreme right “free speech” activism and even “accelerate the
convergence of extreme right-wing groups, which are sharing common grievances and
victimhood narratives” (Davey and Ebner 26). Besides this, regulatory measures can jeopardize the exercise of personal freedom online across the political spectrum, an issue which Hawley recognizes insofar as “rules used against the alt-right today can be used against Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter tomorrow” (165).
In line with the trace-based genealogical perspective I have laid out here, I argue that the effects of regulation should be seen as part of the larger White Twitter assemblage. Rather than the self-propagation of racist memes across the open internet, the spread of #whitegenocide speaks to the machinations of a multivalent, platform-based digital environment comprised by interlocking economic incentives, platform affordances, cultural norms, and varied audiences.
Simple quarantine measures (like deletion or suspension) often fail to account for the myriad technical, historical, cultural, and political influences that animate the White Twitter milieu and drive the circulatory logic of larger extreme right affective economies of transgression.
ii. Extreme right axes of transgression: Co-defining whiteness and mainstream political consciousness
Having conducted a cursory genealogy of the new extreme right, I use this trace-based
framework to ground several analyses of the most retweeted #whitegenocide content. I treat the legacies of anti-progressive identity and racial formation I described in the above genealogy as interrelated axes of transgression which set the emotional tenor of top #whitegenocide retweets. The retweet serves as the primary mechanism of spreadability on Twitter as well as a key
structuring element of otherwise amorphous hashtagged collectives. The significance of retweets is related to their direct influence in determining what “trends” on Twitter (Asur et al.), an algorithmic prominence which heightens their ability to propagate across networks of followers through processes of user-driven iteration. Due to the fact that over two-thirds of the total number of tweets tagged with #whitegenocide during the period I analyzed were retweets, I take the most popular of these as a good indication of the sort of content that galvanizes the
#whitegenocide milieu, setting the tone of extreme right content sharing on Twitter and defining its perception by those across the political spectrum.
Taken together, the 120 top retweets I gathered dealt evenly with the dangers posed by the presence of racial others and the follies of mainstream politics and cultural norms. The former theme typically involved framing “nonwhite” immigrants or minority groups in Western countries as sexual, demographic, criminal, or cultural threats. The discourse of threat
efficacy of an affective register of fear in the spread of #whitegenocide. As Sara Ahmed points out, the affective economy of fear driving white nationalist sentiment works by associatively sticking an array of actors, objects, and symbols together so that the object of fear is never clearly delineated but comprised by an expansive conglomeration of interrelated signifiers. This sort of “stickiness” is especially pronounced on White Twitter where individual tweets form multimedia assemblages that combine discursive and visual content to malign racial others. One top retweet reading, “‘Refugees’ in Germany are responsible for 6,000 criminal incidents per day #whitegenocide” (@LadyAodh), includes a photo of refugees boarding a German train as well as a link to a news article in the New Observer (see figure 1). While the photo is entirely
unconnected to the criminal acts the user reports, their combination in this particular tweet works to relate phenomena of mass immigration and mass criminality. As a result, the otherwise
innocent thumbs up one of the refugees gives to the camera reads as a mocking symbol of thinly veiled ill-intention. Tweets like this one illustrate Ahmed’s point that the possibility of passing— in this case the potential of the criminal to pass as a refugee— works to undermine the
distinction between these figures.
The immediacy of the primary association between refugees and criminals in the tweet is further reinforced by the linked article. An online publication with a clear racial bias, the
webpage of the New Observer includes a tab devoted solely to “race” that features stories meant to amass evidence of non-white inferiority and criminality. The article goes a step further than the tweet, referring to refugees exclusively as “nonwhite invaders.” Here, it is precisely the marked non-whiteness of refugees that makes them “invaders” who inevitably commit acts of excessive violence as well as daily sexual and criminal transgressions against white populations. The fear of such transgression slides elastically sideways to spin new objects (like the photo of
the refugees boarding the train) as scenes of invasion. But, according to Ahmed, the “rippling effect of emotions” also moves backwards to form a continuum with the historical workings of a persistent affective economy of fear (120). Using Ahmed’s terminology, the digital traces of top #whitegenocide retweets speak as much to the “absent presence of historicity” as they do to the affordances of social media platforms. Indeed, from the genealogical perspective I outlined above, extreme speech acts like the above tweet partake of a host of racial stereotypes historically rooted in colonial encounter. Citing the untrustworthiness and amoral nature of nonwhite outsiders, the tweet employs a well-established rhetorical strategy which suggests digital traces should be seen less in terms of epochal shift than historical recalibration.
While the above example illustrates the success of a strategic affective exploitation of race-based fears, the spreadability of other top #whitegenocide retweets is related to the
challenge they pose to the hegemony of normative Western cultural values, mainstream political actors, and mainstream media. The affective register of these tweets is often more in line with the sort of transgressive glee that Nagle pinpoints as the motor of alt-right antagonism. Many
employ a pseudo-satirical rhetorical strategy which ironically frames whites’ complicity in their own destruction. One such tweet reads, “This MORON=>> @DavidAFrench has no idea how the Internet works. What a Jackass!!! 😂😂😂😂 #WhiteGenocide” (@ThePatriot143). The attached visual content appearing below the text juxtaposes a meme featuring David French, a prominent American attorney and journalist, with one of French’s own tweets (see figure 2). The meme identifies him as “Bill Kristol’s candidate,” aligning him with a right-of-center
conservative politician who has been outspoken in his opposition to President Trump. It quotes him saying white working-class communities “deserve to die” (although it provides no source or context for this statement). French’s tweet, on the other hand, critiques Republican politicians
who support Trump stating, “The leaders of the party that ended slavery now endorse a man who bullies women, lies habitually, and incites violence. My heart breaks.” Highlighting the apparent inconsistency of French’s position, the tweet uses deliberately irreverent language as well as an emoji connoting hysterical laughter to ridicule his ignorance of his own digital traceability. The tweet’s jubilant humor contrasts markedly with the earnest tone of French’s tweet, using a parodic rhetorical strategy to redress the evident hypocrisy of mainstream politics.
In other top retweets, the emotional registers of fear and wry humor are closely intertwined. Some instances of this cross-affective referencing include statements such as, “African invader rapes 15 French Women to stop their racism... #nrx #whitegenocide”
(@Thug_Violence), and “#Milwaukee Whites Being Hunted & Beaten by blacks. Multicultural Enrichment for White Generosity Stop #WhiteGenocide” (@trump2016fan). In both cases, common mainstream buzzwords like “multicultural enrichment” and normative political prerogatives like “stop their racism” are used in ironic juxtaposition with highly sensational accounts of non-white violence. Tweets like these illustrate the difficulty of determining a given user’s allegiance to a white nationalist tradition or a subcultural trend. Acknowledging the futility of the search for extreme right origins, Nagle asks of alt-right social media users, “Is it possible that they are both ironic parodists and earnest actors in a media phenomenon at the same time?” (11). In the spirit of this question, I propose that the most popular #whitegenocide
retweets be regarded not as self-same products of either analog histories, cultural trends,
platform affordances, or user inclinations, but rather as affectively positioned along the axes that sustain larger extreme right affective economies of transgression and cut across these inputs. The difficulty of extricating the emotional tones of fear and irony even within the limited scope of individual tweets points to the fundamental interrelation of the racial and mainstream
dichotomies that define an extreme right transgressive imaginary. Indeed, while opposition to mainstream values is defined squarely in terms of race, racial framing develops precisely in opposition to normative values. Investigating the affective positioning of these retweets, I enact a trace-based analysis attuned to the effects of genealogical convergences rather than an
essentialist search for the truth behind extreme speech acts. In what follows, I further develop the notion of affective positioning and the variegated emotive landscape it implies with respect to retweet chains.
iii. Affective positioning, textual bodies, and the multiplicity of the crowd The digital traces of the most popular #whitegenocide retweets encompass not only the
attributions of replicated content itself but also the lengthy chains of their iteration at the hands of individual users. While on the surface the Twitter retweet function produces a fairly uniform output, the aggregate of hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of individual user profiles that underlie the most popular retweets comprise varied and distinctive retweet chains. In this section, I look at how users’ self-descriptions serve as individual “bodies of text” by which users perform their identities online (Van Doorn 535). I position these digitally traceable performances as acts of affective positioning that speak to the dynamic iterability of #whitegenocide retweets and shape the larger #whitegenocide structure of feeling.
In August 2016, a tweet by well-known American white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke was one of the most popular #whitegenocide retweets. In a typical twist of mainstream multiculturalism and anti-racism, the tweet stated, “A racist used to be someone who hated Blacks. Now, a racist is someone who doesn't hate Whites.
#WhiteGenocide” (@DrDavidDuke). Performing the sort of epistemological intervention Daniels links to digital cultures of white supremacy, Duke’s tweet serves as a textbook case of a
“white genocide” discourse rooted in the long-standing tradition of organized American racist activism. The standard white nationalist discourse of this tweet, though, is complicated by the diverse array of user-based digital traces that narrate its propagation.
One retweeter, @vonjagerbomber, clearly aligned with edgy, alt-right counterculture, describing themselves with, “Intersectional Trans-Anime Nazi-Positive Autistkin | Pronouns Hic/Haec/Hoc | Helping oppressed minorities feel those feels since 1488.” In this performative textual body, references to white nationalist ideology combine with distinctly ironic invocations of new leftist rhetoric including the specification of preferred pronouns and a concern for “oppressed minorities.” The number 1488, a common extreme right reference to the “14 words” (the infamous final line of Lane’s “White Genocide Manifesto”) and “Heil Hitler” (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet), blends hallmarks of German Nazism and American white nationalism to form a transatlantic mode of neofascist identification (Anti-Defamation League). Another retweeter provides the following self-description, “22. Catholic. Revelation 21:6,” while yet another characterizes himself as a “Socialista y Nacionalista Español, Anticapitalista, Antifeminista, Antiglobalista, AntiUE, ProNatura,” and still another lists, “Animals Are My Angels🐈 My First LOve Lionel Andrés Messi❤ Culé⚽ Força Barça💪Visca Barça✌ I LOve Argentina💖Vegan🌿37. Twilight Saga & Enrique Iglesias Addict🎸”. Implicating Christianity, Spanish nationalism, and pop cultural references in the spread of #whitegenocide, these
performances contribute to the range of political alignments, personal beliefs and aesthetics behind the retweet. Whether in-the-know irony, religious reverence, patriotic fervor, or innocent fun, each endows the retweeted content with an emotive spin all its own. Together the diverse affective positionings of individual users constitute a more variegated picture of a collective
white self ostensibly under siege and show how top #whitegenocide retweets work as polyvocal instances of extreme speech rather than self-same hate messages.
This varied array of user profiles challenges the collusions of securitizing hate speech discourse and essentialist notions of data which posit the “technological capacity to bridge the gap between the level of the aggregate and the level of the individual, namely to ‘reduce’ multiplicities” (Brighenti 300). The reductive tendencies of hate speech designations and normative data discourse alike make for flattened, proscriptive views of extreme right identity and motivation. Seeing the material outputs of user practices of self-presentation and
personalized content creation as “digital bodies of text,” however, means they are not “mimetic textual copies of the ‘real thing’” (Van Doorn 535). This perspective is in line with the
genealogical outlook of digital traces I detailed earlier under which “the self is not a ‘given’ pre-existing its objectification and, as such, it cannot be represented and computed through bits of data” (Reigeluth 248). In the interest of treating the textual bodies of extreme right retweeters as stylized self-permutations in process rather than static self-representations, I use the terminology of affective positioning as opposed to identification or intent.
But what is the relation between the manifold affective positionings of individual users and the collective affective economies of transgression that animate #whitegenocide? And how to transact between the two without reducing their multiplicity? In emphasizing the variegated affective make-up of top #whitegenocide retweets, I am not arguing for an entirely disaggregated portrait of the new extreme right. Instead, the notion of “multiplicity” as Andrea Brighenti defines it, is meant “to overcome the dichotomy between single and multiple” and “focus on the point in which the ‘many’ stops being a sum of discrete entities and acquires its own status, not as a unity, substance, or group, but as a movement, operation, or act” (305). This understanding
of multiplicity resonates with the point that I made earlier that the term “extreme” serves less as a substantive ideological descriptor than an indication of a transgressive operative logic. Further, Brighenti argues that compound social assemblages or “crowds” are “nothing in themselves but the process and the result of given encounters, of specific ‘experiments’ within a social field” (299), while the individual “emerges as a range within the larger horizon of anthropological possibilities” (297). Conceiving crowds and individuals in radically relational terms, Brighenti’s notion of multiplicity supports the theoretical underpinnings of my trace-based analysis and helps to limb the subjective and societal implications of digital traces.
Indeed, on the one hand, the encounters between platform architectures and affordances, historical imaginaries, and cultural frameworks that shape the #whitegenocide structure of
feeling compel certain kinds of individual performances and bind these distinct textual bodies via an operative unity. On the other, individual acts of creativity expand the conditions of possibility for extreme right expression and shift larger meanings of political participation. In this sense, apparently discordant affective positionings like earnest patriotism, ironic satire, fear towards racial others, religious sentiment, and pop cultural adulation exceed the signifying power of the retweet itself and effectively widen the reach of extreme right affective economies of
transgression. The argument that follows from my analysis of this creative mélange is that a digital trace-based conception of the spread of new extreme right digital culture and White Twitter in particular captures the contingency of individual retweeters and hashtag crowds, and accounts at once for the irreducible multiplicity and operative coherence of the networked new extreme right. In the following section, I show how this operative coherence stretches beyond individuals and their personal alignments to span the boundaries of national collectives.
The most popular #whitegenocide retweets address putative threats to white populations primarily within the U.S. and Europe. Unsurprisingly, they are most frequently retweeted by users based in these geographical areas. Previously, I drew out the historical significance of such transatlantic convergences and problematized both the essentialist framing of “white genocide” as an exclusively American preoccupation and the normative race-neutral pretense of
contemporary European immigration politics. Instead, disparate invocations of whiteness like “white genocide” and “The Great Replacement” partake of a larger white racial imaginary that spans borders rather than being restricted to particular national contexts. Posed in terms of affective affinity, they reflect a shared sensibility regarding the transgression of a supposedly pure national, racial, and cultural collective by those whose proper place is imagined to be outside those limits. In the analysis that follows, I place these historical legacies into solution with the technological affordances that undergird White Twitter, demonstrating how the hashtagification of white genocide discourse retraces historical grooves even while it expands ever outward to establish new transatlantic connections. Where in the previous analysis of retweet chains, the notion of affective positioning served as a non-essentialist means of
accounting for diverse user alignments, here I use the language of affective affinities to explore the significance of self-provided and automatically recorded locative digital traces.
Through its use by a variety of actors in a variety of contexts, #whitegenocide generates complex webs of association that cross political affiliations, personal identities, and national borders. Its transnational digital circulation illustrates how, in the internet era, “the rhetoric of whiteness becomes the means to combine profoundly local grammars of racial exclusion within translocal and international reach, which is made viable through digital technology” (Back 98). In the case of white supremacist networks online, this distillation of “translocal whiteness” is
achieved via extreme right internet users’ attempted delineation of and self-projection into digital “racial homelands” (Back 130). User (re)production of markedly white spaces online calls
attention to the locative dimension of the “digital bodies of text” I discussed previously. Borrowing from Erving Goffman, De Souza e Silva and Frith refer to the practices that bind location to identity construction and performance as the “presentation of location.” They argue that the locative aspect of individual self-presentation becomes especially complex with the advent of location-aware mobile technologies. The digital mediation of location means that locations “acquire dynamic meaning as a consequence of the constantly changing location-based information that is attached to them” (De Souza e Silva and Frith 9). Locations themselves, then, are rendered in the digital era as composites of digital traces.
There is considerable freedom on Twitter to customize or, on the other hand, entirely obscure one’s geographic location. While users have the option to “geotag” tweets (sharing precise geographic coordinates), this feature is notoriously underused (Wilken). Other means of locative identification are available as optional user profile information, including an entirely customizable location field as well as a country/time zone drop down menu. The creative potential afforded by the former is well-represented in the larger top #whitegenocide retweet chains. Returning to the example of @vonjagerbomber, the user designates their location as “Das Trumpenreich,” triangulating the contemporary American political landscape and Hitler’s
Germany to form a sort of white ethnonationalist utopia. Other locational idiosyncrasies in the same retweet chain include, “Among blue-eyed blonds,” “Gunshine State, USA,” and
“Jewmerica.” Anomalous imagined locations like these combine with more standard place names to comprise the spatial dimension of a translocal whiteness.
With respect to the country/time zone option that serves as another means of designating location, data was indicated for around half of the users in the #whitegenocide retweet chains I analyzed. I collated the available time zone traces of several retweet chains to get a sense of the transnational reach of #whitegenocide (or using Back’s terminology, the translocalization of whiteness). I present this not to advocate a return to the sort of national origins-based perspective that I critiqued earlier, but rather to explore how such locative traces can be posed in terms of affective affinity. While time zone data is more standardized than the location data I discussed above (limited to the 141 options in the drop-down menu), it should not be seen as a definitive or reliable means of establishing user location (Maude). The time zone attached to a user’s profile is preselected according to the location-sensing technology of the user’s device, but users have the ability to manually change their time zone, meaning these traces also potentially reflect user interpretation and motivation. Additionally, time zone data cannot account for the nationality of travelers or expats who reside outside their countries of origin. This data, then, should be regarded as the traces of users’ locative affinities, the indeterminate geography of the #whitegenocide structure of feeling.
According to the time zone data, the vast majority of #whitegenocide retweeters were based in the U.S. and Europe. In all of the top retweets I analyzed, the number of U.S.-based retweeters exceeded the number of Europe-based retweeters. These proportions varied, however, given the content of the top retweets themselves. Tweets that specifically addressed European incidents and issues were retweeted more evenly by U.S. and European users. Content of this sort included top retweets like, “Two 14-year-old girls gang raped by three Syrian men in small German town. #WhiteGenocide” (@prowhitesunite), and, “This is Gare Du Nord (Train station) in Paris, 2016. Watch this and please tell me that #WhiteGenocide isn't real” (@ThatExLiberal).
In these cases, U.S.-based retweeters accounted for roughly ⅔ of the total retweets while Europe-based retweeters accounted for roughly ⅓. In another Europe-related top retweet— “German govt is literally explaining to migrants how to properly impregnate German gals using pictures #WhiteGenocide” (@PopulationWatch)— U.S. and European retweeters were equally
represented.
Interestingly, there were relatively few top #whitegenocide retweets that explicitly cited U.S.-related issues. The majority of top retweets that did not reference European issues were concerned with generally defining (or epistemologically refining) “white genocide.” Tweets like these included, “Again, you cannot coexist with people who want to kill you.. #Diversity is codeword for #WhiteGenocide #IslamIsEvil” (@WhitestRabbit_), and, “Love your race and don't race mix! #WhiteIsRight for white women and white men.. #WhiteGenocide”
(@WhitestRabbit_). In the associated retweet chains, users based in the U.S. were much more highly represented than those in Europe with more of an 80:20 or even 90:10 split. The users responsible for these tweets often sported usernames crafted from alt-right subcultural references like @Whitest_Rabbit and @kek_sec. This suggests several things. On one hand, it points to the American origins of white genocide discourse and the tradition of race-based epistemological intervention from which it derives. But on the other hand, it illustrates the poignancy of the European refugee crisis in the context of an emergent extreme right sensibility as well as the formative role this event and its prolific representation are playing in reinforcing and expanding a translocal white racial imaginary. In this sense, the hashtag with its ideological leanings and affective purchase crosses national contexts in a manner that points not to the irrelevance of location in the digital era but its added significatory power in forging a transnational white racial community. The critical understanding of locative traces as affective affinity I have developed
here illuminates the ways in which extreme right affective economies of transgression cohere around the delineation of digital racial homelands in common.
This chapter has laid the groundwork for a genealogical trace-based analysis of new extreme right digital culture which advocates close contextualization over hasty pathologization. Demonstrating how White Twitter materializes through the machinations of platform affordances and technical logics, cultural apprehensions, analog histories, and user creativity, it advanced an understanding of digital traces as “the uncertain, conflictive, and problematic manifestations of our becoming” (Reigeluth 253). In line with this perspective, I conclude #whitegenocide should be seen not as a self-same reflection of established new extreme right prerogatives, but as a structure of feeling that sets the bounds of their continuous transformation. In this, it functions as part of larger extreme right affective economies of transgression which converge at the limits of whiteness and mainstream Western democratic political consensus. My use of the
terms “affective positioning” and “affective affinity” was meant to call attention to the material dynamism of this emotive boundary work. In the following chapter, I further develop a non-essentialist orientation to encounter and gradual distillation in a trace-based investigation of the gender politics of the new extreme right.
Figure 1. (@LadyAodh)
Chapter 2. The Contagious Leadership of @LadyAodh: Extreme White Feminism
and the Gender Politics of the New Extreme Right
“One day all the lies will collapse under their weight, and the truth will once again triumph #WhiteGenocide #WhiteGirl”
@LadyAodh
In the dataset of the most popular #whitegenocide retweets I analyzed in the previous chapter, one user, @LadyAodh, authored nearly half of them. The above quote is featured on the profile sidebar of a Twitter account linked to this user. While @LadyAodh provides no attribution for the quote, it is taken from a letter written by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels shortly before his death and the dissolution of the Nazi regime. Known as the mastermind of the Nazi propaganda machine, Goebbels harnessed new media of his day like film and radio to make the Nazi ideology pervasive and alluring. Citing Goebbels, @LadyAodh fashions herself as a modern extreme right propaganda expert of sorts, a status which is borne out by her position as the most retweeted user in the #whitegenocide dataset. The Goebbels mashup on her profile, however, includes a direct reference to her gender: #WhiteGirl. The resonance of her tweets with the White Twitter crowd is especially interesting given her identification as a woman. In this chapter, I explore how the leadership role of a self-proclaimed #WhiteGirl in a milieu known as much for its outright misogyny as its racism provides opportunity for insight into the gendered nature of the new extreme right phenomenon.
Centering on @LadyAodh, this chapter investigates the conflicted nature of new extreme right femininity as well as the role of what I call “extreme white feminism” in bolstering white
nationalism. Employing the trace-based analytical framework I developed in Chapter 1, it uses the language of digital traces both to forward a non-essentialist account of the performance of gender in digital spaces and demonstrate that top @LadyAodh retweets are best understood as variegated products of the user-leader’s creativity and motivated choices, platform affordances, and the historical shaping of white women in relation to white men and racialized others. In addition to enacting this framework, however, it also builds on it, making the case that digital traces are not only a way of reading gender, but that gender can work as a way of reading digital traces. This methodological orientation leads me to the conclusion that the functioning of the affective economies of transgression I outlined previously cannot be understood without recourse to extreme right gender politics.
The chapter begins by briefly outlining the contradictory position of women in the new extreme right and situating @LadyAodh within the movement’s complex gendered hierarchy through a critical reading of her user profile. It then conceptualizes her leader-like role in the #whitegenocide dataset and forwards the idea that retweet-based visibility on Twitter supports a form of reciprocal “contagious leadership.” This involves more fully explicating the Tardean notion of “the crowd” and using it to approach the gendered emergence of collectivity via contagious relays between user-leader and retweeter crowd. Following this, it considers how extreme white feminism both supports the white nationalist racial program and contests the more violent outgrowths of extreme right patriarchy. Investigating the implications of this gendered affective management, it uses the digital persona of @LadyAodh as another way into the #whitegenocide structure of feeling.
While the new extreme right appears to be primarily driven by a race-based identity politics, its ties to online harassment campaigns targeting white women and women of color alike as well as groups like the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM), suggest it is equally animated by a regressive vision of gender relations. Indeed, the fact that the array of tactics used during the
much-publicized Gamergate harassment campaign have become “the standard toolset of far-right voices online” (Lees), points to the emergence of an “MRM-to-white nationalist pipeline” (Gais). This troubling convergence has exacerbated the conflict “brewing between what the alt-right knows it needs to do—recruit more white women—and the way it envisions the world it wants to build” (Gais). In other words, the task of fostering white (inter)national collectivity is at odds with patriarchal strictures which stand to alienate at least half the “pro-white” population.
The clash of these prerogatives and the larger existential conflict they reflect are most visible when it comes to the cadre of influential extreme right female vloggers, radio show hosts, and commentators. Despite the movement’s overtly misogynistic character, women like Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern, and Lana Lokteff have become extreme right household names and boast Twitter followers in the hundreds of thousands. Seyward Darby draws out the
contradictory status of these audible female supporters who, in actively advancing extreme right interests, “stand shoulder to shoulder with men who think that female independence has
undermined Western civilization” (n.p). While many of these women openly disparage
mainstream liberal feminism, their assumption of leader-like roles within the new extreme right milieu advances to a certain degree feminist prerogatives of self-determination and gender equality. Recasting the “alt-right as a refuge where white women can embrace their femininity and their racial heritage without shame” (Darby n.p.), influential female figures in the new extreme right situate female empowerment within the strictures of traditional gender norms.
