Facebook Live: The Avant-Garde Tactics of the Alt Right

According to its architect and chief spokesman Richard Spencer, the Alt-Right movement in America is "the only new show in town" in the face of what he calls "lame, goofball equal rights schtick". By styling themselves as a 'counterculture' like that of the 1960s, Spencer and a group of anti-liberal internet personalities have rebranded radical right wing politics as the 'cool' rebellious option in an age dominated by the “tyranny of the left". During this Facebook live session I discuss Alt Right tactics of 'trolling' and 'red pilling' as similar to and informed by those used by various avant-garde art and literature movements of the 20th Century. By understanding online shock tactics in the context of these earlier countercultures, I argue, we can devise more productive ways of responding to them.