Cucks, Fags and Useful Idiots: The Othering of Dissenting White Masculinities Online
Online forums have provided fertile ground for the coalescence and growth of new manifestations of extreme-right communities, often referred to as the ‘Alt-Right’. The norms of these communities are policed through the othering of dissenters through inter
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troduction Internet forums have provided a fertile ground for the coalescence and growth of new manifestations of extreme-right communities, often referred to under the umbrella term ‘Alt-Right’. The norms of these communities are upheld and policed through the othering of dissenters and threats through intersectional categories of gender, racial and sexual deviance. Straight white men are placed as intellectually, morally and racially superior, while others occupy a hierarchy of inferiority. However, these discourses become unstable when ‘insiders’ express political opposition; the privileged traitor who expresses liberal politics is a particular threat to the normative hierarchy of identities. While these right-wing communities are engaged in racist projects, and much of their discourse is directly racist, this chapter focuses on the ways in which extreme-right communities use strategies of othering
A. Green (*) University of Southampton, Brighton, UK © The Author(s) 2019 K. Lumsden and E. Harmer (eds.), Online Othering, Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12633-9_3
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to discipline dissenting white men and neutralise perceived threats. It focuses on a prominent case study of two anti-Trump protestors who were filmed at a 2016 rally, with video of them broadly circulated in right-wing forums, including the Donald Trump Reddit subforum and 4chan’s /pol/ board. Following this, the protestors were subject to an onslaught of derogatory memes and insults; their identities were uncovered and published; and they and their families were targeted for abuse in their workplaces. ‘AIDS Skrillex’ and ‘Carl the Cuck’,1 as they became known, have joined the canon of right-wing targets, becoming to many posters the face of social justice warriors (SJWs)2; featured on lists of SJWs and the subject of innumerable memes.3 Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created to mock them,4 and you can buy t-shirts and other merchandise featuring depictions of them,5 designed with community input.6 In his painting Rise of the Republic, notorious pro-Trump artist Jon Proby places AIDS Skrillex among: ‘the forces of the Global political establishment’, alongside Hillary Clinton, the Pope, George Soros, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg.7 In this chapter, I present unedited examples of the offensive insults used by online trolls. This is not for its shock value, but to accurately portray the obscenity and violence of the attacks directed at the two individuals at the centre of this case study. As Jane (2014) has argued, only by representing the unexpurgated entirety of such discourse can we adequately analyse it. I debated whether this policy should apply to the offensive names given to the two men involved in this case study, but while I intend to interrogate the speech of right-wing trolls, I do not wish to join them in applying it. This would, after all, be reifying the trolls’ project to enact power over the individuals in this case by determining their identities. N
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