https://www.mintpressnews.com/global-war-terror-created-heroin-epidemic-us-afghanistan/218662/

I think the difference of that with the left wing conspiracy theories, it's usually some meek old hippy who believes in UFO's and wants to speak truth to power. Didn't Dennis Kuccinich say that he saw a UFO?

Whereas in the right, well, the conspiracies they see are all manifestations of some super ****ed psychological problems common to frustrated young men in a world where success with women and economic prosperity evade them, and this brings out all these demons lurking in the primitive human psyche. In this ways the alt. right is not so much a fundamentally racist movement (though it is that too), but a primitive one (kind of like the Nazis).

I have an alt right friend who speaks kindly of Ted Kaczynski and his concept of 'oversocialization', where modernity and social norms themselves are in fact to blame for denying young men from realizing their full natural potential, so that his various right wing theories are actually a special case of a general rebellion against mainstream society itself.

If the alt. right comes along, then, and lets him blame 'leftists' and communists and cucks for pretty much everything going wrong with the world as seen through the eyes of a frustrated young man, it's pretty much a shoe in.

It's a right wing movement related to mainstream conservativism simply because Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have also been blaming leftists and communists for everything under the sun, albeit in a less unabashedly primitive way, for decades.

Whoops.

There are no shortage of theories relating male/masculinity issues to the rise of fascism, too.

Actually, this idea sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole reading and, yeah, this seems to be accurate.

****. I mean, any discussion of the rise of the alt-right can't fail to watch the rise of **** like /r/theredpill, and various other forums dedicated to male sexual frustration, and it's relationship to the alt-right and GamerGate.

What's really disturbed me though is how similar Nazi doctrine about women was to the kinds of "biotruths" you hear about women in places like /r/theredpill. I always knew the Nazis treated women poorly, but the similarities are compelling.

On a related note: I've been reading some excerpts from a book "Male Fantasies" by this guy Klaus Theweleit. It's pretty unscientific and worthy being a bit skeptical about, but what he does is go through hundreds of letters of Freikorps members, many of whom later became SA and SS members, and discusses their views on women. It's a pretty damning take, though it's not comparative so who knows just how misogynistic they were relative to other men at the time. It's still hard not to notice, though, when you look at how ugly it is it's hard not to start doing armchair sociology yourself.

Like, I guess it was a Nazi thing that Jews had masculine women and effeminate men, and that Jewish women would try and get in male industries and other things not suited for women. Like literally they did the "soyboy" thing but phrased it all in terms of Jews instead of Californians.

Actually, WRT what I linked in the other thread, this is pretty much exactly what FiveThirtyEight is. And they're also really really good, so huh.

It's a blog focused around a topic with a plurality of writers who all come with a certain pedigree. There are other examples of this format, like Lawfare, which I had already mentioned. There are lots of other similar sites.

So maybe what Jon`C is suggesting actually exists: it's called a website. The only real problem is discoverability (something that the social media alternative to staking out on your own like this "solves").

There used to be a concept of a "blogosphere", but social media has really crowded this out to the point that mainstream audiences only ever find blogs if they get shared on Facebook.

Haha. I was scrolling up from the bottom of this thread, and was thinking, "there's a post about Nazis... and another one... and another one... oh! And there's the KKK... damn this thread has become the Trump thread." Then I saw this. Yup.

The fact that nobody seems able to discuss social media without the topic turning to extremism suggests something.

I really enjoy their podcasts.

Well, as we learned from that awesome lecture you linked, fake news propagates mostly on social media, and fake news is clearly going to be associated with extremism.

Mark Zitler

My fake news site didn't get much traffic until I started promoting it on social media. It was a pretty unsuccessful disinformation campaign that mostly spread by word of mouth.

Wait what? So the alt. right conspiracy theories are true? You really are shilling for George Soros and John Podesta? Are you CIA or something?

Let's just say I know who really did 9/11.

A bunch of suicidally depressed young muslim men who were trivially radicalized after growing up in a country marginalized and destabilized by decades of the reified hatred, fear, paranoia, and greed of the richest of Americans. If that's concise enough for you.

It was the pigs from the bay of pigs.

Ted Cruz's dad helped. Also, Jack Ruby is still alive and so is Jack Layton.

Yop. The Timothy McVeighs of the Muslim world, except so many more since so much more depressing bull**** happens there.