A Growing Menace
No.174: August 24, 2023
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Dear Friends,
Long unbeknownst to me there has been a dark menace metastasizing in certain corners of the online world. I always knew intellectually about platforms like 4-Chan and Reddit and Tumblr and so forth, and knew they were often cesspools incubating all manner of depravity. I assumed it was fringe and probably not terribly consequential in the grand scheme of things. Juveniles forming little online clubs while sitting in their parents’ basements doesn’t seem very noteworthy. But over the past year I have been encountering this menace more and more. I am now paying attention. You should pay attention, too.
My own consciousness started waking up over this affair. You may remember it. Celebrated (in certain circles) author Stephen Wolfe’s compatriot and podcast co-host Thomas Achord was “outed” as the owner of a pseudonymous Twitter account devoted to white supremacy. Wolfe himself lamely and unconvincingly claimed that he never could have imagined that his podcast partner held such odious views, but to this very day has never explained why he followed, “liked,” and interacted with said Twitter account, especially if, as he claims, he didn’t know it belonged to his close friend. That would imply he liked it because… he liked it. Moreover, given certain Tweets of his own (interracial marriage can be a “relative sin”), his promotion of Achord’s straightforwardly “kinist” book Who Is My Neighbor: An Anthology of Natural Relations, his fascination with Johann Gottfried Herder’s 18th century racial theories, and his outspoken advocacy of prioritizing one’s “natural affinity” with one’s own ethnic group, one is quite justified in being skeptical of Wolfe’s disavowal. For what it’s worth, his rather incurious publisher stands by him and he continues to have a platform provided to him by various ministries and figures in Moscow, Idaho.
No need to rehash all of that. It was my first real introduction to the world of the online “Alt Right.” Legions of anonymous Twitter users, obsessed with Greco-Roman pseudonyms, inside jokes, and secret wink-wink code words crawled out of the woodwork. Again, I knew they existed. Some of these were no doubt the trolls who for years kept sending David French photoshopped images of his (black) adopted daughter in Auschwitz ovens. Yes, I knew there were actual Nazis hiding in the dark corners behind pseudonyms.
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