Some thoughts on the Alt Right and their hatred of women

Back in April of this year there was an Alt Right event in Berkeley California where violence broke out between the Alt Righters and various Antifa counter protestors. I don’t think anyone knows exactly who started what but in the process video was captured of a woman, who was clearly with the Antifa group, being punched in the face by a man from the Alt Right group.

I came across the video while scrolling through my Twitter feed. I was disgusted by what I saw as a man sucker punching a woman who was not very physically imposing and who was much smaller than he was. I Tweeted something along the lines of “Whatever your political views, it’s disgusting for a man to punch a woman” (I can’t remember the exact Tweet but it was something like that)

What followed was the largest onslaught of abuse I’ve ever received online. I was a “white Knight” and a “beta faggot”. I was accused of only saying that because I wanted to get into her pants (an accusation I found fairly amusing since I will almost certainly never meet this woman in real life). But I don’t mean to make myself the victim here because the main victim of the vitriol in the responses to my Tweet was her not me. I received comments like “Bitch wants equality, this is what equality looks like” and “you want the same rights as a man, then take a punch like a man”.

At first I was baffled by these responses. Most of the responses were coming from Alt Right accounts. Many of those accounts even had “traditionalist” in the description. I don’t know about you but sucker punching a woman in a street fight doesn’t seem very ‘trad’ to me. But the more I reflected on it the more I came to realize that I had been underestimating misogyny as a motivating force behind Alt Right politics online.

This hunch was further reinforced by a conversation I had with a friend who had been moving in the same circles as the young men that would later become the Alt Right for years. He told me that the thing I needed to understand is that the affinity these men had for white nationalism and Donald Trump was a fairly recent thing. In fact, many of them had not been especially political prior to the 2016 election. But what was consistent about them was a deep, burning hatred for society, and especially women. In fact, the resentment towards women is so central that nothing else they do makes sense without it.

It is a common trope to refer to Alt Righters as “angry virgins who are hate women for not sleeping with them”. The only problem with those who through that trope around is they usually don’t realize just how accurate it is. It is almost 100% true.

Commentators will often say about the Alt Right “don’t call it the alt right. It’s not a new phenomenon. It is just rebranded white supremacy”. Although this is an understandable response, it fails to take into account that the Alt Right is a uniquely modern malady. In fact, in a year or two, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these men get bored with ethno nationalism and move onto something else. What motivates them is not some ideology that can be countered with reason and logic. These are young men who are extremely alienated from the society in which they live. By spending years in online echo chambers, they have allowed their (somewhat sympathetic) sexual frustrations to metastasize into a bizarre and paranoid worldview.

If we are to combat the alt right, we must fight the problem at the source. And despite its old fashioned rhetoric and ideology, the central burning hatred that drives them is something quite modern, and something much common than we often realize. The problems of alienation, atomization, and loneliness are things we do not pay enough attention to and which mainstream political parties largely ignore. But these are the problems of the 21st Century, and the longer we ignore them, the worse the situation will become.