![]() 2 In essence, the alt-right offers men’s rights activists, or individuals who make this pro-male attitude central to their identity politics, a solution to the “woman problem”: organized misogyny (Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2016). The alt-right positions itself as (white) men’s salvation, promising to help men reclaim their natural manhood and usurp women’s social, political, and economic power (Ferber 2000). In their view, feminism has distorted the natural gender order and demasculinized men, to the detriment of modern society (Ferber 2000 Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2016). Among other complaints, the alt-right laments men’s status in Western society, arguing that men are under attack from leftism, political correctness, and feminism. ![]() Popularly represented by self-proclaimed Nazis such as Richard Spencer, propaganda “news” sites such as Breitbart and Daily Stormer, and the white supremacist forum Stormfront (Bowman-Grieve 2009), the alt-right seeks to upend traditional conservatism and build a male-dominated white state. His victory was celebrated by many, including the alt-right, which is an extremist movement composed predominantly of young men who embrace white nationalism and anti-Semitism (Southern Poverty Law Center 2012 Lyons 2017). redpillschool, moderator, 2016 Men’s Rights post titled “‘Sexual Assault’ Is Why I’m Endorsing Donald Trump for President of the United States.” 1ĭonald Trump shocked the world by emerging victorious in the 2016 US presidential election. This is our beacon to find allies in the war. Instead I run towards them, because there is no truer signal which side somebody is on, than when they’re given a bogus accusation by the establishment. When somebody accuses a powerful or famous figure like Trump of “sexual assault,” I don’t look the other way. We conclude the essay by arguing that feminists need to understand how men cultivate extreme personal and political identities in online forums so that we can better understand how new technologies are used to move individuals from the armchair to the streets. We argue that while previous research shows the importance of alt-right virtual spaces in creating and maintaining racist collective identities, we know very little about how men conceptualize gender in ways that inform their personal and political action-and this is to our detriment. During the election, forum leaders linked the forum’s neoliberal, misogynistic collective identity of alpha masculinity to Trump’s public persona and framed his political ascendance as an opportunity to effectively push back against feminism and get a “real” man into the White House. The Red Pill forum was explicitly apolitical until the summer before the 2016 election. Drawing on social movement concepts and an analysis of 1,762 posts, we show how leaders of the forum the “Red Pill” were able to move a community of adherents from understanding men’s rights as a personal philosophy to political action. In this essay, we analyze one of the online forums that helped propel Trump to electoral victory. ![]() Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was a shock for feminist scholars, yet it was no surprise to his legion of supporters in alt-right digital spaces.
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