THE ROLE OF TROLLING

Finest Mainstream Tears®

by James Lawrence

A recent surge of Alt-Right optimism, prompted by increased mainstream media attention as a result of the Trump campaign in the U.S., has apparently led some of us to believe that memes, trolling, and shitposting will pave a path to our political victory. Without wishing to spoil anyone’s fun, I think we should plan for a bumpier ride. Those tempted to place their eggs in virtual baskets should study the current affairs of China, particularly its proposed “social credit” system, and remind themselves that the internet requires only minor tweaking to go from a haven of free speech to a Matrix-like system of surveillance and coercion. 

In the long term, then, we should develop strategies that lead us out of the online world, rather than keeping us dependent on it. But, conversely, we should also make the most of the internet’s formidable power to terrorise the Left and the false Right, as we do not know how long we can expect to have it at our disposal. To this end, we ought to clarify the role of transgressive trolling and the often shockingly iconoclastic material in which it deals.

Many Alt-Righters who, in contrast to the trolls, deal in serious ideas and political positions are simply embarrassed and exasperated by such material. However, that the shitlord assault has its role to play is evidenced by the powerful “shock-and-awe” effect that it has had on the Leftist guardians of restricted speech, who have been thrown off-balance and left in the laughable pose of prissy Victorian matrons tutting away at a Bacchic orgy. Long accustomed to attacking when and where they wish, they now find themselves having to put out fires, and doing it badly. 

In an article making the case for transgressive trolling as a “gateway drug” to more serious ideas, Colin Liddell divides the Alt-Right into higher and lower forms – the higher and central form being the intellectual wing, and the lower peripheral form consisting of “memes, trolling, shitposting, Tweeting, and various forms of LARPing and (usually anonymous) signalling”. 

Most controversies within the Alt-Right are caused when these two very different spheres, which ought to stay sharply delineated from each other and focused on their own work, get confused and start lambasting each other. Liddell’s main point is that while it does little harm to let the anonymous shockmongers think that they are the real centre of the movement, the real leaders in the higher Alt-Right should know better, and refrain from adopting troll rhetoric themselves.

This is, of course, sound analysis and advice, but what are we to do when the question of common identity is forced upon us? Let’s say that a prominent leader of the higher, serious, moral-intellectual Alt-Right is invited to an interview with a mainstream media organisation, and hit straight off the bat with the usual tactics: presented with a long list of outrageously transgressive memes and shitposts, all of them proudly wearing the “Alt-Right” label, and told to explain why he identifies with a movement that produces such material. How should he reply? Given that we on the Alt-Right are done with cuckservatism and its strategy of constant retreat, attempting to garner “respectability” by disavowing the shitlords one meme at a time is not a viable option.

However, we would be no less mistaken to bite the bullet and profess to agree with the stuff churned out by the trolls, attempting to defend things like “gas the kikes” in accordance with our moral and intellectual vision. This is not an option: material like this is indefensible at a moral and intellectual level, full stop, “leftist moral framing” be damned. If this were not the case, then the trolls would presumably be doing something wrong, as the whole point of trolling is to make outrageous statements and then sit back and laugh as others react in anger.

So how should our hypothetical Alt-Right leader respond? Two simple, beautiful, hypocrisy-shattering words: tu quoque.

The history of trolling certainly does not begin with the internet and social media. All bullshit excuses aside, why would anyone create something like “Piss Christ” except as an act of trolling? What about taking a popularly beloved symbol of a religious festival, turning it into a giant butt plug, and standing it in the middle of a European city? Or defiling churches with semi-pornographic rubbish like “Pussy Riot” and “Femen”? Can anyone seriously believe that the decision to place a statue of a deformed pregnant woman alongside the heroes of the British Empire in Trafalgar Square had nothing to do with trolling conservative-minded Brits? Or that such motives were absent from a widely promoted book cover that took the popularly-accepted symbol of the British nation and turned her into a foreigner?

These instances, of course, are just the highlights of a long list of desecrations carried out in the public sphere against European religious, cultural and national identity. Whatever nuanced views some of us might have on Christianity, colonialist ancestors or the British monarchy are irrelevant here: the point is that such acts represent a systematic project to locate the symbols held most sacred by traditional Europeans and piss all over them as publicly and provocatively as possible, inviting angry reactions from the targets which are then laughed at by the perpetrators. In other words, acts of trolling that have been going on for decades.

The general culprit of this trolling is the cosmopolitan parasitic class, which rules everywhere in the West but is loyal to nowhere, and is distinguished by a rejection of national and cultural bonds in favour of a largely fictional allegiance to the “brotherhood of man”. What this class has been doing to the European people, its main enemy and competitor for legitimacy, represents more than mere harassment: to defile the sacred symbols of a people is to attack it on the spiritual level, and history tells us that this is a favourite tactic of conquerors. To add insult to injury, no rational justification for any of this was ever given to us; we were merely told that it was “boundary-pushing”, “iconoclastic” and so on, as if these were inherently positive qualities, or else that it was “ironic” and therefore that the joke was on us for taking it seriously.

Trolling, long before it was opened up to
normal people and thus became "problematic".

As all trolling carries the risk of inviting violent reactions, for a long time it stayed the exclusive preserve of these privileged few. The parasite class, with the moral narrative in its hands and the thugs-in-blue in its service, could troll entire nations publicly without fear of retribution, while any attempt by ordinary mortals to throw some iconoclasm the other way was punished by social and financial persecution. 

Due in large part to the fundamental decency of the European people, even the rise of the anonymous and open internet did not initially lead to a widespread counter-trolling movement, and the perception of the parasite class that this medium could be used to perpetuate their own trolling more effectively may account for all those heady rhapsodies to the internet as a rough-and-tumble arena of free expression that we remember from so long ago. Only when the trolling project was farmed out to an online pestilence of mentally ill hangers-on, and reached a ludicrous fever pitch as the “social justice movement”, did some young Europeans don cloaks and masks and start to hit back. They did so by trashing the pseudo-religious and group-defining symbols of the parasite class in ways reminiscent of that class’s own longstanding attack on European culture: shockingly, mercilessly, without reason or restraint, and in the distinctive manner of the troll.  

For those who have grasped these essential points, the moralistic screeching of the pampered, affronted, bloody-nosed crybullies becomes so much sweet music, accompanied nicely by the pleasant gurgling of the falls and rivers of their angry hysterical tears. Disinfect these first, and we can even sip on them calmly as we listen to the hypocritical whinge chorus:

"Ow, that hurts, no fair! They can’t fight back, it's against the law, it’s against their morality isn’t it? Can't we hound them out of their jobs and put their families on the streets for this like usual? What, they’re using pseudonyms? Cowards! Basement-dwellers! Anime masturbators! It’s not fair!!! Get the government, get the police, get the army, do something, civilisation is at risk when good people stand by and do nothing, etc. etc.…"

This bully-coward’s cry of not fair takes many forms. Perhaps the most transparently dishonest of these is the twittish mantra that “satire should punch up”: if progressivist trolls were truly punching upwards at the powerful and privileged, and Alt-Right trolls punching downwards at weak and marginalised groups, then why is it the shitlords who must hide their identities in fear of retribution? Hardly more convincing is the claim that desecration of European culture by white progressivists is legitimate “self-criticism”, in contrast to mere insults and mockery hurled at other races. I can’t speak for the rest of us, but if a group of people deliberately trash my nation while constantly yacking about how they don’t want to be a part of it, then I am willing to grant them their wish and view them as a purely extraneous group of bandits and usupers. 

Hitting back is, like, SO NOT OK.

It is, of course, a widely held conviction nowadays that racial caricatures are somehow much more reprehensible than religious and cultural sacrilege. But if hurt feelings are the crux of the issue, as the hysterical proponents of “trigger warnings” are always telling us, can we really say that “Piss Christ” is any less offensive to Christians than “dindu nuffins” are to blacks? In truth, this all has little to do with anyone’s hurt feelings, and a lot to do with the power and legitimacy of the parasite class: the one is acceptable in a progressive milieu because it attacks Christianity, which is de facto the religion of the Europeans, whereas the other is forbidden because it attacks the religion of egalitarianism that is the sacred idol of the parasite class and the justification for its rule. Any progressivist who cannot see the fundamental correspondence between the two is a parochial, solipsistic moral imbecile, incapable of taking the elementary step of putting himself in another’s shoes and doing as he would be done by.

But MY self-defining beliefs 
are OBJECTIVELY TRUE!

The same principles apply to troll ridicule of Jews and the Holocaust. Progressivists are quite correct to say that joshing about mass murder is mean-spirited, but if this were truly the source of their outrage then they would not deck themselves “ironically” in the faces of Communist butchers. Again, progressivists do not treat the Holocaust as sacrosanct because they brim with compassion for its victims, but because they want to continue standing on their graves to promote an historical narrative conducive to their own self-interest: that the kind of people who live in and identify with nations, as opposed to flying over them on the way to selling off their assets, are all closet homicidal maniacs who will erupt into barbarism if not suitably repressed by corporations, the police, and volunteer violence groups. 

 Of course we might draw other lessons from a massacre of Jewry, for example that an economically resented people had better have a secure homeland if it is to survive. But the interests of the parasite class in maintaining its dogmas are too important to allow for any non-approved thinking on this topic, whether that thinking pertains to historical facts or historical interpretations, as even “Red” Ken Livingstone recently found.

Of course, it is no secret that the international parasite class contains a heavy overrepresentation of Jewish elites, including high-profile villains like George Soros who are deeply invested in the anti-European trolling project. But I do not think that the parasite class - which can be defined in broad terms as a "kakistocracy" that rules against the interests of the nations it rejects - is identical with Jewry, nor that this class must necessarily revolve around its Jewish members. Without going into too many details, it is not clear that the likes of Tony Blair, Angela Merkel and Rupert Murdoch - or the piss-artists of the anti-European trolling project  such as Marc Quinn and Paul McCarthy - would conduct themselves any differently if they were ethnically Jewish; and words like “traitor” are nowhere near adequate to describe the extent to which these people have rejected their nations and transformed themselves into a hostile elite. 

What the Jews do represent for such people is a half-imagined spiritual precedent: a romanticised ideal of a chosen people living wherever it pleases, suffering the envy of bigoted peasants due to its intelligence, wealth and distinctiveness, but thanklessly carrying on with the noble task of “fixing the world”. So again, we are talking about sacred and self-defining myths; and this particular one is what the socially-liberal corporate, bureaucratic and media elite hark back to when they feel the need to justify their privileged positions, as well as their repression of the closet-nationalist hordes who just might dare to seize political power and demand an elite that actually gives a toss for its people.

In sum, we can say that transgressive trolling in both its progressivist and Alt-Right forms is fundamentally one and the same thing: the main point is to attack the enemy at a spiritual level by violating his sacred symbols, whatever they happen to be, rather than to make serious statements or correct representations. None of this means, of course, that the content of any of this trolling on either side is morally justified in objective terms. As any student of logic will tell you, tu quoque cannot prove the objective right or wrong of a position, and progressivists (who are not known for their rational capabilities) should perhaps re-read this qualifier a few hundred times to avoid triggering themselves into spontaneous combustion.  

But...but it's not fair...

However, the call from the Left to renounce this trolling on moral grounds – as the court eunuchs of the false Right are already falling over each other to do – is a deeply disingenuous one. The struggle of the European nations against the global parasite class is not an objective debate, but a subjective metapolitical war; and in this conflict, transgressive trolling can be compared to a form of dirty and lawless skirmisher warfare, carried out by non-centrally-organised partisans. That these tactics are as effective for our side as they have long been for the parasite class is evidenced by the fact that progressivists are now responding to them with obvious maladaptive strategies hitherto associated with the Right, such as the moralistic defensive play of cuckservatives and even the “I-am-whatever-you-say-I-am” bravado of so-called "vantards". They are learning that winning a fight is not so easy when you have to block as well as punch.

Those of us who work in the serious, discursive wing of the Alt-Right cannot “renounce” this trolling, for we have never engaged in it, and these anonymous partisans of the internet certainly do not take orders from us. What is really desired of us is that we should join the progressivists in suppressing and isolating the trolls, cleaning up our own side’s act like good gentlemen, while the enemy keeps the dirtiest tactics in his own arsenal by pleading exceptions for them. While I personally want to have nothing to do with Nazi imagery or outbursts of racialist and antisemitic Tourette’s Syndrome, I know that any call to unilateral disarmament should be countered by a demand for reciprocal good behaviour by the other side, and that if our enemies do not assent to this then we need take no heed of their insincere squealing. This is particularly so in light of the fact that it is they who are the aggressors, who are attacking and injuring Europe's people physically as well as spiritually, whereas shitposters and meme-mongers are hurting nothing but their keyboard fingers. 

After all, as my mother used to tell me, “two wrongs don’t make a right”; but as I answered back to her once at the age of seven or eight, two wrongs make things fair. At least progressivists now know a way to ensure the end of the shitlord assault: curb their own, their fellows’, and their paymasters’ support for the campaign of cultural desecration aimed at the European race. They will probably be too stupid and self-righteous to take this advice, but as a result they will only continue to learn another gem of maternal wisdom: that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. 

Cited in the academic journal Cosmopolitan Civil Societies (archived)

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