An obscure figure from the old Alt Right takes the Hanania Pill.
The main reason I am posting this is not that, but to highlight his insider's history of the 2015-2017 era Alt Right which makes up much of an accompanying article.
1: Hanania's apparent survival of cancellation for past extremism via telling his story and disavowing his most extreme past views may have been quietly influential. This is the 2nd guy I've seen do it without even being forced to by exposure.
2: This guy claims to have been a quietly very influential figure and tells a story where his actions had a very outsized effect on the world. Maybe truly, maybe not. But his general account of events besides his own part in them is an insider's history of that much-mythologized period of the Alt Right, which was very influential and did have have a very outsized effect on the world, and his account seems to be a reasonably well-calibrated explanation of how their influence rippled into events.
It probably didn't hurt that the direct target was something that people whose self-perception was still as Stewart/Colbert liberals wouldn't hit a mental tripwire about, allowing it to break through to the second level where some suppressed thoughts might still linger. Strangely enough, I bet a Robin DiAngelo type would actually have something interesting to say on the matter.
I wonder whether Sweden Yes/Captain Sweden played some quietly significant role in the birth of the Alt-Right as a viral internet phenomenon.
Obviously racist memes have been around forever, but my sense (perhaps naively) was that people who posted eg. A Wyatt Mann cartoons mostly did it as edgelord humor without really buying into it. As crazy artifacts, at a level of remove. I don't think that was the case with Sweden Yes/Captain Sweden. I don't think anybody posted it who didn't mostly believe in it, and I don't think anybody who found it funny didn't end up a little bit more convinced, and I can't think of a meme prior to it that was similar.
+2 upvotes on TheMotte -> 4.5M views on Twitter
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