Lord of Chaos 

It appears we may indeed have arrived at the End Times. But everything is not wild abandon and gross depravity or rampant violence. The New World Order is not going to be the bleak caricature of totalitarianism of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of mindless titillation and elusive truth. It is the adoption of the dictum originally pronounced by Hassan i Sabbah, the eleventh century founder of the Ismaili sect of the Assassins—who purportedly taught the Knights Templar the occult arts, as repeated by author William S. Burroughs his 1959 post-modern novel Naked Lunch: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” It is not the “negative” nihilism described by Nietzsche, but a “positive” one which accepts the supposed emptiness of human existence with a maniacal cackling and mocking laughter for all those who hold futilely to the hope for meaning.

Having spent decades crafting the illusion of being as a wily “deal-maker,” achieving all the shallow trappings of his perverse version of the American Dream, Trump finally successfully rebranded himself paradoxically as the “anti-establishment” hero of the common man, who could simultaneously drain the swamp, and upend the bureaucratic inefficiencies by finally “run the government like a business.” Trump is the Big Brother of the New World Disorder, the insane clown who embodies the truth that there is no truth, and everything is a cruel joke. It’s a time where everything is a joke. Except the “Lulz” are not the simple giggles of mischievous pimple-faced pranksters of 4Chan, but the maniacal cackle of a devilish fiend. And Trump is at once emperor, and messiah of the god of chaos.

According to Gary Lachman, in Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, the “magic” element of meme magic that propelled Trump to office comes from its association with “chaos magick.” Trump, Lachman observes, is “in fact, the first ‘postmodern president,’ in the same way that chaos magic is a kind of ‘postmodern occultism’.” For postmodernism, adds Lachman, “‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted,’ attributed to Hasan i Sabbah… is taken as a given. The same goes for chaos magick.”[1]

Burroughs, the godfather of chaos magic, expressed anti-establishment views in poem initially written in a letter to his lover Allen Ginsberg, in 1960, titled “The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah,” wherein he denounced “Mr Luce Getty Lee Rockefeller.” In the 1970s, Burroughs wrote a manifesto called “The Revised Boy Scout Manual” that was recorded in multiple forms. Burroughs was a “practicing Scientologist at the time” and prescribed the use of the e-meter and made several references to L. Ron Hubbard.[2] Written as a guide to “bring down the economic system of the West,” its recommendations included targeted random assassinations, plane bombings, mobilized street gangs, and fake news, using his magical “cutup” technique:

You construct fake news broadcasts on video camera… And you scramble your fabricated news in with actual news broadcasts.

You have an advantage which your opposing player does not have. He must conceal his manipulations. You are under no such necessity. In fact you can advertise the fact that you are writing news in advance and trying to make it happen by techniques which anybody can use.

And that makes you NEWS. And a TV personality as well, if you play it right. You want the widest possible circulation for your cutup video tapes. Cutup techniques could swamp the mass media with total illusion.

“My take on Trump is that he is an inevitable creation of this unreal normal world,” Adam Curtis said. “Politics has become a pantomime or vaudeville in that it creates waves of anger rather than argument. Maybe people like Trump are successful simply because they fuel that anger, in the echo chambers of the Internet.”[3] Ultimately, what are Trump’s ludicrous pronouncements but provocative pranks in the Discordian sense? Another example of Poe’s Law? A troll? As Whitney Phillips summarized:

It’s the Donald Trump effect in many ways—whether he is serious or not as a politician doesn’t really matter, because the effect he has is real. You can laugh at him, or you can take him seriously, but it all results in the same thing. That’s why he’s the GOP nominee—people laughed, and he’s here.[4]

“It’s all entertainment,” Hillary told a reporter. “I think he’s having the time of his life, saying what he wants to say, getting people excited both for and against him.”[5] Or, as Peter Thiel explained, “The election had an apocalyptic feel to it. There was a way in which Trump was funny, so you could be apocalyptic and funny at the same time. It’s a strange combination, but it’s somehow very powerful psychologically.”[6]

Meme Magick 

Trump’s “anti-establishment” persona was propelled by an army of alt-right trolls, who employed a type of pranksterism that is part of a tradition of Culture Jamming, which was influenced by Discordianism. The basic unit in a message in culture jamming is the “meme.” The term was coined and first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), to describe how ideas spread across cultures. The inference is that, by analogy, memes are for culture what genes are for humans. Memetics is therefore analogous to genetics, where memes can be generated or manipulated to alter human culture.

With Dawkins’ book, the term “meme” entered popular culture. In a 2017 poll to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Royal Society science book prize listed The Selfish Gene as the most influential science book of all time. Yuzuru Tanaka of Hokkaido University wrote, Meme Media and Meme Market Architectures (2003), while the psychologist Susan Blackmore wrote The Meme Machine (2000), which included a foreword by Dawkins. The information scientist Osamu Sakura has published a book in Japanese and several papers in English on the topic. Nippon Animation produced an educational television program titled The Many Journeys of Meme.

In 2012, Facebook conducted studies involving secretive psychological testing of approximately 700,000 of its users. This was through reducing exposure to positive or negative emotional content in order to measure the effects. The study concluded: “Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.”[7] This study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, while another Facebook project explored how users consumed information on Twitter.

In 2008, Cass Sunstein, Harvard law professor and adviser to Obama, wrote a controversial paper advocating the use of covert agents in order to infiltrate online communities. The Snowden files confirmed that intelligence agencies monitor sites including YouTube and Facebook, attempt to “control, infiltrate, manipulate and warp online discourse” and even carry out “false flag operations” in order to discredit targets.[8]

In Memetics: A Growth Industry in US Military Operations, published in 2005, Michael Prosser, now a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps, proposed the creation of a “Meme Warfare Center.” Prosser noted that memes were not acknowledged or accepted components of military strategy at the time, but that, “under the rubric of Information Operations and Strategic Communications both currently offer a multi-faceted meme generation and transmission capability to US military commanders.” In Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War, published in 2006, Keith Henson defined memes as “replicating information patterns: ways to do things, learned elements of culture, beliefs or ideas.” Also in 2006, DARPA commissioned a four-year study of memetics by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, founder of Robotic Technology Incorporated.

The term “meme” as later appropriated by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff—a leading cyberpunk, friend of Timothy Leary and a teacher at Esalen—who claimed memes were a type of media virus. Activists count on the use of a meme to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement in the Situationist sense. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change.[9]

Culture Jamming

The concept of memes is closely connected to psychological warfare and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), whose co-creator Richard Bandler was also a friend of Robert Anton Wilson, dark lord of the Illuminates of Thanateros and founder of Discordianism.[10] This kind of Discordian tomfoolery seems to be the backbone of much of the alt-right political activism, which is related to Culture Jamming. Mark Dery’s New York Times article on the subject, “The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax” was the first mention in the mainstream media of the phenomenon. Dery later expanded on this article in his 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive theorization of culture jamming to date. As Quinn Horton explains in Wired:

Hacker culture, and almost all of computer culture back in the day is shot through with the Discordian edge of 1960/1970s counter-culture and Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus. So from there it’s the yippies, Andy Kaufmann, and the Situationists we need to first comprehend.[11]

The term “culture jamming” was first coined by the band Negativland, whose members belonged to the Church of the Subgenius, an offshoot of Discordianism where Robert Anton Wilson was venerated as “Pope”.[12] According to Wilson, “Many people consider Discordianism a complicated joke disguised as a new religion. I prefer to consider it a new religion disguised as a complicated joke.”[13] As explained by Eric Davis, author of TechGnosis, despite their “goofy devotion to flying saucers, thrift store kitsch,” the Church, “conceal rather profound explorations of America’s magical mind.” [14]

Culture jamming, explains Dery, “is artistic ‘terrorism’ directed against the information society in which we live.”[15] Culture jamming is a tactic normally associated with anti-consumerist movements, and typically uses satire and irony to discredit commercial or political messages. The most widely known example of culture jamming was the movie Fight Club, whose director Chuck Palahniuk was a member of the Cacophony Society, which has links to Church of the SubGenius. The concept of TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones), developed by Peter Lambord Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey), the founder of the Moorsh Orthodox Church, was put into practice on a large scale by the Cacophony Society, in what they called Trips to the Zone, or Zone Trips. The Cacophony Society’s co-founder, John Law, also helped found Black Rock City, now called the Burning Man Festival.

The Burning Man is an obvious allusion to a similar Celtic ritual that involved human sacrifice. In an early Christian document preserved in the Book of Leinster, it is said that the Celts would sacrifice their children to an idol to pray for fertility.25 Julius Caesar’s account of his wars in Gaul describe how at times, for those gravely. The ancient ritual was the basis of the 1973 celebrated cult film The Wicker Man. The plot centers around Sergeant Howie, a Christian who journeys to a remote Hebridean island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Howie finds the islanders practicing a pagan Celtic cult involving May Day celebrations. He believes they want to sacrifice the young girl, but is himself sacrificed in the end, burned alive inside a giant wicker man.

Andy Kaufman is considered a saint by Discordians.[16] Kaufman’s best known act was his “Latka Gravas” character for the ABC sitcom, Taxi. He also toured comedy clubs and theaters appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. Kaufman also began wrestling women proclaiming himself “Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World,” offering a $1,000 prize to any woman who could pin him. In 1982, Kaufman staged encounter with Jerry “The King” Lawler of the Continental Wrestling Association on the David Letterman show. Although Kaufman died of lung cancer at age 35 in 1984, persistent rumors have circulated insisting that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax. In 1999, “Tony Clifton” harangued Jim Carrey at a press conference for Man on the Moon, a film in which he portrayed Kaufman.[17]

Disinformation Company

Richard Meztger, who is inspired by Aleister Crowley, and who maintains strong ties with the Discordians and chaos magicians, founded the Disinformation Company to be a “magick business,” and explained:

Magick—defined by Aleister Crowley as the art and science of causing change in conformity with will—has always been the vital core of all of the projects we undertake at The Disinformation Company. Whether via our website, publishing activities or our TV series, the idea of being able to influence reality in some beneficial way is what drives our activities. I’ve always considered The Disinformation Company Ltd. and our various activities to constitute a very complex spell.[18]

In 2003, Metzger put together The Book of Lies, named after Crowley’s book of the same name. Subtitled The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult, the book is basically an homage to William S. Burroughs, and an anthology of occultism, chaos magic and technopaganism that features almost the entire pantheon of its modern-day exponents, including Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, Hakim Bey, Gary Lachman, Mark Pesce, Genesis P-Orridge, Phil Hine, Erik Davis, Daniel Pinchbeck, Tracy Twyman, and T. Allen Greenfield. Michael Moynihan contributed an article titled, “Julius Evola’s Combat Manual for a Revolt Against the Modern World,” as well as an exclusive interview, “Anton LaVey: A Fireside Chat with the Black Pope.”

Alex Jones’ films Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement and New World Order have been produced by Disinformation Company, founded by Discordian Richard Metzger. The bizarre irony is that, in a Discordian sense, Disinformation seems to produce just that: disinformation. A telling example is Metzger’s interview on Disinfo Nation of Ted Gunderson, a former FBI agent who is known for his investigations of a secret and widespread network of groups in the US who kidnap children and subject them to Satanic ritual abuse and human sacrifice. However, Metzger’s “documentary” is obviously a mockery, in the Discordian style of “humor,” and the playing of both sides typical of Robert Anton Wilson. Gunderson’s focus has been on abuse within the CIA and military establishment, and he mentions that southern California is a pivotal area of Satanic cult activity. However, although Meztger’s documentary claims to be a “deep and undercover look” at the “shadowy figures” in Satanism today, he juxtaposes Gunderson’s comments by reporting on a pitiful group of bumpkin Satanist wannabes.

Metzger’s video recalls a similar piece of disinformation produced by Britain’s Channel 4 in 1992, titled “Beyond Belief,” which purported to provide evidence of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA). However, the footage turned out to have been that of an experimental film created slightly less than a decade earlier by Genesis P-Orridge’s Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), an offshoot of the Illuminates of Thanateros. Additionally, the footage itself had been partially funded during the 1980s by Channel 4, used previously as part of a program on experimental British cinema, and as an element of various performances by associated bands including Psychick TV.[19]

Poe’s Law

Many of the leading right-wing personalities appear to be examples of Poe’s Law, an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers as sincere expressions of the parodied views.[20] Poe’s law was originally written by Nathan Poe in 2005, in a post on christianforums.com, an Internet forum about Christianity. The post was written in the context of a debate about creationism, where a previous poster had remarked to another user “Good thing you included the winky. Otherwise people might think you are serious.” Poe then replied, “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly [sic] impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.”[21]

Likewise, Alex Jones almost betrays a smirk in some of his more outlandish antics, suggesting that he’s yet another Discordian spoofing the stereotype of the “conspiracy theorist.” Alex Jones’s lawyer, Randall Wilhite, recently defended Jones in a custody battle with his ex-wife, claiming the judge should not judge Jones’ ability as a father based on his online persona, because it would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in Batman. “He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said of Jones to state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo. “He is a performance artist.”[22] According to Wilhite, “This is political satire, it’s part of his show.”[23]

Jones verbally attacked Rep. Adam Schiff, saying he “looks like the archetypal cocksucker” and told him on air, “You want to sit here and say that I’m a goddamn, fucking Russian. You get in my face with that I’ll beat your goddamn ass, you son of a bitch.”[24] After legal experts suggested Jones may have committed a felony with his remarks, Jones later qualified his statements saying, “I’m One Of The Biggest Proponents Of Nonviolence [Along With] Mahatma Gandhi And Martin Luther King.”[25] He complained instead that his statements were edited out of context, and “are clearly tongue-and-cheek and basically art performance, as I do in my rants, which I admit I do, as a form of art…”[26] Along the same lines, in a Netflix documentary called Get Me Roger Stone, Stone explained that he was not to be taken seriously all the time. “Sometimes you confuse me with the Steve Colbert-type character that I sometimes play.”[27]

Likewise, Breitbart’s founder Andrew Breitbart’s posturing as a caricature of the conservative right suggests it is another example of Poe’s Law. In a drunken rant, Breitbart confessed, “The thing people don’t understand about me is—I’m a performance artist. You see? But people don’t get that about me, they totally misunderstand me. I’m a performance artist, everything I do is performance art.”[28] Among his most significant influence, Breitbart cites Paul Krassner, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In his book he writes, “Man, how I long for the days of Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Abbie Hoffman, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, and today the only people upholding their free-speech legacies are conservatives like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.”[29] In an interview with Krassner for Playboy, Breitbart remarked, “I love Ann Coulter to the core of my being. Nobody humors me more.”[30]

Either Poe’s Law or Discordian pranksterism also seems to be the basis of subversive performance art of controversial conservative pundit Ann Coulter. Coulter’s antics parallel those of Breitbart. As Chris Sosa described quite convincingly in Salon, Coulter is a “particularly unique brand of polemic performance artist, some would say satirist.”[31] To begin to understand the basis of Coulter’s audacious performance, we can consider that in her own admission, she considers herself “Punk.”[32] As Coulter explains:

The liberal kids are the brown-nosers. They’re the ones who are the apple polishers for teachers,” Coulter says. “The real radicals on college campuses these days—unless you’re at Bob Jones University—are the college Republicans. They are the ones going against the establishment, challenging authority, and they don’t care what people think about them.

Sosa further explained, Coulter, “by creating a character so stupid that she can’t be real — has become one of the greatest artists of our time.”[33] According to Sosa:

Imagine Stephen Colbert with a profound mean streak who doesn’t let anyone in on the fact it’s a charade. Coulter has managed to do this by playing it relatively straight as a bona fide conservative commentator who bolsters the image with numerous best-selling books.[34]

Sosa revealed several instances where Coulter showed no regard whatsoever for the quality of her sources. Because her intent is not to defend her case. Rather, Sosa described her as motivated by “gleeful malice” and noted, “she seemed less interested in her notion of justice but significantly more concerned with inflicting outrage on the American public. Society was stupid, and she was going to screw with it.” [35] Coulter carries her absurdities so far as to claim that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and even came out against the growing interest in soccer, which in her own words, “can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.”[36] Her aim is not only to ridicule liberals. Also according to Sosa:

Ann Coulter had found the perfect recipe: treating news spaces as comedy platforms where she could deliberately make ridiculous statements to infuriate liberals who would be too dense to notice what was going on. But her performance requires equal condescension to conservatives, without whom the Coulter brand would disappear. Coulter knows her performance hurts the right, and she clearly doesn’t care. [37]

According to Sosa, “Ann Coulter is among the best comedians working today.” He aptly concluded: “Some might call Coulter’s public game cynical, even malicious. But Coulter serves as a fantastic object lesson in media distortion and the ability to manufacture outrage. Perhaps if she does it long enough, people will actually start thinking.”[38] Coulter also counts anti-conservative comedians Bill Maher and Joy Behar among her personal friends. By her own confession, comedians seem to gravitate to her. By her own confession, comedians seem to gravitate to her, like Sherrod Small or former Good Times star Jimmy Walker. This caused the National White Alliance (NWA) to choose to rescind giving her an award because she had become “unclean.”

Despite her stance against gay marriage, since the 1990s Coulter has had many acquaintances in the LGBT community, and flaunts herself as “the Judy Garland of the Right.”[39] In the last few years, Coulter has attracted many LGBT fans, namely gay men and drag queens. She insists that her opposition to same-sex marriage “wasn’t an anti-gay thing” and that “It’s genuinely a pro-marriage position to oppose gay marriage.”[40] Coulter told a group of gay friends she said that she knew they really did not want to get married and they were more interested in promiscuous sex than in traditional family structures.

Coulter has been a supporter of gay conservatives, like the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR). Two former Log Cabin Republican staffers who expressed dissatisfaction at that organization’s generally centrist political positions founded GOProud, that represented conservative gay men, lesbians, and their allies. GOProud advocated for free markets, limited government, and a respect for individual rights and worked at the federal and state levels to build strong coalitions of conservative and libertarian activists, organizations and policy makers to advance their shared values and beliefs.

In 2010, GOProud together with the John Birch Society co-sponsored CPAC and added political commentator/author Ann Coulter, political commentator/strategist Margaret Hoover, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, new media specialist Liz Mair, political analyst Lisa De Pasquale, and political communications consultant Chuck Muth. In 2010, the Ronald Reagan Award was given to the Tea Party movement. In 2011, Donald Trump’s first speaking appearance at CPAC was organized by GOProud, in conjunction with GOProud supporter Roger Stone. The 2016 CPAC featured co-sponsorship for the first time from the Log Cabin Republicans.

In a view very similar to radical queers’ opposition to same-sex marriage, Coulter argued that same-sex marriage would ruin gay culture, because gays value promiscuity over monogamy. “That’s the whole point of being gay, so stop the bullshit,” and “I know at least half of you are totally against gay marriage,” she said. By the end of the dinner, they agreed with her. [41] Coulter was a member of the advisory council of GOProud, an advocacy group representing conservative gay men, lesbians, and their allies. She boasted how she talked GOProud into dropping its support for same-sex marriage in the party’s platform and said that “The left is trying to co-opt gays, and I don’t think we should let them. I think they should be on our side” and “Gays are natural conservatives.”[42]

4chan

Internet memes are widely used by the alt-right to advance or express their beliefs on websites such as 4chan.[43] In April 2009, 4chan’s founder Chris Poole was voted the world’s most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine. In 2015, Poole announced he would be stepping down as the 4chan administrator, and started working for Google in 2016. 4chan’s ideology has been described as Discordian.[44] The message board revels in a culture of irreverence for its own sake, and even has a term for it: the “lulz,” a corruption of LOL, online shorthand for laugh out loud. As defined by Know Your Meme:

I did it for the Lulz (also known as 4 the lulz) is a popular catchphrase used to express that one carried out a specific action for the sake of personal comic enjoyment. This is sometimes used to explain why one has posted offensive, far-fetched or disgusting contents on image boards and discussion forums.[45]

The perpetrators of this obnoxious behavior are known as trolls, of which Whitney Phillips said on TEDTalk that they:

…partake of a highly stylized and often outrageous offensive aesthetic and vernacular.. and trade in what the trolls call lulz, a particular sort of antagonistic laughter indicating that the troll’s target has responded with a strong negative emotion like anger, frustration, or shock.[46]

Psychologists have found an important connection between trolling and what has been referred to as the “dark tetrad” of personality traits: psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. The first two traits are significant predictors of trolling behavior, and all four traits correlate with enjoyment of trolling. Research published in June 2017 by Natalie Sest and Evita March, two Australian scholars, has demonstrated that trolls tend to be high in cognitive empathy, meaning they can understand emotional suffering in others, but low in affective empathy, meaning they have little regard for the pain they inflict.[47]

4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet memes such as lolcats, Rickrolling, “Chocolate Rain,” Pedobear and many others. The site’s “Random” board, also known as “/b/,” was the site’s first forum, and is the one that receives the most traffic. /pol/ is one of the most popular boards on the internet dedicated to politics, and has gained a reputation as a hotbed for fringe beliefs. The reputation of the board across the internet in general is typically linked to endorsement of extremist politics, and the board is thus often cited as one of the defining aspects of 4chan’s reputation, alongside /b/. /pol/, an abbreviation for Politically Incorrect, is a board dedicated to current events and political discussion on the imageboard 4chan. Media sources have characterized /pol/ as predominantly racist and sexist, with many of its posts taking an explicitly neo-Nazi bent.[48]

Lulz, according to Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer, are a “weapon of the race war.”[49] According to Keegan Hankes, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, it was Anglin who elevated the Nazi version of Pepe the Frog from 4chan and made him a presence on The Daily Stormer. [50] /r9k/, a controversial 4chan board where according to Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast, “it can be difficult to discern how serious commenters are being or if they’re just fucking around entirely,” a meme known Pepe the Frog became a symbol for the alt-right and neo-Nazi Trump Supporters. Pepe, a cartoon amphibian was introduced to the world in 2005, on Myspace, in the artist Matt Furie’s comic strip Boy’s Club, and popularized on 4chan in the ensuing 11 years, culminating in 2015, when teens shared images Pepe’s likeness so often he became the biggest meme on Tumblr. Teens made Batman Pepe, Supermarket Checkout Girl Pepe, Borat Pepe, Keith Haring Pepe, and carved Pepe pumpkins, and he was featured in tweets by Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj. However, according to @JaredTSwift, a anonymous nineteen year old white nationalist, there “an actual campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies.” As outlined by Nuzzi, “The campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies… had the effect of desensitizing swaths of the Internet to racist, but mostly anti-Semitic, ideas supported by the so-called alt-right movement. Another such stunt was helping to turn Taylor Swift into an “Aryan goddess.”[51]

4chan has been linked to Internet subcultures and activism, most notably Anonymous and Project Chanology. According to the 4Chan, “Anonymous is the name assigned to a poster who does not enter text in to the [Name] field. Anonymous is not a single person, but rather, represents the collective whole of 4chan. He is a god amongst men.”[52] NYU Professor and Anonymous researcher Biella Coleman compares Anonymous to the trickster god archetype.[53] According to Horton, “The lulz is the most important and abstract thing to understand about Anonymous, and perhaps the internet itself.”[54]

According to a leading member of Anonymous, who calls himself DiscordiAnon, “It is no exaggeration to say that most peoples’ understanding of Anonymous, both within and without the collective, has at its root a significant debt to Discordian’s work.[55] Like the Occupy protesters, WikiLeaks, Egyptian revolutionaries, and anti-globalization demonstrators, Anonymous have adopted the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta by renowned comic artist Alan Moore, a self-described ceremonial magician devoted to the works of Aleister Crowley and Discordianism. [56]

Another 4chan related stunt is the hubbub around myths of a flat Earth that are actively disrupting conspiracy research organizations. A Flat Earth Society which can be found at www.flat-earth.org, was inspired by Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy, the Church of the Subgenius and the Principia Discordia. It teaches that the earth is flat and five cornered, that Idaho doesn’t exist, that all places called Springfield are in fact the same place and that what hollow earth theorists see is actually the people living on the bottom.[57]

Manosphere 

Gay Republicans Chris Barron, Jeff Giesea, Jim Hoft, Lucian Wintrich held a WAKE UP party at the Republican National Convention on July 19, 2016, self-described as the “most fab party at the RNC.” The party was in response to the recent Orlando shooting that took place in a gay bar, which the shooter claimed he perpetrated on behalf of ISIS, despite the fact that he was himself a regular patron. The organizers claimed they “could no longer stay silent about a barbaric ideology that wants us dead and that actively threatens the freedoms of all Americans. We decided to organize WAKE UP to raise awareness and start a dialogue about this—all while having a fabulous time.”[58] Featured guests included Roger Stone, Amy Kremer of the Tea Party movement, Geert Wilders and Ann Coulter. Speakers included Islamophobe Pamella Geller and Milo Yiannopoulos. There, Spencer explained:

I think with Trump, you shouldn’t look at his policies. His policies aren’t important. What’s most important about Trump is the emotion. He’s awakened a sense of ‘Us’ a sense of nationalism among white people. He’s done more to awaken that nationalism than anyone in my lifetime. I love the man.[59]

The so-called online “manosphere” quickly became one of the alt-right’s most distinctive venues. Gay masculinist author Jack Donovan, who edited AlternativeRight’s gender articles, was an early advocate for incorporating masculinist principles in the alt-right. His book, The Way Of Men, discusses the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies. Manosphere is a name given to a loose and informal network of blogs, forums and websites, with Internet commentators focusing on issues relating to men and masculinity, as a male counterpart to feminism or in opposition to it. Notable examples of manosphere sites reportedly include the Red Pill Room, A Voice for Men and Roosh V’s website Return Of Kings as well as his personal blog and forum. Jeff Sharlet of GQs described A Voice For Men as “surprisingly pro-gay, or at least anti-anti-gay.”[60] The Southern Poverty Law Center lists A Voice for Men among a list of sites that “are almost all thick with misogynistic attacks that can be astounding for the guttural hatred they express.”[61]

Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, the “rebels” of the alt-right aren’t drawn to it because of an intellectual awakening, or because they’re instinctively conservative. Rather, just like the New Left and the hippies of the 1960s challenged traditional values, with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, the alt-right, they claim, represents a mischievous streak, bent on upsetting the hypocrisy of political correctness, “because it’s funny.”[62] In National Review in April, Ian Tuttle wrote, “The alt-right has evangelized over the last several months primarily via a racist and anti-Semitic online presence. But for Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, the alt-right consists of fun-loving provocateurs, valiant defenders of Western civilization, daring intellectuals—and a handful of neo-Nazis keen on a Final Solution 2.0, but there are only a few of them, and nobody likes them anyways.”[63]

Yiannopoulos dubbed himself “The Most Fabulous Supervillain on the Internet.” In late 2015, Yiannopoulos began a campus speaking tour called “The Dangerous Faggot Tour,” encompassing universities in the United States and Great Britain. Yiannopoulos and Bokhara are writers for Breitbart News, a conservative news and opinion website based in the United States. Yiannopoulos rose to notability in 2014 when he began to provide media coverage and commentary surrounding the Gamergate controversy and was ultimately banned from Twitter. He is a vocal critic of feminism, Islam, social justice, atheism, political correctness, and other movements and ideologies he perceives to be authoritarian or belonging to the “regressive left.”[64]

Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks said that Americans who call themselves “patriotic programmers” also activated bots to aid Trump, coding the computer commands in their spare time. [65] Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, made headlines for selling his virtual reality company to Facebook for $2 billion, has been providing capital for a pro-Trump non-profit political organization called Nimble America. Nimble America has overt ties to the Reddit channel r/The_Donald, a popular forum for Trump supporters and the alt-right, which generated controversy for its racist comments. Nimble America announced its operations on r/The_Donald, stating: “What we’ve been able to accomplish here has been amazing and much bigger than any of us and certainly much bigger than Reddit,” the organization wrote on r/The_Donald. “We’ve proven that shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real.”[66]

Discord

In January 2016, BuzzFeed gained access to a chatroom called The Great Liberation of France, which is hosted on Discord, and discovered that trolls were organizing “memetic warfare” to generate support for France’s Marine Le Pen and her supporters in the National Front (FN). The chatroom’s admins instructed users to create fake Facebook and Twitter accounts that are “ideally young, cute girl, gay, Jew, basically anyone who isn’t supposed to be pro-[FN].”[67] Several times a week, someone will drop a link in the Discord chat, and people click over and attack the comments section. An example was a recent video of Florian Philippot, one of Le Pen’s main advisers, talking to his supporters which was flooded with pro-FN hashtags.

A user named @Das Krout, who identified himself as a 16-year-old from Minnesota, insisted there were no Russians involved, and explained that Discord groups like The Great Liberation Of France are forming organically and largely because they are “regular people who are fed up” and think it’s fun and want to disrupt society.[68] While @Das Krout doesn’t consider himself a white supremacist or neo-Nazi, he believes that people “have the right to preserve their genetic, racial, and cultural identity.” [69]

However, the anonymous user who initially invited BuzzFeed to The Great Liberation of France said he believes the Discord group is mostly made up of 4chan users. He also suspected that it wasn’t just Americans and French users in the Discord group, and noted, “Right now there is this loose sort of alliance between Russian neo-fascists like Alexander Dugin and the international alt-right.” As Ryan Broderick indicated, there have been several recent 4chan threads where users with American IP addresses were asking to learn about Dugin. According to the anonymous user, “The shared agenda is to get far right, pro-Russian politicians elected worldwide. It’s not so much a conspiracy as it is a collaboration,” the anonymous user said. “The alt-right sees the US as compromised and Russia as the good guys who will ‘remove kebab’ (kill Muslims).”[70]

In “A Step-By-Step Guide For How Russian Bots Trick Far-Right Trolls Into Spreading Fake News,” again for BuzzFeed, Broderick described how Russian bots pushed far-right conspiracy theories on Twitter using bots and sock puppet accounts.[71] They waited for one of their honeypots to catch the attention of a far-right influencer, and then used a botnet to amplify their deceptive content. Then, private communities on platforms like 4chan and Discord picked it up and helped push the theory to go viral on Twitter and Facebook. A Russian hacker linked to a network of Twitter bots told BuzzFeed that he and 30 other people in Russia had been promoting messages favorable to AfD during the election.[72] The AfD came third in the election, with a projected 13.5% of the vote, and are set to be the first far-right party to enter the German parliament for the first time in 65 years.

The Daily Stormer

Discord also had a private chat server for the followers of Andrew Anglin’s The Daily Stormer. The alt-right’s association with chaos magic would explain the nature of their political antics, which have been described as “culture jamming,” a form pranksterism from the tradition of Situationism and Discordianism. Culture jamming is a tactic normally associated with anti-consumerist movements, and typically uses satire and irony to discredit commercial or political messages and claims. Andrew Anglin, administrator of The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website popular among the alt-right, encouraged his audience to strike out on their own and impersonate people of color and women, or to purchase disposable cell phones to avoid detection and banishment from social media platforms like Twitter, in order to conduct what he referred to as “culture jamming,” a tactic which has been endorsed by Radix. The Daily Stormer takes its name from the Nazi Party’s tabloid newspaper Der Stürmer, whose publisher, Julius Streicher, was a member of the German Socialist Party (DSP), an initiative of Rudolf von Sebottendorf as a child of the Thule Society. Streicher was executed after the Second World War for crimes against humanity. Anglin has a symbol of the Nazi black sun tattooed on his chest, and according to a prominent white nationalist who collaborated with him, “He imagines he has some magical power.”[73] According to Dery:

Anglin’s tactics, really a bastardized form of cultural jamming, have many effects. One of them is to discredit the official narrative. Another one is to sow seeds of doubt and to suggest a false equivalency between viewpoints and positions where there truly is a right and a wrong. [74]

The Daily Stormer had significant ties to The Right Stuff (TRS), a white nationalist blog that hosts several podcasts, including The Daily Shoah, both created by Mike Enoch, who was regarded as one of the three most influential figures in the alt-right, alongside Anglin and Richard B. Spencer.[75] TRS is best known for popularizing the use of “echoes,” an anti-Semitic marker which uses triple parentheses around names used to identify Jews and people of the Jewish faith on social media. Parts of the website briefly ceased operations on January 15, 2017 after revealing that the site’s founder, Mike Enoch, was a New York website developer named Mike Peinovich, who has said that his wife is Jewish. 4Chan users have revealed that Peinovich’s Jewish wife is a strong proponent of LGBT issues and has worked for the Jewish service organization B’nai B’rith.[76] Nevertheless, the Daily Stormer defended Enoch and his site.[77]

A collective of data scientists called Susan Bourbaki Anthony conducted an analysis of The Daily Stormer’s reach on Twitter from February 2 to March 2, 2017, and found that Anglin’s content was being spread by a network of bots and “sock puppets,” whose schedule of activity parallels a workday in Moscow and St. Petersburg.[78] Anglin voted in the November 2016 election via absentee ballot sent from Krasnodar in western Russia.[79] In August 2017, after causing outrage by insulting the victim of a ramming homicide at a far-right rally, the website was rejected by several domain registrars and moved to the dark web. On August 17, after a relocation to dailystormer.ru, the Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor requested a shutdown of the domain. Rumors claim he continues to live in Russia.[80]

Pizzagate

According to Ben Schreckinger, Wikileaks’ release of the emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign advisor, in October 2016, set up “the most disturbing meme magic yet.” As described by Schreckinger:

What many of the boards’ most active users lack in social graces they make up for in the ability to process and find patterns in high volumes of information, a talent they only half-jokingly call “weaponized autism.” The 4Chan hive-mind was made for the massive WikiLeaks dump, which brought new releases nearly daily for the final month of the campaign, and the boards frantically combed through them.[81]

In the final days of the campaign, the boards “struck meme gold” when they discovered emails that provided fodder for the infamous Pizzagate conspiracy. The “fake news” machine went into overdrive when alt-right trolls discovered an email chain where Podesta’s brother Tony, a prominent lobbyist, invited him to attend a “spirit cooking” session in New York with the Serbian performance artist Marina Abromovic, setting off a firestorm of conspiratorial speculation known as Pizzagate. The online conspiracy community made far-fetched interpretations from Podesta’s leaked emails, speculating that he was part of a pedophilia ring supposedly being run out of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor by Hillary and her campaign chairman John Podesta, which went viral in the conspiracy community. Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched such attacks, said that fake news stories like Pizzagate were assisted by Russian bots.[82]

On 4 December 2016, an individual from Salisbury, North Carolina, brought a semi-automatic rifle into the restaurant to “self-investigate” this conspiracy theory. He fired shots but no one was injured. In subsequent weeks, InfoWars deleted posts related to Pizzagate and fired two of their employees involved. And, finally, on March 24, 2016, Jones read a statement on air in which he stated that InfoWars “regret any negative impact our commentaries may have had on Mr. Alefantis, Comet Ping Pong, or its employees.”[83]

Pizzagate was popularized by Mike Cernovich, a pro-Trump web personality associated with the alt-right. In 2015 Cernovich explained, “I went from libertarian to alt-right after realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is code for white genocide.” Additionally, in a series of since-deleted tweets, Cernovich declared that “white genocide is real” and “white genocide will sweep up the [social justice warriors].” Cernovich also callous anti-feminism of the Manosphere, having claimed that “date rape does not exist” and “misogyny gets you laid” and said that people who “love black women” should “slut shame them” to keep them from getting AIDS.[84]

Cernovich’s partners in the Pizzagate hullabaloo included David Seaman and Brittany Pettibone. Seaman briefly interned at Jezebel before being fired, and was then briefly a contributor at The Huffington Post where he was also removed. In 2008, Seaman wrote a book called Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz: How to Attract Massive Attention for Your Business, Your Product, or Yourself. The book, originally titled How to Be a Publicity Whore, calls Seaman a “veteran promotional stunt-planner,” and promises to teach readers how to practice the “black art of buzz” and “how controversy, scandal-mongering, and social networking can turn your message into a viral sensation.”[85] The book uses examples from popular “publicity whores” like Howard Stern, Tila Tequila, Ann Coulter, Bill Maher, and even Donald Trump. In 2009, Seaman did an interview with Business Beat Live, in which he said, “I would protest gravity if I thought it was going to get me buzz.”[86]

Brittany Pettibone is an award-winning author of Hatred Day and co-host of the successful video podcast “Virtue of the West.” She is also contributor to Richard B. Spencer’s AltRight.com. A strong supporter of Donald Trump, she was invited to his inauguration, and posted photos of herself there with Nigel Farage on Instagram. Pettibone is scheduled to speak at a conference sponsored by Arktos Media titled Scandza Forum in Oslo on July 1, 2017, titled Globalism vs the Ethnostate. Invitees include Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents, John Black Morgan, founder of Arktos Media, various former members of the BNP and Nazi-sympathizing artist Charles Krafft. After they were barred from entering the U.K., Pettibone along with fellow alt-right personality Lauren Southern and Southern’s fiancée Martin Sellner, travelled to Russia in early June 2018 to meet with Dugin.[87] In 2015, Southern ran as a Libertarian Party candidate in the Canadian federal election. She worked for The Rebel Media until March 2017. Sellner is an Austrian Neue Rechte activist, and leader of the Identitäre Bewegung Österreichs (IBÖ, Identitarian Movement of Austria).

Cernovich’s manufactured online popularity was largely propelled through MicroMagicJingleTM, the most recent handle adopted by a notorious pro-Trump Twitter, MicroChrip, who is a ringleader described by a Republican strategist as the “Tumpbot overlord.” Although some have suspected him of being a Russian, in a conversation with BuzzFeed over on Discord, MicroChip claimed to be a freelance mobile software developer in his early thirties and lives in Utah. “Micro is a true believer alt-right guy,” wrote the alt-right observer who had MicroChip investigated. “He’s brilliant and is not LARPing. His tech skills are real as is his opsec.”[88] MicroChip has been figuring out how to make pro-Trump tags go viral on Twitter, which he said is an ideal platform with which to shape a message. “Twitter is easier [than other social networks] and more volatile,” he said. “Emotions run high at 140 characters. The chaos is perfect.”[89]

Cernovich currently serves as a regular host of The Alex Jones Show on Infowars. According to Alex Jones, Cernovich’s sources are allegedly Donald Trump’s sons, “especially Donald Jr.. He’s a total patriot.”[90] Another controversy arose when Donald Jr. retweeted remarks by Kevin B. MacDonald about alleged favors exchanged by Hillary Clinton and Switzerland’s largest bank.[91] On the campaign trail, Donald Jr. promoted Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton wore an earpiece to a presidential forum and that official unemployment rates were manipulated for political purposes.[92] In April 2017, he said of Cernovich, “In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer.”[93]

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, promoted Cernovich’s March 26 appearance on CBS’ 60 Minutes on fake news, calling the interview “a must-see ratings bonanza” and linking on Medium to Cernovich’s blog.[94] During the interview, while refusing to admit that he used very poor journalistic standards, Cernovich implied that was a purpose to his deliberate spreading of false stories. When asked by Scott Pelley if he was poisoning democracy, Cernovich answered that he was “improving it by adding voices to the conversation.” When Pelley asked him, if he doesn’t publish anything he doesn’t believe is true, how does he decide whether something is true? Cernovich waxed philosophical:

How does anybody decide? That’s an epistemological question. What is the nature of truth? How do human beings who are floating around this rock with eyes and ears and skin and smell, how does anybody ascertain what is true or what is false?[95]

Cernovich attempted to intervene in the Jeffrey Epstein case on behalf of Alan Dershowitz, with an unsuccessful request to have a large volume of blacked-out court documents released. The defense lawyers argue that Cernovich’s motive is not for his alleged opposition to pedophilia as he had claimed, but for saving face of Epstein and Dershowitz. Trump’s ties to Epstein have triggered speculation that Cernovich might be gathering information on those who have leveled sex-related accusations at Trump or trying to collect information damaging on Trump for his own purposes. Cernovich warned in April 2017 that he might release a “motherlode” of dirt on top White House officials if Trump adviser Steve Bannon was fired.[96]

In March 2017, Michael Flynn Jr., son of Ret. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, retweeted a post by David Seaman, stating, “Let’s clear up#PizzaGate nvr abt JUST #cometpingpong. Abt a culture of SICK corruption among elites.” Flynn’s father had used to have a profile picture on Twitter and Facebook of himself wearing an Infowars t-shirt, according to CNN, and posted multiple tweets on containing conspiratorial material regarding Hillary Clinton alleging that John Podesta drank the blood and bodily fluids of other humans in Satanic rituals, which Politico says “soon morphed into the ‘#pizzagate’ conspiracy theory involving Comet Ping Pong.”[97] Michael Flynn Jr. tweeted in December 2016, “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidences’ tied to it.”[98] Two days after the shooting that took place at Comet Ping Pong, Trump fired Flynn’s son Michael from his transition team, with The New York Times and ABC News both reporting the reason was because of their Twitter posting of fake news.[99]

Deplorables

Cernovich and Jeff Giesea, a gay Stanford graduate and startup veteran who has worked for Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers, founded MAGA-3X (for “Make America Great Again”), a pro-Trump social-media group. At Stanford, Giesea edited the Stanford Review, the conservative paper founded by Thiel. After graduating in 1997, Giesea went to work for Thiel’s hedge fund, Thiel Capital Management. MAGA3X describes itself on Twitter as “a citizen grassroots movement that helped elect Trump” and on its website as “Freedom’s Secret Weapon.” As Joseph Bernstein described in BuzzFeed, “The MAGA3X accounts were a water cannon of memes, Breitbart stories, WikiLeaks theories, pro-Trump YouTube videos, and cartoons about #Pizzagate, and they swelled to the tens of thousands, eventually gaining public praise from Gen. Michael Flynn, the national security adviser to be.”[100]

Together, Giesea and Cernovich set up a network of pro-Trump internet influencers, including Jack Posobiec and Baked Alaska. John Michael “Jack” Posobiec III is an American alt-rights internet troll and conspiracy theorist known primarily for his controversial and pro-Donald Trump comments on Twitter. He was a key figure in the promotion of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy. Anthime Gionet, who goes by his Twitter handle, Baked Alaska, and the alias Timothy Treadstone, began his career online as a social media strategist for BuzzFeed, as well as Capitol Records. In 2013, he produced music videos as a comedy rapper under the alias Baked Alaska. In 2016, he left BuzzFeed and worked as a tour manager for Milo Yiannopoulos’ “Dangerous Faggot” tour, and grew a following with alt-right personalities such as Chuck Johnson and Mike Cernovich, gaining more than 160,000 Twitter followers as of April 2017.[101]

MAGA3X were also the organizers of the DeploraBall, an unofficial inaugural ball held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on the evening of January 19, 2017, to celebrate the victory and inauguration of Donald Trump. The name is a play on Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comment made during her 2016 Presidential election campaign. The group had a falling out when, following a change of venue, Baked Alaska, who was one of the original organizers, was reportedly banned after posting "anti-Semitic and racist comments" on Twitter, sparking an online argument with Cernovich. White supremacist Richard Spencer, who had recently made news for leading a group Nazi salute during a pro-Trump conference at a restaurant, was also uninvited from the event. Images of Pepe the Frog were also banned. Although journalist Milo Yiannopoulos had been invited, he did not attend. Roger Stone arrived at the venue, but left without entering the event after learning the organizers had not provided sufficient tickets for his family members accompanying him. The event was broadcast live by Right Side Broadcasting Network.

Giesea, Cernovich, Baked Alaska and Richard Spencer were all friends with Trump Troll, Charles C. “Chuck” Johnson, once called “the most hated man on the internet.”[102] Johnson was banned from Twitter for requesting donations to “take out” a Black Lives Matter activist.[103] He is also known for publishing the home addresses of New York Times reporters he erroneously claimed released the name of the policeman who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson and the home address of a woman he claimed was the source of Rolling Stone’s now-retracted story about an alleged rape on the University of Virginia campus.

Johnson also has numerous ties to the alt-right and has professed white supremacist views. In July 2016, he appeared as a guest on the racist radio show “Fash the Nation,” in which he claimed that he got interested in “race realism,” and had already read The Bell Curve. Johnson the owner of the websites GotNews.com and WeSearchr.com, as an alternative to the “lying mainstream media.” He said it receives 2.5 million page views per month. In 2015, Johnson created a crowd-funding website called WeSearchr. Andrew Anglin, founder of The Daily Stormer, used the website to raise money to defend himself against a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of a woman trolled by Anglin’s followers.[104]

Johnson also befriended Malik Obama, the president’s Trump-loving half brother, and mentoring him to become an alt-right troll celebrity. Although he was the best man at Barack Obama’s wedding, in July, Malik, the 58-year-old with dual US and Kenyan citizenship, announced that he would support Trump's presidential bid. Shortly afterward, Trump welcomed his support on Twitter. By October, the Trump campaign invited Obama to the final presidential debate, where he snapped a photo alongside Kellyanne Conway. Malik was so adamantly pro-Trump on Twitter that his account was often accused of being a parody. However, Malik was verified by Twitter shortly before the election. Shortly thereafter, as Bernstein also reported in BuzzFeed, “Malik Obama has gone full chanterculture, shitlord troll, adopting much of the language and similar tactics to those used by the alt-right.”[105] For example, Malik called his opponents cucks, railed against “fake news” like CNN and the Huffington Post, and assured his followers that he had not been “spirit cooked,” and shared Pepe memes of himself bearing the name “Memelik Obameme.” Both Obama and Johnson denied that Johnson writes the president’s half-brother’s tweets. Malik proclaimed on Twitter that it was Johnson who taught him how to tweet. “I teach people neurolinguistic programming,” Johnson wrote. “When Malik Obama told me he supported Donald Trump I helped him throughout the process.”[106] There’s no question that two know each other, as they were photographed together for Johnson's news site GotNews.com, with both of them wearing a “Make American Great Again” cap, and Johnson flashing the alt-right “OK” hand-sign.

Johnson worked with Bannon at Breitbart before Bannon left to become Trump’s chief strategist. “I liked [Bannon], and was close to him,” Johnson said in a December phone interview.[107] In the fall of 2016, Johnson and Bannon led an effort before the second presidential debate in October to hold a press conference with four women who alleged that former president Bill Clinton had raped, sexually abused or sexually harassed them.[108]

Johnson agreed to help Peter Smith who confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that he and Michael Flynn had tried in 2016 to contact computer hackers, including Russian hackers, in an attempt to obtain opposition research material to use against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Smith was a board member and officer of the Atlantic Council and was also active with the Heritage Foundation, CSIS, and the Brookings Institution. In 1998 he was identified as a major financial supporter of the 1993 Troopergate story, in which several Arkansas state troopers accused U.S. President Bill Clinton of having carried out sexual dalliances while he was Governor of Arkansas. Johnson met Peter Smith in 2013 while conducting “opposition research” on President Obama, had been in touch with Smith throughout the 2016 campaign, discussing “tactics and research.”[109]

Johnson said he also suggested that Smith get in touch with Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker who goes by the alias “Weev” and has collaborated with Johnson in the past. Auernheimer, who became famous in 2010 for exposing a hole in AT&Ts security system and wound up serving prison time, has been closely involved in the activities of the overtly racist “1488” segment of the alt-right. Auernheimer helped Anglin set up the Daily Stormer, and has been involved in sending threatening fliers out to Jewish community centers and colleges. Auernheimer finally vacated and moved to the Ukraine [110]

In that quest Smith contacted several known hacker groups, including Guccifer 2.0.[111] Smith was national chairman of the College Young Republicans. Matt Tait, an information security specialist for GCHQ and now runs a private internet security consultancy in the UK, claimed that Smith had contacted him mentioned that he had received emails from Clinton’s private server from someone on the ‘Dark Web’, and wanted help to validate whether or not the emails were genuine.[112] According to Tait, Smith claimed to be working with Trump’s then foreign policy adviser, Michael Flynn, and showed documentation suggesting he was also associated with close Trump aides including Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. According to Tait, Smith seemed unconcerned about the possibility that by helping publish such emails, he could be aiding a Russian intelligence operation. Tait declined to comment for this article, saying he has recently been contacted “by a number of congressional and other investigators.”[113]

Federal investigators are probing an apparent attempt by Russian government hackers to obtain the deleted emails and provide them to former national security adviser Michael Flynn through a third party, the Wall Street Journal also reported. Smith’s confession to the Journal corroborated other aspects of the Russia investigation that have been uncovered by reporters. It explained: “The operation Mr. Smith described is consistent with information that has been examined by U.S. investigators probing Russian interference in the elections. Those investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.”[114] Smith killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room on May 14, 2014, days after talking to the Journal reporters. He left behind a carefully arranged stack of documents explaining his suicide and a note exclaiming, “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER.”[115]

Rep. Matt Gaetz, a conservative Republican firebrand, was responsible for inviting Johnson to Trump’s State of the Union address on January 28, 2018. Gaetz’s public profile had grown as he has helped lead the charge for the releasing of the highly-controversial memo House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes put together on government surveillance. Johnson said that he was invited by several members of Congress but “took Gaetz’s invitation” as “he’s into stuff on the issues that I care about.” The issues included “weed and bitcoin and Trump and animal welfare.” Johnson said he also likes Gaetz because he has “that fuck you mindset.” “It was a wild time. I certainly did a bunch of jumping out of my chair,” Johnson said of the address. “Trump was straight up gangster.”[116]

Johnson told his interviewer on Mother Jones, “You may decide, for instance, what many people on the left and the right think—that I’m a sociopath and blah blah blah. Or, on the other hand, that I’m ‘working on some new entity that’s going to be controversial.’ There’s a degree to which, however you turn the lens, both things will be true.”[117] When asked if he felt that he had gotten credit for his recent work, Johnson said, “Not as much as I deserve.”[118] Johnson attributed much of the work that he and others have done in support of Trump to being able to tap into voters’ emotions through memes, such as the Pepe the Frog “The election was won by a bunch of people making memes,” Johnson proclaimed. “We memed the President into existence.”[119]

In August 2017, Johnson brokered and attended a meeting in London between Rep. Dana Rohrabacher—who Politico dubbed “Putin’s favorite congressman,”[120]—and Julian Assange to discuss a presidential pardon for Assange.[121] However, Johnson has since refused to turn over documents and emails requested by the Senate Intelligence Committee about any contacts he has had with Russian agents.[122]

Lord Kek

Richard B. Spencer was uninvited from the DeploraBall for his triumphal speech for the NPI, titled “Long Live the Emperor!” following Trump’s election victory, when he infamously declared, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” which was received by the audience with Nazi salutes [but described as “Roman salutes”]. Betraying the occult origins of the alt-right’s support for Trump, Spencer proclaimed, America, Spencer said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a named which had been adopted by Gladio’s Ordine Nuovo, inspired by Julius Evola.[123] Spencer summed up the bizarre association of the extreme right and chaos magick that bolstered Trump’s win:

But even though we always took Trump seriously, there was still a moment of unreality – or perhaps too painfully intense reality – when the state of Pennsylvania was called for Donald Trump, the moment when we knew Kek had smiled upon us, that meme magic was real. And though these terms are used half-jokingly, they represent something truly important--the victory of will. We willed Donald Trump into office, made this dream into reality. If you will it, it is no dream, a quote [from Theodor Herzl] I’m sure our friends at the Anti-Defamation League know well. And this is only the beginning.[124]

The 8chan coined the term “meme magic,” which is defined at KnowYourMeme.com as, “a slang term used to describe the hypothetical power of sorcery and voodoo supposedly derived from certain Internet memes that can transcend the realm of cyberspace and result in real life consequences.”[125] The concept has gained popularity on 4chan’s /pol/ board and been heavily associated with several in-jokes and shitposting fads on the site, including Ebola-chan, Baneposting and Donald Trump. Some have compared it to the occult concept of the egregore, developed in works of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Rosicrucians.[126] The egregore is an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind,” an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. On May 10th, 2015, two 8chan boards centered on meme magic were created: /bmw/ (Bureau of Memetic Warfare) and /magick/.

The foundation of chaos magic is the sigil (also called “glyphs”), to “codify and project one’s Will into the Universe.”[127] The image could be something as abstract as a hieroglyphic doodle. Basically, it involves creating an image that represents your “will”. In what is described as “memetic warfare,” the image is disseminated widely, even subliminally, so that it can seed the minds of the larger population and bring about real-world results. In effect, it’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming on a large scale. Paris-based occult researcher Théodore Ferréol observed:

And I’m fascinated at the way internet folklore is turning into something new—not exactly activism, not exactly religion, but something close to a new form of magic and animism in an era when communities have transformed into tribes. And they are savage, creative and, as we now know, really powerful.[128]

From June 2015 onwards, the term has been heavily associated to Donald Trump, with /pol/ users using the “meme magic” to make Trump win the elections and transform the country under a similar ideology. Several notable events include the posting of a Trump Pepe picture on Trump’s twitter or the use of a Yiddish curse word to talk about Hillary Clinton, being consequently reported on a opinion editorial featuring the word “Oy vey.”[129]

The dream that Trump is the messiah of chaos is shared by the denizens of 4chan, where it became all the rage on /pol/, due to a number of eerie coincidences, to hail him as the emissary of the god of chaos. Every post on 4chan and similar online venues has an 8-digit numerical identifier. With the amount of traffic these sites get, the last couple digits of this number are essentially a random roll. When a poster gets repeated digits, its called “dubs”, “trips”, “quads”, and so on. Readers would “bet” the contents of their message on the occurrence of repeating digits. Successful bets were celebrated as a “GET”. What was strange was that discussion threads associated with Trump displayed noticeably frequent GETs. The synchronicity was paired with the popularity of Pepe the Frog, and the use of the expression “KEK”, which comes from the Korean language and the popular video game World of Warcraft, and which came to replace “LOL.” Kek also happens to be the name of an ancient Egyptian god of chaos, who was depicted with the head of a frog.

The connections are not attributed to chance alone. It is believed to be the result of meme magick. As explained in “The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of KEK” at pepethefrogfaith.wordpress.com, it is the result of chaos magic. One or a few anonymous 4chan contributors discovered an old track from the 1980’s on YouTube, of a B-side vinyl by performer P.E.P.E., designed with a frog holding a magic wand. P.E.P.E. stand for: Point, Emerging, Probably, Entering. Most importantly, the full-length vocal version’s album artwork features the Trump Tower’s clock. According to the blogger, “When a lot of people pool their united willpower towards a single sigil, its called a Hypersigil, and its exponentially more potent. Pepe/Kek is 4chan’s hypersigil.”[130] Leading alt-right sites such as TheRightStuff.biz reach a broad audience by promoting Esoteric Kekism, a parody religion based on Devi’s work, centered on semi-ironic memes of Hitler and Vishnu.[131]

[1] Gary Lachman. Dark Star Rising (p. xii). Kindle Edition, (Penguin Publishing Group, 2018).

[2] Smith John M. Bennett. “William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scott Manual.” Kirkus (Sept. 10th, 2018). Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/william-s-burroughs/william-s-burroughs-revised-boy-scout-manual/

[3] Tim Adams. “Adam Curtis continues search for the hidden forces behind a century of chaos.” The Guardian (Octover 9, 2016).

[4] Jake Kivanç. “Nero, Nazis, and the New Far Right: The Phenomena of the Professional Troll.” Vice Magazine (June 15, 2016).

[5] Michael Sainato. “WikiLeaks Reveals DNC Elevated Trump to Help Clinton.” Observer (October 10, 2016).

[6] Maureen Dowd. “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself.” The New York Times (January 11, 2017).

[7] Youssef El-Gingihy. “How Silicon Valley, spooks and the super rich took control of the 21st century.” Independent (April 5, 2018).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Erika Summers-Effler, “The Micro Potential for Social Change: Emotion, Consciousness, and Social Movement Formation.” Sociological Theory (2002) 20(1): 41–60.

[10] Joseph Bernstein. “How Malik Obama Became A Twitter "Shitlord" And Alt-Right Darling.” Buzzed (December 13, 2016); Richard Bandler. Richard Bandler's Guide to Trance-formation: How to Harness the Power of Hypnosis to Ignite Effortless and Lasting Change (Deerfield Beach: Health Communications, Inc., 2010) p. 73.

[11] Quinn Norton, “Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz.” Wired (August 11, 2016).

[12] Vince Carducci. “Culture Jamming: A Sociological Perspective,” Journal of Consumer Culture (2006) 6(1): 116–38.

[13] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[14] Davis. TechGnosis. p. 182.

[15] Mark Dery. “The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax.” The New York Times (December 23, 1990)

[16] “Saints - The Final Frontier.” Retrieved from http://www.discordia-inc.co.uk/d8mer/saints.html

[17] Dr Moon Rat. “Tony Clifton Attacks Jim Carrey at Press Conference.” YouTube (uploaded Jan 26, 2009).

[18] Mark Presce. “The Executable Dreamtime,” Richard Metzger ed. Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (Disinformation Books, 2008).

[19] David Keenan. England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground (London: SAF Publishing, 2003), p. 225.

[20] Scott F. Aikin. “Poe’s Law, Group Polarization, and the Epistemology of Online Religious Discourse.” Social Science Research Network (23 January 2009).

[21] Nathan Poe. “Big contradictions in the evolution theory.” christianforums.com (August 11, 2005).

[22] Jonathan Tilove. “In Travis County custody case, jury will search for real Alex Jones.” American-Statesman (April 16, 2017).

[23] Elura Nanos. “Right Wing Nut Alex Jones Brings All Kinds of Crazy to Courtroom in Custody Battle.” Law Newz (April 19, 2017).

[24] Eric Hananoki. “Alex Jones Claims His Violent Adam Schiff Remarks Were Just ‘Tongue-In-Cheek’ And ‘Art Performance’.” Media Matters (April 6, 2017).

[25] Nina Burleigh. “Alex Jones’s Threat to Congressman May Be a Felony.” Newsweek (April 5, 2017).

[26] “Democrats Call for Alex Jones’ Arrest” The Alex Jones Channel (April 5, 2017). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/efzjBFDu1oA?t=2m57s

[27] Maxwell Tani. “Trump’s top alternative media backers defend their controversial actions by saying they play ‘characters.’” Business Insider (April 25, 2017).

[28] Mark Ames. “Mark Ames 1, Andrew Breitbart 0: Exiled Editor Does Dirty Chicken Dance on Breitbart’s Grave.” The Exiled (March 1, 2012).

[29] Playboy; cited in “‘Playboy’: Paul Krassner Vs Andrew Breitbart.” Breitbart (November 16, 2011).

[30] Ibid.

[31] Madeleine Davies. “Genius Performance Artist Ann Coulter Is Now Pretending to Hate Soccer” Jezebel (June 26, 2014).

[32] Mitchell Sunderland, “Ann Coulter Is a Human Being.” Broadly (August 13 2015).

[33] Davies. “Genius Performance Artist Ann Coulter Is Now Pretending to Hate Soccer.”

[34] Chris Sosa. “Let’s all laugh at Ann Coulter, right-wing performance artist” Salon.com (October 24, 2013).

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ann Coulter, “Coulter: Any growing interest in soccer a sign of nation’s moral decay” Clarion Ledger (July 2, 2014).

[37] Sosa. “Let’s all laugh at Ann Coulter, right-wing performance artist.”

[38] Ibid.

[39] Mitchell Sunderland. “Ann Coulter Is a Human Being.” Broadly (August 13 2015).

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid.

[42] “Coulter Says ‘Gays Are Natural Conservatives’—To Cheers From CPAC Crowd”. Metro Weekly (February 12, 2011). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/20110922134505/http://metroweekly.com/poliglot/2011/02/coulter-says-gays-are-natural.html

[43] Dylan Matthews. “The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It’s that, but way way weirder.” VOX (April 18, 2016).

[44] stcredzero. YCombinator. Retrieved from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581653]

[45] “Lulz,” Know Your Meme. Retrieved from http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-did-it-for-the-lulz#.TriVW81b1NU

[46] Whitney Pillips. “Why study villains, scoundrels, and rule breakers? Whitney Phillips at TEDxCCS” TEDTalk (1:30). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAubx3BBgLk

[47] Luke O’Brien. “The Making of an American Nazi.” The Atlantic (December 2017).

[48] “Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman.” The Washington Post (September 25, 2014)

[49] Luke O’Brien. “My Journey to the Centre of the alt-right.” The Huffington Post (November 03, 2016).

[50] Ibid.

[51] Olivia Nuzzi. “How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and alt-right Symbol” The Daily Beast (May 25, 2106).

[52] 4Chan Faq Page, 4Chan, 8 June 2008. Retrieved from http://www.4chan.org/faq#anonymous

[53] Biella Coleman. “Hacker and Troller as Trickster.” Social Text (February 7, 2010).

[54] Quinn Norton, “Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz.” Wired (August 11, 2016).

[55] Raincoster, “DiscordiAnon on #LulzSec, #AntiSec, and #Anonymous.” The Cryptoshere (November 13, 2015). Retrieved from https://thecryptosphere.com/2015/11/13/discordianon-on-lulzsec-antisec-and-anonymous

[56] DeZ Vylenz (Director). “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” (Documentary). Shadowsnake Films (30 September 2008); Scott Oliver. “Inside the Resurgence of Discordianism – the Chaotic, LSD-Fuelled Anti-Religion.” Vice Magazine (June 15, 2016).

[57] “Is this site a hoax ran by people from 4chan?” Retrieved from https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=31427.0

[58] Chris Barron, Jeff Giesea, Jim Hoft & Lucian Wintrich. “WAKE UP! (the most fab party at the RNC).” Retrieved from https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wake-up-the-most-fab-party-at-the-rnc-tickets-26286695213#

[59] Joan Walsh. “Islamophobes, White Supremacists, and Gays for Trump—the alt-right Arrives at the RNC.” The Nation (July 20, 2016).

[60] Jeff Sharlet. “Are You Man Enough for the Men’s Rights Movement?” GQ (March 2015).

[61] “Misogyny: The Sites.” Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2012/misogyny-sites

[62] Ullam Bokhari & Milo Yiannopoulos. “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The alt-right,” Breitbart (29 Mar 2016).

[63] Ian Tuttle. “The Racist Moral Rot at the Heart of the alt-right.” National Review (April 5, 2016).

[64] Scott Greer. “Milo Yiannopoulos Challenges Mark Zuckerberg To Debate Facebook Censorship,” The Daily Caller (May 13, 2016); Kristen Brown. “The ultimate troll: The terrifying allure of Gamergate icon Milo Yiannopoulos.” Fusion (October 27, 2015); Elle Hunt, “#Milo Yiannopoulos, rightwing writer, permanently banned from Twitter,” The Guardian (July 20, 2016).

[65] Peter Stone & Greg Gordon. “FBI’s Russian-influence probe includes a look at Breitbart, InfoWars news sites.” McClatchy (March 20, 2017).

[66] Taylor Link. “Meme magic is real”: Silicon Valley whiz kid is financing an assembly line for alt-right clickbait.” Salon (September 23, 2016).

[67] Ryan Broderick. “Trump Supporters Online Are Pretending To Be French To Manipulate France’s Election.” BuzzFeed (January 24, 2017).

[68] Ibid.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Henk van Ess & Jane Lytvynenko. “This Russian Hacker Says His Twitter Bots Are Spreading Messages To Help Germany’s Far Right Party In The Election.” BuzzFeed (September 24, 2017).

[73] Luke O’Brien. “The Making of an American Nazi.” The Atlantic (December 2017).

[74] Keegan Hankes. “How the extremist right hijacked ‘Star Wars,’ Taylor Swift and the Mizzou student protests to promote racism.” Southern Poverty Law Centre (January 05, 2016).

[75] Matthew Sheffield. “The alt-right eats its own: Neo-Nazi podcaster “Mike Enoch” quits after doxxers reveal his wife is Jewish.” Salon (January 16, 2017).

[76] David G. Brown. “Anti-Jewish Owner Of ‘The Daily Shoah’ Podcast Mike Enoch Outed As Having A Jewish Wife.” Return of Kings (January 18, 2017).

[77] Keegan Hankes. “Beyond the Pale: Andrew Anglin’s Newest Case for ‘Purity Tests.’” Southern Poverty Law Center (January 17, 2017).

[78] Luke O’Brien. “The Making of an American Nazi.” The Atlantic (December 2017).

[79] Ibid.

[80] Joel Oliphint & Andy Downing. “The White Nationalist from Worthington”. Columbus Alive (February 8, 2017).

[81] Ben Schreckinger. “World War Meme.” Politico (April 2017).

[82] Peter Stone & Greg Gordon. “FBI’s Russian-influence probe includes a look at Breitbart, InfoWars news sites.” McClatchy (March 20, 2017).

[83] Alex Jones. “A Note to Our Listening, Viewing and Reading Audiences Concerning Pizzagate Coverage.” InfoWars (March 24, 2017).

[84] Media Matters Staff. “Trump’s White House Touts A Rape-Promoting Media Troll Propped Up By The ‘Alt-Right.’” Media Matters (April 3, 2017).

[85] David Seaman. Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz: How to Attract Massive Attention for Your Business, Your Product, Or Yourself (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2008), backcover.

[86] Tvidie. “David Seaman - Author of Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz.” YouTube (uploaded Oct 29, 2008).

[87] Casey Michel. “Why is this Pizzagate truther meeting with a Russian neo-fascist?” Think Progress (June 10, 2018).

[88] Joseph Bernstein. “Never Mind The Russians, Meet The Bot King Who Helps Trump Win Twitter.” BuzzFeed (April 5, 2017).

[89] Ibid.

[90] Media Matters Staff. “Alex Jones: “‘Mike Cernovich’s Sources’ Are Trump’s ‘Sons, Especially Donald Jr’.” Media Matters (May 2, 2017).

[91] Jason Horowitz. “Donald Trump Jr.’s Skittles Tweet Fits a Pattern.” The New York Times (September 20, 2016).

[92] “Campaign 2016 updates: Donald Trump plans another visit to Capitol Hill.” Los Angeles Times (Septermber 8, 2016); C. Eugene Emery Jr. “Donald Trump Jr.’s unemployment claim up in flames.” @politifact (July 25, 2016).

[93] Maxwell Tani. “Some of Trump’s top supporters are praising a conspiracy theorist who fueled ‘pizzagate’ for his reporting.” Business Insider (April 4, 2017)

[94] Media Matters Staff. “Trump’s White House Touts A Rape-Promoting Media Troll Propped Up By The ‘Alt-Right.’” Media Matters (April 3, 2017).

[95] “Here is the full 60 Minutes Interview Transcript with Mike Cernovich.” Medium.com (April 1, 2017).

[96] Josh Gerstein. “The one weird court case linking Trump, Clinton, and a billionaire pedophile.” Politico (May 4, 2017).

[97] Brian Bender & Andrew Hanna. “Flynn under fire for fake news.” Politico (December 5, 2016).

[98] Cliff Kincaid. “Anti-Communist Revolutions are Spreading.” Accuracy in the Media (February 25, 2014).

[99] Matthew Rosenberg. “Trump Fires Senior Adviser’s Son From Transition for Sharing Fake News.” The New York Times, (6 December 2016); Katherine Faulders, “Mike Flynn Jr. Forced Out of Trump Transition Amid Fake News Controversy.” ABC News (6 December 2016).

[100] Joseph Bernstein. “This Man Helped Build The Trump Meme Army — Now He Wants To Reform It.” BuzzFeed (January 18, 2017).

[101] “Baked Alaska.” KnowYourMeme.com

[102] Hatewatch Staff. “Trump’s Troll: Racist Internet figure aiding president-elects transition team.” Southern Poverty Law Center (January 11, 2017).

[103] Ibid.

[104] Michelle Castillo. “The far right uses this site to fund its favorite causes—and its founder hopes to build a ‘very profitable business.’” CNBC.com (June 24, 2017)

[105] Joseph Bernstein. “How Malik Obama Became A Twitter ‘Shitlord’ And Alt-Right Darling.” BuzzFeed (December 13, 2015).

[106] Ibid.

[107] Ryan Mac. “A Troll Outside Trump Tower Is Helping To Pick Your Next Government.” Forbes (January 9, 2017).

[108] Hatewatch Staff. “Trump’s Troll: Racist Internet figure aiding president-elects transition team.” SPLC (January 11, 2017).

[109] Ben Schreckinger. “GOP Researcher Who Sought Clinton Emails Had Alt-Right Help.” Politico (July 11, 2017).

[110] “Two Notorious ‘Alt-Right’ Figures May Play Key Roles in Russia Investigation.” SPLC (July 26, 2017).

[111] Schreckinger. “GOP Researcher Who Sought Clinton Emails Had Alt-Right Help.”

[112] Julian Borger. “Cyber expert says GOP operative wanted to expose hacked Clinton emails.” The Guardian (July 1, 2017).

[113] Schreckinger. “GOP Researcher Who Sought Clinton Emails Had Alt-Right Help.”

[114] “Two Notorious ‘Alt-Right’ Figures May Play Key Roles in Russia Investigation.” SPLC (July 26, 2017).

[115] Ibid.

[116] Lachlan Markay & Gideon Resnick. “Florida (Congress)Man Invited Infamous Troll Chuck Johnson to Trump’s State of The Union.” The Daily Beast (January 31, 2018).

[117] Tim Murphy. “The Rise and Fall of Twitter’s Most Infamous Right-Wing Troll.” Mother Jones (December 16, 2014).

[118] Ryan Mac. “A Troll Outside Trump Tower Is Helping To Pick Your Next Government.” Forbes (January 9, 2017).

[119] Ibid.

[120] Alex Seitz-Wald. “Russia probe descends on Nunes’ re-election, threatens to upend midterms.” NBC News (March 26, 2018).

[121] Christine Mai-Duc. “Rohrabacher on meeting with WikiLeaks’ Assange: We talked about 'what might be necessary to get him out.’” Los Angeles Times (August 17, 2017).

[122] Michael Isikoff. “‘Alt-right’ figure who set up Assange meeting refuses to cooperate with Senate intel probe.” Yahoo News (August 18, 2017).

[123] Roger Griffin & Matthew Feldman. Fascism: Post-War Fascisms (London: Routledge, 2004) p. 237.

[124] “Long Live the Emperor!” Radix Journal (November 21, 2016).

[125] “Meme magic.” KnowYourMeme.com Retrieved from http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-magic

[126] Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis. Manifesto: Positio (1614). Epilogue p. 25.

[127] “The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of KEK.” Retrieved from https://pepethefrogfaith.wordpress.com/ [accessed November 20, 2016].

[128] Paul Spencer. “Trump’s Occult Online Supporters Believe ‘Meme Magic’ Got Him Elected.” Motherboard (November 18, 2016).

[129] “Meme magic.” KnowYourMeme.com

[130] “The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of KEK.” REtrived from https://pepethefrogfaith.wordpress.com/ [accessed November 20, 2016].

[131] Blake Smith. “Writings of French Hindu who worshipped Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu are inspiring the US alt-right.” Scroll.in (December 17, 2016).

Volume Six

1. Culture Wars

2. Red Mafia

3. From Russia With Love

4. #MeToo

5. Conservative Media

6. Atl-Reich

7. Multipolar World Order

8. Katehon

9. Collusion

10. Russia House

11. Techno-Libertarianism

12. Military-Digital Complex

13. Fake News

14. Memetic Warfare

15. Big Data

16. Make America White Again!

17. In Trump We Trust

18. Israel First