Sometimes trolling is just trolling, but that doesn’t preclude a sincere political motive behind many of these actions. Most of what the alt-right does is done under the cover of “satire” or “irony,” providing a measure of plausible deniability in the event that one is challenged, ex. “It’s just a meme” “It’s just a green cartoon frog,” etc.
Much of the festering racism that took hold on 4chan started out as transgressive humor, violating norms for the sake of it, but it provided camouflage for people to circulate real neo-Nazi ideas. Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin said as much in his “Normie’s guide to the Alt-Right:”
The anonymous nature of 4chan allowed for all different sorts of people to get together and discuss all sorts of ideas, without having those ideas attached to an identity of any kind (not even an internet pseudonym). Anti-Semitic and racist jokes had been a key feature of / b/, but on /pol/ the sentiments behind the jokes slowly became serious, as people realized they were based on fact. /pol/ became a haven for virulent anti-Semites and aggressive racists, and tone of the Alt-Right is drawn directly from these roots on 4chan.
Earlier this spring, the hashtag #PitbullDropOff went viral on Twitter. Supposedly, it referenced a campaign to adopt pitbulls from no-kill shelters and drop them off at shelters that would put them down. A “Final Solution” to the “Pitbull Question,” it originated as a /pol/ “op.”
It was “just a meme,” a troll, but the purpose behind it was to spread a “race realist” message through a thinly veiled metaphor for pseudoscientific narratives about inherent black criminality. Alt-Right Youtuber James Allsup produced a video about the hashtag filled with dogwhistles (no pun intended) about pits “skulking around the housing projects.”
You can say “don’t feed the troll” all you want, but let’s not pretend any of this is innocent or shouldn’t be taken seriously. These people are using humor to soften others up and get them comfortable with the idea of genocide. Full stop.
