John Derbyshire is a British-born American computer programmer, journalist, and political commentator. He was noted for being one of the last paleoconservatives at the National Review, until he was fired in 2012 for writing an article for Taki's Magazine that was widely viewed as racist. Since 2012 he has written for white nationalist website VDARE.
4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from video games and television to literature, cooking, weapons, music, history, technology, anime, physical fitness, politics, and sports, among others. Registration is not available, except for staff, and users typically post anonymously. As of 2022, 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of whom approximately half are from the United States.
The Occidental Observer is an American far-right online publication that covers politics and society from a white nationalist and antisemitic perspective. It is run by the Charles Martel Society. Kevin B. MacDonald, a retired American professor of evolutionary psychology, is its editor. It is an offshoot of The Occidental Quarterly.
The manosphere is a diverse collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism. Communities within the manosphere include men's rights activists (MRAs), incels, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUA), and fathers' rights groups. While the specifics of each group's beliefs sometimes conflict, they are generally united in the belief that society is biased against men due to the influence of feminism, and that feminists promote misandry, or hatred of men. Acceptance of these ideas is described as "taking the red pill", a metaphor borrowed from the film The Matrix.
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.
/pol/, short for Politically Incorrect, is an anonymous political discussion imageboard on 4chan. As of 2022, it is the most active board on the site. It has had a substantial impact on Internet culture. It has acted as a platform for far-right extremism; the board is notable for its widespread racist, white supremacist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, misogynist, and anti-LGBT content. /pol/ has been linked to various acts of real-world extremist violence. It has been described as one of the "[centers] of 4chan mobilization", a title also ascribed to /b/.
Pepe the Frog is a comic character and Internet meme created by cartoonist Matt Furie. Designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body, Pepe originated in Furie's 2005 comic Boy's Club. The character became an Internet meme when his popularity steadily grew across websites such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan in 2008. By 2015, he had become one of the most popular memes used on 4chan and Tumblr. Different types of Pepe memes include "Sad Frog", "Smug Frog", "Angry Pepe", "Feels Frog", and "You will never..." Frog. Since 2014, "§ Rare Pepes" have been posted on the "meme market" as if they were trading cards.
The alt-right is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s, and has been declining since 2017. The term is ill-defined and has been used in different ways by academics, journalists, media commentators, and alt-right members themselves.
The term virtue signalling refers to the act of expressing opinions or stances that align with popular moral values, often through social media, with the intent of demonstrating one's good character. While the expression might sometimes be sincere, it is frequently used pejoratively to suggest that the person is more concerned with appearing virtuous than with actually supporting the cause or belief in question. An accusation of virtue signalling can be applied to both individuals and companies.
In Internet culture, shitposting or trashposting is the act of using an online forum or social media page to post content that is of "aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality". Shitposts are generally intentionally designed to derail discussions or cause the biggest reaction with the least effort. It may even sometimes be orchestrated as part of a co-ordinated flame war to render a website unusable by its regular visitors.
Alpha male and beta male are pseudoscientific terms for men derived from the designations of alpha and beta animals in ethology. They may also be used with other genders, such as women, or additionally use other letters of the Greek alphabet. The popularization of these terms to describe humans has been widely criticized by scientists.
The alt-lite, also known as the alt-light and the new right, is a loosely defined right-wing political movement whose members regard themselves as separate from both mainstream conservatism and the far-right, white nationalist alt-right. The concept is primarily associated with the United States, where it emerged in 2017. The term remained in vogue during the Trump administration, as observers assessed all sources for right-wing populism, but has mostly faded from popular discourse as of 2024.
Jack Michael Posobiec III is an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent and presenter, conspiracy theorist, and former United States Navy intelligence officer.
Angela Nagle is an American-born Irish academic and non-fiction writer who has written for The Baffler, Jacobin, and others. She is the author of the book Kill All Normies, published by Zero Books in 2017, which discusses the role of the internet in the rise of the alt-right and incel movements. Nagle describes the alt-right as a dangerous movement but also criticizes aspects of the left that she says have contributed to the alt-right's rise. Since 2021, she has been publishing articles on a wide range of personal, political and cultural topics via the online publishing platform Substack.
Collective Ink is a publishing company founded in the United Kingdom in 2001 under the name O Books. The publisher has 15 active imprints, the largest of which are Moon Books, O-Books and Zero Books. After changing ownership in 2021, in June 2023, John Hunt Publishing was renamed to Collective Ink.
Opponents of the alt-right have not reached a consensus on how to deal with it. Some opponents emphasized "calling out" tactics, labelling the alt-right with terms like "racist", "sexist", "homophobic", and "white supremacist" in the belief that doing so would scare people away from it. Many commentators urged journalists not to refer to the alt-right by its chosen name, but rather with terms like "neo-Nazi". There was much discussion within U.S. public discourse as to how to avoid the "normalization" of the alt-right. The activist group Stop Normalizing, which opposes the normalization of terms like alt-right, developed the "Stop Normalizing Alt Right" Chrome extension. The extension went viral shortly after the release of Stop Normalizing's website. The extension changes the term "alt-right" on webpages to "white supremacy". The extension and group were founded by a New York-based advertising and media professional under the pseudonym George Zola.
Men Going Their Own Way is an anti-feminist, misogynistic, mostly online community advocating for men to separate themselves from women and society, which they believe has been corrupted by feminism. The community is a part of the manosphere, a collection of anti-feminist websites and online communities that also includes the men's rights movement, incels, and pickup artists.
An extremely online, terminally online or chronically online, individual is someone who is closely engaged with Internet culture. People said to be extremely online often believe that online posts are very important. Events and phenomena can themselves be extremely online; while often used as a descriptive term, the phenomenon of extreme online usage has been described as "both a reformation of the delivery of ideas – shared through words and videos and memes and GIFs and copypasta – and the ideas themselves". Here, "online" is used to describe "a way of doing things, not [simply] the place they are done".
It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office is a 2019 book by Dale Beran, focusing on the intersection of Internet culture, alt-right, and Donald Trump's first presidency.
Frogtwitter is a network of loosely-connected pseudonymous X accounts characterized by promoting dissident ideas and policies associated with the far-right that formed around writer and online personality Costin Alamariu.
