The lives of millions of Americans are sometimes altered forever by the goofy decision of one person who has no idea that history itself is waiting on their metaphorical dice roll. The collection of conspiracy theories, nationalism, and extremely online identity that we refer to as the alt-right was birthed out of several unrelated accidents. Today, we’re going to look at five of those seemingly innocuous moments in roughly chronological order.
Bill Cooper’s Weird Life Goal
Milton William Cooper came from a proud military family, and for inexplicable reasons this made him want to serve in all four branches of the United States Armed Forces as some sort of badge of honor. After a (probable) stint in the Air Force, he joined the Navy just as the Vietnam War was getting heated, which would end up being his last stop. After becoming a decorated seaman, he was transferred to naval intelligence and the briefing office of Admiral Bernard A. Clarey. It was here that his first dream would end, and his actual work began.
Cooper, now with the highest classified clearance of Q, would spend the rest of his life building the modern ecosystem of conspiracy theories by using his credentials and top secret information he claimed he saw in Clarey’s filing cabinet. Eventually, these included unfounded beliefs about UFOs, HIV/AIDS being manmade, the Illuminati, the Kennedy assassination, and countless others. Cooper became the cornerstone of the conspiracy theory universe through a popular radio show as well as his book Behold a Pale Horse.
In addition to just flat out reprinting the anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in toto as a chapter, Cooper laid the groundwork for what eventually became QAnon. It was Cooper who popularized the word “sheeple,” and who framed the conspiracy movement as something that would necessitate a civil war. The book remains such a popular alt-right text that Charlie Daniels was basing songs about it right around the time the backlash to President Barack Obama was really getting going. Speaking of that…
Henry Louis Gates Jr. Wanted to Fix His Door
Harvard literary professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. had just returned home in Cambridge, Massachusetts from a trip to China on July, 16, 2009 when he discovered his front door wouldn’t open. Gates entered through the back door and tried to open it from the inside, but it still wouldn’t budge. Eventually, Gates forced it open with the help of his driver, then reported the problem to Harvard’s maintenance department since the university owned the house.
Unfortunately, a neighbor saw a Black man messing with the front door in a fancy neighborhood and called the police. Gates was arrested in his own home by Sgt. James Crowley for disorderly conduct. When Obama, a Harvard alumni, was asked about the incident, he remarked:
“Recently, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you? And what does it say about race relations in America? Now, I’ve – I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”
White America lost it. A Pew Research poll released shortly afterwards saw Obama’s standing with white voters tumble from 53 percent to 46 percent almost immediately. Obama later claimed that his own internal polling showed that the incident hurt him more with white voters than anything else he ever did in office. Even when he invited Gates and Crowley for a “beer summit” at the White House to smooth things over, he never really recovered. The dream that Obama would represent a post-racial America shattered when the president insisted on the continuing realities of racism in the country. The backlash from this point on would grow into a new movement based around white grievance and accusations that Democrats were dividing the nation.
Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka Banned Child Rape Drawings
Before there was 8Kun, 4Chan and other online hubs of white nationalist and QAnon conspiracy thought, there was a forum called Something Awful. Around 2003, Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, the founder of the site, began cracking down on the sub-forum known as Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse. Specifically, he began removing lolicon, anime-style pornography where the characters resemble very young girls. This angered many users, who looked for a new home with no rules that would allow them to post the most atrocious things they could find.
Enter Christopher “moot” Poole, a New York teenager who copied the source code of the Japanese Image board site Futaba Channel, sometimes known as 2chan, to create 4chan. It was there, on the /pol/ board, that the movement called GamerGate and a dozen other organized harassment campaigns were launched. GamerGate quickly spiraled out of control to become national news. Websites like Breitbart latched onto the community built on 4chan to ascend to major players in the far-right media sphere.
When GamerGate became too toxic even for 4chan, it moved to 8chan and beyond, mutating past video games into full-on right-wing demagoguery. These image boards and the far-right media outlets that supported and sourced stories from them became the core of Trumpism. Now, they’ve been linked to multiple mass shootings and gestated the ideas that lead to the January 6 attempted coup.
Allen Estrin Was Bad at Copyright Law
These days, PragerU is an online juggernaut of far-right misinformation whose channel has been viewed over a billion times despite getting flagged repeatedly by fact checkers, but in 2013 they were still just a little start-up with very little money. This became a problem when an Irish photographer sued them for stealing his picture. Allen Estrin, a former Hollywood screenwriter who helped found the company, had used the photo in a video without permission and now the fledgling endeavor was facing bankruptcy.
Desperate to not repeat the mistake, PragerU overhauled their entire aesthetic using original animation. These days, half of YouTube seems like it’s made up of animated narrated content, but in 2013 the animated landscape was littered with the corpses of would-be Strong Bads, Charlie the Unicorns, and Amazing Horses. PragerU’s new look was unique, and it paid off immediately.
Two years after the lawsuit, PragerU had over 1 million subscribers, many in the coveted Under 35 range. The channel’s appearance as a right-leaning learning tool with an accessible art style made many of its videos go viral. These days, it hosts content from top-level alt-right favorites like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens and Jordan Peterson and serves as a primary pipeline for right-wing content on YouTube.
Seattle Starts an Anti-Bias Training Course for City Employees
The COVID pandemic introduced many people to concept of Zoom meetings for the first time, as well as the ability to record them. This turned out very poorly for the City of Seattle in July 2020.
The city’s Office for Civil Rights drew from the work of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendri to build an anti-bias training program for city employees. These included discussions of white fragility and how it damages people in the workspace. One employee recorded some of the slides used in the presentations and sent them to a journalist called Christopher Rufo.
Rufo by then was a failed city council candidate who had made a far-right turn after working on a report on homelessness for a conservative think tank. Rufo had concluded that the problem was unfixable with social policy, something that made him a pariah to many activists. When he received the materials about the course, he began digging into the footnotes to uncover an obscure legal hypothesis with unlimited potential for a conservative audience: Critical Race Theory.
Within a year, Rufo had used critical race theory as a preeminent bogeyman against teaching about white supremacy in public schools and become a major force in white grievance politics. His work became the foundation of many right-wing political campaigns, and he pivoted neatly to opposition to LGBT acceptance in public schools as transphobia became a major Republican talking point. Now, he is arguably the most powerful thought-leader in the alt-right space affecting millions of children’s education and safety, and all because a City of Seattle employee had access to Zoom and took the concept of white supremacy personally.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
