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 varied 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.
/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/.
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.
Virtue signalling is 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. The term virtue signalling 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.
Woke, the African-American English synonym for the General American English word awake, has since the 1930s or earlier been used to refer to awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans, often in the construction stay woke.
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.
Incel is a term associated with an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, and blame, objectify and denigrate women and girls as a result. The movement is strongly linked to misogyny. Originally coined as "invcel" around 1997 by a queer Canadian female student known as Alana, the spelling had shifted to "incel" by 1999, and the term later rose to prominence in the 2010s, following the influence of misogynistic terrorists Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a New York-based journalist and a senior editor of The Nation. Abrahamian is also the author of the 2015 non-fiction book The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen.
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.
The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a term used to describe a loose affiliation of academics and social commentators who oppose the perceived influence of left wing–associated identity politics and political correctness in higher education and mass media.
Natalie Wynn is an American left-wing YouTuber, political commentator, and cultural critic. She is best known for her YouTube channel, ContraPoints, where she creates video essays exploring a wide range of topics such as politics, gender, ethics, race, and philosophy.
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right is a 2017 non-fiction book by Angela Nagle published by Zero Books. It describes the development of internet culture, the nature of political correctness, the emergence of the alt-right and the election of Donald Trump. Nagle offers a left-wing critique of contemporary social liberalism, arguing that it helped create the alt-right movement.
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 that espouses male separatism from what they see as a gynocentric society that has been corrupted by feminism. MGTOW specifically advocate for men to avoid marriage and committed romantic relationships with women. 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.
Misogynist terrorism is terrorism that is motivated by the desire to punish women. It is an extreme form of misogyny—the policing of women's compliance to patriarchal gender expectations. Misogynist terrorism uses mass indiscriminate violence in an attempt to avenge nonconformity with those expectations or to reinforce the perceived superiority of men.
The alt-right pipeline is a proposed conceptual model regarding internet radicalization toward the alt-right movement. It describes a phenomenon in which consuming provocative right-wing political content, such as antifeminist or anti-SJW ideas, gradually increases exposure to the alt-right or similar far-right politics. It posits that this interaction takes place due to the interconnected nature of political commentators and online communities, allowing members of one audience or community to discover more extreme groups. This process is most commonly associated with and has been documented on the video platform YouTube, and is largely faceted by the method in which algorithms on various social media platforms function through the process recommending content that is similar to what users engage with, but can quickly lead users down rabbit-holes. The effects of YouTube's algorithmic bias in radicalizing users has been replicated by one study, although two other studies found little or no evidence of a radicalization process.
