Tara Isabella Burton at the Hedgehog Review:
It started with the memes. People in the online know were all reading the tweets of Bronze Age Pervert. Quoting from neo-Nietzschean joke-manifesto Bronze Age Mindset was a sign, on what was still in 2016 called the alt-right, that you not only valued strength and masculine vigor and the annihilation of all liberal and feminizing impulses from the sclerosis of the liberal-bureaucratic-democratic establishment but also that you could speak the cant of the scene. It was the first Trump administration, and half the alt-right was high on the promise of meme magic—the tantalizing notion that a group of posters on 4chan had, implausibly, harnessed the latent energies of the universe and the powers of Internet vibes to meme Donald Trump into office. Neopagan vitalism was as sexy, in the recesses of the Internet characterized by avatars of cartoon frogs, as the mirror-image figure of the “resistance witch” on the anti-Trump left.
But memes, as they tend to do, shape reality in their image. Somewhere between Trump’s shock victory in 2016 and the inevitability of his return, vitalism became not merely a pithy means of online identity-formation but a renascent political and, indeed, spiritual project.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.