Article:

The High/Low Toggle. Alt-Right Code Switching on 8chan

The alt-right has recently achieved a kind of intellectual legitimacy, with best- selling books, lecture tours, and academics who splice racist ideals into sophisticated new ideologies with pseudoscientific rhetoric. Yet the alt-right also contains a strong anti-intellectual tradition, a populist demagoguery that rails against the doctored version of reality handed down by official institutions like the university. This paper thus argues that the alt-right derives much of its power from an ability to rapidly code switch between the high culture of scientific rationalisation, academic theories and institutional legitimacy, and the low culture of populist tropes, crude humour and pragmatic action. To explore this phenome- non, I analyze 24 hours of postings from the /pol board of 8chan, regarded as ground zero of alt-right discourse. In scrolling through these pages, 8chan users move back and forth between logical arguments and low-brow jokes, between scholarly literature recommendations and simple lifestyle suggestions. Though these twin modes are logically opposed, they are functionally complementary, slowly nudging users towards a more far-right position.