One salient example of this is the absurd comedy Prison School, which features a group of five boys in a female-majority high school who are literally jailed inside the school for being perverts. (Your author assures you that he definitely watched this series entirely for sociological research purposes). In their quest to escape from prison and their buxom guards—and later to avoid being expelled from school altogether by feminist-misandrist conspirators, yes seriously—they form powerful bonds of male friendship, camaraderie, teamwork, self-sacrifice, and loyalty aimed at accomplishing their goals. Escaping from prison, clearing their names, exposing conspiracy against them, etc., all required mannerbund. Reminiscent of the notion of honor among thieves, the protagonists can be seen calling for “death to traitors,” while being immoral themselves. The show even tackles gay hermeneutics (that in this particular case arise with prison life), and the boys are able to move past it to accomplish their objectives. And this is in a show with so much fanservice it reaches parody. Teenage voyeurists aside, does American television or cinema feature much in the way of bands of brothers putting aside their gripes and working together to achieve collective goals, or s it a diversity pageant? Does an (((industry))) that caved to #OscarsSoWhite even bother trying to tap tradition? The closest thing to a mannerbund in an entertainment culture that produces Broad City and Inside Amy Schumer might be the misadventures of "the gang” in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Anime stands apart, in my opinion, in having these sorts of values.

Anime aesthetics got mixed into at least a segment of the Alt-Right through chan culture, the ethos of 4chan and its derivative imageboards. The site's millennial founder, moot, originally set it up in 2003 to be an English-language imageboard/forum for discussing Japanese media (especially anime and manga), analogous to the Japanese-language board 2chan. This is where a segment of the Alt-Right started. 4chan was rooted in anime but grew beyond it. The founder effect is there—Japanese culture discussion in English. No matter which board one was on, 4chan provided an almost un-moderated anonymous social space, which gave rise to irreverent and deliberately provocative memes. These were in the beginning primarily associated with the site's misanthropically random /b/ board. The environment there let meme makers hone their skills. While the ability to interact with others online behind a mask was not unique, it was a crucial component in creating chan culture. And that such an anonymous communication format became popular in a country of alienated youth should be unsurprising. In anonymous or pseudonymous digital spaces, the ideas expressed tend to be socially less left and further right, as there is no need for the social approval and virtue signaling that contemporary leftism thrives on. The memes are incendiary because they are allowed to be. The libertine, whiggish society that calls itself Western is shockingly curmudgeonly, so why not take swipes at it? Troll your adversaries for the lulz. Raid other forums. Tell black jokes. Photoshop swastikas on things. Why not? Just think back to the golden age of YouTube comments, or how Twitter is now. Its a Wild West of unfiltered, irreverent, and politically incorrect views. It's pissing people off for sport on one hand, but a sign of festering dissent on the other. The people doing these sorts of things are unhappy about something.

Jokes and pranks make people laugh—if they're funny. Laughing along to Louis CK isn't funny. Trolling and provoking numales and catladies who agree with everything he says is. Right wing humor tends to be a lot funnier than that of the left, at least under the current zeitgeist. The Alt- Right has a better understanding of how society works, and can laugh at the duplicity and inconsistencies of the left. It also doesn't have to worry about offending anyone's arbitrary feelings. Without censorship (self-imposed or otherwise), one can A-B test his memes over and over until he has something a lot of people respond to. Anonymous and pseudonymous digital media in the early 21st century are game-changers-—content spreads not based on how socially acceptable it is offine, but based on how interesting it is to users, independent of gatekeepers. And being edgy, irreverent, and illiberal is what became interesting to users (and alarming to administrators). Its why the Daily Shoah gets in the news now and not the Daily Show. It gives us outsized influence. It leads to the (((ADL)) classifying Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol of white supremacy. Our puritanical enemies are addicted to outrage, and our memes were crafted to elicit that outrage. Beginning around 2011, /pol/, or Politically Incorrect, pretty much became 4chan’s most infamous board. It's where all the so-called racists and sexists were supposed to be quarantined—and where if you kept calling them such, they adopted those labels proudly. It's where the sharpest and realest ideas were coming from. It was where people were making unfiltered observations and memes about race, gender, religion, history, politics, culture, and crime. It was where you could talk about George Zimmerman or the Ferguson riots from both a realist and an irreverent respective. And it was on an anime imageboard.

If vou think about memes like genes, in a Richard Dawkins kind of way, they are ideas that get passed on from individual to individual across generations in a population. They evolve over time as well. From watching foreign cartoons and reading foreign graphic novels, to discussing them anonymously on the internet, to discussing politics and current events anonymously on the internet, to engaging in meme warfare against the left this is an evolution that could certainly describe a sizable subset of the Alt-Right. The memes change over time. They go from anime girl reaction images to smug anime girl reaction images, to smug anime girl reaction images wearing MAGA hats. Even though today's 4chan is very much a shadow of its former self in terms of quality content output and users, its milieu has transcended its servers. Your author percolated there for several years before really moving on to the Alt-Right blogosphere c. 2014. But back to anomie. Would millennial and Gen-X White men be sitting in front of their computers watching chinese cartoons and discussing national socialism with anons over the internet if not for anomie? Would they spend time trolling their ideological adversaries and slaughtering the sacred cows of the Judeo-Calvinist progressive faith if not for their alienation from those paradigms? Why have an interest in foreign animation and interwar right-authoritarianism in the first place? It was never preordained what we were supposed to use the internet for. It didn't have to turn out like this for a subset of the population. But it did. People living in the suburbiae of Texas, California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the South can all communicate with one another about their 2D waifus, dindu crime, and how much they miss Hitler. In real-time. | guess Europeans and Australians can too, come to think of it.

Welcome to the post-postmodern world. Don't ride the tiger, force-feed it some Mountain Dew and Doritos. You can't ask what the meaning of life is if no one has any concept of what meaning is anymore. We aim to restore not only meaning, but direction. No more aimless wandering through the ruins of a once mighty civilization to just barely escape the momentum of its ongoing collapse. The Alt-Right is a revolt against anomie. /end/