ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the emergence of a global new right culture and the role of influencers in that emergent culture. New right activists have set up a whole ecology of digital media platforms for metapolitical goals. In doing so, they adapt to the technical requirements of those platforms, they integrate into their cultures and their content is made to fit the content and form requirements of these platforms. As LaVioletteargues, platforms can be seen and analysed as Goffmanian frames that circumscribe ‘discourse and becomes crucial for its interpretation’. Contemporary new right culture, style and discourse are created as a socio-technological assemblage. This chapter shows that the digital performance of the new right identity is in itself a metapolitical deed. It is through this careful stylization of hair, body, clothes and language that new right actors address different audiences and introduce far-right ideas. Both Swedish bodybuilding YouTuber The Golden One and #pizzagate promotor and wife of Martin Sellner Brittany Pettibone-Sellner represent two sides of a crucial new right metapolitical battlefield which could be labelled as the ‘gender war’ or the antifeminist battle. This battle aims at restoring the ‘natural order’ of things by promoting the heteronormative nuclear family and traditional gender roles for men and women as part of a larger metapolitical battle to centres around the construction homogenous, white and organic communities. Both cases illustrate the importance of brand and integration in the digital mainstream for contemporary metapolitics.
