> and the video gaming vlogger Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose "Pewdiepie" YouTube channel featuring Nazi-themed jokes has 54 million subscribers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it a single joke that got him in trouble? The article's wording here is pretty slippery, but it seems to be trying to give the (as I understand it) false impression that "Pewdiepie" was a Nazi humor site. That doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of the article.

> He spoke admiringly of Napoleon, whom he considers to be "kind of the Steve Jobs of France."

I think the problem with journalism about the alt-right is it's near impossible to tell who's sincere, who's joking, and who's half-joking-half-serious. I've been on 4chan for over a decade and I have trouble telling. It's even harder to tell who's actually influential in the community (tip: it's almost never the people who claim they are).

Muslim engineers are also more likely to become extremists than other muslims.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/1...

The authors posit a couple of potential reasons. I'd also add a tendency to see the world in black-and-white.

With the way people process the world today, you'd think everyone is living in their own version of "Man in the High Castle." The extreme left and right leaning people likely see themselves as comparable to the resistance in the series, careful to hide their true origins and intentions, orchestrating, in their minds, the downfall of an oppressive society that would rather see them fall into a one size fits all policy of obedience.

The public at large, mainly due to time constraints, have no time for critical thought these days, nor have they ever, so anytime the world looks like its on fire, people are driven ever more into a fantasy narrative of "tomorrow you will die if you don't act today", paving the way for normalization of extreme views of the world and people.

I'm worried that the emphasis on the alt-right and their clearly racist and sexist motivations is overshadowing any deserved scrutiny towards the left.

What ever happened to the "Why I Need Feminism" campaign? I could make a dozen signs all on my own, for some serious shit my family and I have had to live through. Yet--according to the attributes that both the left and the right seem to care about the most--I am nothing more than a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered man, propped up as a poster-child for what is either wrong (to the left) or right (to the right) with the world. (But that's the thing about posters, they're two-dimensional.) I know better than to take some of my worst experiences with poor excuses for liberals to be indicative of the movement. Every job has its bad employees. But it's really easy to see how other people would see the abuse thrown at them and just wash their hands of the entire situation.

The alt-right is too easy of a target. Let's not let our glee to cut them down turn us into them.

Recently, there was a picture of a young guy with a MAGA Trump cap hate all over the Internet. Turns out I knew the guy and was one of the brightest chaps I've met in terms of research. I went to check his posts on Facebook which was filled with bigotry and rhetoric. I haven't engaged with him but I don't know how to react.

All 3 of them!

The nerds don't like it when their own - Brendan Eich, Tim Hunt, Richard Dawkins, DongleGate guy etc - get witch-hunted by the SJWs. So it's no surprise that they let off steam by supporting people who oppose that stuff.