That comment kicked off something in my brain that’s been nagging at me since these videos first started dropping. The series is now wildly popular on YouTube, with some videos garnering over two million views.

The issues that I have with it are manifold because it makes claims that it absolutely cannot back up about the psychology, motivations, and actions of the alt-right but the reason why I particularly dislike it is because it casts such a broad net in its definition of “the alt-right” that it can include anyone from the most ardent antifascist activist to the middle of the road mom and pop who holds some lukewarm bigoted opinions due to their upbringing and/or watching too much Fox News all the way to the circa-fascists who align with white nationalist groups etc. but who don’t directly identify with overt fascism.

The attitudes and patterns of behaviour described in the video series are likewise just as broad to the point of being functionally useless.

You can literally look to what the Playbook videos describe as alt-right behaviours and the majority of them can be seen across the political spectrum, given the right conditions and a large enough sample size.

What this means, in effect, is that it relies upon assumptions and the biases of the target audience to create their own understanding of what the alt-right looks like without any real historical or theoretical underpinning, and of course there’s no materialist analysis of the alt-right either (which is also why I take issue with Umberto Eco’s work on fascism - it’s completely lacking in a materialist basis in favour of cultural and psychological critique which is loose enough that you can apply it far beyond the scope of real fascism.)

The upshot of this is that, when the lessons from the Playbook are applied, virtually everyone outside of your political in-group can be miscast as being part of the alt-right or that they are somehow taking their cues from the alt-right.

The issue then is that, by doing so, you have expanded your own definition of the alt-right to include so many groups that the term becomes functionally useless, you risk alienating people who you disagree with, and the aggregate effect will eventually be that the alt-right becomes a term that no longer signifies anything meaningful but it becomes a label that gets thrown around haphazardly based on “vibes”.

If you happen to watch the playlist, or at least the introduction video and a couple of the most popular videos, try using summarising what the Playbook describes as the definition or the behaviours of the alt-right in a way that actually meets the criteria of the alt-right to reasonable exclusion of other groups. It’s really hard to do this while sticking to the content without drawing upon other ideas in order to flesh out the description. When the series first came out I personally was keen on hearing more because I wanted to see where it would go but I quickly lost any hope in it because every episode was just vapid and the takeaway lessons from it were downright sloppy and I gave up on it.

It’s just really disappointing that a channel which apparently has so much reach that could do so much good instead just reaffirmed people’s existing biases and failed to grasp what the alt-right really is or how it functions because it ends up working in the same way as a limited hangout - there’s enough in there that is right so as to be compelling but it’s so clouded and murky as to be borderline disinfo in effect.

/rant