Much of political discussion on the internet now is framed around easily shareable buzzwords and talking points. In the short time I've been alive, this has always been the case to some extent, but social media promotes easily transmissible and attention grabbing content explicitly.

In the aggregate, this reduces the importance of thorough analysis of political issues to the public perception of those issues. This is because long form analyses are less likely to be shared, cannot function very well as clickbait, and many nuances are likely to be filtered out if they are shared. As before, it's true that longer pieces of journalism and analysis have had less sway for some time, we now discuss politics using media that softly constrains discourse to the tantalising, the shocking and the hilarious.

One consequence of those soft constraints is that a strategy for influencing public discourse can become self sustaining once it has obtained sufficient attention. More attention generated means even more attention generated. This can be forced by the actions of isolated individuals with enough internet savvy to create bots and fake accounts, or emerge from the concerted repetition of a talking point by a special interest group.

Even though it is difficult to transmit nuanced political analysis through the attention economy of social media, it is far less difficult to transmit a faceted perspective through the same. This is achieved by creating memetic content that contains framing devices.

Some recent ones are 'cuck', 'snowflake', 'social justice warrior', 'post modern neo marxism', 'cultural marxism', 'leftism = relativism' and 'identity politics' in its popular disparaging sense.

Make no mistake here, these terms and their surrounding lore were created to be highly infectious vectors of alt-right political opinion. Through that lens, the perspectives created by the alt-right are transmitted with alarming speed and veracity through the relationship networks of social media, thus they come to have disproportionate influence on the public perception of the issues they touch on.

The unfortunate origin of many of these distortions in perspective is Gamergate, a movement that was coopted and then strategised by the alt-right from very near its beginning.

The term 'cuck' was not invented by the alt-right, but it was repurposed by them around this time. You can look up the original meaning of the term yourself, what it means now is a man who gets off through his partner having sex with another man. How it is used is as a disparagement of feminism. The story goes for the alt-right that feminism increases the autonomy of women, which gives them more sexual autonomy, which means that a woman's male partner no longer has exclusive control over their woman's genitals, which is designed to evoke the fear of cheating and the emotions of sexual jealousy. It repurposes those feelings to cast a shadow on feminists. How could any man want to be a feminist when it means they have to enjoy their wife cheating on them?

The term 'snowflake' is similar, it allegedly refers to someone who believes themselves exceptional. How it is used is to attack people of minorities for speaking out or protesting the effects of their identity. The story goes that any person who highlights social disparities due to identity is just a whiner pleading for them to be treated better than other people. Of course, this isn't actually true, as such 'snowflakes' care far more about being treated the same as others and avoiding violence (structural or personal) unfairly done to them due to their identity.

The term 'social justice warrior' was coined during Gamergate to refer to anyone who passionately defends or agrees with anything that can be termed 'social justice'. This originally was used to delegitimise criticism of the portrayal of women in games, now it refers to anyone who provides an impassioned defense of any identity, or works to mitigate any social injustice. Note that only someone who is prejudiced in every way or does not care for equality of different social groups cannot be called the phrase.

'post modern neomarxism' was popularised recently by Jordan Peterson, it refers to the idea that the left dominates academic discourse and most social institutions. It also references postmodernism, unfairly characterised as relativism, and Marxism, unfairly characterised as Stalinism. It should be noted that post-modern political philosophy has a real internal tension with Marxist political philosophy, and the idea as such is incoherent. This is agreed with by people using the term, who assert that many social institutions believe both and are thus acting from an inconsistent and dangerous ideology. This idea is very close to the literal Nazi propaganda of 'cultural Bolshevism', which has its modern form in...

'cultural marxism' is a rebranding of the term 'cultural Bolshevism' for a post Soviet-Bloc age. It refers to the conspiracy that leftists run and own most social institutions, including the media. In the original formulation of 'cultural Bolshevism', the Jews were implicated as the agents of leftist conspiracy. The Jews' interests were also equated with the interests of international finance capital. You will not find a savvy alt-right person nowadays who will talk about 'international Jewry' outside of their fascist safe spaces. They are far more likely to leave it as a left conspiracy which works through control of finance capital. Please note at this point, if the left really did control finance capital, it would have either been destroyed or transformed as leftist ideals are typically opposed to the power of finance capital.

'identity politics' as a disparaging term used by the alt-right and some of the radical Marxist left to delegitimise the organisation of people of any social group, or for the radical Marxists any social group except class. It should be noted that politics itself is a negotiation of power differentials between social groups, and formally politics itself just is identity politics. This does not mean that all political practices associated with the use of the term 'identity politics', such as the sufficiency of consciousness raising for political change (not that anyone ever believes this either), are the extent of political concepts and actions. All it means is that politics largely consists in the negotiation or application of power differentials between social groups.*

Each of these terms carries with it a context of discussion, on social media this translates to people who talk about or use the terms. Because of the framing and the concerted efforts of the alt-right fringe to prefigure public discourse, those who use these terms are far more likely to be introduced to people on the alt-right, perspectives from the alt right, and the false science that the alt-right relies upon. They are a gateway into a dark mirror of reality, filled with hatred and entitlement, which requires vigilance of thought and kindness of deed to counteract. They are parasites on the noble enlightenment ideals of free expression and freedom of association, and their vitriol should not parroted. They see themselves as great warriors in a culture war, they are not, they are bigoted troglodytes insecure around any difference. They are opportunists preying on the disaffection and disappointments in our lives. They are the bitter creep at the seedy bar who fails to flirt then absolves their failures with misogyny, they are the factory worker who hates immigrants for the livelihood automation stole from them.

They deserve compassion, but their ideas and actions do not.

*edit: While some radical Marxists use identity politics in this disparaging sense, they don't mean to completely delegitimise the voices of minorities subject to systemic injustice, they instead believe that all such injustices would go away with the abolishment of class, and so de-emphasise anything outside of the proletarian identity.