Alt-Right Media Literacy Series

Live on Zoom from the University of California, Santa Barbara
Fall 2022 - Spring 2024

The Alt-Right Media Literacy Series is a public facing six-part virtual speaker series with scholars invited to speak on the Alt-Right movement.

The election of Donald Trump, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the January 6th riot at the Capitol demonstrated the potency and militancy of the growing Alt-Right movement in the US. With midterm elections this fall and national elections on the horizon in 2024, the Alt-Right Media Literacy Series provides a platform for scholars and the public to understand the increasingly powerful coalition of the Alt-Right.

Upcoming in-person events at the Sedgwick Reserve 3566 Brinkerhoff Ave, Santa Ynez, CA 93460

  • Graduate Student Workshop for the Media Fields Special Issue: Media Literacy of the American Alt-Right

    02.16.2024 4:00-6:00PM

    UC Graduate students! Please join us and editors of Media Fields for a workshop focused on brainstorming and preparing abstract proposals for the upcoming Special Issue of Media Fields. Call here.

  • Alt-Right Media Literacy Series Symposium

    02.17.2024 11:00AM-7:30PM

    Please join us for an in-person roundtable discussion on the American Alt-Right with keynote “Cucked by Capitalism” by Professor Catherine Liu (UCI). Schedule and Synopses of events here.

  • Visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum

    02.18.2024 11:00AM

    Please join us for a self-directed visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

Still from feels good man.

Upcoming Live Event

CWC Docs: Feels Good Man

Tuesday, November 14, 2023 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PST)

Pollock Theater, Carsey-Wolf Center
University of California Santa Barbara

Feels Good Man traces the surreal journey of cartoonist Matt Furie’s character Pepe the Frog as it evolved from a niche web comic image into a white supremacist icon during Donald Trump’s ascendance to the Presidency. It follows Furie’s quest to reclaim his character from the clutches of alt-right extremists and to rehabilitate Pepe’s image, and, by extension, his own. Feels Good Man is an eye-opening exploration of questions of authorial intent, virality, magical thinking, and the internet’s influence on our culture. The film captures a strange and evocative chapter in the rise of Donald Trump and illustrates the far-reaching consequences of meme culture.

In this event, director Arthur Jones and producer Giorgio Angelini will join moderator Chelsea Kai Roesch (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Feels Good Man.

Event is free and open to the public but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee seating.

Director Arthur Jones

Arthur Jones is a director, animator, designer, writer, and producer. He won the 2020 Sundance Film Festival U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker, the Cinema Eye Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design & Animation, and an Emmy for Outstanding Research: Documentary for his debut film Feels Good Man.

Producer Giorgio Angelini

Giorgio Angelini is an architectural designer and filmmaker. Working for Schaum/Shieh Architects, Giorgio helped design award-winning projects like The White Oak Music Hall and The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology. While practicing, Giorgio directed his first documentary, OWNED: A Tale of Two Americas, which took on the history of post-war housing policy in America. The success of the project led him down a path to pursue more film work, including collaborating with OWNED animator Arthur Jones on his directorial debut Feels Good Man.

Mid-Portrait of Dr. Reece Peck

Part Three

The Power of Style and the Limits of Technology: From Fox News and the Alt-right to The Young Turks and the Digital Sanders’ Left 

May 18, 2023, 5 PM Pacific Time
Dr. Reece Peck, Associate Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, CUNY

Since Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, the US commentariat has been grasping for answers to explain how the nation had become so polarized. The predominant hypothesis was that social media was to blame. The reason “disinformation” experts lean so heavily toward the role that social media algorithms play is that such a theory of causation suggests a relatively easy fix. If technology created the problem of political extremism, then technical remedies should be able to undo it. The myopic obsession with the computational wizardry of big tech companies like Facebook and Google have prevented analysts from seeing how the political content that currently performs the best online tends to use a style of political commentary that was first innovated by Fox News. In other words, the conservative media industry of the late twentieth century helped create the discursive and aesthetic cues that social media algorithms have picked up on and subsequently amplified. This presentation charts a pre-social media timeline that connects the history of cable news partisanship to current trends in digital media, streaming, and podcasting.   

Where existing explanations of Fox News’s appeal have stressed the network's conservative editorial slant, this talk will shed light on the importance of its style as a generative mode of ideology. In addition to tracing Fox’s historical ascendancy, this talk compares the conservative cable giant with the progressive YouTube-based network the Young Turks (TYT). TYT stands as one of YouTube’s longest running and most successful “news and politics” channels on the platform and it played a crucial role in creating the Justice Democrats, the progressive PAC that recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other “Squad” members. This progressive digital network has long embraced a populist anchoring style that resembles Fox News and the style of its conservative YouTube competitors. This presentation stresses the importance of style as an analytical category for studying modern news branding and political movements and argues that there is no inherentconnection between media populism and political conservatism — even though today, thanks to Fox News, many conflate the two.

Reece Peck is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media Culture at the City University of New York and is the author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge, 2019)His research uses concepts and methods from sociology, political science, and media studies to examine populist rhetorical styles, partisan news, and tabloid media. In addition to providing commentary for outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Vice TV, Peck was among a select group of media scholars asked to provide a written testimony to the Congressional Investigatory Committee on the January 6 Capitol riot.  

Part Two

“From Memes to QAnon: How Toxic Anime Websites Ushered in the Misinformation Age” with Dale Beran, author of It Came From Something Awful

Portrait of author Dale Beran

November 10, 2022, 5 PM Pacific Time
Dale Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful

In 2003, a fifteen year old boy started an internet forum devoted to anime called 4chan. As the site ballooned into a phenomenon, it spawned a set of cultural inventions which have come to define our present. The internet meme, the endless scroll, collective trolling, the hacktivist collective Anonymous, Gamergate, the Alt-Right, Pizzagate, and QAnon all began their early life on the pages of 4chan. Beran’s talk will walk you through the strange history of the site and how it plays an outsized role in contemporary politics.

Dale Beran is a writer and artist in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidently Memed Donald Trump into Office (2019, St. Martin's Press) which The New York Review of Books described as "a wild history that is meticulously and grippingly detailed." His articles on online radicalization have appeared in The Atlantic, Der Freitag, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Pacific Standard, and The Huffington Post among other places. And he has spoken on the topic on MSNBC, the BBC, the CBC, Reply All, and Marc Maron's WTF Podcast. His work in comics has been nominated for an Ignatz Award. He teaches writing and drawing at Morgan State University.

It Came From Something Awful available for purchase at St. Martin’s Press.

Part One

Memeing their Way into the Mainstream: A Cultural Approach to Understanding the US Far Right

A portrait of scholar Pete Simi

November 3, 2022, 5 PM Pacific Time
Dr. Pete Simi, Professor of Sociology at Chapman University

The election of Donald Trump and the eventual J6th attempted insurrection left many people wondering how we got to this point. The answer to that question is multidimensional, complex, and nuanced and today’s talk focuses on several pieces that helped generate the current moment. A broad constellation of far-right extremism highly adept at marketing ideas and emotions and far more sophisticated than often understood played a key role in rebranding white supremacy to ensure wider circulation and resonance. But part of the answer to how we got here today, requires stepping back to the 1980s and tracing the evolution of how the far right utilized technology to generate and distribute propaganda; cultivate and strengthen social network ties; and eventually produce links to a wide ranging cultural lifestyle complete with merchandise, housing options, and dating forums. The result today is a diverse and dynamic cultural landscape of far right extremism where sitting members of Congress now proudly declare themselves “Christian Nationalists” and openly speak at explicitly white supremacists conferences funded by far right social media platforms.

Pete Simi is a Professor of Sociology at Chapman University and member of the Executive Committee for the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. For the past 25 years, he has been studying political violence, hate, and extremism. His fieldwork has taken him inside white supremacist groups across the United States where he has been embedded with racist skinheads, Klan members, neo-Nazis, and anti-government militias. He is co-author of an award-winning book American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate and has published more than 60 articles and book chapters on issues related to political extremism, street gangs, and juvenile delinquency. He provides regular consultation on criminal cases involving hate crimes and domestic terrorism including expert witness testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs in the landmark civil case, Sines v. Kessler, aimed at holding the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally accountable for the violence they helped incite and commit in Charlottesville, VA.  His work has been featured in media outlets such as Rolling StoneNew York Times, and the Wall Street Journal and he has also appeared on various television broadcasts including Good Morning AmericaLarry King Now, and CNN’s AC 360

The Alt-Right Media Literacy Series is organized by graduate students from UC Santa Barbara (Film and Media Studies, Sociology), UC Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness), UCLA (Cinema and Media Studies), and UC Irvine (Visual Studies).

Funding provided by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) at UC Santa Barbara, and the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at UC Irvine, with the generous support of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara.