Bigotry is big business. But maybe not for who you think it is.
“Bigoteer” is a neologism for someone who profits not from bigotry themselves. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be much action in promoting bigotry these days. The “alt right” is largely being fed by the mainstream media’s attention rather than being an organic movement. Far more profitable is the living to be made from lumping Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and the few people pretending to be actual Nazis online together along with 300-follower Twitter accounts run by edgy teenagers with politically incorrect senses of humor.
For context, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the sort of main hive of bigoteering, has $518 million in total assets in October 2018, up from $477 million the year before.
Racism is largely a thing of the past, but you wouldn’t know that if you went on Twitter, where low-status whites using racial slurs in a Walmart parking lot are filmed by teenagers looking for attention and shock value and parading it as evidence of the continued existence of Jim Crow and a burgeoning Fourth Reich.
Much of the invective levelled at President Trump boils down to style rather than substance — Barack Obama also kept “kids in cages” (to use the preferred term of the left), but at least he was polite on Twitter. Hate hoaxes, whereby hate crimes are fabricated for social media clout and hopefully a few dollars, have been well documented by the independent journalist, Andy Ngo.
Indeed, it’s not a novel observation that significant, if not the lion’s share, of web traffic is driven by hate clicks. The news industry is on its deathbed and the thing keeping its remnants alive is online outrage. So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the best way to profit online is by calling out the folk devils of our modern-day moral panic: the so-called “far right” or “alt right,” so nebulously defined that it includes sensible centrists such as the aforementioned Peterson and Harris as well as avowed racists and fascists.
Read more Bigoteer: What Is a Bigoteer and What Does Bigoteer Mean? at Spread Great Ideas: https://spreadgreatideas.org/concepts/bigoteer