Abstract

The core aim of this chapter is to arrive at an understanding of the growing appeal of the “Alt-Right” (Alternative Right), a white-supremacist movement, for young, mostly male, millennials in the United States. It draws on Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theorizing of laughter fabricated by the culture industry to outline the ways in which the Alt-Right uses humor and jokes in its culture industry on the internet to recruit new members to its extremist ideas. It also explains the ways in which humor and jokes connect Alt-Right extremism with Trumpism. To ground the theoretical elaborations with empirical examples, the chapter draws on published in-depth interviews with Alt-Right members.