Revolt Against the Modern World: Gender, Sex and Violence in Traditionalist YouTube videos

Traditionalism is said to be a search for the eternal, transcendent truth at the heart of all religion. Based on Julius Evola it frames the defense of racist, misogynist, even monarchist social hierarchy as a quest for meaning in soulless, materialist, modernity. Gaining popularity through mythopoetic and masculinist discourses, Traditionalism is a major force supporting far-right movements (Teitelbaum 2020) and violent white supremacist violence (Upchurch 2021), as it argues for the futility of political action and celebrates violence as a spiritual and sexual force. This paper offers a semiotic analysis (Gal & Irvine 2019) of the channel of PhilosophiCat, a Traditionalist and white nationalist linked to neo-Nazi skinheads, the processes differentiation through which Traditionalist discourses reshape racism as a quest for the rebirth of a transcendent order of manhood, and the processes of circulation (Gal 2018) which link this mythology and its violence to the mainstream self-help author Jordan Peterson who has nearly 8 million followers. In looking at aspect of "the communicability of evil" (Milani 2020), how racism is made into "spiritual warfare" or a heroic quest which naturalizes male violence as "vitality" and "virility", it explores what we might call the "desirability" of evil.