In recent years, members of the alt-right have, in blog posts and in YouTube videos, courted young men who share an interest in video games. This scheme has proved effective. Last month, a YouTube user uploaded a clip from the recent blockbuster video game Red Dead Redemption 2, a cowboy playpen set in the late-nineteenth-century American Southwest. In it, the player guides his character toward a computer-controlled suffragette who is campaigning for her right to vote, and punches her unconscious. The video, titled "Beating Up Annoying Feminist," has been viewed more than 1.7 million times, with a chorus of support in the comments below. This kind of trolling can easily escalate.

Ten years ago, at All Tomorrow's Parties, a now-defunct music festival held occasionally in the rain-harangued British seaside town of Camber Sands, I attended a show by Lightning Bolt, a noise-rock duo from Providence, Rhode Island. They had set up in the center of a grubby hall at Pontins, England's second-best-known budget holiday park. At the band's request, security had allowed only thirty or so festival-goers into a venue that could comfortably have accommodated a thousand, leaving plenty of room on the beery carpet for dancing, or possibly rioting. We clustered in the round as Brian Gibson began to flay his bass and Brian Chippendale, wearing a wrestler's mask, assaulted his drum kit, his voice blaring primally through a microphone taped to his cheek. The performance was disorienting, both intimate and savage, like the first moments after an accident, before time resumes its normal speed and the damage can be measured.