After the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz moved to LA in 1925, he sent a friend a hurried telegram.

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

One imagines Jordan Peterson, Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern, Stefan Molyneux and other alt-righters making similar assessments after their treks out to Australia.

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The philosopher Eric Hoffer once noted that “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Hoffer might have added a fourth stage of that devolution, a phase in which the fading grafter heads to the antipodes in search of softball interviews on Sunrise.

After all, back in America, Yiannopoulos has been reduced to peddling milk thistle extract and other nostrums on the Infowars conspiracy network.

In Australia, however, he can masquerade as a serious intellectual of the Right, courtesy of a fawning conservative media that assists him to pack out suburban halls for a reprise of his greatest hits.

Not surprisingly, Milo’s just announced a return trip, this time supported by the old school hatemonger Ann Coulter, whose influence peaked in about 2004. He’ll be followed in November by reactionary hipster doofus Gavin “Proud Boys” McInnes, the thuggish anti-masturbation campaigner who’s somehow netted sponsorship from, um, Penthouse magazine (presumably he reads it for the articles).

Naturally, Herman Mankiewicz’s personal good fortune in Hollywood posed, as his cable implied, a corresponding problem for local idiots, who were suddenly confronted by an influx of foreign talent.

Such is the nature of troll politics – a weaponisation of identity in the service of reaction

So too in Australia, where the country’s relative isolation traditionally allowed conservative pundits to maintain a kind of closed shop. With the most talented rightwingers gravitating to business rather than media (or politics, for that matter), a small coterie of commentators could, until very recently, maintain their prominence simply by their willingness to turn up, year after year after year.

Think, for instance, of Gerard Henderson reheating his dreary columns about who did what to whom in the Melbourne University Labour Club, circa 1961.

Now, though, YouTube offers a smorgasbord of far spicier fare, a limitless array of clips entitled “Ben Shapiro slaughters SJWS with facts and logic” or “Milo brutally confronts the panel of libtards” and so on.

That’s the explanation for Andrew Bolt’s recent “Jewish colony” article – a desperate (and hamfisted) attempt by an established pundit to reskill in the face of a changing market and new competitors.

It’s also the context for the so-called “March for Men”, an event organised in Melbourne later this week by one Sydney Watson, who describes herself as a “conservative political commentator”.

What, precisely, do Watson’s marching men hope to achieve? Not much, really. Her Facebook page explains: “March For Men is about showing the men in our lives that they matter and their issues matter.”

But we’re told nothing about what those issues might be or how the march will address them. In that sense, the event thus offers a textbook manifestation of the “virtue signalling” for which conservatives regularly lambast the left.

Indeed, the whole intervention’s predicated on a deep commitment to the identity politics that the right supposedly loathes, with men framed (preposterously) as requiring a “safe space” to collectively wallow in their victimhood.

“[A] lot of people,” Watson told the Herald Sun, “are very distressed that they don’t feel as though they can support men’s rights, masculinity and men in general without being judged.”

Well, toughen up, snowflakes, as Milo might say.

But such is the nature of troll politics – a weaponisation of identity in the service of reaction.

Much of the media coverage on the March for Men has focussed on the seeming anomaly of a woman leading a men’s march. But the new breed of pundit understands – and exploits mercilessly – the theoretical problem posed for identity leftism by rightwingers from traditionally marginalised groups.

Yiannopoulos, for instance, explains that he couldn’t possibly be a bigot because he is gay and Jewish and in a relationship with a black man. Intellectually, the argument makes no sense at all but it discomforts the left – and really, that’s all that matters.

Likewise, the complete absence of any goals from Watson’s rally should be understood not as a bug but a feature. She planned the event, after all, as a riposte to the feminist anger after Eurydice Dixon’s murder, understanding a men’s march as a smart piece of trolling, calculated to infuriate the woke.

In 1950, the literary critic Lionel Trilling complained that “the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not … express themselves in ideas but only in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas’.

But Trilling wrote in a very different era, one in which mainstream conservativism sought to challenge communism with a more-or-less coherent vision of governance.

The alt right, by contrast, represents less a political program than a business model, predicated on transforming amorphous anti-liberal rage into shares and page views.

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As a result, it’s irritable mental gestures, pretty much all the way down.

The success or failure of the March for Men will thus be measured not by any policy outcome but by the airtime netted for Watson on Sky News, a network with seemingly limitless enthusiasm for culture war trolling.

In any case, irrespective of Watson’s personal fortunes, the stream of second-rate provocateurs schlepping out to Australia to monetise the local rubes pretty much guarantees that a new crop of homegrown imitators will eventually arise.

There’s millions to be grabbed, after all – and the word’s getting around.

• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist. He will appear at ANTIDOTE on Sunday 2 September alongside David Neiwert and Ed Husain for a panel on Fringe-dwellers and fanatics

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