I don't think a 48-year-old professional actor is misspelling "friend" because of his accent, when that exact spelling is an alt-right shibboleth.

As indicated by the deliberate use of the word "adjacent", it's a sign that the crypto space and the alt-right have sufficient contact that there is horizontal memetic transfer (in both the original and modern senses of "meme") between the two.

I don’t think Seth Green is alt-right. I think he’s Jewish as well. I’m assuming ‘frens’ lost a lot of it's meaning, I doubt most of the people using it know it’s origins, and that includes Seth Green. It would be a similar infraction to Katy Perry using a Pepe meme.

I said nothing about the person, just the spaces.

And considering that Richard Spencer himself called Bitcoin, "the currency of the alt-right" it's not surprising if there's cultural cross-pollination.

You might be more closely tuned in to what's happening in those alt-right(-adjacent) spaces, but I am both seriously doubtful that the word originated in those places and also confident that it is used in such a large variety of ways that it cannot be reliable indicator that a person saying it has anything to do with those spaces.

For example, pretty much everyone I hear saying this word is a liberal. But that says more about who I spend my time with than who uses the words. It has more to do with being Extremely Online than with any specific political affiliation.

I'm afraid you've gone off the rails and forgotten Bayes theorem.

P(alt-right|fren) = P(fren|alt-right) P(alt-right) / P(fren)

You have tunnel vision for P(fren|alt-right) and are confusing it with P(alt-right|fren).

If P(fren|alt-right)=1 and P(fren and not alt-right) is low versus P(alt-right) then P(alt-right|fren) is actually high...

> and P(fren and not alt-right) is low

But it probably isn't. It's a cutesy term adjacent to pet-speak and baby-speak. Do an image search for "frens" and most of what you'll find is cute animals, 10-to-1 vs frog cartoons.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/uyhno1/frens_chilling_...

8 out of 10 Google image results for "frens" (in a new session) involve meme frogs, and one of them refers to "bopping" of non-frens which, at least at some point, was fren-speak for murder.

https://www.google.com/search?q=frens&tbm=isch

Very wholesome.

Maybe this is your browsing history? I did a duckduckgo image search from a private tab, and got 10-to-1 cute animals. Search it on reddit and you'll find that the term is very popular with people who like cute things.

The alt-right has a meme of 'appropriating' popular terms and symbols in an attempt to make people overestimate P(alt-right|symbol), to make their critics seem unhinged as they level accusations against innocent people, and to make themselves seem more popular than they actually are. They've done this with 'frens', the 'okay gesture', and even drinking milk. You have unfortunately fallen for this, and become their tool.

I just duckwent[1] an image search for "frens" and got four Pepes in the first 30 results.

The same search on Google gives me pretty much nothing but Pepes - only 7 images in the first 30 results are not Pepes. Google is pretty convinced "fren" is an alt-right signifier.

1: I am proposing "duckwent" as the past tense for "duckduckgo".

>it's a sign that the crypto space and the alt-right have sufficient contact

That's a nice theory, and until a proof has been constructed, presented and validated it'll keep being a nice theory.

It's not alt-right.

It's just dopey Internet slang, like lulz and omgwtfbbq, and alt-right (whatever that means) is also an Internet thing.