Lectures on Tap - From Hentai to Hate: Understanding the Alt-Right Pipeline

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "From Hentai to Hate: Understanding the Alt-Right Pipeline"

🎤 Speaker: Michaela (Mica) Chua

Join us for a provocative and insightful evening as Michaela Chua unpacks the hidden emotional and social dynamics behind the “alt-right pipeline.” Rather than starting with explicit political content, this lecture explores how online spaces shape expectations around intimacy, power, and belonging long before extremist ideas appear.

Drawing on media theory, social movement scholarship, and an original content analysis of popular hentai, Chua traces how desire, validation, and online identity can make some individuals more receptive to radicalization over time. She examines why certain corners of the internet feel so compelling, and how those emotional and social conditions can gradually steer people toward increasingly politicized and extremist worldviews.

Mica Chua is a Policy Associate at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where she works to improve outcomes for low-income communities by connecting academic research to real-world policy. Her broader work focuses on how beliefs are formed, the mechanisms of political polarization, and what these mean for evidence-based policymaking.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.