I realize I never brought up France's
Papa Branleurs here when we have at least a couple of noteworthy examples.
Take Alain Soral
The brother of a moderately famous actress, coming from a pretty nasty home, he apparently cruises in the eighties-early nineties between the world of clubs, fashion, advertising, filmmaking and last but not least, medias. He's featured as a guest periodically. He also dives deep in the world of "street seduction" and write a couple of books about it (one getting successful) and become an "expert" about it for the media. He said in one interview his pick up addiction appealed to him for the class warfare aspect of it (extracting some of the surplus value by fucking bougie girls). He says he was a Communist Party member at that point (unconfirmed). In the late nineties he starts ranting about feminism and manhood being under attack.
From 2000 to 2004. He gets to make a real film about street pick up, that quickly gets derailed out of cinemas, and gets a few more mid-profile guest slots on TV. He apparently later blamed his film failure on gays and Jews "that both hate me". Gets refused as a freemason too.
He then decries "communautarisme" (Identity politics) which is always a looming talking point in France, taking aim at gays, feminists, Jews, etc... And start drifting to the far right. "Identitarians" (a subset of nationalists) start trying to associate with him, but he quickly goes to the Front National party and appears at some official events there in 2007 or about and is a special councel to Jean Marie Le Pen. He leaves in 2009 after failing to secure the top spot in their European election list, with some people in the party commenting he was decidedly too obsessed with sionists for their taste. He already started his own club meanwhile, Égalité & Réconciliation, with the help of former members of the GUD (as close as you'll probably get to French neofascists, a group that basically triggered the modern far right here).
He ends up heading an "antisionist" list in those Euro elections alongside disgraced comic Dieudonné and a French Shia representative (there's talk that their campaign was funded by Iran to the tune of a couple millions). That one was really absurd, with meetings where they claimed that sionism was behind every divorce in France and a political program that had almost no mention of Europe but over a dozen mentions of rooting out sionist influence in France.
He had a long association with Dieudonné, a talented (black) comic. Dieudonné spiraled after making a sketch in 2003 on late night TV playing a Nazi Israeli sionist (in full stereotypical orthodox attire). All hell breaks loose for him and he was engaged in an arms race of being "cancelled" (with public authorities pressuring some halls to not accept him) and equivalent provocations for almost 15 years. Soral and Dieudonné already considered running together in 2004 Euro elections on an "Euro Palestine" list but retired before the ballot was cast. Dieudonné himself would probably be a full currpost... I think they had a fallout, or at least Dieudonné became a lot more shy on later years (also facing some real legal pursuits for tax avoidance). Please note that Dieudonné coined a popular arm sign (La quenelle, basically "you're getting assfucked".) that was at the center of some hysteria for a while around 2013, not unlike the whole OK sign thing you have your side of the pond.
Since 2009 Soral mainly focused on Égalité & Réconciliation and became a prominent online figure of what wasn't yet called the "alt right". He kept some stock with some elements of the FN party for a while. He self identify as a red-brown, national-socialist or a leftist nationalist. He launched his own print label and managed his own platforms. He had run-ins with Facebook (he was banned in 2017 or 2018) and YouTube (suspended briefly in 2018, banned in 2020).
I think it's interesting because you have the whole pick up artist / media personality / shades of claiming to be a philosopher / moving to his own online platform / far right figure recipe, but starting a lot earlier than current American Wank Dads.
