Alt-right

There are two, and only two, scientific definitions of "alt-right".

Frogs, clowns, and swastikas Alt-right

Chuds

Fuentes, Benjamin, and Baked Alaska Taylor, Molyneux, and Spencer Bannon, Southern, and Yiannopoulos SF, TDS, TRS, 8chan, and /pol/

Rebuilding the Reich, one meme at a time

Matthew Heimbach PewTube Michael Coombs Anatoly Karlin DropTheB Alex Jones Clown World Cloudflare

Buzzwords and dogwhistles

Alt-right glossary Alt-right glossary (non-Anglophone) Indian alt-right glossary Manosphere glossary Russian alt-right glossary v - t - e

A lunatic Chaplin imitator and his greatest fans Nazism

First as tragedy

Reinhard Heydrich Martin Heidegger Arnulfo Arias Rudolf Hess Reinhard Heydrich Thomas Dalton

Then as farce

Antipodean Resistance National anarchism StoneToss David Lane Davud Monshizadeh The Daily Stormer v - t - e

“”Well, tough luck, fags. The alt-right is just a euphemism for Nazism.

—The Daily Stormer, actual Nazi website

“”By all means, compare these shitheads to the Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you.

—Mike Godwin of Godwin's Law fame, referring to the Unite the Right rally

The alt-right (short for alternative right) is a far-right movement that opposes tolerance, humanism, multiculturalism, and social justice (items they file under "Cultural Marxism" and "SJW"). Their racist ideology, including Social Darwinism, eugenics, and ecofascism, is rooted in the ideology of Progressive Era white supremacists (and birth control activists) Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who their hate-ridden websites frequently extol.

The movement is largely internet-based, made up of selfish, black-hearted, frustrated late-blooming teens-to-twenty-somethings, and is the merger of traditional white nationalists, neo-Nazis, right-libertarians, and neo-Confederates overlapping the neoreactionary movement, Gamergate, and the manosphere. The alt-right consensus of the day generally rests at the juncture of those three groups. The term originated with Richard Spencer's white nationalist magazine/blog Alternative Right, nicknamed "AltRight".

The alt-right wholeheartedly embraces the overt racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and homophobia typical of neo-Nazi affectations — in Twitter-paced combination with the shitposting, bullying, doxxing, and trolling of 4chan/8chan culture as a lifestyle. You'll find them on /pol/, The Daily Stormer, My Posting Career, Gab, Voat, The Right Stuff, and (most notably) in every unmoderated comment field on any decent website where wholesome and inclusive news reports may go otherwise unprotested.

The frothing vanguard of manufactured outrage, executive producers, and core demographic of fake news-driven social media hysteria, perpetually in search of today's new bar for "edgy", they're also the ones who popularized "cuckservative" as a term of abuse for anyone on the right that they consider not racist enough.

Whether they are primarily neoreactionaries who are into white nationalism, or white nationalists dressing their ideas up with neoreactionary jargon, is probably a distinction without a difference. The term "alt-right" has come more generally to signify "Trump supporters who think swastikas are good". In this context, it's just a hip alias for "white supremacists" — with all the extra PR-savvy granted by its plausible deniability for when the need arises.

The Associated Press recommends:

“”Whenever "alt-right" is used in a story, be sure to include a definition: "an offshoot of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism," or, more simply, "a white nationalist movement." Avoid using the term generically and without definition, however, because it is not well known and the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience. In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist.

Origins

“”The alt-right began with a speech the conservative writer Paul Gottfried gave in 2008, after the Republican Party's electoral wipeout. […] But it was Donald Trump's presidential campaign that brought the movement into the mainstream".

—The Washington Post

The press has been calling it an online phenomenon, even though some factions pre-date the internet. 4chan and vloggers are the online element, with others having one foot in the real world and the other online. You can trace it back to father's rights and mythopoetics in the 1980s, which had some crossover with Christian Identity/Quiverfull in the 1990s. Over time, it became more myopic and selfish, with Men's Rights, Ladder Theory, PUA, and the Red Pill. Gamergate was the debutante ball for much of the reaction, which had been building but had no central ladder.

The paleoconservative wing is perhaps the oldest (hence paleo): Pat Buchanan (himself a Nixon aide) founded the news journal which produced Richard Spencer, and you have guys who were once mainstream like Peter Brimelow, who was an aide to Orrin Hatch and editor of Forbes. Then you have the Clinton-era militia groups like the Oath Keepers, who are in or out depending on who you talk to. There's the Silicon Valley neoreaction wing made up of techies and businesspeople, where some have considerable weight (see Peter Thiel advising Trump), and others are just extremely prolific bloggers (Mencius Moldbug). There's the academic HBD/eugenicist wing made up of professors, grad students, and their followers, some of whom are affiliated with neo-Nazi parties like Kevin MacDonald. The internet didn't cause these things so much as it allowed consolidation into the loose coalition of the alt-right. There are even more sects, but the point of things like "Unite the Right" is to try to hold all of them together.

Who exactly brought the movement to the mainstream? Richard Spencer, who is best described thus:

Richard Spencer uses chopsticks to deftly pluck slivers of togarashi-crusted ahi from a rectangular plate. He is sitting in the Continental-style lounge of the Firebrand Hotel, near his home in the upscale resort town of Whitefish, Montana, discussing a subject not typically broached in polite company. "Race is something between a breed and an actual species," he says, likening the differences between whites and people of color to those between golden retrievers and basset hounds. "It's that powerful."

We are well into our third round of Arrogant Frog, a merlot that Spencer chose because its name reminds him of Pepe, the cartoon frog commandeered as a mascot by the "alt-right" movement that has been thrust from the shadows by Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Spencer says Pepe could also be seen as the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian frog deity, Kek: "He is basically using the alt-right to unleash chaos and change the world," he says, looking slightly annoyed when I crack a smile. "You might say, 'Wow,' but this is literally how religions arise."

The correct response to Spencer and the alt-right is, "Wow, that's some fucking cringey racialist bullshit."

But behind Spencer and other key members of the alt-right was funding from old-guard racists: members of the Charles Martel Society, particularly Bill Regnery a failed businessman and heir to Regnery Publishing fortune. After Spencer left the alt-right, he said of its funders:

“”They see something that is alive, and they want to go suck its blood. And then the second they don't think it's alive, or it's objectively dead, they want to move on to something else.

The dawn of shitposting

“”The movement is magnetized to shit. Any form of shit it sees, it wants to go die on that hill… It's just like Oh look — more shit! Let's go involve ourselves. Let's at least endorse it. It's just so insane."

Although the alt-right has only become prominent in recent years, the truth is that random people using the internet to spread cringey white supremacist propaganda is nothing new. Perhaps the first example of such would be the 1995 Usenet essay The Long March by Ian P. McKinney of the neo-fascist National Alliance. This essay was infamous not only for its extreme bigotry and logic that would best be described as being not even wrong but also for being spammed everywhere on the internet.

The essay begins with a plea, supposedly to those who care enough about the fate of Western civilization, to heed the author's words. The essay then attacks Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh for not being racist enough for McKinney's liking (one can assume that, if the word "cuckservative" existed at the time, McKinney would have used it).

From there, the author proceeds to rattle off a painfully long diatribe in which he fusses about IQ scores, religiously cites The Bell Curve, and uses all other manner of disproven statistics, circumstantial evidence, half-truths, stereotypes, and condescending pseudo-intellectual jargon to reach his main "conclusion": that African Americans are developmentally inferior to Caucasians and that the only reason anyone believes otherwise is because of the fiendish machinations of Jewish communists who have successfully infiltrated the cultural anthropology departments of major universities as part of their sinister plot to overthrow Western civilization.

McKinney argues that racial equality is a "false religion" promoted by fanatical sheeple consisting of liberals and moderate conservatives (and yes, he counts people like Gingrich as "moderates"), and there's also a brief mention of immigration causing white genocide. At least the knowledge that McKinney clearly has a lifetime's supply of tinfoil is of some use should we need to borrow some for baking.

Major themes

“”Here's how to understand the alt-right: Think about what's right, then think about the alternative to that.

—Stephen Colbert

Superstructure taken from "Dismantling the Alt-Right Mythology".

Whites are under attack

“”The alt-right is just a euphemism for Nazism.

—The Daily Stormer

Look, it's the alt-swastika!

The subbreddit /r/AltRight defined itself thus:

The Alt-Right, unlike the dominant ideology of the 20^th Century (Liberalism/Conservatism), examines the world through a lens of realism. Rather than continue to look at the world through the ideological blinders that Liberalism imposes in its dogmatic evangelism of the Equalitarian religion, we prefer to look & examine social relations & demographics from a perspective of what's real. Thus, racial & sexual realism is a key component of the Alt-Right — perhaps the key component that ties the diverse factions within it together. Another core principle of the Alt-Right is Identitarianism. Identitarianism is the prioritization of social identity, regardless of political persuasion. Thus, the Alt-Right promotes White Identity and White Nationalism.

Men are under attack

See the main article on this topic: Anti-feminism

In journalist Mike Wendling's book Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House, the alt-right's views on women's rights are explained thus:

They are also opposed to feminism. While some begrudgingly give credit to second-wave feminists and concede that legal equality between the sexes is indeed a valid goal, others argue against any such notions. Some even say that giving women the franchise was a terrible mistake. Many embrace the old conservative lament that "these days" things have "gone too far" and call for a reaffirmation of traditional values. At the same time, other alt-righters are obsessed with porn and the promise of sexual freedom offered by "pick-up artists."

Language is under attack

See the main article on this topic: Political correctness

“”"I am not a Sith. I am a 'Force realist.'" #AltRightStarWars

—Patton Oswalt

The alt-right has effectively co-opted common complaints about "political correctness" into their agenda, using the assumed overzealousness of "politically correct" people and movements to demonize everyone on the left and make their own far-right ideals look palatable in comparison. On this, Wendling writes:

And yet they found traction as their online efforts melded with the current fever-pitch of anti-elitism, and found a willing audience in a concentrated generational backlash against young men. These foot soldiers feel aggrieved by the successes of feminism and the progress made by ethnic minorities, and have also felt rising anxiety as former certainties about race, sexuality and gender crumble. At the same time, some are puzzled and scared — as are many people from the more traditional right as well as the left — by the censorious atmosphere of many university campuses today, a confusing, sometimes barely comprehensible minefield of trigger warnings, privilege checking, safe spaces, and complicated sexual politics. For the alt-right, all of those fall under the umbrella of one of the ideas they loathe the most: political correctness.

Ethnostates

See the main article on this topic: Ethnocracy

“”"I'm just saying that when we die, there's gonna be a planet for the French, a planet for the Chinese, and we'll all be a lot happier."

—Barney Gumble, representative of the cause

While not much different from views expressed by more traditional white nationalists like Tom Metzger, the alt-right often aims to create ethnostates, such as a "white homeland" and the potential division of the continental United States into ethno-"regions". For example, noted alt-right leader Matthew Heimbach has called for the white region to be named "Avalon".

On religion

The alt-right's thoughts on religion are all over the place, but still decidedly intolerant of religious minorities, as Wendling explains:

When it comes to religion there are equally baffling contradictions. The alt-right counts many committed atheists in its ranks and many in the movement scorn monotheistic religious thought. Some embrace a purely cultural notion of Christianity – they prefer cathedrals and incense to church communities and prayer – or even adhere to a pre-Christian paganism. You will also find a few churchgoers and many others who, like Steve Bannon, are fond of talking about the "Judeo-Christian West."

Most importantly, alt-righters see no unity in the Abrahamic religions. Antisemitism is rife and goes well beyond sketchy reports of Bannon’s comments about Jews. Nazi imagery and "jokes" about gas chambers are one of the alt-right's defining tropes, and debate revolves not around the question of what should or shouldn't be said, but rather about what most irritates its opponents.

As for Islam – as a whole, and not just in its radical extremist form – it is viewed as an existential threat to Western civilization. Some of the less worldly alt-righters in America view Europe as already lost to the invading hoards[sic] from the East, despite Muslims making up only 6 percent of the continent’s population.

Rebranding ideas from past losers

“”The alt-right is a loser's poor fantasy of what a radical revolution looks like. I should know.

—former neo-Nazi Jacob Bacharach

Any one of these alt-right leaders is basically just taking the ideas of past idiots like David Duke, Tom Metzger, and George Lincoln Rockwell (who was such a joke in his day that he was murdered by a bunch of fellow neo-Nazis in 1967 at a laundromat), dusting them off and updating a few words here and there. Then when shit gets crazy, much like alt-right figurehead Gavin McInnes, they abandon the alt-right ship and say the whole thing was just a joke anyways. Nice dodge, guys.

Most who are involved in the alt-right movement are attention-seeking media whores who will latch onto anything to get a press agent. When judged on accomplishments alone, someone like Milo Yiannopoulos, who can't seem to figure out how to properly book a room at UC Berkeley, stands shoulder to shoulder with a complete nutjob like David Duke, who can't get through an interview without frothing at the mouth about his fake PhD and disavowing his past KKK affiliation.

On substance, they put forth the same vile tenets of white extremism, Nazi ideology, and ethnic division as part of their modern agenda. They share the same laughable ineptitude as their forefathers when making the most basic logical case for their point of view when challenged with the most simplistic line of rational questioning. Some may try to come up with a semi-coherent argument in support of their socio-political position that "white people are good, period"… but then they will flail uselessly when someone brings up the obvious counterargument that there is a hell of a lot of unjustifiable atrocities committed by whites against non-whites and that, no, you really can't blame all that on "Cultural Marxism" or immigrants or the "liberal media" or "the Jews". Realistically, this is an argument that no white supremacist would ever concede, as it goes against their ideology to take personal responsibility for any wrongdoing whatsoever.

The need for attention

For whatever reasons, most of the leaders that have emerged from this new movement have shared the same trait as their glorious forefathers in so far as needing attention from traditional and non-traditional media outlets, especially the former. This might also be what separates them from your average brainrot neo-Nazi and KKK members who have, up until now at least, only really managed to be able to produce typo-strewn monthly publications and random acts of violence, mostly on their fellow race warriors™.

In being able to actually put a sentence together, traditional media outlets have raced to interview, profile, and "examine" this group of "new voices" emerging on the fringes of the right-wing. The major issue with this development is that, at the end of the day, they are just rehashing the tenets of the same old racist propaganda for their own gain.

The other problem is, by giving these alt-right figureheads a platform, traditional media outlets have allowed them to spread a damaging underlying message of hatred to many more ears than their incompetent predecessors could have ever dreamed possible and have potentially lent them an air of legitimacy. This has tragic consequences, as witnessed by some alt-right-inspired mass shootings. Even when the alt-right tries to walk back from these events as they usually do, they rarely miss an opportunity to take credit for these tragedies by blaming their behavior on black people once the dust has settled.

Doublethink

For the alt-right's massive number of conspiracy theories, slurs, and insults to make any sense, obscene use of doublethink is basically required. Jonathan Weisman notes:

The anti-Semitism of the alt-right, the newest manifestation of bigotry that combines age-old hatred with internet-era technological savvy, biting wit and a self-conscious sense of irony, shows no more logical consistency than the anti-Semitism of the past. Jews are both all-powerful puppetmasters and sniveling weaklings, rapacious capitalists and left-wing anarchists. The Holocaust never happened, but man, was it cool.

Alt-tech

Alt-tech refers to a recent phenomenon of various "free speech" internet websites and companies which serve as alternatives to mainstream websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, Patreon, GoFundMe, and dating sites. In many cases, these websites are overflowing with typical alt-right content, and while many of these websites do not necessarily support the views of the alt-right (with a few exceptions), they tend to have plenty of users who post or upload content that is explicitly in line with the alt-right. "Alt-tech" websites have included PewTube, Gab, WrongThink, Voat, Hatreon, Rightpedia, Goyfundme, Rumble, and WASP Love. One New York Times reporter had used various "Alt-tech" outlets and found them to be a mess in his own eyes.

The alt-right idea of "free speech" is the protected right to call for the deportation or death of non-whites, trying to get a feel for those who agree with you, coordinating efforts to disseminate and refine the ideas espoused in the name of "free speech", public events to spread the ideas outside of one's social circle, and lobbying from a political standpoint to have those ideas brought into the public discourse. All of this is legal as long as it is done through the magical lens of probable deniability.

Unite the Right

See the main article on this topic: Unite the Right

“”On the one hand, Charlottesville was a catastrophe. ... On the other hand, however, Charlottesville changed nothing. The central tenets that have always animated alt-right activism continue to inspire the movement ... The alt-right movement may have emerged from Charlottesville demoralized, but it was far from vanquished.

—

On August 11–12, 2017, various alt-right white nationalist, white supremacist, and antisemitic groups held a "Unite the Right" (UtR) rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they protested against the Jews and their supposed plan to replace the white race with non-white immigrants. Also in attendance were right-wing militia groups such as the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. Somewhat presciently, the Proud Boys officially skipped the rally, citing the planned attendance by explicit neo-Nazis as a factor.

Cries of "Jews will not replace us" and "You will not replace us", followed by "White Lives Matter" and the Nazi-era slogan "Blood and Soil" were heard. Unfortunately for the protesters, Antifa counter-protesters were standing in their way, and what was a simple protest soon turned to violence when a neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. killed a woman named Heather Heyer during the rally, for which he received a sentence of life in prison. This wasn't the only act of violence: a protester was seen shooting a gun, a black man (DeAndre Harris) was assaulted by six white men resulting in Harris suffering a concussion and four of the white men receiving jail sentences, and League of the South Florida members led by Craig Tubbs shoved their shields at counter-protesters.

Aftermath and "optics"

“”The reality is that it's not the optics people are objecting to, it's the message. Even in this crazy day and age, the majority of Americans reject hardcore white supremacy whether there are swastikas or suits and ties involved. White supremacists can't face that, so they quibble over optics instead.

—

The organizer of the rally, Jason Kessler, was denounced and later sentenced to 50 hours of community service for punching James Taylor. The Daily Stormer insulted the victim killed in the rally during the subsequent media frenzy, resulting in the website being expelled from Google and GoDaddy.com. Many social media platforms (especially those where the event was planned or promoted) began policing alt-right accounts and content more aggressively following UtR. Members of the movement were also doxed, fired by their employers, or removed from payment processors.

Meant to be a "rally the troops" showing that might further galvanize the movement, the rally ultimately achieved precisely the opposite, despite initial appearances to the contrary. It was essentially a real-world culmination for the various sub-movements of the alt-right which had been bubbling up for several years, and many within the movement considered it a catastrophic failure in terms of political optics (that is, public relations). That was especially because of a combination of: the widely-noted presence of explicit neo-Nazis and Klansmen, the arrests of several prominent alt-right activists (like Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell), the ensuing violence, national-scale media coverage, and a general failure by the alt-right to impress its desired narratives about the event onto the public.

Thus, many sought to adjust their tactics from then on accordingly. This internal "optics war", among other internal divisions inflamed by the inflection point which the Unite the Right rally represented, helped fuel the relative disunity of the movement over the next few years. Kessler (among others) would go on to promote more "sanitized", optics-focused strategies along the lines of the It's Okay to Be White poster campaign. Others within the alt-right would reject optics-focused strategies. In one striking summary of this division within the alt-right, the perpetrator of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting would declare online immediately before committing the massacre: "Screw your optics, I'm going in."

Another example of such splitting occurred with the far-right Vanguard America group, which James Alex Fields Jr. had marched with at UtR. As a direct result of UtR and the resultant optics war infighting, the group splintered, with Patriot Front taking a more euphemistic approach and National Socialist Legion a more explicit approach to the goal of promoting neofascist ideology. Members of the alt-right who are overly concerned with optics (if to an even greater extent than the examples cited above) might be categorized as alt-lite; these fellow travelers would tend more towards eschewing open association with the alt-right in the succeeding years whether or not they shared the same goals. It is, after all, only a difference of style rather than substance.

Similar events

Just one week after the UtR rally, a "Free Speech Rally" in Boston drew only a few dozen attendees, who were drowned out by some 15,000–30,000 counter-protesters. This could be seen as a direct manifestation of the American public's rejection of the alt-right immediately following UtR.

Another "Unite the Right" event (dubbed "Unite the Right 2") was held a year later, in Washington, D.C. — and it had nowhere near the broad attendance by a wide variety of alt-right groups and individuals that the original event did. Instead, it was overwhelmed by a massive crowd of counter-protesters. Seeing as this event was also organized by Jason Kessler, it was illustrative of the movement's loss of trust in him and its renewed focus on optics (at least for the time being).

The 2021 U.S. Capitol riot would later represent a similar occurrence to the Unite the Right rally, with some attendance by extreme alt-right individuals (e.g. Nick Fuentes) and groups. However, it can't be understood as a manifestation of quite the same contexts, especially because the Capitol riot was primarily spearheaded by a relatively more "mainstreamed" pro-Trump conservatism than it was by the most racially-focused and explicitly neofascist elements of the alt-right.

US presidential politics

Trump cult

The alt-right: fascists among themselves, fans of societal progress when normies are looking.

“”If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.

—Ross Douthat

The full spectrum from neoreaction to the alt-right came out solidly for Donald Trump as the 2016 presidential nominee. In an interview with MSNBC, Republican strategist Rick Wilson characterized Trump supporters as an online movement of antisemites and "childless single men who masturbate to anime," noting the "Hitler iconography in their Twitter icons and names." Elements of the alt-right have also been sympathetic to Nigel Farage, Vladimir Putin, and Brexit — although some white nationalists call for a European superstate built along ethnic lines, not unlike Oswald Mosley's "Europe a Nation" policy or the Third Reich.

Steve Bannon, the former CEO of the Trump campaign who was briefly Trump's chief political strategist in the White House, is also tied in with the alt-right and anti-"establishment" populism; he was the former executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC and "turned Breitbart into Trump Pravda for his own personal gain", according to former Breitbart employee Ben Shapiro. Under his leadership, Breitbart embraced "the white supremacist alt-right", and the website "[became] the alt-right go-to website", according to Shapiro. Bannon once openly bragged about Breitbart: "We're the platform for the alt-right". Ultimately, however, Bannon, like so many others who had worked in the administration, was dropped.

Stephen Miller, another Trump adviser, was arguably even worse: leaked emails showed his affinity for white nationalist publications (like VDARE and American Renaissance) and the broader alt-right. In another instance of possible alt-right involvement in the Trump team, social media director Daniel Scavino for Trump selected antisemitic imagery (originally from 8chan) to attack Hillary Clinton with in 2016. Another alt-right figure in the administration was Sebastian Gorka, a follower of the antisemitic Magyar Gárda and Order of Vitéz, who was a Trump adviser for seven months.

Aside from direct links by some Trump staffers or advisers to the alt-lite and alt-right, however, various aspects of his political career and campaigning style made him appealing to these groups. This includes his rhetoric, his authoritarianism, and his policies. Because these have often promoted political incorrectness, anti-intellectualism, and prejudice, all of which disrupted mainstream political norms in a way that benefited the far-right, his 2016 campaign received broad appeal among the alt-right. In turn, Trump himself has occasionally offered some direct cover for the alt-right movement, for example when he attempted to morally equate them with an "alt-left".

Yang gang

In early 2019, the American alt-right had a schism, with many members bizarrely defecting from Trump to Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang. The alt-right's increasing disillusionment with Trump was partly due to his failure to get his flagship Build the Wall policy passed despite his attempts to blackmail Congress into rubberstamping it, using a government shutdown; his very pro-Israel policies; his support for even a limited level of legal immigration; and his authorization of the 2017 Shayrat missile strike in Syria.

The attraction to Yang was based on:

1. One possibly completely innocent Yang tweet mentioning falling white birth rates.
2. Another tweet, calling Americans underdogs in their own country — a sentiment that ZOG conspiracy theorists would agree with. However, his tweet was alluding more to the idea that the deck is stacked against the average American economically.
3. His opposition to circumcision, as it is a religious requirement in both Islam and Judaism (neither of which the alt-right tend to be fond of). However, Yang has said he would not oppose circumcision for religious or cultural reasons and would not attempt to ban it by law, instead wanting parents to be better informed rather than having the practice "pushed" on them — as is common in the US. How this would manifest itself in the form of federal policy was unclear.
4. Probably most importantly, his policy to give $1,000 a month to every American ("Freedom Dividend"), which has nothing to do with alt-right beliefs but is attractive to many people regardless of their other views.

Yang formally disavowed the alt-right's support — as would be expected by any presidential candidate that wanted to have a shot at winning an election, even Donald Trump did this (reluctantly). But he also said that he found their support hilarious, in part because of their use of surrealist Internet meme imagery. Their frequent use of such imagery (e.g. in the vaporwave style) drew easy parallels to Trump's online supporters during the 2016 election. Despite Yang's disavowal of the alt-right, an argument in response by white nationalist Greg Johnson summarized why they may not have cared: "he will still cash our checks". In this way, many alt-righters argued that neither Trump nor Yang would help advance their political goals, but that at least with Yang, they would have gotten $1,000 a month.

People should have no illusions that this flip to a Democrat for cynical reasons indicates any fundamental political realignment. After Yang's deputy chief of staff tweeted that the Freedom Dividend was feminist, angry alt-righters sought her social security number and other personal details to dox her. Likewise, some on the alt-right began accusing Yang himself of being a "Manchurian candidate"-esque Chinese socialist spy. This racialized attack was despite the fact that Yang, more precisely, descends from Taiwanese immigrants.

Although the "Yang gang" phenomenon was relatively brief (especially because lost the Democratic primary), it may be seen less as reflective on Yang himself, or on some move away from racist ideology by the alt-right, but instead more reflective of a wider disillusionment with Trump that had been growing across the alt-right ever since the 2016 election. Yang gang represented a desperate search by the alt-right for any kind of alternative — to the responsibility of attaching themselves to anyone who was actually in power, and the complex political realities that entails.

See also

For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about Alt-right.

• Alt-right glossary
• Classical antiquity — includes misrepresentations and appropriations by the alt-right
• Distinction without a difference
• Neo-Nazism, of which some of the more hardcore elements of the alt-right are associated with
• Identitarianism, a European white nationalist movement that is followed by some members of the alt-right such as Identity Evropa and Richard Spencer
• Pepe the Frog, one of the many things that were appropriated by the alt-right
• 4chan and 8chan, two of the hubs of the alt-right
• Gab, alt-right alternative to Twitter
• BitChute, "free speech" alternative to YouTube used by the alt-right
• Breitbart News, a news service which many in the alt-right follow
• Alt-lite, a ever so slightly more moderate version of the alt-right
• Netto-uyoku (Japanese internet far-right nationalists)

External links

• Alt-right, Britannica
• I’m not Sith, I’m Alt-Jedi, clarifies Darth Vader
• Clinton mentioned the alt-right, and they went berserk. Meanwhile the "alt-light" (the Gamergate-esque subset of the alt-right who didn't quite know what they were getting into) mocked Clinton for suggesting that Pepe had anything to do with fascism.
• Alternative Right (Southern Poverty Law Center)
• Vox explainer on the alt-right
• How they describe themselves, as per Reddit. DON'T BELIEVE THE MSM SHILLS!
• Cyanide and Happiness explains: Neo-Nazi Simulator 2016
• Reddit:

• /r/AltRight - Banned on February 1, 2017 (for doxing). The mods took away the subs that let them torment black people/fat people, "investigate" a fictitious pedophile ring, or share such baubles as "the end goal of feminism is lesbianism". Truly a dark day for America.
• /r/theNewRight

• Are Jews White? The Atlantic on the Alt-Right's hatred of Jews
• Salon's Alt-right series:

• "A history of hate: How the alt-right became racist (Part 1)"
• "How the alt-right became racist, Part 2: Long before Trump, white nationalists flocked to Ron Paul"
• "Rise of the alt-right: How mainstream conservatives’ obsession with purity fueled a new right-wing radicalism"

• What 'uyoku dantai' and Japanese alt-right groups want
• The alt-right playbook - a by-the-by in-depth exploration of how the alt-right fundamentally works.