How the Alt-Right Is Attempting to Hide Its White Supremacist Ties
The alt-right has recently splashed into mainstream view like a surprise tidal wave, only expanding after Hillary Clinton made criticisms of it a key part of her campaign against Trump. Based in intellectual-sounding right-wing rhetoric, a "fashy" (fascistic) rewriting of science and history and a palatable white anger, it is a subculture that has been defined by Internet trolling and online argumentation about everything from the "problems of feminism" to the "invading hordes" of Syrian refugees. At the core of the alt-right is a white nationalism that advocates for white ethnic homelands, traditional gender roles and the repression of Black people.
The alt-right has differentiated itself from other right-wing groups through its distinctly middle-class and intellectual character. Hoping to shed the stigma associated with white nationalism, the alt-right espouses philosophies that sound more fitting for university halls than for Klan rallies. But while the alt-right may be seeking to leave behind the baggage of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi skinheads, in reality it is part of the same tradition. Indeed, many of the same people both identify as neo-Nazis and occupy alt-right Twitter handles, today.
The alt-right cannot remove itself from other white supremacists' patterns of violence and terrorism because it is part of the same neo-fascist lineage, tracing its key ideas and philosophers to the interwar European period and through the white supremacist street battles that have ensued in the decades since.
A Movement for Those Abandoned by Conservatism
The alt-right originated several years ago when former assistant editor at the American Conservative, Richard Spencer, took a job at Taki's Magazine, a controversial web publication closely associated with the edge of paleoconservatism (a conservative movement that reclaimed "Old Right" isolationism intermixed with libertarian economics and racial dog-whistle policies). Scott McConnell, the founding editor of the American Conservative, invited Spencer to join the magazine's editorial staff after reading an article that Spencer had written in defense of the Lacrosse players at Duke University who were accused of sexually assaulting a Black student from North Carolina Central University. As Spencer himself drifted to the right, he began meeting "dissidents" from the Conservative Movement. This included libertarians on the social right, "race realists," "ethnic" (white supremacist) pagans, "radical traditionalist" (anti-Semitic) Catholics, white nationalists, and a host of others that seemed to be both on the "right" and an "alternative" to the neoconservatism of the Conservative Movement associated with the commentator William F. Buckley Jr. Inside of the far-right H.L. Menken Club, which has hosted everyone from Pat Buchanan to VDare founder Peter Brimelow, a term for this dissident strain was brewing.
It was in this atmosphere that Spencer built up the website Alternative Right, a "big tent" for these different, intersecting views. Within the first few weeks of its publication it honed in on racial issues, with Spencer voicing the idea that "innate inequality" was central to the emerging alt-right ideology. It quickly drew in many of those who had been rejected by mainstream publications like National Review for their racist views, publishing people like former Heritage Foundation staffer Jason Richwine (whose dissertation sought to show that undocumented Latino immigrants have lower IQs than white people), and "race realist" authors like John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer, who were both removed from the conservative movement when their ideas about racial differences in intelligence and crime were made known. It eventually moved even further to the right, opening up with explicitly racial nationalist politics and including a myriad of fringe viewpoints from occultists to monarchists to self-described fascists.
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