Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has begun to call out a new enemy in some of her speeches, referring to a group she had previously not named in any of her press releases or public statements. The group’s name? The much-discussed but somewhat undefined “Alt-Right.”
The “Alt-Right,” sometimes short for “alternative right-wing,” is a loose collection of conservative-minded, Internet-savvy people who aren’t afraid to express their opinion, especially online — and especially if it might be deemed controversial.
Alt-Righters are tired of social justice warriors and political correctness champions ruling the day on campuses and in the press by dint of the fact that there’s usually no one who dares to publicly oppose them. They seek to use new media and social networks to spread their message in ways that in the past might have been considered subversive or previously identified with the left.
Politically, Alt-Righters lean to the right, and lately, many support the policies and platform of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has, over the course of his campaign, taken to retweeting a healthy number of Alt-Right memes, quotes or video clips.
Alt-Right views usually don’t usually coincide with those of large progressive and liberal political action committees, groups and television hosts. Many times, like Trump, Alt-Righters will say things that the media is too afraid to say or too paid-off to communicate.
In numerous ways, the Alt-Right keeps the Alt-Left fair because it uses the same tools, technology, platforms and networks they do to spread its message, without blindly jumping on the “PC” bandwagon (in fact, usually Alt-Righters do just the opposite).
Some pundits have accused the Alt-Right of being a cover name for racists, sexists or fascists who are adept at using the Web to spread messages of hatred, i.e., a new catch-all group for dated conservative stereotypes of the past who now live in the 21st century.
In fact, however, most Alt-Righters are capable of seeing the whole political picture most situations — it’s just that their tendency is not to express an opinion simply because it’s politically correct or because other people might be parroting it.
In 2008, the paleo-conservative writer Paul Gottfried first identified people whom he referred to as “alternative-right.” News website Business Insider claims in an article that a white American nationalist named Richard Spencer coined the term “Alt-Right” in 2010 in an interview he conducted with the magazine The New Yorker, stating that the expression implicitly incorporates “European identity” at its core.
Spencer had previously founded a website called Alternative Right that some have confused with the Alt-Right movement, but as he’s been vilified in the press as “a leader in white supremacist circles” who “can’t or won’t represent explicitly white interests,” many Alt-Righters are not eager to identify with him.
Business Insider also claims that the Alt-Right is “full of white nationalists, reactionaries, men’s rights activists and Gamergaters” (the latter group is a collective of video game players and aficionados who have been upset at women for attempting to inject feminist and politically-correct anti-sexist values into the previously male-dominated world of video games).
However, attempting to lump all these disparate groups together under one “Alt-Right” label is misleading and incorrect. The fact that The New Yorker wants to scapegoat the group is patently obvious; their article is actually a perfect example of the media bias that Alt-Right people outright reject and stand completely against.
Other sources say that Alt-Righters simply seek to be politically incorrect, no matter who’s right. “They felt that to fight political correctness, they had to put out these memes to ‘trigger’ the activists,” said Ben Shapiro, the editor-in-chief of website The Daily Wire.
Online pundit Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News Network says that many people are drawn to the Alt-Right movement, not because of politics, but because they want to “challenge social norms.”
According to Shapiro, for a few bad actors, “that [behavior] escalated into, ‘Well, we’re going to send out Holocaust memes and racist memes,’ and it became indistinguishable.”
Shapiro believes that such offensiveness has become an end in itself and that only a few Alt-Righters instinctively think that if something is offensive, it must essentially be the truth — hence the appeal in some Alt-Right circles of Donald Trump.
Without Trump, some pundits say the Alt-Right itself would be a fringe group. But whether the Alt-Right came to Trump, or Trump came to the Alt-Right is an open question.
Certainly, the business magnate has played to the group’s interests with his discussion of topics such as illegal immigration, guns and crime. But the group’s demographic structure and political leanings are also likely too tempting a target for Trump to ignore.
Alt-Righters tend to be married, white and between the ages of 20 and 40 — almost a perfect alignment of the type of voters Trump needs to win the presidential election.
Whether the Alt-Right’s true numbers will be enough to land Trump in the White House in November is an open question. The answer to it may lie in whether he continues to reach out to its members to as great a degree as he has already.
~American Liberty Report
