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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35412 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I am curious, because I saw it written many times here, but had no chance to investigate more.

What happened to the Alt-Right movement, and what makes it very different from the dissident right of now?

I'm sure there's more inside baseball, but I think people stopped self-describing as "alt-right" after the Charlottesville debacle.

I never saw anyone self describe as "alt right."

If you have an example, please provide one.

Maybe I'm misremembering but I believe it was a media applied label.

Edit:

upon further inquiry, I still believe that it is basically a media applied label in most cases.

from the SPLC:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right

As I read the SPLC page about the alt-right, I am more convinced that virtually nobody, outside of Richard Spencer and of a few of his associates, uses the term alt-right.

The one professor listed as included in the movement was condemned by his own university.

It seems as if these are the same 500 people that showed up at Charlottesville.

So my initial statement stands, with one caveat, outside of Richard Spencer and his immediate associates, I don't know anybody who refers to themselves as "alt-right."

From the SPLC:

Although Spencer has positioned himself as the effective leader of the alt-right, other proponents include several well-known names on the far right, including Jared Taylor, editor of the American Renaissance racist journal; Greg Johnson of the publishing house Counter-Currents; Matthew Parrott and Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Youth Network; and Mike "Enoch" Peinovich, who runs The Right Stuff blog. But the general population of the alt-right is composed, by and large, of anonymous youths who were exposed to the movement’s ideas through online message boards like 4chan and 8chan’s /pol/ and Internet platforms like Reddit and Twitter.

I looked on google analytics and it looks like the term exploded in 2015 around the time of Hillary's speech asserting a link between Trump and the alt-right, followed shortly by a New York Times article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/us/politics/alt-right-reaction.html

Hillary Clinton, speaking in Reno, Nev., highlighted Donald J. Trump’s support by the “alt-right” movement, saying he is “taking hate groups mainstream.”

  • -12

It was absolutely a self-applied term used by people in the alt right. From roughly 2015 to 2018, it was the term of choice to describe the movement. If you listen to any TRS or Millennial Woes podcast recorded during that era, you'll see them using the term copiously. Here are some instances of the term appearing in text; there are many others.

https://counter-currents.com/2016/08/the-alt-right-means-white-nationalism/

https://www.unz.com/article/what-is-wrong-and-right-with-the-alt-right/

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/12/08/the-abcs-of-the-alt-right-a-guide-for-students/

See my comment above. Thanks for these examples. It can simultaneously be true that media outlets used the term to paint with a very broad brush.

Also the google analytics show it is not even on the radar until Hillary Clinton's speech and the accompanying New York Times article.

Basically Hillary said, look at this fringe group that totally supports Trump, (although strangely Richard Spencer endorsed the Democrat candidate in 2020,) and suddenly it gained national attention.

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