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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?
They are alive and well. You have groups like Patriot Front that are doing more activism than all the alt-rights groups in 2015 or 2016. McInnes left Proud Boys but Proud Boys is still around and recruiting. Gab has taken off and is a bastion of alt right, the CEO is alt right, and it has 100,000 users.
Some minor event like unite the right made them seem popular, but only a few hundred showed up there. It’s as popular as it has ever been, it’s just touched as much by the mainstream.
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Adding on to the history a couple other people have laid out, first let me set the stage. Obama was elected in 2008 on a platform of Hope and Change. By 2016, Occupy had come and died, healthcare reform was a disaster, the banks had been bailed out, infrastructure investment was a failure, and we capped things off by bombing a Doctors Without Borders hospital. On the culture war front during those eight years, we had Atheism+, the gender wars, Gamergate, and the start of BLM.
Imagine you're a younger guy, late teens to twenties, in late 2015. You don't really care about gay marriage, or abortion. You're not religious. But at the same time, you're a veteran of the gender culture wars and Gamergate and you think wokeness and feminism are retarded and dishonest. You've been blackpilled on mainstream media and large parts of academia. You think socialism is fucking stupid.
Where is your political home? The answer, from maybe mid 2016 to early 2017, was an "alternative right". "Not yer granddaddy's rightwinger." This was the alt-right of The_Donald and "God Emperor Trump gonna make anime real". The media was in the early, heady stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome and in full war footing. As a counter-offensive against the nascent alt-right, they drug Richard Spencer's loser ass out of obscurity and put him on TV at every opportunity, culminating in this scene.
And that was the end of the alt-right as a name with any power. There was just no saving it against the kind of full court media campaign being waged. Anyone who wasn't a white nationalist started to abandon the term, with Charlotteville as the final nail in the coffin.
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Long story short the American right had been in something of a civil war since the signing of the Troubles Assets Relief Program in 2008 while a temporary cease fire had been called in 2012 to prevent a split vote awarding automatic victory to the Democrats, Romney's loss brought the conflict roaring back. Seeing the establishment wing of the GOP solidly on the back foot a number of academic types from UCLA and Berkeley (Sailer, Spencer, and Yiannopolus being the most prominent) sought to establish themselves as a sort of new vanguard party, an alternative right that would unite the waring factions, and bring balance to the force.
Problem is that their ideas of what would unite the right basically had 0 buy-in outside the west coast academic bubble they'd been inhabiting and thus they found themselves lumped in with the quislings, trolls, and controlled opposition, by the wider right.
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I first remember hearing the term to refer to a variety of Right Wing thought that rejected the more staid conservatism of a Romney or a Bush II, and particularly that did not center either Libertarianism or Evangelical Christianity (as most of the more extreme right-wing movements to that point tended to do). So "Right wing" in whatever sense, without being married to either Pat Robertson or Ayn Rand philosophically, and with an aesthetic that was more rude mix of 4chan and "punk rock" than suit-and-tie George Will.
During/After the 2016 Trump campaign the term came into popular use in the media, and self application by supposed adherents, to mean something more like what other posters have talked about. Too nebulous to ever really be a useful descriptor, it has fallen out of favor. But in many ways, Alt-Right is more like asking where Hipsters went: we're all hipsters now, and the whole right is Alt-Right now. The idea of a Republican politician doing what Desantis does in terms of both tone and content was unimaginable in the Bush years.
As I've touched upon before, I think that this has far more to do with the Patrician wing of the GOP having been soundly defeated, than it does any sort of success or influence on the part of the NrX and Taki's Mag crowd
I agree with your point more generally, but I'm talking more about tone (which I think is the essence of Alt-Right as a label) than about ideology or class or politics; these can't necessarily be conflated. It's not really a Social Conservatives vs Wall Street conservatives thing, the Social Conservatives of my youth were unfailingly polite. They aren't anymore, they cuss. It's not really a tax rates vs white pride thing, or an Ayn Rand vs Julius Evola thing; it's a Veggie Tales vs The Boys thing or an Oral Roberts vs Joe Rogan thing.
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It became low status around mid 2018 but lingered until around mid 2021, when it finally died out when Nick Fuentes, the last holdout, had his twitter account suspended. Also, de-platforming . It's hard to create a movement when its members keep being arrested or booted off every platform. I think the alt-right has been replaced by the ethno-trad right, especially on Twitter starting in 2021. It's composed of popular people like Cernovich and Posobiec who evaded the de-platforming that plagued alt-right, and puts much more emphasis on Christianity, self-improvement, and mainstream conservative politics (generally a white pill message) compared to the alt-right, which tended to be more negative, nihilistic, and eschew mainstream politics. I think the alt-right became associated with doomerism and larping, which made it low status. The 4chan people however are not going away but they don't seem to have as much influence as they had in the past, before 2018
From 2015-2018 or so was a period of indecisiveness and uncertainty. The Obama era was closing, and then Trump against all odds won, but no one knew what was next. There was an opportunity for fringe movements like the alt-right to fill this gap. But by early 2021 with the inauguration of Biden, it became clear what the stakes were: the woke vs. anti-woke, but the alt-right does not fit into this categorization or paradigm, so it became irrelevant.
Interestingly enough 4chan itself is also increasily becoming whitepill affiliated. I don't lurk /pol/ because I value my sanity, but across /lit/ /fit/ /int/ and some of the video game boards there is a notable uptick in christian clean living as counterculture towards modern woke consumerism. Raw Egg Nationalism, Bronce Age Mindset, Harassment Architecture, Which Way Modern Man, you are my best soldier, if there was no hope their propaganda would be futile are all memes, books or buzzwords becoming more mainstream across all boards. Most notable is goyslop, which encapsulates the general disdain for modern society and the garbage it feeds it's citizenship, which is bordering on spilling over into the mainstream.
I think the whitepill is the successor microtribe to the redpill, because it is way more fit from an evolutionary psychology standpoint. A redpiller may find himself ostracised from society and become a complete loser through his tribal affiliation, while a whitepiller may even increase his standing among other tribes through it just by becoming rich, handsome etc. etc. How beneficial a tribe is for the tribesmen long term is imo the strongest parameter for it's staying power.
I'm sorry, what? Is this literal n-word towers?
That one is a book by Mike Ma. Kind of infamous on /lit/, given that Mike Ma pilfered in style from Behead All Satans, which was written on /lit/ itself. Quite archetypical for the 4chanesque interpretation whitepill in a way, it is sort of like an amphetamine fueled trip through a world of paranoid delusions and various forms of extreme racism and mysigony, all coalescing in a general dislike of industrialisation and a call to hit the gym as hard as possible. It is a wild read, side splittingly hilarious at times when Mike Ma goes off on semi self-aware rants about poison in the tapwater and estrogenic chemicals in cashier receipts.
Now that was a paragraph I was not expecting to read today. Or ever really. I know what my popcorn reading will be this weekend.
Do tell me what you think of it when you read it, I wonder how all of the political shock factor and hyperviolence comes across when one isn't as in tune with chan culture.
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I think there were a few groups/people describing themselves as alt-right in the mid 10s before Donnie came along and the movement entered media prominence. The groups that constituted the alt-right, as perceived by news stories primarily referred to themselves as whichever group they were originally, be they White Nationalists or Seduction types and so on.
It is potentially a useful distinction from the sort of conservativism espoused by older people, which tends to focus on keeping the welfare state alive for the elderly while selecting random populist items, such as re-legalising imperial measurements and cyclist registrations as policy goals.
Currently the term refers to any ideology that places itself in opposition to the liberal mythos, and they are all lumped in together. Bi-weekly we see articles in news outlets that decry the dangers of the "alt-right" recruiting young men and boys to its nebulous banner. If you bother to read the article this is mostly anti-feminism with elements of white nationalism.
Anyone on the right who does not disavow Trump it would seem is lumped together.
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Near as I can tell, the WN types coined the term. They applied a critique to the mainstream Right, and then answered that critique with their own prescriptions. The thing is, WN types are a vanishing minority, and much of their critique wasn't actually dependent on specifically WN axioms, or even particularly novel to their ideology. A lot of relative-to-WNs "normies" adopted positions generally similar to that critique, but then supplied their own prescriptions rather than drawing the conclusions the WNs prefered. Given that these relative normies outnumbered the actual WN types by several orders of magnitude, it was trivial for them to appropriate the "alt-right" label for themselves, and claim the WNs had no actual ownership of it.
This article captures the landscape at the time.
Of course, while a vanishing minority, the WN types did enjoy one advantage: they wanted to control the label, and the media likewise wanted them to control the label. Charlottesville provided the necessary pretext, and the media went to work cementing the "alt-right = nazi" meme indelibly into the public consciousness. Anyone with the slightest bit of insight saw this particular battle was lost, and so ceded the term permanently to the WNs. "Dissident Right" was the next-best alternative label for the mass of non-WN, non-establishment right-wingers to adopt, but the population as a whole lacks much in the way of coherence or structure. MAGA is probably the largest block at the moment, but even there you see significant variance between the die-hard Trump partisans and the people who think Trump is, at the moment, weakly, the best of a bad set of alternatives.
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The alt-right as a movement died with Charlottesville and Richard Spencer; it was basically the right version of Occupy. Energy that went nowhere. These days, the group is much larger, but also less coherent. Others have pointed to MAGA, dissident right, etc., and these are all related, but not exactly direct children of the Alt-Right.
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Richard Spencer claims to have coined the term "Alt-Right" in 2010. But for a brief time around 2015-2017 the term was applied more broadly, with even Steve Bannon and Breitbart claiming to belong to the Alt-Right. It was never clearly defined, but broadly speaking it was a big-tent, right-wing movement that included populist elements and radical elements of the right. It spread through memes and edgy optics, and had some momentum from the election of Donald Trump. Richard Spencer was viewed as a leader, more by default due to his willingness to serve as a lightning rod for the media.
The Charlottesville debacle stopped the Alt-Right in its tracks, as for the first time it received serious opposition in the form of lawfare and mass deplatforming. So the movement immediately crumbled under the pressure and is defunct for all intents and purposes. "Dissident right" is used on one level to avoid the baggage of the alt-right, but on a deeper level the alt-right really does not exist anymore. I would estimate that a majority of those in the DR were red-pilled post-Charlottesville and never belonged to the alt-right in its heyday.
In contrast to the alt-right, I would define the dissident right (DR) as highly fragmented discourse surrounding issues of politics and culture that is only united by its universal acceptance of certain highly controversial premises. Things like the race question and Jewish question more broadly aren't controversial; they are premises that are just understood as true and therefore embedded in the discourse on other political and cultural topics, like the war in Ukraine.
And that leads to a bunch of small groups with wildly different ideas for how the right-wing should move forward. There are Nietzscheans, Christian nationalists, Neo-Platonists, fascists, but there's no broader organized movement and no aspiration for big-tent advocacy. Outsiders would probably consider them all alt-right, but they don't view themselves as part of the same movement although they'll refer to the broader discourse as "DR".
The far right is probably even more ideologically diverse than the far-left. I have seen on Unz articles that Covid either does not exist (a hoax or a flu), came from the US, or came from China. These cannot be mutually inclusive especially not the first one. For Covid to have originated from the lab in China implies that it also exists and is a real thing. Some see China as a major threat, others see China as an ally against US-led globalism and multiculturalism .
There's no analogue to Marxism on the far right, so the radical right is more of a greenfield. There is a lot of ideological diversity, even if they are unified on some issues. There's no sign of any consensus emerging from the DR any time soon.
The dissident right more or less agrees that-
Traditional gender roles are good and necessary. If this means that women’s lib and equality is much reduced that is either desirable or at least an acceptable price to pay. Sexual promiscuity is bad, and birth control is a problem at least in part because it enables it.
Blacks, on average, have lower abilities in all sorts of ways and achieving black-white equality is a pipe dream.
Atheists are untrustworthy.
Bolsonaro and Trump were good, but frustratingly moderate.
The Covid vaccine is bad and this is symptomatic of the state of medical knowledge being generally poor as a whole.
Medical knowledge is unreliable because academia is generally compromised in all sorts of ways, but there’s usually a nugget of truth there.
Human beings have a right to self defense that is more fundamental than freedom of speech or association, never mind the ‘rights’ invented by progressives. Restricting self defense unnecessarily is bad, and that includes the right to keep and bear arms.
Gays are at least suspect if not generally assumed to be perverts.
Capitalism isn’t great but it’s at least better than socialism. Where technology enables human flourishing this is generally good, but there are many technological advances that do nothing of the sort.
State power is necessary.
An excellent summation.
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Not really that much. The "alt-right" can both generally refer to the varied yet associated movements of the far-right, or narrowly referred to a specific sense of trying but failing to imitate respectable politics like richard spencer, or a "cringe" focus on race / white genocide / jews, and the name just became "toxic", some said Unite the Right clearly showed the "failure" of the alt-right, and people stopped using the term. Some will say the "dissident right" is more nietzchean or aesthetic or something than the old alt-right, but the far-right in 2016 had just as much of that in some subgroups as it does now.
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I think the terms just changed.
Alt right originally just meant the same thing that MAGA does now. It was conservatives who didn't identify with the likes of Mitt Romney or the Bushes. Alt rights were in favor of limited, but useful government, in favor of religion, but as a structure for families and communities, not the weird evangelical stuff you used to see from conservatives (so: Catholic).
Eventually the media succeeded in convincing people that "alt right" was equivalent to neo nazi, so people stopped using the term. I still people say it to each other ironically. For instance: "I don't think that the CIA should be telling facebook what news stories to allow on their platform because I think that is election interference. I guess I'm an alt right neo fascist."
I don't think that's correct.
In the late 2000s, libertarians were reeled in by the Tea Party if they weren't outright supporting Ron Paul. No idea what the Catholics were doing. But neither group was a MAGA-equivalent. The Republican mainstream was compatible with those stances. Even if they weren't a Romney fan they probably voted for him over Obama.
I'm not sure that Spencer really gets to claim invention of the alt-right label, but he was certainly using it for his niche. It's not until the neoreactionaries get going that awareness spreads down to the people you're thinking of.
I believe the Catholics were allying with the libertarians such as Paul Ryan.
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what? This isn't true at all.
from wikipedia
from alternativeright.com (sorted by earliest first, i.e. from field)
The URLs say enough already - "julius-evola-radical-traditionalism", "hbd-human-biodiversity/liberals-face-reality", "left-right/the-failure-of-conservatism", "authors/steve-sailer",
"From wikipedia" should lose you any argument.
Also, "alternative right" is not "alt right" for the same reason that "Afro-American" is not "African-American"--"these two phrases are almost the same so they mean the same thing" is not how the culture war works.
I don't have any particular reason to believe that this particular fact, that Spencer ran an Alternative Right website in 2010, is being editorialized by Wikipedia.
I have my skepticism about that instance popularizing the term "alt-right," since I figure Spencer would claim influence whether or not it actually existed. But "alternative right" clearly existed, and it clearly had overlap with the HBDers and the Steve Sailers who would later wave the alt-right flag.
Also, it's one more source than either you or the parent provided.
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Wikipedia is in almost all contexts a better source, in practice, than any random news website or blog. It is especially a great way to get broad context on a topic or issue, which is precisely what OP doesn't have! And in this case it is accurate. Nevertheless, it's confirmed with "primary sources" from alternativeright.com, and elsewhere from /r/altright. Sure, it's morally biased against the right, but that doesn't prevent it from having detailed and mostly accurate articles on it.
Sure, but richard spencer, when he was still emphatically alt-right, used both, and was using alt-right to describe a "movement" in 2011. That objection doesn't make sense in relation to the way people used the term. I've talked to a lot of far-right people over the past decade, and have seen 'alt-right' used to describe their own white nationalist/fascist/extreme right movement many times, and used to describe their own 'maga / conservative who dislikes bush movement' not many at all.
Not on topics related to American contemporary culture war, of which Alt Right is a prime example.
Gamergate wikipedia article is sufficient to prove my point:
... it would make sense to include attacks on wikipedia as a source in a context where: wikipedia was being used to support incorrect claims - wikipedia was making incorrect claims - or wikipedia was a key pillar of my argument. But in no cases is that true here - what was being debated was vaguely "did a significant group of people call themselves alt-right, or was it a media term to label conservatives". And I was using it to show how easily accessible that information is, and also supported it with direct links, so I don't see why it's worth questioning wikipedia here. And the wikipedia article very effectively answers that question -
I think the connection between the alt-right and white supremacy is more 'very close' than 'entirely', but that's very complicated, and this is a decent introduction to the topic.
This is also a decent introduction to the topic, and would've been very useful for the people who claimed 'nobody called themselves alt-right" to read. The mention of dailystormer, occidental dissent, paleoconservatism, dark enlightenment, etc - those are definitely relevant!
So, given that many people in this thread would have been informed by reading just the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia article, the claim that "[wikipedia is not a better source than a random blog / not a great way to get broader context] on topics related to American contemporary culture war" is, imo, false. The rest of the article is certainly morally against the alt-right ... but that's to be expected, everyone is against the alt-right, they're "nazis"! Outgroup, the hated enemy, etc, it's really not worth expecting anything else. The rest of the article is also worth reading - much of it is misleading, of course, and wikipedia's article about priming is also misleading, writing things that are entirely accurate is ... quite hard, but it's still worth reading.
If you think that Wikipedia is a decent introduction to culture war issues, then the only words I have to describe are unflattering. Gullible comes to mind. Naive, willfully naive, and stridently naive are some others
Wikipedia is controlled by admins and editors and their bias permeates anything remotely controversial, and is prevalent across the entire English language site. The kind of things are and are not relevant, noteworthy, acceptable curtains, be and so on, provide a hundred thousand absurd for the common PMC bias to sleep through.
But none of this is new. I learning it in 2014 and 2015 regarding the gamergate article, which cannot be described as useful by anyone operating in good faith.
Did you even check the talk page to get a sense of the changes that have occurred, why, and when?
... I'm very far-right, and very clearly stated that wikipedia is biased against the right in the original post. (what is "PMC" bias? Does the new york times like chief financial officers, or corporate lawyers, in their rhetoric? Why aren't CEOs PMC, and hence wikipedia biased towards CEOs?)
If you have an organized source that's informative and detailed on a wide range of culture war issues in a wiki or article, as opposed to news format, that you think is better than wikipedia here, post it.
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SPLC also distinguishes Richard Spencer as the premier author/person of the alt right movement, whether rightly or wrongly.
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You could write a whole book about it, but the main things are:
Deplatforming: There used to be a time when the alt right could freely proselytize on youtube and facebook and twitter, sell their books on amazon, and collect donations and membership fees online via credit card. All of that has been made much more difficult, which limits their ability to organize and expand.
Doxxing: In the wake of Charlottesville, a lot of people got doxed and lost their jobs, which scared people off. No one wanted to show their face at an NPI or AmRen conference anymore.
Scandals and Lawsuits: Major figures in the movement like Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch, and Andrew Anglin had to deal with a spate of personal scandals and post-Cville lawsuits, which tarnished their image and the image of the movement as a whole. No one wants to bet on the weak horse.
Changing Political Landscape: Trump felt like the “last hope” to many people, and he essentially turned out to be a total failure. Demographic change in the west feels inevitable now, which blackpilled a lot of people and lead to decreased interest in the alt right.
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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.”
The term is sufficiently poisoned at this point that people certainly aren't going to willingly describe themselves this way and have probably even tried to scrub any history of having ever done so, but my recollection was a decent number of people on the far right referring to themselves as alt-right, to the point where there was some pushback on Spencer for trying to grab all the glory of leading it. I really doubt that I'll be able to find any meaningful evidence of that, but my recollection is that the term was used by people up to something like the Bannon wing of politics prior to Charlottesville.
I voted for Hillary so wasn't really paying attention. Another user showed there was an /r/altright sub. But I am curious how many followers it has. If it's less than 500 then I feel like my point stands. Maybe I came along later, but I distinctly recall it being used often as a conflationary slur in the same way that "white supremacist" later began to be used.
archive.org should have a premium subscription that makes your requests take <200ms i'd pay at least 100/month for it
this shows "12395 Fashy Goys" (i.e. reddit subscribers, the reddit skin lets you rename it, often subs do themed ones) . Although from browsing said spaces for a while, there are a lot more people that who are alt-right or similar overall.
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Please stop blaming everything on the "liberal media" without even reading the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia article - "In 2010, the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Right webzine". There was also https://old.reddit.com/r/altright, which has one capture in 2010 but only takes off in 2016. There were a lot of people who were far-right and explicitly called their movement "alt-right".
Browsing this stuff is a bit tedious - I use a combination of web.archive.org and pushshift's api and just read the json... but there's a lot of positive mention of white nationalism.
Amusing aside, one random post: "As a gay anarcho-capitalist and white nationalist (both are organically tied together), I find it quite annoying when I encounter vulgar, violent and vitriolic homophobia on the right. Such hateful focus on what people do in their intimate moments surely most be one of the most useless things one could spend their valuable time on. ..."
I appreciate you providing what I asked for here.
Here is the evidence of why I had this general perception. The Economist labeled Ben Shapiro as "alt right." Later retracted, which I was unaware so good for them.
Both can be true at once- that there were some people who called themselves the "alt right"... (which is why I asked my question,)
And the media and social media commentators have a tendency to paint with a broad stroke.
"This article has been changed. A previous version mistakenly described Mr Shapiro as an "alt-right sage" and "a pop idol of the alt right". In fact, he has been strongly critical of the alt-right movement. We apologise."
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/03/28/inside-the-mind-of-ben-shapiro-a-radical-conservative
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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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Yeah, the only real competitor was "intellectual dark web." And "alt-right" came across as a little more dignified.
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