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Notes -
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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