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Notes -
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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