WHEN WHITE NATIONALIST Richard Spencer coined the term alt-right nearly a decade ago, his movement was marginal, impotent, and striving for respectability. The phrase was a useful euphemism for his genocidal ideology, a palatable alternative to the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi Party to go with his suit, tie, and military undercut.
In the years to follow, as trolling culture grew online and began to adopt the symbols and lexicon of white supremacy first ironically, then less so alt-right proved a conveniently ambiguous label for the sanitized neo-Nazi movements new prankster fellow travelers. The online trolls who flocked to the alt-right liked to play footsie with racist extremism, then laugh at anyone who took it seriously. Like their cryptic Kek flags and Pepe the Frog memes, the alt-right label signaled an allegiance to white nationalism without fully committing to it. It was so malleable, in fact, that during the 2016 election, it expanded to include just about anyone on the right who considered themselves anti-establishment, including many of Donald Trumps rank-and-file supporters.
Now, however, the term has become a liability. Its erosion began as far back as November 2016, when Spencer paid homage to the soon-to-be president with a cry of Hail, Trump! Then, in August, the alt-right brand cratered. During a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, meant to bring together a coalition that still regarded itself as the so-called alt-right, crowds of white men were captured on camera giving the Roman or Nazi salute. Swastikas abounded. Street fights broke out, and the violence turned deadly: A left-wing counterprotester named Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist.
Just a few days after Klansmen and other extreme right-wing activists marched openly on the Charlottesville streets, far-right YouTube star and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich disowned the alt-right, calling them Nazi boys. Thats all it is now, he said in a video, is a purely anti-Semitic movement. In 2016, the right-wing website Breitbart had embraced both the moniker and the movement of the alt-right. Steve Bannon, who returned to Breitbart as executive chair after resigning as Trumps chief strategist, infamously called Breitbart the platform for the alt-right, and Breitbart reporters Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos celebrated the arrival of these young, creative far-right instigators, in full recognition of the movements racial segregationist dimension. But after Charlottesville, Breitbart angrily denounced its critics for ever daring to insinuate that it was part of the alt-right movement, calling it a smear.
The Proud Boys, a drinking club of male, far-right street brawlers, who purport to defend Western values, are routinely associated with the alt-right. But the groups leader, Gavin McInnes, who helped launch Vice Media in 1994 and now runs a right-wing YouTube talk show, has in fact rejected the term for some time, preferring the milder-sounding alt-light. McInness insistence that the Proud Boys have nothing to do with the alt-right grew even more adamant after the violence in Charlottesville. Last month, in a blog post titled WE ARE NOT ALT-RIGHT, he alerted his group that alt-right members planned to infiltrate Proud Boys meetings and sabotage them. Then, McInness attorney threatened to sue The Intercept over a short documentary film I directed, which included about 17 seconds of footage drawn from McInness YouTube shows. His lawyer, Jason Van Dyke, claimed that the films obvious insinuation is that McInnes is a white nationalist, a white supremacist, or alt-right, whereas in reality, McInnes has no affiliation with the alt-right whatsoever.
Such is the growing toxicity of the alt-right brand post-Charlottesville, and the eagerness of many right-wing groups and leaders to escape its valence. That eagerness, in turn, may suggest that the new far-right movement that coalesced around the Trump campaign last year is splitting into factions, divided over the degree to which they openly embrace an overt white nationalist ideology
