The Alternative Right, commonly known as the “alt-right,” was a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief was that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. The movement adopted the “alt-right” label to strategically soft-pedal their racist and antisemitic beliefs.
Top Takeaways
The racist right-wing coalition began to coalesce in the late 2000s, relying heavily on social media to organize online and off. Alt-righters eschewed “establishment” conservatism, skewed young, and embraced white nationalism as a fundamental value. Though many of the figures associated with the movement have remained active, the coalition of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other extremists who defined the alt-right largely fractured amid infighting in 2018. Though the alt-right only lasted about a decade as a defined movement, it represented a historical highpoint in white nationalist organizing.
In their own words
“At the core of the JI [Jewish Identity] is a malevolent supremacy. This is the manifest in their rejection of outgroups who wish to participate and innovate traditional Jewish cultural activities. Why reject diversity and progress within your community if not a false feeling of ‘betterness’? The root of this problem is, of course, a sexual feeling of inferiority. Mighty psychosexual urges must not be downplayed within group dynamics. As a remedy to this, the JI must be infiltrated with foreign members to procreate with their men and women. That way, the deep psychological psychosis can be treated at the root.” —“A Critical Analysis of the Jewish Identity,” The Right Stuff, January 2016
“The new left doctrine of racial struggle in favor of non-Whites only, a product of decolonization and the defeat of nationalists by egalitarians after WWII, must be repudiated and Whites must be allowed to take their own side in their affairs. A value system that says Whites are not allowed to have collective interests while literally every other identity group can do so and ought to do so is unacceptable.” —“The Fight for the Alt Right: The Rising Tide of Ideological Autism Against Big-Tent Supremacy,” The Right Stuff, January 2016
“Martin Luther King Jr., a fraud and degenerate in his life, has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of Occidental civilization. We must overcome!” —National Policy Institute column, January 2014
“Immigration is a kind of proxy war—and maybe a last stand—for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.” — National Policy Institute column, February 2014
“Since we are fighting for nothing less than the biological survival of our race, and since the vast bulk of Jews oppose us, we need to err on the side of caution and have no association with Jews whatsoever. Any genuine Jewish well-wishers will understand, since they know what their people are like better than we ever can. Saving our race is something that we will have to do ourselves alone.” — Greg Johnson, “White Nationalism & Jewish Nationalism,” August 2011
“I oppose the Jewish diaspora in the United States and other white societies. I would like to see the white peoples of the world break the power of the Jewish diaspora and send the Jews to Israel, where they will have to learn how to be a normal nation.” — Greg Johnson, “White Nationalism & Jewish Nationalism,” August 2011
“This is our home and our kith and kin. Borders matter, identity matters, blood matters, libertarians and their capitalism can move to Somalia if they want to live without rules, in the West we must have standards and enforce them. The ‘freedom’ for other races to move freely into white nations is nonexistent. Stay in your own nations, we don’t want you here.” — Matthew Heimbach, “I Hate Freedom,” Traditionalist Youth Network, July 7, 2013
“Those who promote miscegenation, usury, or any other forms of racial suicide should be sent to re-education centers, not tolerated.” — Matthew Heimbach, “I Hate Freedom,” Traditionalist Youth Network, July 7, 2013
Background
The Alternative Right was a term coined in 2008 by Richard Bertrand Spencer to describe a loose set of far-right ideals centered on “white identity” and the preservation of “Western civilization.” In 2010, Spencer — who had stints as an editor of The American Conservative and Taki’s Magazine — launched the Alternative Right blog, where he worked to refine the movement’s ideological tenets. In 2011, Spencer went on to head the white nationalist think tank known as the National Policy Institute, which became one of the central institutions throughout the alt-right’s heyday.
Since its inception in 2008, the alt-right underwent multiple iterations, ranging from a niche intellectual project in the late aughts to a vehicle for street actions that often descended into violence, such as the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally.
The alt-right represented a big-tent ideology that blended the ideas of neo-reactionaries (NRx-ers), who advocate a return to an antiquated, pseudo-libertarian government that supports “traditional western civilization”; “archeofuturists,” those who advocate for a return to “traditional values” without jettisoning the advances of society and technology; human biodiversity adherents (HBDers) and proponents of scientific racism; male supremacists; and other extreme-right ideologies. Many of its adherents, including its leaders, aspired to create a whites-only state. Alt-right adherents stridently reject egalitarianism and universalism in favor of racial and sexual hierarchies, isolationism and fascism.
At the heart of the alt-right was a break with establishment conservatism. Like the paleoconservative and radical-right thinkers who influenced the alt-right, the movement’s adherents saw mainstream conservatism, which some derogatorily dubbed “Conservative Inc.,” as outmoded. Instead, they favored experimentation with the ideas of the French New Right and other European radical right ideologies, such as Identitarianism; libertarian thought as exemplified by former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas); anarcho-capitalism, which advocates individual sovereignty and open markets in place of an organized state; and other ideologies. Some alt-righters saw merits in Catholic traditionalism, which seeks a return to Roman Catholicism before the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. However, the movement never had a unified position on religion.
The alt-right was connected with American Identitarianism, a version of an ideology popular in Europe that embraces national cultural and racial homogeneity as a political ideal. One difference is that while European Identitarians indict the generation known as the “68ers,” a reference to the left of the 1960s, their American counterparts attack older generations, including baby boomers, who are presumed to comprise the bulk of the current Republican Party’s base. But the movements on both continents are similar in accusing older conservatives for selling out their countries to foreigners.
Spencer left his Alternative Right blog in 2013 in order to focus on the Radix Journal, an online journal published by the National Policy Institute that promotes the creation of a white ethno-state. Spencer’s abrupt departure left the blog to two fellow white nationalists, Colin Liddell of the United Kingdom and Andy Nowicki.
Although Spencer positioned himself as the effective leader of the alt-right, other proponents and leaders included several well-known names on the far right, including Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance; Greg Johnson of the publishing house Counter-Currents; Matthew Parrott and Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker Party, formerly known as the Traditionalist Youth Network; Peter Brimelow, the founder and editor of VDARE, which once helped fund Spencer’s Alternative Right blog; Andrew Anglin of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer; and Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, who ran The Right Stuff podcasting network. The alt-right used a variety of means to spread its message and hash out its ideological positions, ranging from publishing houses like Johnson’s Counter-Currents or Spencer’s Washington Summit Publishers, to blogs, podcasts, videos, forums, and social media.
Lesser-known alt-right figures who were able separate their racist political activism from their professional careers to some degree tried to make inroads with the conservative media and political ecosystem, according to later reports from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, Splinter, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed News and HuffPost, among others. But by and large, the alt-right’s largest audience came from anonymous youths who were exposed to the movement’s ideas through online message boards like 4chan and 8chan’s /pol/ and internet platforms like YouTube, Reddit and Twitter.
“The ‘alt-right’ is just a placeholder label for a feeling that haunts the senile elite, Right and Left: ‘you have lost the youth,’” Costin Alamariu — a contributor to the neoreactionary and alt-right-adjacent website Social Matter — wrote in March 2018. Alamariu, according to multiple media reports, also writes reactionary content under the pseudonym “Bronze Age Pervert.”
As the alt-right grew in prominence during the 2016 Trump campaign, others sought to capitalize on its momentum. Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, described his website as “the platform for the alt-right” at the July 2016 Republican National Convention. Before Bannon’s statement, multiple Breitbart News contributors had already forged inroads with the alt-right. Milo Yiannopoulos, one of the site’s most prominent contributors, corresponded and collaborated with a handful of white nationalists and at least one neo-Nazi while writing a several-thousand-word article for the site, according to a later Buzzfeed News report. The piece sought to explain the movement to more mainstream conservative audiences.
The movement was not monolithic. Some activists previously enamored with the alt-right, such as Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, coalesced around what some journalists, researchers and right-wing activists referred to as the “alt-lite,” particularly following infighting among members of the movement in 2017. Though some of these figures used the “alt-lite” to distance themselves from its more overt appeals to white identity politics, the two movements shared common currency in their racist rhetoric and animosity toward antiracist activists that sometimes escalated into violence.
The diversity of far-right ideologies that it includes has resulted in some disagreement with regard to Jews, and whether to blame them for the perceived plight of white culture — a belief that has undergirded many sectors of white nationalism for decades. While some alt-right leaders were unquestionably antisemitic, others, like Jared Taylor, are not, seeing Jews simply as white people. For his part, Spencer repeatedly brought in antisemites to speak at his events.
In March 2016, for instance, former California State University-Long Beach professor Kevin MacDonald, the author of a trilogy purporting to show that Jews seek to undermine the host Christian societies in which they often live, spoke at an NPI event in Washington, D.C., titled “Identity Politics.” After the event, Spencer stopped just short of questioning the Holocaust, telling a HuffPost reporter that if it “really happened, then of course it wasn’t justified. If it happened differently than what the story we’ve been told [is], then I think that needs to be let out.”
Social media and image boards, such as 4chan, were instrumental to the growth of the alt-right. The best example of that was probably the proliferation of the term “ cuckservative” — a combination of “cuckold” and “conservative,” coined to castigate Republican politicians who are seen as traitors to their people who are selling out conservatives with their support for immigration, free trade and certain liberal ideas. The phrase has a racist undertone, as some of its backers have suggested, implying that establishment conservatives are like white men who allow Black men to sleep with their wives.
But the alt-right has taken on many more issues than that, including issues of high importance to white nationalists like the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the U.S. and Europe in 2015 and 2016, the Black Lives Matter movement and immigration reform.
Trump was a hero to the alt-right. Through a series of semi-organized campaigns, alt-right activists applied the “c—servative” slur to every major Republican primary candidate except Trump, who regularly rails against “political correctness,” Muslims, immigrants, Mexicans, Chinese and others. They have also worked hard to affix the alt-right brand to Trump through the use of hashtags and memes.
The alt-right and street activism
The movement was not limited to the internet. Alt-right figures organized and participated in a range of prominent demonstrations and rallies, some of which descended into violence up to and including murder. The movement boasted a range of members-only groups that were active throughout the mid-to-late 2010s that supporters could join if they wanted to build connections with others outside of social media and forums.
Identity Evropa, a white nationalist group founded by Nathan Damigo in 2016, distributed propaganda and recruited on college campuses. For fans of Anglin’s Daily Stormer website or Peinovich’s The Right Stuff podcasting network, there were so-called “Stormer book clubs” and TRS “pool parties,” respectively. Spencer’s NPI, Taylor’s American Renaissance and Johnson’s Counter-Currents regularly organized meetups in Washington, D.C., and beyond. Though some events, such as Spencer’s, were open to reporters, the gatherings were often cloaked in secrecy. Attendees regularly used false names or refused to identify themselves for fear of being labeled as racists.
Between 2016 and 2018 — the alt-right’s peak — the SPLC documented in a report at least 125 rallies, marches and protests throughout the country. Over 70 of those events took place in 2017. This included the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that Heimbach, Parrott, Anglin, Spencer and others participated in or promoted online.
In 2021, a federal court in Virginia ruled that over a dozen white supremacist organizers behind “Unite the Right” were liable for $24 million in damages for their involvement in orchestrating the event. After a series of rulings from a federal judge and an appeals court, that amount was cut to $9.7 million in mid-2024.