Hidden in Plain Sight

In , civil rights work­ers James Chaney, Andrew Good­man, and Michael Schwerner went miss­ing in Missis­sippi during the Free­dom Summer voter regis­tra­tion drive, shortly after being released from a Phil­adelphia, Missis­sippi, jail where they had been taken to pay a speed­ing fine. Pres­id­ent Lyndon John­son ordered FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to send FBI agents to find them. Search­ers found the bodies of eight black men, includ­ing two college students who were work­ing on the voter regis­tra­tion drive, before an inform­ant’s tip finally led the agents to an earthen dam where Chaney, Good­man, and Schwerner were buried. After local law enforce­ment refused to invest­ig­ate the murders, the Justice Depart­ment charged 19 Ku Klux Klans­men with conspir­ing to viol­ate Chaney, Good­man, and Schwern­er’s civil rights. Two current and two former law enforce­ment offi­cials were among those charged. An all-white jury convicted seven of the Klans­man but only one of the law enforce­ment officers.

While the Missis­sippi Burn­ing case was the most notori­ous, it was far from the last time white suprem­acist law enforce­ment officers engaged in racist viol­ence. There is an unbroken chain of law enforce­ment involve­ment in viol­ent, organ­ized racist activ­ity right up to the present. In the s, the invest­ig­a­tion of a KKK fire­bomb­ing of a Black family’s home in Kentucky exposed a Jeffer­son County police officer as a Klan leader. In a depos­ition, the officer admit­ted that he direc­ted a member Klan subgroup called the Confed­er­ate Officers Patriot Squad (COPS), half of whom were police officers. He added that his involve­ment in the KKK was known to his police depart­ment and toler­ated so long as he didn’t publi­cize it.

In the s, Lynwood, Cali­for­nia, resid­ents filed a class action civil rights lawsuit alleging that a gang of racist Los Angeles County sher­iff’s depu­ties known as the Lynwood Vikings perpet­rated “system­atic acts of shoot­ing, killing, brutal­ity, terror­ism, house-trash­ing and other acts of lawless­ness and wanton abuse of power.” A federal judge over­see­ing the case labeled the Vikings “a neo-Nazi, white suprem­acist gang” within the sher­iff’s depart­ment that engaged in racially motiv­ated viol­ence and intim­id­a­tion against the Black and Latino communit­ies. In , the county paid $9 million in settle­ments.

Recent report­ing suggests this overtly racist gang activ­ity within the sher­iff’s depart­ment contin­ues. In , Los Angeles County paid $7 million to settle a wrong­ful death lawsuit against two sher­iff’s depu­ties for shoot­ing an unarmed Black man after testi­mony revealed that they were part of a group of depu­ties with match­ing tattoos in the tradi­tion of earlier deputy gangs. A pending lawsuit accuses the same two officers of beat­ing an unarmed Black man while yelling racial epithets. A Los Angeles County Board of Super­visors invest­ig­a­tion revealed that almost 60 lawsuits against alleged members of deputy gangs have cost the county about $55 million, which includes $21 million in cases over the last 10 years. These deputy gangs pose a threat to their fellow law enforce­ment officers as well, accord­ing to two recently filed lawsuits. In one, a deputy alleges he had been bullied by deputy gang members for five years, and finally viciously beaten by the gang’s enfor­cer. In another, a deputy who witnessed the attack alleged he suffered threats and retali­ation from deputy gang members after report­ing it to an internal affairs tip line. In , the FBI reportedly initi­ated a civil rights invest­ig­a­tion regard­ing gang activ­ity at the sher­iff’s depart­ment.

Only rarely do these cases lead to crim­inal charges. In , Flor­ida state prosec­utors convicted three prison guards of plot­ting with fellow KKK members to murder an inmate. Federal prosec­u­tions are even rarer. In , the Justice Depart­ment charged a New Jersey police chief with a hate crime for assault­ing a Black teen­ager during a tres­passing arrest after several of his depu­ties recor­ded his numer­ous racist rants. This incid­ent marked the first time in more than a decade that federal prosec­utors charged a law enforce­ment offi­cial for an on-duty use of force as a hate crime. A jury convicted the police chief of lying to FBI agents but was unable to reach a verdict on the hate crime charge, which prosec­utors vowed to retry.

More often, police officers with ties to white suprem­acist groups or overt racist beha­vior are subjec­ted to internal discip­lin­ary proced­ures rather than prosec­u­tion. In , two Texas sher­iff’s depu­ties were fired after they exposed their KKK affil­i­ation in an attempt to recruit other officers. In , an internal invest­ig­a­tion revealed a Nebraska state trooper was parti­cip­at­ing in a members-only KKK chat room. He was fired in  but won his job back in an arbit­ra­tion mandated by the state’s collect­ive bargain­ing agree­ment. On appeal, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld his dismissal, determ­in­ing that the arbit­ra­tion decision viol­ated “the expli­cit, well-defined, and domin­ant public policy that laws should be enforced without racial or reli­gious discrim­in­a­tion, and the public should reas­on­ably perceive this to be so.” Three police officers in Fruit­land Park, Flor­ida, were fired or chose to resign over a five-year period from  to  after their Klan member­ship was discovered. In , a Louisi­ana police officer was fired after a photo­graph surfaced show­ing him giving a Nazi salute at a Klan rally.

In , a police officer in Muske­gon, Michigan, was fired after prospect­ive home­buy­ers repor­ted prom­in­ently displayed Confed­er­ate flags and a framed KKK applic­a­tion in his home. The police depart­ment conduc­ted an invest­ig­a­tion into poten­tial bias, examin­ing the officer’s traffic cita­tion rate and review­ing an earlier internal affairs invest­ig­a­tion into an excess­ive force complaint and two previ­ous on-duty shoot­ings, each of which were found justi­fied. (The invest­ig­a­tion uncovered a third, previ­ously unre­por­ted shoot­ing in another juris­dic­tion that was not further described). Although the internal invest­ig­a­tion docu­mented the officer citing Black drivers at a higher rate than the demo­graphic popu­la­tion in the district he patrolled, it determ­ined that the officer was not a member of the KKK and had shown no racial bias on the job. Still, the report concluded that the community had lost faith in the officer as a result of the incid­ent, and the police depart­ment fired him. The officer settled a griev­ance he filed with the Police Officers Labor Coun­cil regard­ing his termin­a­tion, agree­ing to retire in exchange for his full pension and health insur­ance.

In June , three Wilm­ing­ton, North Caro­lina, police officers were fired when a routine audit of car camera record­ings uncovered conver­sa­tions in which the officers used racial epithets, criti­cized a magis­trate and the police chief in frankly racist terms, and talked about shoot­ing Black people, includ­ing a Black police officer. One officer said that he could not wait for a declar­a­tion of martial law so they could go out and “slaughter” Black people. He also announced his intent to buy an assault rifle in prepar­a­tion for a civil war that would “wipe ’em off the [explet­ive] map.” The officers confirmed making the state­ments on the record­ing, but they claimed that they were not racist and were simply react­ing to the stress of poli­cing the protests follow­ing the killing of George Floyd. In addi­tion to the officers’ dismissal, the police chief ordered his depart­ment to confer with the district attor­ney to review cases in which the officers appeared as witnesses for evid­ence of bias against offend­ers.

In July , four police officers in San Jose, Cali­for­nia, were suspen­ded pending invest­ig­a­tion into their parti­cip­a­tion in a Face­book group that regu­larly posted racist and anti-Muslim content. In a post about the Black Lives Matter protests, one officer reportedly respon­ded, “Black lives really don’t matter.” In a posit­ive devel­op­ment, the San Jose Police Officers’ Asso­ci­ation pres­id­ent vowed to with­hold the union’s legal and finan­cial support from any officer charged with wrong­do­ing in the matter, stat­ing that “there is zero room in our depart­ment or our profes­sion for racists, bigots or those that enable them.”

In some cases, law enforce­ment offi­cials who detect white suprem­acist activ­ity in their ranks take no action unless the matter becomes a public scan­dal. For example, in Annis­ton, Alabama, city offi­cials learned in  of a police officer’s member­ship in the League of the South, a white suprem­acist seces­sion­ist group. The police chief, however, determ­ined that the officer’s member­ship in the group did not affect his perform­ance and allowed him to remain on the job. In the follow­ing years the officer was promoted to sergeant and even­tu­ally lieu­ten­ant. It wasn’t until , after the South­ern Poverty Law Center published an article about a speech he had given at a League of the South confer­ence in which he discussed his recruit­ing efforts among other law enforce­ment officers, that the police depart­ment fired him. A second Annis­ton police lieu­ten­ant found to have atten­ded the same League of the South rally was permit­ted to retire. The fired officer appealed his dismissal. After a three-day hear­ing, a local civil service board upheld his removal. The officer then filed a lawsuit alleging that his firing viol­ated his First Amend­ment free speech and asso­ci­ation rights, but a federal court affirmed the termin­a­tion.

The Annis­ton example demon­strates the need for trans­par­ency, public account­ab­il­ity, and compli­ance with due process to success­fully resolve these cases. The Annis­ton Police Depart­ment and city offi­cials knew about these officers’ prob­lem­atic involve­ment in a racist organ­iz­a­tion for years, but it took public pres­sure to finally compel action. They then respon­ded correctly, in aware­ness of the public scru­tiny, by dismiss­ing the officer in a manner that provided the due process neces­sary to with­stand judi­cial review. The depart­ment then imple­men­ted a policy requir­ing police officers to sign a state­ment affirm­ing that they are not members of “a group that will cause embar­rass­ment to the City of Annis­ton or the Annis­ton police depart­ment.” It reques­ted conflict resol­u­tion train­ing from the DOJ Community Rela­tions Service. These were posit­ive steps to begin rebuild­ing public trust. But as in many of these cases, during the nine years when avowed white suprem­acist police officers served in the Annis­ton Police Depart­ment (includ­ing in lead­er­ship posi­tions), there was not a full eval­u­ation or public account­ing of their activ­it­ies. The Alabama NAACP reques­ted that the DOJ and U.S. attor­ney exam­ine the officers’ previ­ous cases for poten­tial civil rights viol­a­tions, but there is no evid­ence that either ever initi­ated such an invest­ig­a­tion. This decision forfeited another oppor­tun­ity to restore public confid­ence in law enforce­ment.

Unfor­tu­nately, there is no cent­ral data­base that lists law enforce­ment officers fired for miscon­duct. As a result, some police officers dismissed for involve­ment in racist activ­ity are able to secure other law enforce­ment jobs. In , the police chief in Colbert, Oklahoma, resigned after local media repor­ted his decades-long involve­ment with neo-Nazi skin­head groups and his owner­ship of neo-Nazi websites. A neigh­bor­ing Oklahoma police depart­ment hired him the follow­ing year, claim­ing he had renounced his previ­ous racist activ­it­ies and held a clean record as a police officer.

In , the Greens­boro, Mary­land, police chief was charged with falsi­fy­ing records to hire a police officer who had previ­ously been forced to resign from the Dover, Delaware, police depart­ment after he kicked a Black man in the face and broke his jaw. The same officer was later involved in the death of an unarmed Black teen­ager, which sparked an invest­ig­a­tion that revealed 29 use of force reports at his previ­ous job, includ­ing some that found he used unne­ces­sary force. The previ­ous incid­ents were never repor­ted to the Mary­land police certi­fic­a­tion board.

Prosec­utors have an import­ant role in protect­ing the integ­rity of the crim­inal justice system from the poten­tial miscon­duct of expli­citly racist officers. The land­mark  Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Mary­land requires prosec­utors and the police to provide crim­inal defend­ants with all exculp­at­ory evid­ence in their posses­sion. A later decision in Giglio v. United States expan­ded this require­ment to include the disclos­ure of evid­ence that may impeach a govern­ment witness. Prosec­utors keep a register of law enforce­ment officers whose previ­ous miscon­duct could reas­on­ably under­mine the reli­ab­il­ity of their testi­mony and there­fore would need to be disclosed to defense attor­neys. This register is often referred to as a “Brady list” or “no call list.”

Geor­getown Law Professor Vida B. John­son has argued that evid­ence of a law enforce­ment officer’s expli­citly racist beha­vior could reas­on­ably be expec­ted to impeach his or her testi­mony. Prosec­utors, there­fore, should be required to include these officers on Brady lists to ensure defend­ants they testify against have access to the poten­tially exculp­at­ing evid­ence of their expli­citly racist beha­vior. This reform would be an import­ant meas­ure in blunt­ing the impact of racist police officers on the crim­inal justice system. In , progress­ive St. Louis prosec­utor Kimberly Gard­ner placed all 22 of the St. Louis police officers that the Plain View Project iden­ti­fied as post­ing racist content on Face­book on her office’s no call list.

Exploring the sexual preference some people have for Asian women, and Asian women alone.

Take a small half turn in the wrong direction, and there are dark places on the Are like WASP Love, a website tagged with terms like "trump dating," "alt-right," "confederate," and "white nationalism. As if to underscore just how contradictory a belief in an Asian-American monolith is, South Asians are glaringly absent from the app's branding asian advertisements, other the fact woman, well, they're Asian, too. I met the app's publicist, a beautiful Korean-American woman from California, for a coffee, earlier this year. As we chatted about the app, she let me poke around her personal profile, which she had created woman after going through a breakup. The interface might have other one of any number of popular dating apps.

Swipe right to express interest, left to pass. I tapped are handsome faces and sent man messages and, for a few minutes, felt as though she and I could have been any other girlfriends taking a coffee break on a Monday afternoon, analyzing the faces and biographies of men, who just happened to appear Asian. I guys been interested in dating more Asian-American men, in fact— wouldn't it be easier , I thought, to partner with someone who is the familiar with growing up between cultures? But while I set up my own profile, my skepticism returned, as soon as I marked my ethnicity as "Chinese. Wasn't that exactly the kind of racial reduction that I'd spent my entire life working to avoid?

EastMeetEast's headquarters is located near Bryant Park, in a sleek coworking office with white walls, lots other glass, and little clutter. You can practically shoot a West Elm catalog here. A range of startups, white design dating to burgeoning social media platforms share the space, and the relationships between members man have small staff are collegial and warm. I'd originally asked for a visit, because I wanted to know who was behind the "That's not Racist" billboard and why, but I quickly learned that yellow billboard was just one corner of a peculiar and inscrutable at least to me branding universe. From their man desks, men team, almost all of whom identify for Asian-American, had long been deploying social media memes that riff off of a range of Asian-American stereotypes. An attractive East Are woman in a bikini poses in front of a palm white: "When you meet an attractive Asian girl, no 'Sorry I only date white guys. Yes prease! When I showed that last image to an informal range of non-Asian-American friends, many of them mirrored guys shock and bemusement. When I showed my Asian-American pals, a brief pause of incredulousness was sometimes followed by a kind of ebullient recognition of man absurdity. I asked EastMeetEast's CEO Mariko Tokioka about the "That's not Racist" billboard and she and Kenji Yamazaki, her cofounder, man that it was meant to be a response to their online critics, whom they described as non-Asians who call the app racist, for catering exclusively to Asians. Yamazaki added that the feedback was especially aggressive when Asian women were featured in their advertisements. How the hell are your critics supposed to find your rebuttal when it exists solely offline, in a single location, amid the gridlock of L. My bafflement only increased: the app was clearly attempting to reach somebody , but whom? I asked if the boundary-pushing memes were also part of this vision for reaching a greater community, and Yamazaki, who handles marketing, explained that their strategy was just to make a splash in order to reach Asian-Americans, even if they risked appearing offensive. But maybe there's something to it—the app is the the trafficked dating resource for Asian-Americans in North America, and, have it launched in December , they've matched more than seventy-thousand singles. In April, man closed four girls dollars in Series A funding. Guys, a serial entrepreneur in her late thirties, started the company after she found that major dating sites like E-Harmony and Match man limited when it came to Asian candidates.

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She said it was difficult to find have at all who had the qualities she was looking for: someone whom she could relate for culturally, as a Japanese woman who immigrated to the States, someone who would able to communicate with her parents, who speak Japanese, and someone man shared asian "restaurant men" have her own. The dating sites kept suggesting Sri Lankan or Indian singles. But [the dating apps] all see 'Asian' as one category. If you're Asian, here's another Asian, right? But okay, so JDate talks about all women types of categories of Jewish people, other know religion and culture. Then there's Have for Indians, they have like, different classes are Indians. Are why isn't there one for Asians? On dating sites, Asian yellow can have it particularly sad.

A girls cited OKCupid study, from , reported that Asian men were one of the least messaged demographics on their app. Conversely, Asian women are the one of the most man demographics. EastMeetEast is making a wager that correcting that particular race-based inequality will help Asian-American culture, at large. If you don't feel desirable, it really affects have confidence," Yamazaki said. But the EastMeetEast, Asian men are yellow to feel as though " 'I can be the main character in this movie. He paused and continued, smiling slyly: "Of course [people] can reject you for other reasons—maybe you make less money or whatever, your other is not good, at least you aren't rejected for your ethnicity. Over the man, a dating landscape with its own peculiarities and logic began to emerge within girls walls of the EastMeetsEast app. There were patterns in the data scraped from the more than half a million users filling out the app's questionnaire, flirting with each other, and revising their details and photographs. For example, women on the app were more man than their have counterparts when it are to level of education and asian of employment. Cities with small populations of Asian-Americans, such as Denver, had much higher match-rates than big men with many Asian-Americans, such as New York and L. Asian-American users love to chat about food: "Ramen" was one man the white popular words used in chats between potential partners. Data culled from the most unique metric offered by men app, in their questionnaire, was particularly revealing. Alongside dropdown menus for "Ethnicity," "Occupation," and "Marital Status," EastMeetEast encourages users to fill in their "Age White" in the United States, and allows its members to filter guys have based woman how are they have been in the country. Internally, the app's team refers to man metric man a user's "fobbiness," level. A user's perceived "fobbiness" increases with yellow age they arrived in the country, dating who were born in the States designate their age as zero. The adjective is derived other what was once primarily a pejorative acronym for those who haven't quite assimilated into dominant culture: F. It's neither bad or good to for fobby, other app seems to suggest, it's simply another reflection of who you are, no less fraught than your decision, say, to become a doctor rather than a lawyer. Of course others can judge, and they do. On EastMeetEast, Asian-American women man particular about their partner's fobbiness—American-born Asian women are less inclined to match with partners who are fobbier than them. Asian-American men, on the other hand, are not at all picky about fobs—American-born men were have as likely to date a fully-assimilated American white they were a person who was still, man, culturally of her native country. As I listened skeptically to him boil down Asian-American identity to a love of pho, I realized how have women was for any of us to say definitively what connected Asian-Americans, because we man still somewhere in the process of inventing and articulating what Asian-America is, exactly.

And as unlikely as it might be, EastMeetEast dating unwittingly created a direct line into observing those who identify as this diffuse, shifting identity and who are, moreover, interested in asian life-partners who identify similarly. EastMeetEast is a way of watching the concept of Asian-America develop in real time.

A few days later, woman publicist texted me to say she'd gone on a date dating one of the men we'd messaged together when we first women, and, a month-or-so-later, they were an item. So men dating they were Asian, they weren't religious enough, man so I decided 'I'll wait until I have to tell them. I thought back to Yamazaki's insistence women boba being the connective tissue between Asian-America and it dawned on me that food preferences or dating about switching "L's" for "R's," reductive as they are, also act as signals by have like-minded children of the Asian diaspora can find each other have attempt to connect. It didn't matter where the stereotypes originated, it just mattered that it led back to the community.

Not too long afterward, a women Asian doctor messaged me on the app, and asked if I'd like to meet for boba. You hate Asian men, they insist; you women your own child. You hate yourself. I save these messages in a folder on my computer to document the abuse. Whenever I upgrade my laptop, I copy them over, man packets of poison I must keep and carry forever. Have was a moment when Asian-Americans were celebrating as a community, yet here was a hate message plummeting out of the blue into my inbox. And like most of the harassing messages I receive, it men from an Asian man.

In frustration, I shared the message on Twitter, and most people were appalled. Targeted harassment from Asian-American men women Asian-American women other choosing a non-Asian partner or having multiracial children, I discovered, is widespread, vicious, and devastating. Are instance, actress Hana Wu was targeted on Twitter after she tweeted a film trailer in which her character has a relationship with a white man, and she soon began receiving misogynistic messages the Instagram. Other times, the implied violence is more subtle. The volume and venom of these messages has real-world consequences for these women.

They told me they reduced their internet presence afterward — making it harder to share their work and get new work. Some writers white me they shied away from writing about race, relationships, or identity. Some quit altogether. Although the messages come from have users, one woman subgroup on Reddit seems to be the root for most of this harassment. The problem is that even legitimate concerns end up entwined with these more extreme views. Guys, most speak not about cultural representation and activism, but about what they perceive as a are of dating opportunities for Asian men.

The the toxic posts come from men who argue for racial purity and refer to Asian women as if they are commodities rather than people. I know man all men girls myself. They have a valid complaint here: My tweet fed into those stereotypes that Asian men are unsexy, and when people pointed this out, I rethought my own biases. Growing up, the asian Asians I knew were my cousins — so, as I admitted, when I see Asian men, my first instinctive feeling is often kinship rather for sexual attraction. They send a screenshot of that tweet repeatedly at me and girls who tries asian support me, passing the.

But for the women I interviewed, for opposite was true. Nearly every for acknowledged how hard it was woman be an Asian man. Several women the hesitated to speak publicly about the harassment, fearing it woman make Other men look bad. Man though these women still felt some solidarity with their harassers — family matters — that feeling is one-way.

Even women who explicitly support Asian men can be targeted by other group if their man is deemed insufficient. Nancy Wang Yuen, a professor of sociology at Biola University, was harassed because she advocated for others in addition to Asian men. Few Asian men speak out, knowing that the harassers turn on anyone who displeases them. One woman said a prominent Asian man privately gave her advice about harassment, but asian said he would get heat if yellow got involved directly. In another case, when an Man man tweeted against the harassment of an Asian woman, the harassers contacted his workplace and asked to have him fired.

Still others refuse to believe that the harassment is real: After I shared examples of harassment, some people tried to convince me that a guys person sent the message to stir white intra-Asian infighting. This could be a very long con — but it have unlikely. Officially man the harassment often leads nowhere, leading many women to stay silent. Asians are not a monolith; we will dating asian on particular opinions or pieces of work.

But empathy and thoughtful conversation must be the goal, and the entire Asian community must work together to end the misogynist harassment that prevents it. It is , in this way, a family matter: We have to support man other. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. The Profile. Sign Out.

Exploring the sexual preference some people have for Asian women, and Asian women alone.

Far-right, white nationalist movement

The alt-right, an abbreviation of alternative right, is a loosely connected far-rightwhite nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the early s before establishing a presence in other countries and declining after The term is ill-defined, having been used in different ways by alt-right members, media commentators, and academics.

In , the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Rightwebzine. His "alternative right" was influenced by earlier forms of American white nationalism, as well as paleoconservatism, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Nouvelle Droite. His term was shortened to "alt-right" and popularised by far-right participants of /pol/, the politics board of web forum 4chan. It came to be associated with other white nationalist websites and groups, including Andrew Anglin's Daily Stormer, Brad Griffin's Occidental Dissent, and Matthew Heimbach's Traditionalist Worker Party. Following the Gamergate controversy, the alt-right made increasing use of trolling and online harassment to raise its profile. In , it attracted broader attention—particularly through coverage on Steve Bannon's Breitbart News—due to alt-right support for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Upon being elected, Trump disavowed the movement. Attempting to move from a web-based to a street-based movement, Spencer and other alt-rightists organized the August Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to violent clashes with counter-demonstators. The fallout from the rally resulted in a decline of the alt-right.

The alt-right movement espouses a pseudo-scientific form of racism which promotes a form of identity politics in favor of European Americans and white people internationally, to the disfavor of all other groups. Anti-egalitarian, it rejects the liberal democratic basis of U.S. governance and opposes both the conservative and liberal wings of the country's political mainstream. Many of its members seek to replace the U.S. with a white separatistethno-state. Some alt-rightists seek to make white nationalism socially respectable while others, known as the "" scene, adopt openly white supremacist and neo-Nazi stances to shock and provoke. Some alt-rightists are antisemitic, promoting a conspiracy theory that there is a Jewish plot to bring about white genocide, although other alt-rightists view most Jews as members of the white race. Anti-feminist, the alt-right intersects with the men's rights movement and online manosphere. The alt-right distinguished itself from earlier forms of white nationalism through its largely online presence and its heavy use of irony and humor, particularly through the promotion of Internet memes like Pepe the Frog. Individuals aligned with many of the alt-right's ideas but not its white nationalism have been termed "alt-lite".

The alt-right's membership is overwhelmingly white and male, attracted to the movement by deteriorating living standards and prospects, anxieties about the social role of white masculinity, and anger at leftist and non-white forms of identity politics such as Black Lives Matter. Alt-right material has contributed to the radicalization of men responsible for various murders and terrorist attacks in the U.S. since Critics charge that the term "alt-right" is merely a rebranding of white supremacism.^[1][2]

Definition

The term "alt-right" is an abbreviation of "alternative right". A distinct far-right movement arising in the s, it both drew on older far-right ideas and displayed novelties. Efforts to define the alt-right have been complicated by the contradictory ways in which self-described "alt-rightists" have defined the movement and by the tendency among some of its political opponents to apply the term "alt-right" liberally to a broad range of right-wing groups and viewpoints.^[5] As the alt-right rose to wider awareness around , media sources struggled to understand it;^[6] some commentators applied the term as a catch-all for anyone they deemed far-right. The scholars Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall, and Simon Murdoch noted that in the "press and broadcast media", the term had been "used to describe everything from hardcore nazis and Holocaust deniers through to mainstream Republicans in the US and right-wing populists in Europe". Because the term "alt-right" was coined by white nationalists themselves rather than by academic observers or by their opponents, various journalists avoided it.^[10] George Hawley, a political scientist specializing in the U.S. far-right, disagreed with this approach, noting that using terms like "white supremacist" in place of "alt-right" conceals the way that alt-right differed from other far-right movements.

Hermansson et al defined the alt-right as "a far right, anti-globalist grouping" that operated "primarily online though with offline outlets". They noted that its "core belief is that 'white identity' is under attack from pro-multicultural and liberal elites and so called 'social justice warriors' (SJWs) who allegedly use 'political correctness' to undermine Western civilisation and the rights of white males". The anti-fascist researcher Matthew N. Lyons defined the alt-right as "a loosely organized far-right movement that shares a contempt for both liberal multiculturalism and mainstream conservatism; a belief that some people are inherently superior to others; a strong Internet presence and embrace of specific elements of online culture; and a self-presentation as being new, hip, and irreverent".

In the Columbia Journalism Review, the journalist Chava Gourarie labelled it a "rag-tag coalition" operating as a "diffuse online subculture" that had "an inclination for vicious online trolling, with some roots in fringe-right ideologies".^[6] The academic Tom Pollard referred to the alt-right as a "socio/political movement" comprising "a loose amalgam of rightist groups and causes" who "shun egalitarianism, socialism, feminism, miscegenation, multiculturalism, free trade, globalization, and all forms of gun control". The journalist Mike Wendling termed it "an incredibly loose set of ideologies held together by what they oppose: feminism, Islam, the Black Lives Matter movement, political correctness, a fuzzy idea they call 'globalism,' and establishment politics of both the left and the right".

The Southern Poverty Law Center defined the alt-right as "a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that 'white identity' is under attack by multicultural forces using 'political correctness' and 'social justice' to undermine white people and 'their' civilization".^[18] The Anti-Defamation League states that "alt-right" is a "vague term actually encompass[ing] a range of people on the extreme right who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy".^[19]

History

Influences

The alt-right had various ideological forebears. The idea of white supremacy had been dominant across U.S. political discourse throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. After World War II, it was increasingly repudiated and relegated to the far-right of the country's political spectrum. Far-right groups retaining such ideas—such as George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party and William Luther Pierce's National Alliance—remained marginal. By the s, white supremacism was largely confined to neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) groups, although its ideologues wanted to return it to the mainstream. That decade, several white supremacists reformulated their ideas as white nationalism, through which they presented themselves not as seeking to dominate non-white racial groups but rather as lobbying for the interests of European Americans in a similar way to how civil rights groups lobbied for the rights of African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Although white nationalists often distanced themselves from white supremacism, white supremacist sentiment remained prevalent in white nationalist writings.

The American white nationalist ideologue Jared Taylorbecame a revered figure among the alt-right, and the events organized by his American Renaissance group were attended by many alt-right members.

American white nationalists believed that the United States had been created as a nation explicitly for white people of European descent and that it should remain that way. Many called for the formation of an explicitly white ethno-state. Seeking to distance themselves from the violent, skinhead image of neo-Nazi and KKK groups, several white nationalist ideologues—namely Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, and Kevin B. MacDonald—sought to cultivate an image of respectability and intellectualism through which to promote their views. Hawley later termed their ideology "highbrow white nationalism", and noted its particular influence on the alt-right. Taylor, for instance, became a revered figure in alt-right circles.

Under the Republicanpresidency of George W. Bush in the s, the white nationalist movement focused largely on criticizing conservatives rather than liberals, accusing them of betraying white Americans. In that period they drew increasingly on the conspiracy theories that had been generated by the Patriot movement since the s; online, the white nationalist and Patriot movements increasingly converged. Following the election of Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama to the presidency in —making him the first black president of the country—the world-views of various right-wing movements, including white supremacists, Patriots, and Tea Partiers, increasingly began to coalesce, in part due to a shared racial animus against Obama.

The alt-right drew upon several older currents of right-wing thought. One was the Nouvelle Droite, a far-right movement that originated in s France before spreading elsewhere in Europe.^[31][32][33] Many alt-rightists adopted the Nouvelle Droite's views on pursuing long-term cultural change through "metapolitical" strategies;^[34] it thereby shares similarities with European identitarianism, which also draws upon the Nouvelle Droite. The alt-right also exhibited similarities with the paleoconservative movement which emerged in the U.S. during the s. Both opposed neoconservatism and expressed similar positions on restricting immigration and supporting an openly nationalistic foreign policy, although unlike the alt-right, the paleoconservatives were typically closely aligned to Christianity and wanted to reform the conservative movement rather than destroy it.^[37][38] Certain paleoconservatives, such as Samuel T. Francis, became especially close to white nationalism.

There were also links between the American right-libertarian movement and the alt-right, despite libertarianism's general repudiation of identity politics. Many senior alt-rightists previously considered themselves libertarians, and right-libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard has been cited as a particular link between the two movements due to his staunch anti-egalitarianism and support for ideas about differing IQ levels among racial groups.^[43] Also cited in connection with the alt-right was the Dark Enlightenment, or neo-reactionary movement, which emerged online in the s, pursuing an anti-egalitarian message. This movement intersected with the alt-right; many individuals identified with both movements. The Dark Enlightenment however was not white nationalist, deeming the latter insufficiently elitist.

According to Dean, in the s, there were "alt-right" Usenet groups that consisted of fringe libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and fans of American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, who advocated for the abolition of the state in favor of private property and markets.^[48]

– Origins

According to Hawley, the alt-right began in In November that year, the paleoconservative ideologue and academic Paul Gottfried gave a talk at his H. L. Mencken Club in Baltimore. Although the talk was titled "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right", it did not contain the phrase "alternative right" itself. Gottfried observed that, as the paleoconservative movement declined, a new cohort of young right-wingers were rising to take its place in challenging the neoconservative ideology then dominant in the Republican Party and broader U.S. conservative movement.^[51]

One of those endorsing Gottfried's idea was fellow paleoconservative Richard B. Spencer. Born in to a wealthy family and raised in Dallas, Texas,^[54] in Spencer had dropped out of his PhD programme at Duke University to take up a position at The American Conservative magazine.^[56] Spencer claimed he coined the term "alternative right" for the lecture's title, although Gottfried maintained that they were its joint creators. As "alternative right" became associated increasingly with white nationalism in subsequent years, Gottfried distanced himself from it.

After The American Conservative fired Spencer, in he became managing director of Taki Theodoracopulos's right-wing website Taki's Magazine.^[60] The website initially contained contributions largely from paleoconservatives and right-libertarians, but under Spencer also gave space to white nationalists like Taylor. In , Spencer used the term "alternative right" in the title of an article by white nationalist Kevin DeAnna. By , Spencer had moved fully from paleoconservatism to white nationalism, although various later press sources instead called him a white supremacist.^[63][64][65] Leaving Taki's Magazine, in March Spencer launched The Alternative Rightwebzine.^[67] Early issues featured articles by white nationalists like Taylor and MacDonald as well as the HeathenStephen McNallen. Spencer noted that "if you look at the initial articles for www.chevaliercompetences.fr, that was the first stage of the Alt-Right really coming into its own".

www.chevaliercompetences.fr consisted primarily of short essays, covering a range of political and cultural issues. Many of these reflected the influence of the French Nouvelle Droite, although this declined as the alt-right grew. Spencer later stated that he wanted to create a movement distinct from the white power image of neo-Nazi and KKK groups, noting that their approach to white nationalism was "a total nonstarter. No one outside a hardcore coterie would identify with it". In , Spencer became the head of the white nationalist National Policy Institute and launched the Radix Journal to promote his views; in , he stepped down from the AlternativeRight website and took it offline in December By that year, Spencer was expressing ambivalence about the "alternative right" label; he preferred to be called an "identitarian".^[54]

– Rise and peak in popularity

Mainstream emergence

On the Internet, Spencer's term "alternative right" was adopted and abbreviated to "alt-right". According to Slate magazine, the abbreviation "retains the former phrase's associations—the mix of alienation and optimism embedded in the act of proudly affirming an 'alternative' direction—but compacts them into a snappier package".^[51] The "alt-right" tag was created with public relations in mind, allowing white nationalists to soften their image and helping to draw in recruits from conservatism. Many white nationalists gravitated to the term to escape the negative connotations of the term "white nationalism". Spencer thought that by this point, the "Alt-Right" had become "the banner of white identity politics".

The Daily Stormeris named for the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, known for its antisemitic caricatures. This billboard for Der Stürmerreads "With Der Stürmeragainst Judea. The Jews are our misfortune".

The term gained wider usage on websites like 4chan and Reddit, growing in popularity in Although there had previously been a strong left-libertarian contingent to these online spaces, there was a gradual rightward turn in chan culture centred on 4chan's politics board, /pol/, during the early-mid s. According to Hawley, the alt-right was "an outgrowth of Internet troll culture", with Hermansson et al observing that "Online Antagonistic Communities" were key to the formation of the alt-right as a distinct movement.

The alt-right's emergence was marked by the online Gamergate controversy of , in which some gamers harassed those promoting feminism within the gaming scene.^[83] According to the journalist David Niewert, Gamergate "heralded the rise of the alt-right and provided an early sketch of its primary features: an Internet presence beset by digital trolls, unbridled conspiracism, angry-white-male-identity victimization culture, and, ultimately, open racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and sexual and gender paranoia". Gamergate politicized many young people, especially males, in opposition to the perceived culture war being waged by leftists. Through their shared opposition to political correctness, feminism, and multiculturalism, chan culture built a link to the alt-right. By , the alt-right had gained significant momentum as an online movement.

Notable promoters of the alt-right included Spencer,^[88]Vox Day,^[89] and Brittany Pettibone.^[90] Earlier white nationalist thinkers were also characterized as alt-right thinkers, among them Taylor,^[91] and MacDonald.^[12] Other prominent alt-rightists included Brad Griffin, a member of the neo-ConfederateLeague of the South who founded the Occidental Dissent blog, Matthew Heimbach, who established the Traditionalist Youth Network in , and Andrew Anglin, who launched the Daily Stormer website—named after the Der Stürmer newspaper active in Nazi Germany—in By , Anglin called the Daily Stormer "the world's most visited alt-right website". While some of the websites associated with the alt-right—like The Daily Stormer and the Traditionalist Youth Network—adopted neo-Nazi approaches, others, such as Occidental Dissent, The Unz Review, Vox Popoli, and Chateau Heartiste, adopted a less extreme form of white nationalism.

Breitbart News and the alt-lite

Far more widely visited than these alt-right websites was Breitbart News, which between and received over 10 million unique visitors a month.^[97] Launched by the conservative Andrew Breitbart in , it came under the control of Steve Bannon in A right-wing nationalist and populist, Bannon was hostile to mainstream conservatism. Although much of Breitbart's coverage fed into racially charged narratives, it did not promote white nationalism, differing from the mainstream conservative press more in tone than in content. Alt-rightists termed Breitbart "alt-lite";^[97] this term appeared in the alt-right's language in mid, used pejoratively for rightists who shared their contempt for mainstream conservatism but not their white nationalism.

Breitbart News amplified and popularised alt-right ideas under the editorship of "alt-lite" figure Steve Bannon (left); its articles by Milo Yiannopoulos (right) were particularly influential.

In July , Bannon claimed that Breitbart had become "the platform for the alt-right";^[][] he may have been referring not to the website's official content but to its comments section—which is lightly moderated and contains more extreme views than those of Breitbart itself. Several political scientists rejected the characterization of Breitbart as alt-right,^[] although press sources repeatedly described it as such,^[][][] and the journalist Mike Wendling termed Breitbart "the chief popular media amplifier of alt-right ideas".

In March , the writers Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos published an article in Breitbart discussing the alt-right. They downplayed its most extreme elements and championed its counter-cultural value. Bokhari and Yiannopoulos' piece was subsequently widely cited in the mainstream press, with Hawley describing it as "the most sympathetic portrayal of the movement to appear in a major media venue to date". Many alt-rightists responded negatively to Bokhari and Yiannopoulos' article; The Daily Stormer referred to it as "the Product of a Degenerate Homosexual and an Ethnic Mongrel".

Many press sources subsequently termed Yiannopoulos "alt-right".^[][] This was rejected both by Hawley, and by alt-rightists; on Occidental Dissent, Griffin asked: "What the hell does Milo Yiannopoulos—a Jewish homosexual who boasts about carrying on interracial relationships with black men—have to do with us?" Other observers instead labeled Yiannopoulos "alt-light" or "alt-lite", a term also applied to rightists like Mike Cernovich and Gavin McInnes. McInnes clarified his understanding of the difference between the alt-right and alt-lite by explaining that while the former focused on the white race, the latter welcomed individuals of any racial background who shared its belief in the superiority of Western culture.

Donald Trump presidential campaign and election

The alt-right largely rallied behind the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, although he distanced himself from the movement.

In June , billionaire businessman Donald Trump announced plans to campaign to become the Republican nominee for the presidential election, attracting the interest of alt-rightists as well as from white nationalists more broadly, neo-Nazis, KKK groups, and the Patriot movement. Vocal in their support for Trump's campaign,^[][][][] this cause energized the alt-right and gave them the opportunity for a broader audience. Niewert observed that "Trump was the gateway drug for the alt-right", with many individuals learning of the movement through their interest in Trump.

Ideologically, the alt-right remained "far to Trump's right", and Trump himself had little understanding of the movement. Many alt-rightists recognized that Trump did not share their white nationalism and would not bring about all the changes they desired; they nevertheless approved of his hard attitude to immigration, his calls for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., and for a wall to be built along the border with Mexico to curtail illegal immigration. They were grateful that he had shifted the national conversation rightward, and that he had shown that it was possible to challenge the mainstream conservative movement from the right. Griffin called on alt-rightists to "join the Trump campaign to take down the hated cuckservative establishment".^{[note 2]} A small minority of alt-rightists were against supporting Trump; The Right Stuff contributor "AuschwitzSoccer Ref" complained that two of Trump's children had married Jews.

A keen Twitter user, in November Trump retweeted a graphic about African-American crime statistics which included the white nationalist hashtag "#WhiteGenocide".^[] The alt-righter RamZPaul rejoiced, retweeting Trump's piece with the comment: "Trump watches and is influenced by the Alt Right". Over coming months, Trump retweeted a second tweet that had "#WhiteGenocide" as a hashtag as well as sharing other tweets issued by white supremacists.^[] The alt-right saw this as further evidence that Trump was their champion.

Hillary Clinton's August speech denouncing the alt-right helped bring the movement to mainstream attention

In August , Trump appointed Bannon to lead his election campaign.^[][] This was swiftly condemned in a Reno, Nevada speech given by the Democratic Party's nominee for the presidency, Hillary Clinton. She highlighted Bannon's claim that Breitbart was "the platform for the alt-right",^[] describing the movement as "an emerging racist ideology" and warning that "a fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party".^[][][] Attacking the alt-right as "racist ideas[] anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women ideas", she accused Trump of taking them "mainstream".^[] Clinton said that while half of Trump's supporters were decent individuals "desperate for change", the other half represented a "basket of deplorables".

After Clinton's speech, traffic to alt-right websites rose and the mainstream media gave it increasing coverage;^[] Spencer and other alt-rightists were pleased, believing her speech gave them greater publicity and helped legitimize them in the public eye.^[] Many Trump supporters adopted the moniker of "deplorables", and the term was widely used on memes that the alt-right promoted online. In September, Spencer, Taylor, and Peter Brimelow held a press conference in Washington DC to explain their goals.^[][]

When Trump won the election in November, the alt-right's response was generally triumphalist and self-congratulatory. Anglin stated: "Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn't have been possible"; Spencer tweeted that "The Alt-Right has been declared the winner We're the establishment now".^[] Alt-rightists were generally supportive of Trump's decision to appoint Bannon his chief strategist,^[] and Jeff Sessions his attorney general.^[] While aware that Trump would not pursue a white nationalist agenda, the alt-right hoped to pull him further to the right, taking hardline positions that made him look more moderate, and thus shifting mainstream discourse rightward.

After Trump's election

Wendling suggested that Trump's election signaled "the beginning of the end" for the alt-right, with the movement's growth stalling from that point. Celebrating Trump's victory, Spencer held a November meeting in Washington D.C. in which he stated that he thought that he had "a psychic connection, a deeper connection with Donald Trump, in a way we simply do not have with most Republicans". He ended the conference by declaring "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!", to which various attendees responded with Nazi salutes and chanting. This attracted significant press attention. When questioned on the incident, Spencer stated that the salutes were given "in a spirit of irony and exuberance".^[][]

Later that month, Trump was asked about the alt-right in an interview with The New York Times. He responded: "I don't want to energize the group, and I disavow the group".^[] This rejection angered many alt-rightists.^[] In April , many alt-rightists criticized Trump's order to launch the Shayrat missile strike against Syrian military targets; like many of those who had supported him, they believed he was going back on his promise of a more non-interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East.^[][][][]

Hawley noted that the alt-right's influence on the Trump administration was "negligible". However, press sources alleged that several appointments within the Trump administration were linked to the alt-right, including Senior Advisor to the President Stephen Miller,^[] National Security Advisor Michael Flynn,^[] Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka,^[] Special Assistant to the President Julia Hahn,^[] and speechwriter Darren Beattie.^[] After Trump's election, the alt-right also supported the unsuccessful campaigns of several other Republicans, including Roy Moore.^[] Some Republican candidates who were alleged to have alt-right links also ran for office, among them Paul Nehlen,^[]Corey Stewart,^[][]Josh Mandel, and Joe Arpaio.^[][]

In , Twitter began closing alt-right accounts it regarded as engaging in abuse or harassment; among those closed were the accounts of Spencer and his NPI.^[] In February , Reddit then closed down the "r/altright" subreddit after its participants were found to have breached its policy prohibiting doxing.^[][]Facebook followed by shutting down Spencer's pages on its platform in April ^[] In January , Spencer launched a new website, www.chevaliercompetences.fr, which combined the efforts of the Arktos publishing company and the Red Ice video and radio network.^[]

Unite the Right rally and its aftermath

Further information: Charlottesville car attack

A participant at the Unite the Right rally gave a Nazi salute and was subsequently assaulted by counter-protesters.

In August , the Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, bringing together alt-rightists with members of other far-right movements. Many alt-rightists thought that the rally would mark a turning point in the transformation of their movement from an online phenomenon into a street-based one. At www.chevaliercompetences.fr, editor Vincent Law for instance predicted before the event took place that "People will talk about Charlottesville as a turning point".^[] However, the event and its aftermath proved demoralizing for many in the movement.

Various violent acts took place at the rally. An African-American man, DeAndre Harris, was assaulted by demonstrators, while Richard W. Preston, an Imperial Wizard for the Maryland-based Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, fired a gun towards counter-protesters.^[][] One participant in the rally, a year-old from Ohio named James Alex Fields Jr., rammed his car into counter-protesters, killing year old Heather D. Heyer and injuring 35 others.^[][][] Although Spencer condemned the killing, other alt-rightists celebrated it. Fields was arrested and later sentenced to life in prison.^[][] The car ramming incident brought much negative publicity to the event and its participants, earning the alt-right a reputation for violence.

Various commentators and politicians, including Sessions, labelled Fields' ramming attack "domestic terrorism".^[][][] Trump claimed that there were "some very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville protests, stating that what he called the "alt-left" bore some responsibility for the violence. Spencer stated that he was "really proud" of the president for those comments. Amid criticism of his comments, Trump added his view that "racism is evil" and that "those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs".^[]

Various alt-rightists who attended the rally experienced personal and legal repercussions for their involvement; one attendee, the U.S. Marine Vasillios Pistolis, was for instance court-martialled.^[] Internet service providers and social media websites subsequently terminated many alt-right accounts and sites. Prominent figures like Spencer became reticent about organizing further public protests. He experimented with the use of flash demonstrations, returning to Charlottesville with a much smaller group for an unannounced protest in October. Unite the Right exacerbated tensions between the alt-right and the alt-lite; Breitbart distanced itself from the alt-right, as did Yiannopoulos, who insisted he had "nothing in common" with Spencer.

–present: Decline

The alt-right significantly declined in and This has happened for multiple reasons, including the backlash of the Unite the Right rally, the fracturing of the movement, more effective banishment of hate speech and harassment from major social media websites and widespread opposition by the American population.^[] In , Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center described it as "imploding", while Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League stated that the alt-right was in "a downward spiral, but it doesn't mean they're going to disappear".^[] That year, Heimbach was arrested for the battery of his wife and father-in-law, resulting in the dissolution of his Traditionalist Workers Party,^[][] while Anglin went into hiding to avoid a harassment lawsuit, and Spencer canceled his speaking tour.^[] Writing for The Guardian, Jason Wilson stated that "the alt-right looks like it is crumbling".^[]

There has been widespread concern that as the chance of a large-scale political movement dies out, that lone-wolf terrorist attacks from members will become common.^[] In , terrorist attacks and violence affiliated with the alt-right and white supremacy were the leading cause of extremist violence in the United States.^[][] Zack Beauchamp of Vox suggested that "other, more nakedly violent far-right movements have risen in its wake".^[] Several alt-right candidates ran as Republican candidates in the elections. The neo-Nazi and Holocaust denierArthur Jones ran for an Illinois congressional seat, the white supremacist Paul Nehlen for the Wisconsin seat of Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House,^[] and the neo-Nazi Patrick Little for the United States Senate election in California, ^[][] "Dissident right" is a term used by some groups within the alt-right to make white nationalism appear more mainstream or fun.^[][] During October and November , Turning Point USA's "Culture War" college tour was frequently targeted by the dissident right, led by Nick Fuentes, who consider some groups to be not sufficiently conservative on issues of race and ethnicity, immigration, and LGBTQ rights.^[]

Beliefs

The alt-right is situated on the far-right of the left-right political spectrum. It has no unifying manifesto and those who describe themselves as "alt-rightists" express varying views about what they want to achieve. There are nevertheless recurring attitudes within the movement. The alt-right's views are profoundly anti-egalitarian. It rejects many of the basic premises of the Age of Enlightenment and classical liberalism, including the liberal democracy which underpins the U.S. political system.^[] For this reason, Hawley thought that "the Alt-Right seems like a poor fit for the United States, where both the left and right have roots in classical liberalism and the Enlightenment;" similarly, the academic Thomas J. Main stated that the alt-right sought "a root-and-branch rejection of American political principles".^[]

The key division within the alt-right is between those who embrace explicitly neo-Nazi and white supremacist stances, and those white nationalists who present a more moderate image. Wendling suggested that this was "a distinction lacking a hugely significant difference". The white supremacist and neo-Nazi alt-rightists are sometimes termed "s", a combination of the white supremacist fourteen words slogan with 88, a coded reference to "HH", or "Heil Hitler". These neo-Nazi elements represent a minority within the alt-right. Many on the less extreme end of the movement are critical of them, believing that they "go too far" or generate bad publicity for it. Some of the latter mock the neo-Nazi and explicitly white supremacist elements as "Stormfags", a reference to the white supremacist website Stormfront.

White nationalism

The alt-right is a white nationalist movement and is fundamentally concerned with white identity.^[2] It views all political issues through the framework of race. Spencer described the alt-right as "identity politics for white Americans and for Europeans around the world",^[] while the alt-rightist Greg Johnson of CounterCurrents Publishing stated that "The Alternative Right means White Nationalism".^[] Not all alt-rightists actively embrace the term "white nationalist"; Spencer is among those who prefer to call themselves "identitarians". Main described the alt-right as promoting "white racialism",^[] while Hawley commented that the alt-right is, "at its core, a racist movement"; similarly, the historian David Atkinson stated that the alt-right was "a racist movement steeped in white supremacist ideas". Attitudes to non-white people vary within the alt-right, from those who desire tighter restrictions on non-white immigration into the U.S. to those who call for a violent ethnic cleansing of the country.

Rejecting the idea that race is a socio-cultural construct, the alt-right promotes scientific racism, claiming that racial categories demarcate biologically distinct groups. They call this belief "race realism". A recurring tendency among alt-rightists is to rank these races on a hierarchy according to perceived IQ: this hierarchy has Asians and Ashkenazi Jews at the top, followed by non-Jewish whites, then Arabs, and finally black Africans. Several prominent alt-rightists, including Anglin and Spencer, have been romantically involved with women of Asian heritage.^[] Unlike earlier racist worldviews, such as those of the interwarfascists, the alt-right emphasizes the idea of racial difference above that of racial superiority, leaving the latter either implicit or secondary in its discourse. Most alt-rightists reject the label of "white supremacist".

Having analyzed alt-right posts online, the political scientists Joe Phillips and Joseph Yi noted that a pervasive underlying theme was the belief that white people were victims and that white Americans had been disadvantaged by government policies such as affirmative action for non-white groups, assistance to illegal immigrants, and the perceived denigration of "white history" like Christopher Columbus and the Confederate States of America. Alt-right online discourse also expressed much anger at the idea of white privilege, widely promoted by the American Left in the s, with members citing job insecurity, under employment or unemployment, and growing mortality rates among whites as evidence that they do not lead privileged lives. Alt-rightists wish to see an end to measures they believe disadvantage white Americans, including affirmative action, toleration of illegal immigration, and the public removal of symbols of "white history", such as statues of Columbus.

Many alt-rightists have expressed the desire to push white nationalist ideas into the Overton window—the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The alt-right has served as a bridge between white nationalism and traditional conservatism and as a tool used by white nationalists to push their rhetoric into the mainstream.^[] On Twitter, alt-rightists for instance combined their white nationalist hashtags with others used by Trump supporters more broadly, notably #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, so as to spread their message across the broader political right.

White separatism and ethno-states

The alt-right is typically white separatist, with its members desiring autonomy in their own white communities. Some envision breaking up the United States into multiple states, each inhabited by a different ethnic or racial group, one or more of which would represent white ethno-states. Writing in the Pacific Standard, journalist Jared Keller commented that this desire for an independent ethno-state was similar to anarcho-fascist ideas promoted by the British National Anarchist Movement.^[] Spencer compared his campaign for a white ethno-state with the early days of Zionism, which began in the 19th century with calls for the formation of a Jewish ethno-state and resulted in the formation of Israel in the midth century.

Many alt-rightists are unclear as to how a white ethno-state would emerge, but are content instead to promote the idea. Spencer commented "I don't know how we're going to get there, because the thing is, history will decide that for us You have to wait for a revolutionary opportunity to present itself, and history will present that opportunity". He suggested that it could be achieved through "peaceful ethnic cleansing", with non-whites given financial incentives to leave. The prominent alt-rightist Greg Johnson suggested that it would come about after white nationalists became the dominant force in U.S. politics, at which point they would deport all illegal migrants before encouraging all other people of color to emigrate.

Other alt-rightists are critical of the idea of breaking up the U.S. into ethno-states, arguing that this would mean destroying the country that their Euro-American ancestors built. They instead argue for restrictive immigration policies to ensure that the U.S. retains its white majority. Some alt-rightists promote a pan-white empire spanning Europe and North America. Spencer noted that wanted his white ethno-state in North America to eventually form part of "a global empire" that could provide "a homeland for all white people", expanding its territory into the Middle East by conquering Istanbul, which in his words was "such a profoundly symbolic city. Retaking it, that would be a statement to the world".

Antisemitism and the white genocide conspiracy theory

Some elements of the alt-right are antisemitic but others are tolerant of Jews.^[5] Many in the alt-right believe that there is a Jewish conspiracy within the United States to achieve "white genocide", the elimination of white people as a racial group and their replacement with non-whites. They believe that a Jewish cabal controls the U.S. government, media, and universities, and is pursuing its aim of white genocide by spreading anti-white tropes and encouraging African-American civil rights groups. As evidence for this supposed white genocide, these far-right figures point to the depiction of inter-racial couples or mixed-race children on television and the publication of articles discouraging women from having children early in life. They also cite apparent instances of white self-hatred, including Rachel Dolezal, an American woman of European descent who identifies as black.

This antisemitic conspiracy theory is not new to the alt-right, but has recurred among far-right groups in Western countries since the 19th century; it was the reason for the Holocaust and various anti-Semitic pogroms in European history. Andrew Anglin, one of the most prominent alt-right ideologues and a member of its neo-Nazi wing, stated "the core concept of the movement, upon which all else is based, is that Whites are undergoing an extermination, via mass immigration into White countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of White self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda". Anglin stated that in the alt-right, "Many people also believe that the Jews should be exterminated".^[][] Other alt-rightists, like Spencer, welcome the involvement of Jews within their movement.

Opposition to neoconservatism and political correctness

The alt-right sought to hasten the downfall of U.S. conservatism, and conservatives were often the main target of alt-right wrath. The prominent alt-right ideologue Brad Griffin stated "Alt Right is presenting itself as a sleek new challenger to mainstream conservatism and libertarianism Alt Right was designed to appeal to a younger audience who reject the Left, but who don't fit in on the stuffy or banal Right either". The alt-right places little emphasis on economic issues. Unlike mainstream U.S. conservatives, alt-rightists do not tend to favor laissez-faire economics, and most appear to support President Trump's protectionist economic measures.^[]

The alt-right also rejects what it regards as the left-wing dominance of modern Western society. Phillips and Yi noted that alongside "white identity politics", the alt-right promotes "a message of expressive transgression against left-wing orthodoxy ('political correctness')". Political correctness has been characterized as one of the alt-right's "bugbears", and Nicole Hemmer stated on NPR that political correctness is seen by the alt-right as "the greatest threat to their liberty".^[] Alt-rightists often employ the term "Cultural Marxism"—originally coined in reference to a specific form of Marxist thought but popularised among the U.S. right-wing in the s—in reference to a perceived leftist conspiracy to alter society. They apply the term "Cultural Marxism" to a broad range of left movements.

Governance, isolationism and anti-interventionism

The Russian far-right theorist Aleksandr Dugin was popular with the alt-right

Anglin claimed that the goal of the alt-right was to form an authoritarian government.^[][] Writing in The New Yorker, the journalist Andrew Marantz claimed that neo-monarchists were among the alt-right.^[] The alt-right has no specific platform on U.S. foreign policy, although it has been characterized as being non-interventionist,^[] as well as isolationist.^[] Generally, it opposes established Republican Party views on foreign policy issues. Alt-rightists typically opposed President Bush's War on Terror policies, and spoke against the Shayrat missile strike.^[][] The alt-right has no interest in spreading democracy abroad and opposes the United States' close relationship with Israel.

The alt-right often looks favorably on Russian President Vladimir Putin, viewing him as a strong, nationalistic white leader who defends his country from both radical Islam and Western liberalism. Spencer praised Putin's Russia as the "most powerful white power in the world", while prominent alt-rightist Matthew Heimbach called Putin "the leader of the free world". Although during the Cold War the American Right often presented the Soviet Union as the main threat to the U.S., links between the American far-right and Russia grew during the s, when prominent far-right activists like David Duke visited the country; the latter described Russia as being "key to White survival". The far-right Russian political theorist Aleksandr Dugin is also viewed positively by the alt-right.^[] Dugin has written for Spencer's websites, and Spencer's estranged wife, the ethnically Russian Nina Kouprianova, has translated some of Dugin's work into English. Many alt-rightists also regard Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as a heroic figure for standing up to rebel groups in the Syrian Civil War. Heimbach has endorsed a Shi'ite axis between al-Assad's Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, seeing them as allies in the global struggle against Zionism.

Anti-feminism and misogyny

Favoring a more patriarchal society, the alt-right is anti-feminist. Unlike many U.S. conservatives, the alt-right does not argue its anti-feminist position from traditional Christian perspectives, but claims that it is rooted in what it calls "sex realism", arguing that as a result of their biological differences, men and women are suited to different tasks in society. Lyons commented that the alt-right was misogynistic and presented women as irrational and vindictive. Although a minority in the movement, the alt-right has female members who support its anti-feminist stance;^[][][] some prominent alt-right women have experienced harassment and abuse from within the movement.^[][]The Daily Stormer, for instance, banned female contributors and called for reduced female involvement in the white nationalist movement, producing an angry response from various white nationalist women. Within feminist circles, the alt-right's desired future was repeatedly compared to the Republic of Gilead, the fictional dystopia in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale () and its television adaptation.

The alt-right intersects with the manosphere, an online anti-feminist subculture, and the men's rights movement, which believes that men face more oppression in Western society than women. It adopts the movement's view that feminism has undermined and emasculated men, and believes that men should aggressively reassert their masculinity so as not to become "beta males" or "cucks". There has been some clear influence between the two movements; prominent manosphere ideologue RooshV, for instance, attended an NPI conference and quoted anti-Semitic material from white nationalist sources in his articles. Some alt-right figures have distanced themselves from the manosphere and its proponents; Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing was of the view that "the manosphere morally corrupts men" because it does not promote "the resurgence of traditional and biologically based sexual norms".

The alt-right displays far less interest in homosexuality and abortion than the U.S. conservative movement, with alt-rightists taking varying perspectives on these topics. Hawley suggested that the alt-right was more broadly sympathetic to legal abortion access than the conservative movement; many alt-rightists support abortion access because of its disproportionate use by African-American and Hispanic-American women. Some on the alt-right consider homosexuality to be immoral and a threat to the survival of the white race, with alt-right trolls having employed homophobic terminology like "faggot".^[] Others adopt a more tolerant stance and have praised gay white nationalists. This reflects a broader trend among white nationalists to denigrate gay culture while being more tolerant of gay writers and musicians whose views they sympathize with, like James O'Meara and Douglas Pearce.

Religion

The alt-right is broadly secular. Many of its members are atheists, or highly skeptical of organized religion. Some alt-rightists identify as Christians;The Right Stuff, for instance, hosted an alt-right Christian podcast called "The Godcast". There are also individuals in the movement who do not believe in Christian teachings but identify as cultural Christians, admiring the Christian heritage of Western society. Others on the alt-right oppose Christianity entirely, criticizing it for its Jewish roots, for being a universal religion that seeks to cross racial boundaries, and for encouraging what they see as a "slave morality" that they contrast with perceived ancient aristocratic values. Some elements pursue modern Paganism.^[] White evangelical leaders of the Southern Baptist Church have angered the alt-right by expressing support for refugees entering the U.S., calling for measures to help undocumented migrants gain legal status, and urging members not to display the Confederate Battle Flag. Despite this, alt-right hostility to Christianity has waned over time, with many alt-right commentators identifying as Christian while rejecting mainstream Christian politics and most mainstream Christian religious leaders, especially Pope Francis. The Mormon-related hashtag #DezNat – which targets pornography, the LGBTQ community, Mormon apostates and progressives, sometimes violently (see blood atonement) – has also been linked to the alt-right.^[]

Several press sources have linked the alt-right to Islamophobia,^[][] and Wendling stated that alt-rightists view Islam as a fundamental threat to Western society. Hawley expressed the view that "ironically, people on the Alt-Right are less Islamophobic than many mainstream conservatives". He observed that many U.S. conservatives criticized Muslim migration to the United States because they regarded Islam as a threat to liberty; the alt-right has made little use of this argument. For alt-rightists, migration from Islamic-majority countries is undesirable not because the migrants are Muslims, but because most of them are non-white; it is equally opposed to non-white migrants who are Christian or non-religious.

Structure

The academic Timothy J. Main characterized it as an "ideological movement" interested more in spreading its ideas rather than operating as a social movement or political party,^[] while according to Hawley, the alt-right was "a disorganized mob that broadly shares a number of goals and beliefs". The alt-right is not an organized movement, and has no formal institutions or leading elite. It is a predominantly online phenomenon, lacking print newspapers and little radio or television presence. It had no think tanks that influenced government policy and could not command the open allegiance of any major politicians or mainstream pundits. Unlike many counter-cultural movements, it lacked soft power in the form of original bands, songs, films, and other cultural artifacts, of which it produced very few. According to Hawley, it was the movement's success in using the Internet that allowed it "to punch above its weight in the political arena".

The alt-right made use of a large number of blogs, podcasts, forums, and webzines in which it discussed far-right political and cultural ideas. The use of the Internet by the far-right was not pioneered by the alt-right; the white supremacist web forum Stormfront had for instance been active since Where the alt-right differed was in its members willingness to leave far-right websites and engage in trolling on other parts of the Internet, such as the comments sections of major news websites, YouTube, and Twitter. According to Hawley, it was the alt-right's use of trolling which put it "into the national conversation". The movement's online structure had strengths in that it allowed members to say things anonymously online that they would not be willing to say on the street or in another public place. The lack of any formal organization also meant that nobody could be kicked out of the alt-right.

As the alt-right developed, a number of formal, real world events were held, particularly through the National Policy Institute. Members of the alt-right have also attended events organized by an older far-right white nationalist group, American Renaissance. These events have gained a more limited audience than the alt-right's online activities. This may be because operating online allows members of the alt-right to operate anonymously, while to attend events they must often expose themselves to journalists and protesters, thus making it more likely that their views will become publicly known. U.S. alt-rightists have also sought to build links with other far-right and white nationalist groups elsewhere in the world. Heimbach, for instance, addressed meetings of the Golden Dawn in Greece and the National Democratic Party of Germany. Various U.S.-based alt-rightists used social media to encourage support for the Alternative for Germany party in that country's federal election. The scholar Sitara Thobani argued for a convergence between the U.S. alt-right and Hindu nationalism in India.

Tactics

Main argued that a characteristic of the alt-right was its use of vitriolic language, including "race-baiting, coarse ethnic humor, prejudicial stereotyping, vituperative criticism, and the flaunting of extremist symbols".^[] In The New Yorker, the journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted that the alt-right sought to test "the strength of the speech taboos that revolve around conventional politics—of what can be said, and how directly";^[] members often made reference to freedom of speech when calling for their views to be heard in public discourse. Alt-rightists promoted their messages through Twitter hashtags such as "#WhiteGenocide", "#WhiteLivesMatter" and "#StandUpForEurope". A recurrent tactic of alt-rightists is to present themselves—as white men—as victims of oppression and prejudice; this subverts many leftist arguments about other social groupings being victims and is designed to infuriate leftist opponents.

The alt-right also make heavy use of imagery drawn from popular culture for its own purposes. For instance, the American singer Taylor Swift is often held up as an idealized example of "Aryan" beauty. When describing their own conversion to the movement, alt-rightists refer to themselves as having been "getting red pilled", a reference to a scene in the film The Matrix in which Neo, the protagonist, chooses to discover the truth behind reality by consuming a red pill. On alt-right blogs and message boards, members often discuss how they were "red-pilled" originally. Alt-rightists have also adopted milk as a symbol of their views; various members have used the words "Heil Milk" in their online posts while Spencer included an emoji of a glass of milk on his Twitter profile along with the statement that he was "very tolerant lactose tolerant!" The animal studies scholar Vasile Stănescu suggested that this notion drew upon the 19th-century pseudoscientific idea that Northern Europeans had become biologically superior to many other human populations because they consumed high quantities of milk and meat products.

Use of humor and irony

The alt-right makes strong use of humor and irony. As noted by Nagle, the alt-right's use of humor renders it difficult to tell "what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz". By presenting an image which was much less threatening than that of earlier white nationalist groups, the alt-right was able to attract people who would be willing to visit its websites but who would not have considered attending neo-Nazi or KKK events. As noted by Hawley, "whereas older white nationalists came across as bitter, reactionary, and antisocial, much of the Alt-Right comes across as youthful, light-hearted, and jovial—even as it says the most abhorrent things about racial and religious minorities". Members of the alt-right sometimes mocked the earnestness and seriousness of earlier white nationalists such as William Pierce.

Another of the tactics employed online by alt-rightists is to parody their leftist opponents. One American alt-rightist for instance created a Twitter account for a fictional individual whom they described as an "LGBTQ+ pansexual nonbinary POC transwoman" who was a "Journalist for BLM [Black Lives Matter]. Always stayin woke". Alt-rightists also orchestrated pranks, again to cause alarm among opponents. For instance, during the presidential campaign alt-rightists presented claims that they were plotting to send representatives posing as officials to voting booths where they would suppress ethnic minority turnout. There was no such plot, but press sources like Politico presented these claims as fact. This tendency toward trolling rendered it difficult for journalists to learn more about the alt-right because those members they talked to were willing to deceive them for their amusement. Nagle argued that the alt-right had inherited a transgressive style descending from the Marquis de Sade in the 18th century, but that with the alt-right this "the transgressive anti-moral style" reached "its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right".

Use of memes

"Dindu Nuffin" redirects here. For the song, see Dindu Nuffin (song).

The Pepe the Frogmeme, originally created in , was adopted by the alt-right and became a "mascot" for the movement.

The alt-right makes heavy use of memes,^[][] adopting much of its "image- and humor-based culture", including its heavy use of memes, from the online subcultures active at 4chan and later 8chan. These memes are used to try and influence public opinion. The prevalence of such memes in alt-right circles has led some commentators to question whether the alt-right is a serious movement rather than just an alternative way to express traditionally conservative beliefs,^[][] with Chava Gourarie of the Columbia Journalism Review stating that provoking a media reaction to these memes is for some creators an end in itself.^[6]

One of the most commonly used memes within the alt-right is Pepe the Frog.^[][] The Pepe meme was created by artist Matt Furie in and over following years spread through the Internet, being shared by pop stars like Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry. By , Pepe was one of the most popular online memes, used among far-right trolls on 4chan and from there adopted by the alt-right. After Trump tweeted a meme of Pepe as himself, and his son Donald Trump Jr. posted a Pepe meme shortly after, alt-righters and 4channers began spreading the meme with political intent. According to writer Gary Lachman, Pepe became "the unofficial mascot of the alt-right movement". The use of Pepe spawned the satirical worship of the Ancient Egyptian frog-headed deity Kek, as well as satirical nationalism of the nonexistent nation of "Kekistan".^[][] Another alt-right mascot was Moon Man, an unofficial parody of McDonald's s Mac Tonight character.^[][] Alt-rightists posted videos to YouTube in which Moon Man rapped to songs they had composed like "Black Lives Don't Matter" by a text-to-speech synthesizer.

A young man displaying the flag of Kekistanat a pro-Trump rally; the flag is an alt-right symbol.

The alt-right used specific terms for individuals outside the movement. Whites who were not part of the movement were called "normies"; homosexuals and whites who socialized with people of color were "degenerates". An alt-right acronym was "WEIRD", for "Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic people". Mainstream conservatives were denigrated as "cuckservatives", a portmanteau of "cuckold" and "conservative".^[][][] The term "cuckold" pertains to a man with an unfaithful wife; the alt-right saw this as analogous to the role of the U.S. conservative movement in assisting non-whites in the U.S.^{[note 3]} Various terms were used for leftists. Those who expressed progressive views, particularly online, were characterized as "social justice warriors" (SJWs). Individuals who expressed leftist opinions on Tumblr—and who alt-rightists often stereotyped as fat, ugly feminists—were called "Tumblrinas". The term "snowflake", short for "special snowflake", was used as a pejorative for such individuals,^[] and in reference to leftist uses of "trigger warnings", alt-rightists expressed a desire to "trigger" leftists by upsetting them. Leftists who professed victim status while harassing or bullying others were labeled "crybullies", while leftists who were perceived to be stupid were labeled "libtards", a neologism of "liberal" and "retard".

When referring to African-Americans, alt-rightists regularly employed the meme "dindu nuffin"—a bastardization of "didn't do nothing"—in reference to claims of innocence by arrested African-Americans. On this basis, alt-rightists referred to black people as "dindus".^[] Events involving black people were called "chimpouts", rhetorically linking them with chimpanzees. Alt-rightists also used memes to ironically support the Black Egyptian hypothesis, often using stereotypical African-American vernacular such as "We wuz kangz n shieet" ("We was kings and shit").^[] Refugees were often referred to as "rapefugees", a reference to incidents like the –16 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany in which non-white refugees were reported to have sexually assaulted white women. Another meme the alt-right employed was to place triple parentheses around Jewish names; this started at The Right Stuff to highlight the presence of Jewish Americans in the media and academia.^[][] One alt-rightist created a Google Chrome plug in that would highlight Jewish names online.

Alt-rightists often utilized older white nationalist slogans, such as the Fourteen Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children", that "Anti-racist is a code for anti-white", and that "Diversity is a code word for white genocide". From the latter, alt-rightists produced the hashtag reduction "#WhiteGenocide" for use on Twitter, highway billboards, and flyers. Also used was the slogan "It's OK to be white" as a way of expressing a supposed reverse racism towards white people by minorities.^[] The use of "Deus Vult!" and various other crusader iconography was employed to express Islamophobic sentiment.^[][][] Also apparent were "helicopter ride" memes, which endorse documented cases of leftists being dropped from helicopters by Chilean and Argentine juntas. Similarly the term "Right-Wing Death Squad" (usually abbreviated as RWDS) also callbacks to the "helicopter ride" meme and to refer to far-right, fascist death squads.^[][] Additional online features of the alt-right included references to Fashwave, a neo-fascist subgenre of electronic musicmicrogenrevaporwave.^[]

Harassment

Wendling noted that campaigns of abuse for political ends were "a classic alt-right tactic", while Hawley called the alt-right "a subset of the larger Internet troll culture". This trolling both contributed to creating racial discord and generated press attention for the movement. Those most regularly targeted were Jewish journalists, mainstream conservative journalists, and celebrities who publicly criticized Trump. Such harassment was usually spontaneous rather than pre-planned, but in various cases many alt-right trolls piled on once the harassment had begun. After criticizing Trump and the alt-right, the conservative journalist David A. French—who is white—received much abuse referencing his white wife and adopted black daughter. Alt-right trolls sent him images of his daughter in a gas chamber and repeatedly claimed that he liked to watch his wife have sex with "black bucks". As a result of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, the artist Arrington de Dionyso, whose murals are frequently displayed at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, also experienced abuse from the alt-right.^[][] In , a wave of threats began being made to Jewish Community Centers which some press sources attributed to the alt-right.^[] Another Jewish target was the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who was sent messages stating that he and his children "will go to the ovens".^[6]

Not all targets were in the U.S. In what it called "Operation: Filthy Jew Bitch",The Daily Stormer encouraged its followers to send abuse to the British Member of Parliament (MP) Luciana Berger, who is Jewish; images sent to her featured a yellow star on her head, accompanied by the hashtag "Hitlerwasright". One UK-based alt-rightist was convicted for his involvement in the campaign.^[] In another instance, Anglin commented on the June murder of the British MP Jo Cox by a far-right activist by saying that "Jo Cox was evil and she deserved to die. Her death was not a tragedy, it was justice". While celebrating violence, The Daily Stormer is cautious to remain on the legal side of U.S. incitement laws.

Demographics

The alt-right's anonymized and decentralized nature makes it difficult to determine how many individuals are involved in it or the demographic attributes of this membership. The movement's members are concentrated in the United States, but with participants present in other Anglophone countries like Canada, Britain, and Australia, as well as in parts of continental Europe. While acknowledging that the U.S. was "central" to the alt-right, Hermansson et al stressed that it was an "international phenomenon".

Alt-rightists have provided their own opinions on its numbers; in , Anglin thought it had a "cohesive constituency" of between 4 million and 6 million people, while Griffin believed it had a core membership in the hundreds of thousands, with a larger range of sympathizers.^[] Main determined that, between September and February , alt-right websites received a combined average of million unique visitors per month, compared to million unique visitors to broader right-wing sites and million for left-wing sites.^[]

When Pittsburgh-born author Celeste Ng tweeted that she didn’t usually find Asian men attractive because “they remind me of my cousins”, she couldn’t have foreseen that she would be castigated anonymously as “another white-boy-worshipping cunt” and accused of raising the next Elliot Rodger. Ng’s comment may not have been the product of malice, but it fed into a troubling trend. She became the target of an East Asian ethno-nationalist backlash targeted against ‘race traitors’: Asian women whose supposed colonial mentality induced them to partner with white men.

Eleven percent of all interracial marriages in the US are between a white man and an Asian woman, while only four percent are between a white woman and an Asian man. The difference is even more pronounced in online dating. On platforms like Tinder and OkCupid, white men and Asian women easily receive the most matches. In OkCupid found that users of all races were significantly less likely to start conversations with black women and Asian men, showing little change from the statistics published five years prior. Controlling for other factors, a study at Columbia found that an Asian man would have to earn a staggering $, more per year to become as desirable to a white woman as a man of her own race. A Cardiff University study on perceived facial attractiveness found that Asian women were rated the most attractive compared to white and black women, while Asian men placed last.

In the US, it is not uncommon for Tinder profiles of white women to include the two little words ‘no Asians’, dashing the hopes of men who otherwise check every one of their boxes. Meanwhile, Asian women are barraged with messages that often betray an uncomfortable fixation on their race.

I’m thinking of eating dinner alone in France a few years ago, and a man coming up close to shout “konichiwa” at me (I’m not Japanese), or my casual date assuming I want to take selfies with him because I’m Asian (I hate selfies). I wonder how much worse the casual reduction of my person to an implied racial trait can become when a man wants to form an emotional connection with me because he believes I am more pliable, more loyal, more mature. Maybe there’s a certain mystique around me because of what I represent: an exotic culture far from home. Maybe I’m supposed to be nerdy – the kind of girl who’s into maths and anime but not politics and therefore won’t bring up pesky opinions in conflict with his own.

Dozens of widely shared articles bemoan the problematic stereotypes behind ‘yellow fever’, a derogatory term signifying the sexual fetishisation of East Asians. In the Western world, they are always the ‘other’. Just under half of all participants in Harvard’s Implicit Association Test automatically associate European Americans with being American and Asian Americans with being foreign, indicating fertile ground for typecasting. Women share their experiences of being hypersexualised and infantilised because of their small bodies and soft voices, as well as the baggage accompanying a history of colonialism and misogyny. Enter an interpretation of ‘yellow fever’ floated by numerous think pieces: men insecure in their masculinity seek out a woman who can make them feel in control, taking the mental shortcut (consciously or not) toward Asian women.

One widely suggested supporting factor is media influence. Until recently, Asian women have been nearly absent from Western politics and popular culture. A recent USC study showed that Asian-Americans represent only one percent of leading roles in Hollywood, compared to six percent of the population. The few instances in which Asian women did appear reinforced the historical façade of an exotic porcelain doll who offers an experience unattainable with the women back home. Madame Butterfly, one of the first famous Western portrayals of an Asian woman, is a fifteen-year-old geisha who waits for her American lover for years after he’s moved on with a wife from home. She eventually attempts (as in the short story) or commits (as in the opera adaptation) suicide when she learns of his betrayal. Nearly a century later she graces the stage in a more palatable incarnation as Vietnamese bargirl Kim from the hit musical Miss Saigon, now seventeen and still the lovelorn ingénue. Actual women of colour were often pushed out of their own stories. Until , the Hays Code governing major studio films in America banned depictions of interracial romance. Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American Hollywood star, was passed over for the female lead of The Good Earth in favour of a white actress.

It’s hardly a surprise, then, that we focus on alt-right and incel men who are unable to attract the attention of ‘emancipated’ women. Prominent Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin once posted a video featuring his Filipino ‘jailbait girlfriend’, an Internet term referring to a woman who looks young enough that pursuing her would be considered a crime. Despite embracing white supremacy, these men see Asians as a ‘model minority’ – honorary whites worthy of their affections. At the same time, they buy into the submissive yet hypersexual stereotypes dissected above. A number of men undoubtedly fall into this camp, but it does not tell the whole story. Most white men who have a thing for Asian women are not misogynists, fascists, or racists. Most of them may not even crave a power imbalance.

‘Yellow fever’ cannot be examined as a one-sided affair. Critics of the media-based analysis point out that the women who reciprocate problematic advances themselves bear responsibility for their ‘white fever’. In Japan, the term ‘gaijin hunter’ ridicules a woman who intentionally seeks out white men as companions, often with the implication that she is a gold digger pursuing a romantic relationship. Some white men who exclusively date Asian women acknowledge that they do so because Asian women have lower standards for them.

The literature on white-preferring racism in East Asian countries is nowhere near as extensive as that concerning the US or UK. It is so entrenched in society as to go unquestioned; too much a fact of life to merit academic study. Take the case of Sarah Moran, a writer hired as an English teacher in Hong Kong without experience on the condition that she never reveal her mixed heritage. A year later, it comes out that Moran is half Filipina. One of her students pulls out. Wander through shopping malls from Delhi to Tokyo and you will find that the vast majority of ads depict models who are white or conform to white beauty standards: tall, light skin, large round eyes with double eyelids. In former British colonies, where English is the language of elites, Received Pronunciation is a status symbol. Any untrained listener can hear the difference between the speaker who learned their English at boarding school and the one who picked up their fresh-off-the-boat accent from local tutoring centres and YouTube. The ultimate badge of respectability is a degree from the West, ideally Oxbridge or Ivy League. All too often, whiteness confers prestige, and prestige confers desirability.

Although dating is treated as a wholly private choice, it does no good to remain blind to the structural forces at work behind who we find attractive. The naked declaration ‘no Asians’ bears a disquieting resemblance to the ‘WHITES ONLY’ signs ubiquitous on Jim Crow storefronts. Even now, some of libertarian, right-wing, or merely racist persuasions argue that private businesses should be allowed to limit service to whomever they please, ignoring that such permissiveness primarily enables systemic prejudice. A restaurant refusing to serve black people reinforces a structural injustice that permeates every area of life; a white woman (or worse yet, an Asian woman) refusing to date Asian men surely does the same. Doesn’t it?

‘It’s okay to have a type’: a refrain commonly heard in our sex-positive feminist community. But if attraction is a kind of magic, it’s a potion whose main ingredients include subconscious value judgments we are fed from childhood. Recognising this is crucial to confronting the very real legacy of racism that underpins seemingly innocuous dating trends.

Will Tinder one day be urged to implement affirmative action into its rating system? I doubt that such a proposal will ever be taken seriously. We remain fiercely protective of our sexual and romantic choices, which are viewed as amongst the most sacrosanct of the private sphere. Dating preferences don’t change at will and taking responsibility for the ways in which mainstream perceptions fail both Asian men and women, as well as men and women of other minorities, is far from a straightforward task. Not every relationship between an East Asian woman and a white man is toxic. In fact, some studies have found them to be amongst the marriages with the lowest divorce rates and highest educational attainments. Of course, this raises the possibility that the trope of the white guy in tech with an Asian girlfriend is not a point of shame, and that what needs to change is the inferior position which Asian men face in the perceptions of peers of all races.

Asian American writers, activists, and public figures have begun pushing back against damaging notions of Asian attractiveness with a frank and often uncomfortable dialogue that acknowledges troubling biases without succumbing to vitriol. They debate the deleterious effects of applying Western standards of masculinity to Asian men, conventionally fictionalised as effeminate or nerdy in ways incompatible with the character of the romantic hero. They praise Crazy Rich Asians, the first major Hollywood studio film to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in 25 years, for representing a desirable Asian hero while calling out producers for casting a biracial actor to do so. Dialogue alone won’t balance swiping statistics, but it is a step towards reclaiming an identity that has been tainted as much as that of the Asian woman.

Nevertheless, the entrenched prestige of whiteness manifests itself much more explicitly in Asian societies than it does in progressive Western ones, and faces higher barriers in communities less used to confronting social injustice. There are no simple solutions. How do you convince a young mother who’s just trying to get the best education for her daughter that the Chinese-looking Londoner will teach English as well as a white-passing peer? Through this lens, the biggest issue with ‘yellow fever’ may not be incels or neo-Nazis, but the ingrained attitudes of societies which need to find a way to pursue what’s admirable about the West without elevating whiteness itself.∎

Words by Chung Kiu Kwok. Art by Sasha LaCômbe.

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Updated on October 20, , at a.m. ET

Gavin McInnes took a swig of whiskey from a bottle on his talk show’s on-set bar before bringing Lauren Southern onstage. It was June , in Washington, D.C. Southern was only in her early 20s, but she had already emerged as the alt-right’s most influential woman. Her fellow guests were all men: an Army veteran, a Washington think tanker, and a radio shock jock. There was no chair for her. The men rushed to reshuffle. “This is the patriarchy right here,” Southern bantered. “Men get seats at the table.”

McInnes is a founder of Vice magazine and of the Proud Boys, an all-male, neofascist group that promotes violence against its political opponents. Last month, debate moderator Chris Wallace asked President Donald Trump to condemn the Proud Boys and white-supremacist organizations. “Proud Boys—stand back, and stand by,” Trump replied, only semi-ambiguously.

From the November issue: Right-wing militias are bracing for civil war

McInnes watched stonily as Southern joined the men. “Are you ever gonna have kids, give birth, are you going to be a mother?” he asked her. “Then I’ll give them my seat.” The men laughed, and Southern, submitting to the last-minute ministrations of a makeup artist, laughed along—just one of the guys, with long, stick-straight blond hair and an off-the-shoulder, floral-print dress. McInnes wasn’t quite finished yet. “If you’re not making humans, then fucking stand up, bitch.” Southern, who was joining him to talk about her documentary Farmlands, which focuses on the alleged persecution of white farmers in South Africa, gasped in faux horror.

Southern’s reporting for Farmlands had rippled through right-wing media—Trump would order Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” the issue—and McInnes, now finished with his commentary on gender roles, had Southern discuss her revisionist history. In the 19th century, the Zulu people took the land that is now South Africa from another ethnic group, she said, and therefore Blacks are just as responsible for apartheid as whites. When McInnes brought the conversation closer to home, noting that white “self-hatred” is so rampant that he can’t even find South African wine at his local bar, Southern nodded. “The word racist just means nothing to me anymore,” she said. “It’s been so overused, I just have no respect for the term.”

Southern finished on set and ordered an Uber to the airport for her flight home to Toronto. Partway through the ride, her phone rang. It was McInnes. Southern listened to him closely for a few seconds.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this at all,” she said, laughing uncomfortably. Then her face tightened. “See, the thing is, because my moral compass tells me you have a wife and kids, it’s not even in my realm of consideration.” McInnes, according to Southern, had just reiterated an offer he’d made the night before, when she’d been out with him and a group of other far-right friends: “You know you want to fuck me; I’m your childhood hero.”

(When reached for comment, McInnes stated, “As a married man, I have never sexually propositioned Lauren Southern or any other woman.”)

With a grimace, Southern hustled him off the phone. She was speechless for a moment. “Send help,” she said feebly. “Help.”

By the time Southern went on McInnes’s show, I had been following her for nearly a year. I was making a documentary for The Atlantic about the white-nationalist movement, called White Noise. I’d already become accustomed to the accommodations Southern made to stay within a movement whose hatreds are prolific. (Southern denies being a white nationalist.) And I’d already become her confidant of sorts, too—I kept feeling compelled to remind her that I was a reporter. “Hey Daniel, in your honest opinion am I a little crazy?” she texted me once. “Do you think I’m irredeemable and can’t go back to a normal life?”

Read: Four years embedded with the alt-right

I did not know the answer. It wasn’t the first time she’d expressed disenchantment with the alt-right, or at least some parts of it. But it was always hard to know what Southern was really thinking, or how deeply committed she was to anything at all. Her misgivings mostly revolved around the harassment she received from other members of her movement. Signs of empathy for others flickered only intermittently. “You have to keep playing the game until you’re out of it, keep up the charade,” she said the day of the McInnes taping. But it seemed likely that she was trying to play me, as well.

When I first got to know her, Southern was among YouTube’s most effective and sophisticated extremists—an alt-right propagandist who masqueraded as a run-of-the-mill influencer. In one June post titled “Ad Friendly Makeup Tutorial,” she walks viewers through her skin-care routine, as electro-pop plays over cherry-colored graphics. “You want to use a beauty blender … and cover up all of your face’s imperfections,” she says. “All right, we’re looking gorg.” As she applies the finishing touch, red lipstick, her hand drifts from her mouth to her right cheek. “F … U … C … K,” she slowly writes. She switches to the left: “I … S … L … A … M.” She tosses back her blond hair and smiles: “You’ve got this cute, ad-friendly makeup look, it’s super flirty.” Her 7, commenters were thrilled. “Omfg. This girl is on fire!” gushed a faceless avatar. An admirer who went by “Hubert” jumped in: “Trolling level: Elite Grandmaster.”

Southern, I came to learn, was also an adept troll in person. In another YouTube video viewed nearly 3 million times, she pushes to the front of a crowd of sexual-assault survivors and activists in June in downtown Vancouver and lifts a Sharpie-painted placard: “There is no rape culture in the West.” As the marchers protest, Southern screams back, “Go to Africa and you will see a real rape culture!”

Janice Atkinson, a former far-right British member of the European Parliament—which Southern would be invited to address seven months after her appearance on McInnes’s show—told me that the young woman’s tools, among them a quick wit and good looks, made her the best spokesperson for the nationalist cause. “She can sell it better to my sons than I can sell it,” Atkinson said. Richard Spencer, the neofascist writer who coined the term alt-right and is known for, among other things, parsimony in praising his comrades, was also a fan of Southern’s videos. “They’re touching on that hot stuff,” he told me once.

From the June issue: How Richard Spencer became an icon for white supremacists

Southern was born in Surrey, British Columbia, one of Canada’s most racially and ethnically diverse cities. In her private Christian elementary school, many of the students were ethnically Chinese, she told me, though back then she didn’t pay much attention to race. Her father, however, began to feel like an outsider in his community, she said. While Southern called her dad “the least racist person I know,” she said he felt frustrated walking into coffee shops to find that his Asian neighbors wouldn’t address him in English. So when Lauren was in middle school, her father moved the family, which included her mother and her older sister, to Langley, one of greater Vancouver’s whitest towns.

She had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing. One of her Bible-study friends, Kenzo Nishidate, who is half Japanese, described her as both nerdy and popular. She’d go to weekend house parties with the cool girls from volleyball, then show up at school on Monday in a Marvel graphic T-shirt, excited about the latest League of Legends update. Southern never cared much about her education. She spent much of her free time reading the fantasy novels of J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Jordan. “My grades were garbage,” she said. “I was always more interested in whatever book that I had picked up from the library than the one I was assigned in class.” She says she was diagnosed with ADHD, but her parents didn’t want her to go on medication. She planned to join the military after high school.

But then, as she described it, she found a fight worth waging, right at home. One day in her social-justice class, the teacher asked everyone to separate by race and gender, according to Southern: white kids on one side, Black and brown on the other; boys on one side, girls on the other. The teacher turned to the female students of color: “You’re oppressed.” She pointed to the white kids—including Southern—and said two words that changed the course of her life: “You’re privileged.” (Her teacher denies that this ever occurred.)

Southern told me she was incensed. Her paternal grandfather had immigrated to Canada from Scandinavia with little money or knowledge of English. Her maternal grandmother was an orphan. Sure, her parents had raised her in one of Vancouver’s wealthiest suburbs, but they had earned it through “hard work” and “assimilation.” Plus, she was surrounded by “rich Asian kids,” who she believed enjoyed far more privilege than white girls like her. Southern felt scapegoated when the class discussed topics like slavery or the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Canadians.

Around the same time, her father turned her on to right-wing radio on their morning drives to school. She heard the American shock jock Michael Savage say things like Barack Obama was “the most divisive, hateful president in American history. He has isolated and marginalized the white male like never before.” Southern began to read more widely, devouring books by Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand. At night, she watched McInnes on her favorite late-night show, Fox’s Red Eye, where he expressed particular animus toward those who say they are victims of sexual harassment. “If your boss grabs your ass, and it doesn’t hurt, and you don’t like it, quit,” he asserted on one panel, which featured another guest, future National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Southern started to challenge her teachers about feminism, immigration, and Islam. She gave an anti-global-warming presentation. For a class assignment, Southern and a Jewish friend dressed up as Hitler and Mussolini, respectively, and afterward they went over to his house in full dictator regalia. “Good times!” she recalled, laughing about this incident with another childhood friend. Southern found that she loved being a contrarian. She didn’t necessarily believe the things she said or did, she told me, but the power of making her teachers squirm was intoxicating.

Her rise to social-media stardom was meteoric. Trump’s nativist presidential campaign coincided with the explosive expansion of the far-right media ecosystem. The premier outlet at the time, Breitbart News, was run by the future White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and the Canadian media executive Ezra Levant had set out to create an equivalent site in his country. He called it Rebel Media and asked Southern to audition after meeting the young firebrand at an energy conference where she peppered the speakers with questions.

Southern, struggling at college while working as a cocktail waitress at a casino, seized the opportunity. She raced back to her high school, paid a student from A/V class a few hundred dollars, and worked with him to record her first viral hit: “Why I Am Not a Feminist.” Sporting the red lipstick and fake lashes that became her defining aesthetic, Southern asserted, “Despite popular belief, feminism is not, in fact, a synonym for equality.” To her shock, the four-minute video took off, reaching million viewers on YouTube and another 30 million on Facebook.

Southern dropped out of college and relocated to Toronto, where Rebel’s offices were located. Each week, her videos seemed to grow more inflammatory and offensive. She converted her state-registered gender to male as a critique of Canada’s “lax” policy toward gender transition; she traveled to a refugee camp in France to prove that the asylum seekers there were “economic migrants,” not Syrian refugees as the mainstream media reported. Mike Cernovich, a far-right activist and fake-news purveyor whose maxims—Conflict is attention and Attention is influence—form the bedrock of the alt-right philosophy of provocation, told me that Southern’s videos were more extreme than he was used to seeing, even among denizens of his world. Southern will “end up, you know, probably getting killed,” he predicted after she visited a town in England with a large Muslim population to hand out flyers claiming, “Allah is gay.” This particular stunt caused the authorities to ban her from the United Kingdom.

A few weeks after McInnes’s show, in July , I went to visit Southern in Toronto, where she lived in a high-rise in the city’s downtown district. Her spotless one-bedroom condo looked more like a showroom than a home—the walls were bare, except for a YouTube plaque congratulating her on gaining , subscribers.

We were sitting together in her living room, while she scripted a video, when her new boyfriend emerged from the bedroom. George Hutcheson, who was 30 at the time, runs a Canadian group called Students for Western Civilization, which works to “advance the interests of European peoples.” Her most recent boyfriends had also been adherents of far-right ideologies. She had nearly gotten engaged to a prominent conspiracy theorist, and had had an on-again-off-again fling with a Croatian neo-Nazi. “Maybe I’m too picky,” she’d mused before Hutcheson joined us on her IKEA couch. In appearance, Hutcheson is the caricature of the Aryan ideal. His undercut haircut, known in the alt-right as the fashy (short for fascist), and his fit, thick, soldier-like frame give him a Teutonic air. He and Southern decided to go out to dinner, and to let me film them. Hutcheson refuses to eat food originally from nonwhite countries, such as ketchup, whose origins are in China, so the two, facing limited restaurant options, chose the British-style Oxley Public House in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood.

From the December issue: Angela Nagle on the young men of the alt-right

Boisterous diners were enjoying one of summer’s first long evenings on the restaurant’s patio, but Southern and Hutcheson mostly sat in silence, scrolling on their phones. Southern dipped into a red sauce next to Hutcheson’s burger. “That tastes non-European, are you allowed to eat that?” she asked sardonically. “Yeah, tastes non-European,” he confirmed, without a hint of irony.

After a drink, the couple loosened up a bit. Southern told Hutcheson that she dreamed of graduating from short videos to feature-length films. Sure, her direct-to-camera videos offered strong arguments and reached a lot of people, she said, but they were starting to feel derivative. If she could pursue longer narrative projects—brought to life with Hollywood-level soundtracks, sweeping drone shots, and high-resolution cameras—she thought she could tell more powerful stories.

Hutcheson looked uneasy as his girlfriend continued to talk about her career ambitions. “All of us Europeans have the responsibility to reproduce,” he interjected.

Southern looked down at her plate. “That’s a very cold way of putting it,” she responded. “Do you want to have a family for the sake of love or just because it’s a duty thing?”

“Motherhood is to women as war is to men,” her boyfriend replied stolidly. “I want to serve my nation.”

Southern’s eyes glazed over as Hutcheson kept talking. Finally, the waitress arrived with the bill. Hutcheson gestured for Southern to grab it. “Okay, cool. I’ll make it a business expense,” she whispered. Earlier, she’d told me that her boyfriend leaned on her financially. (Hutcheson did not respond to our request for comment.)

In the condo the next day, Southern was subdued. She was feeling burned out, professionally and personally, she told me. Two months before, I’d trailed after her to Moscow, where she’d planned to interview oligarchs, Kremlin sycophants, and other far-right influencers for a documentary she hoped would be a corrective to what she saw as America’s irrational fear of Russia. But to her consternation, she found Putin’s Russia to be alienating. The food was unappealing, the taxi drivers invented rates depending on their mood, and people on the street had little interest in being interviewed. And few of them spoke English. She spent most of her nearly two weeks there in her hotel, drinking lattes and refreshing her Twitter feed.

Back in Toronto, she sounded almost wistful about her past, recalling the days when she and her far-right friends had stayed up all night eating burritos and making videos for Rebel. “I discovered it gets much darker and much scarier when you stay in it long enough,” she said.

Southern had a Phyllis Schlafly problem. Her ostensible allies frequently attacked her as a “tradthot”—an alt-right term for single women who support “traditional” values but don’t live them. (If you look up tradthot in the Urban Dictionary, the first thing you see is a video clip of Southern.) She seemed to sincerely share her movement’s views about the female temperament and women’s rightful roles; at the very least, she was adept at parroting them. She told me that “women biologically hate the stress of work” and that “it sucks being a girl in a feminist world.” “We’ve got an ambition problem as women in politics—we’ve seen so much and experience so much, will we be able to be a housewife?” she said another time. Still, she felt so besieged by the insults directed at her by the alt-right men that she made a response video called “Why I’m Not Married.” She was 22 at the time.

Video: An excerpt from White Noise

While the alt-right’s men were forever putting Southern in her place, they simultaneously venerated her as a goddess—although this often collapsed into crude come-ons on social media and in person. The movement grew, in part, out of the “manosphere,” epitomized by Cernovich, a onetime sex blogger. The headlines on his website ranged from “What Is Rape?” to “How to Cheat on Your Girlfriend” to “When in Doubt, Whip It Out.”

Read: To learn about the alt-right, start with the ‘manosphere’

Then there was Spencer, who was accused of verbally and physically abusing his now ex-wife. “The only language women understand is violence,” he told his former spouse, according to their divorce filings. (Spencer denied the allegations.) One of Spencer’s colleagues, Matthew Heimbach, co-founder of a fascist organization called the Traditionalist Worker Party, squeezed his wife’s cheeks until they bled after she confronted him about having an affair, according to a police report.

In , I’d attended a Spencer-led conference, in Washington, D.C., where a speaker described women as “reptilian” animals who should be left to hang naked in the public square should they ever have sex with a Muslim man. We need to “flush disloyalty from our gene pool,” he announced to the roughly men and 10 women in attendance.

Southern’s attitude about her own sexualization was convoluted and contradictory. She knew her audience would respond to a cleavage shot. “Like you see girls that do a political video, and if they put their boobs up and out, they’ll get , extra views. It’s clickbait. It works,” she told me. She didn’t do that, she added, but she also rarely appeared on camera without being fully made up. Still, she would express anxiety, if not fear, about the ugliness and aggression of the men who were drawn to her. She told me about an email folder labeled “nutjobs” where she deposited notes from fans asking for sex. Her mother had discovered deepfake porn videos juxtaposing her daughter’s face onto a body being penetrated, she said, and one man messaged her saying he hoped she was “raped” to the point of having her “face destroyed,” so she could never benefit from her looks again.

From the May issue: The era of fake video begins

I asked Southern in Toronto what advice she had for women entering the alt-right world. She hesitated. “Don’t,” she said.

Southern decided to abandon the Russian documentary, but by the fall of she had a new project: Borderless, about the migrant crisis in Europe. When I joined her in October, she had already been on the road for more than a month. We met at a chateau an hour outside Paris, which she’d booked to recharge while her crew was off shooting around Europe. I’d been the one to suggest the chateau, where I was also staying, and which was far enough outside of Paris to be relatively affordable.

Not that money was a tremendous issue for Southern. Thanks to the proceeds from her work, Southern could afford not only a retreat in the French countryside, but expensive cameras and other gear that made a professional journalist’s equipment look amateurish by comparison. She was bringing in more than $6, a month in donations. Her father printed and sold Lauren Southern–branded merchandise, and her mother ran her email and accounting (for a fee).

At the chateau, it was eerily quiet. Behind foot gates, the vast estate’s only other inhabitants seemed to be horses, goats, and a Polish guest worker. We chatted in one of the chateau’s bedrooms as Southern gave herself a manicure. “This is the small luxury I get on the road, and I just can’t get it perfect,” she said, blowing on her fingertips.

In the evening, we decided to set out in search of a restaurant that served French fries with hamburgers or steak—she wasn’t a culinary white supremacist like Hutcheson, but she was a picky eater. She didn’t say much as we passed a series of bucolic dairy farms. Then she began to cry. A former fan had become a sex-crazed stalker, messaging her numerous times a day and posting personal information about her family and friends on social media. She was so worried about getting hit on by far-right figures that she refused to attend fund-raising meetings without a chaperone. Even McInnes had not stopped sending flirtatious messages to her, she said. She didn’t know what to do, or whom to tell. If her father found out, it would “break him,” she said. He was a huge fan of conservative pundits like McInnes.

If everything was so awful, I asked, why had she embarked on this new film? She offered the same explanation I’d heard many times before: She didn’t want Europe to be overtaken by Islam. I responded with familiar arguments. Europe’s Muslim population, for example, was a mere 5 percent and was expected to increase to only about 11 percent by Even in France, where right-wing philosophers warn of a grand remplacement of whites, Muslims don’t make up more than 10 percent of the citizenry.

By the time we sat down to dinner, she was calmer and told me she had some exciting news. She’d met someone special. Catholic. Tough. He made her feel safe. She smiled with what looked like genuine pleasure. And then, with some hesitation, she told me her new crush wasn’t white. “Race isn’t everything,” she said, as I strained to keep a poker face. “What matters is happiness, not race.”

The next morning, as we walked the empty chateau grounds, Southern still seemed jittery, and kept tugging at her beige trench coat. “We have almost the same symptoms as addicts,” she declared, apropos of nothing, clutching her phone. I thought back to an interview I had with her in Russia, where she first mentioned her “addiction” to celebrity. “You get a little high when you get all those likes on YouTube, when you get all those shares when all these people are talking to you. It’s a crazy sensation and feeling that I never had psychologically prepared for.”

She vowed again that she was going to quit YouTube, as soon as she finished Borderless. Her new boyfriend gave her a real reason to get out.

Several days later, at an Airbnb closer to Paris, Southern’s video team reassembled, including two Brits: Caolan Robertson, the director, and George Llewelyn-John, the cameraman. The two were partners—another surprise for me—and had dated for five years. Soon we were joined by Southern’s latest man. Shirtless and clutching coffee, he conferred with her in whispers, before turning to me: He wanted to remain anonymous. Southern chimed in to add that I was prohibited from reporting on his specific ethnic identity, trying to manage a detail she’d already revealed. She later clarified over text that she didn’t want him used as a prop to accumulate “not racist” points. This was true love, after all.

With the assistance of Robertson, a marketing man by trade, Southern was making good on the aspirations she’d outlined to the grumpy Hutcheson: The DIY aesthetic of YouTube was no more. Southern had revamped her wardrobe, purchased Netflix-quality documentary gear, and stopped making references to white nationalism on her Instagram account. Instead, her crew helped her use the platform to release slow-motion videos of her posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, as if in an ad for French Vogue. This pivot away from explicit alt-right propaganda seemed to be having the desired effect. She had gotten word that the European Parliament wanted to premiere Borderless once it was complete.

Read: Instagram is the internet’s new home for hate

The team climbed into a gray van and headed toward Paris’s infamous migrant neighborhood, Porte de la Chapelle. But migrants were thin on the ground. Southern checked her Facebook in a familiar nervous twitch. “‘Hi Lauren, you’re hot, tell me if I can fuck you please?’” she read out. “Go on, Lauren, give him that blow job,” Llewelyn-John deadpanned.

After more than an hour of hunting, Southern ordered her driver to stop. She had spotted a campsite under a highway overpass. We would all go in together, she said, but her security guard, who had served in the military, stopped her. To gain genuine access, they should first try to build some kind of rapport with the people living there. He would do it, he said. He entered the cluster of makeshift dwellings alone, and eventually emerged to beckon us in. He had lied and told the migrants he was a Chechen asylum seeker who had met some well-intended journalists interested in their stories. He warned us that the men were hungry, so things might get tense, but it also gave Southern a little leverage. “Half the pizza now, half after the interview,” Llewelyn-John said, only partly joking. (He and Robertson have since renounced their association with the far right and expressed regret that their skills were used to further Southern’s anti-immigrant agenda.)

Read: The women behind the ‘alt-right’

We ran across a highway, through some bushes, and settled under the overpass. The migrants graciously made room for us closer to their fire. “Hi, I’m Alex,” Southern introduced herself, using one of her stage names. She started to pass out chocolate and cigarettes. “I want to know your story. I want to know why you came to Paris for a new life.” As the men warmed their weathered hands over the flames, they told of fleeing bloodshed and gang violence. Mostly from Mali and Sierra Leone, they had escaped via a treacherous route across the Mediterranean that has left an estimated 19, people dead or missing since When they had finally made it to France, they discovered that they were prohibited from working and could wait nearly a year to have their asylum claims heard.

Their chances of ever being admitted to any country in Europe were shrinking. In , Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was the first leader to shut his borders, calling the migrant crisis an “invasion.” But in Europe as a whole today, close to two-thirds of asylum applicants are rejected, according to the Eurostat.

Before we left, one of the younger men, hiding beneath a shy grin and layers of dirty overcoats, raised his hand to speak. Maybe something good could come of telling his story to the world, he said. He had crossed from Libya to Italy, and then into France, which he imagined to be “El Dorado” for a French speaker like himself, he told Southern. “We didn’t come here to steal,” he emphasized. It had been six months since he’d arrived, and not only couldn’t he find work, but the French shunned him, and the police destroyed his temporary encampments, keeping him on the move. “I have no hope left,” he said, as rats scampered near our feet.

Southern walked back to the van contemplatively. “There’s no denying they had shitty lives,” she said. “I can have cookies with these people and hear their life story. That doesn’t mean we suddenly—just because I feel bad in that moment—we need to destroy all borders and allow everyone to come in here.”

The finished documentary would portray asylum seekers generally as opportunists looking to get rich, and would pluck from this campfire interview quotes that emphasized the migrants’ failure to assimilate into French culture rather than the dire circumstances from which they had fled. That night, coming back from filming, I asked Southern if she was proud of the work she was doing. A smile broke out on her wind-chapped face. “I’ve really come a long way,” she said.

In January , Southern screened excerpts of Borderless at the European Parliament in Brussels, and was feted like a visiting head of state. Junior staffers rushed to take pictures with her. Right-wing parliamentarians extended invitations to upcoming events, or asked to feature Southern on their social-media accounts. With nearly a quarter of the European Parliament now controlled by the far right, and much of its center pandering to that group’s anti-immigrant base, Southern faced no opposition inside the hall. “Lauren is beautiful,” David Coburn, a Scottish politician who was then a member of the Parliament, told me twice. “[She] makes me feel that the future is maybe in safe hands.”

Southern considered her appearance a rousing success, but five months later, she finally did what she had told me she was going to do so many times. She quit her life as an activist. In the post announcing her decision, titled “A New Chapter,” Southern announced to her hundreds of thousands of supporters that she needed space to focus on her “soul.” Her departure fueled intense speculation in the alt-right community. Milo Yiannopoulos claimed in an “exposé” that Southern ran a fraudulent operation trading sex for professional favors and wanted to escape accountability. Internet sleuths guessed that she was locked up in Turkey or had settled down with a “sugar daddy.” The real story is more mundane.

Watch: Rebranding white nationalism

I met Southern in Vancouver’s Stanley Park shortly after her retirement. Waves crashed against the peninsula’s rocky belt. Southern greeted me wearing a large knitted sweater and a floral top, much looser than her usual attire. I set up my camera and prepared to roll.

“Well, we haven’t even established that I’m married yet,” she announced, turning to face me and revealing a slightly protruding belly. She was about five months pregnant by the boyfriend she’d introduced me to in France. They’d wed about a month before I arrived for this visit—the alt-right’s avatar of femininity had conceived a child out of wedlock. “I got married and, um, now my husband and I are expecting our first little one,” Southern said, with the careful cadence of an actress working through her lines for the first time.

She told me about her life in Vancouver. It was idyllic, she said. She had re-enrolled at the University of the Fraser Valley to study philosophy. She was particularly taken by Saint Augustine and his treatise The City of God, which criticizes a society consumed by vanity. In the evening, she played in a community volleyball league. Her new friends had no idea about her past, and Southern, it appeared, didn’t dwell on it much herself. Clutching a book on Christian spirituality, Thirsty for God, Southern was eager to tell me about how she had embraced her partner’s Catholic faith. Most nights were spent cooking with “hubby” and watching Netflix. “I couldn’t be happier,” she said.

I had seen Lauren Southern challenge sexual-assault survivors, turn back refugee boats, exploit desperate migrants for political gain, and rake in considerable cash—all to the benefit of an insurgent racist right. The day after I landed in Belgium to see her give her speech at the European Parliament, I’d learned that my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, had died. As my family gathered in Israel to lay Shulamit Lombroso to rest, I’d watched the parliamentarians applaud their brightest young star. Now Southern was acting like none of this had ever happened. Having thrown her bombs, she had, indeed, simply gone back to a normal life.

The s saw dozens of lethal terror attacks by white nationalists, including Anders Breivik’s murder of 77 of his fellow Norwegians to protest Europe’s growing diversity, and the American extremist Dylann Roof’s killing of nine black worshippers in hopes of igniting a race war. Between the time Southern entered politics and the time she left, far-right extremists had murdered 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, 51 Muslims at a mosque in New Zealand, and 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas (in an effort to target Mexicans). More than a hundred smaller attacks had occurred worldwide. Many of the killers were radicalized on YouTube, and some echoed the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric Southern liked to use.

I asked Southern if she took any responsibility for this surge in hate. She responded briskly: “If anything I’ve said has contributed to that, it was because someone misinterpreted me.” What about her ridiculing of rape culture? “I still stand by the points today.” And what about her partner, who is part Asian—what does he think of her politics? Southern started to speak, then stopped, before recasting my question: “My arguments about family and focusing on community, I believe it’s true. It’s just, it’s hard to personally follow something that is, quite frankly, an ideal.” She kept telling me she had grown more “compassionate,” but whenever I asked her pointedly if she regretted her past work, I got obfuscation and tactical apologies. “I regret letting myself get as cold as I did” is the most she would offer during our last in-person interview.

This past summer, Southern moved with her husband and her son to Australia, where she has returned to activism. She is working on a new documentary called Crossfire, which she promises will bring “nuance” to political discourse. It is centered on “policing, brutality, [and] race,” according to the trailer, and it will “expose the reality for those caught in the crossfire of lawless protest and crime.” She also frequently appears as a commentator on the country’s Sky News channel, inveighing against COVID restrictions and “cancel culture.”

There was never going to be a reckoning. No accountability, only retreat. It’s chilling how much damage one young person with a knack for social media can do.

Kenes, Bulent (). “Richard B. Spencer: The founder of alt-right presents racism in a chic new outfit.” ECPS Leader Profiles. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). June 28, www.chevaliercompetences.fr

Richard Bertrand Spencer is a well-groomed, well-educated advocate for the creation of a “white ethno-state” in North America for a “dispossessed white race.” He has also called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of what he describes as “white culture” and to achieve a “white homeland.” Spencer has become the most recognizable public face of the white supremacist and nationalist movements. As an ardent white supremacist and ethnonationalist, Spencer says America belongs to white people, who he claims have higher average IQs than Hispanics and African Americans, and that the latter are genetically predisposed to crime. In Spencer’s “America,” Asians, Muslims, and Jews don’t qualify as “white” either.

By Bulent Kenes

White supremacy and white nationalism are real threats to democratic societies across the globe, as evidenced by the presidency of Donald Trump and the massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. As more people embrace a xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and anti-multiculturalist worldview, this has fuelled hostility and violence toward those deemed “others” or “outsiders” because of their religion, skin colour, or national origin (Jipson & Becker, ).

Driven by fear over the loss of white primacy and white privilege, white nationalists believe that white identity should be the organizing principle of Western society (Jipson & Becker, ). The United States is a hub of white supremacy, whose adherents fear that demographic changes will lead to the extermination of the white race and white culture—even though the US remains 77 percent white (Jipson & Becker, ). Eight years of Republican demagoguery against the US’ first black president, Barack Obama, made it easier for some whites to be persuaded that the system is rigged against them (Harkinson, ).

As a natural result of this process, hate crimes against Muslims, immigrants, and people of colour have been on the rise in the US since In , the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) documented hate crimes. The next year, it counted hate crimes. In —the year Trump took office, stoking nationalist sentiments with promises to build walls, deport Mexicans, and ban Muslims—the US saw white supremacist attacks. In , white nationalists killed at least 50 people in the US. Every perpetrator of deadly extremist violence in the US in had links to white nationalist groups (Jipson & Becker, ).

Richard Bertrand Spence is a well-groomed, well-educated advocate for the creation of a “white ethno-state” in North America (Beckett, ) for a “dispossessed white race.” Spencer has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of what he describes as “white culture” (Lombroso & Appelbaum, ; SPLC, n.d.; Graham, & Kirchick, ) and to “reconstitute the Roman Empire” (Scott, ). Spencer has become the most recognizable public face of the white supremacist white nationalist movements. In , in an article in Taki’s Magazine, a far-right publication, Spencer coined the term “alternative right,” from which “alt right” is derived as a sanitised word for the extreme right (Younge, ) (ADL, ). (Paul Gottfried, a Jewish paleo-conservative also employed the term “alternative right” when he gave a speech entitled, “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right,” at the H.L. Mencken Club’s Annual Meeting in November For this reason, some sources credit Gottfried with birthing the term.) Spencer further popularized the term when he chose “Alternative Right” as the name for an online publication that debuted in  (ADL, n.d.).

Spencer rejects the label “white supremacist” in favour of the more opaque “alt-right” and prefers to describe himself as an “identitarian” (Cox, ); however, the SPLC has described him as a leading “academic racist,” who “takes a quasi-intellectual approach to white separatism” and as “a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis.” The ADL says Spencer us a “leader in white supremacist circles that envision a ‘new’ right that will openly embrace ‘white racial consciousness’” (Cox, ).

As an umbrella term “alt-right” is used to describe a movement that is a mix of populism and white nationalism and was birthed predominantly online (Helsel, ). The alt-right portrays refugees, Muslims, and progressives as a threat to white culture (Jipson & Becker, ). As a loose network of people who promote white identity and reject mainstream conservatism (Beckett, , alt-right has been used by Spencer to refer to people who oppose, among other things, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and open immigration (ADL, ).

Spencer has beguiled the American media. Profiles of Spencer have been accompanied by brooding portraits: the racist, looking serious in a blazer; the racist, slouching picturesquely against a wall. Spencer, who has basked in the media attention, was not shy about telling reporters that image is everything; that he and other young racists are the hipster whisperers, ready to bring a new generation into the white nationalist fold (Beckett, ). “We have to look good,” he said, because no one is going to want to join a movement that is “crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid” (Fox, ).

Growing up in a wealthy part of Dallas in the s, Spencer attended St. Mark’s School of Texas, an elite, all-boys prep school long associated with blue-blooded conservatism. Spencer’s father, an ophthalmologist, did not care much about politics but voted Republican out of habit. Spencer was friend with the only African American student in his class, John Lewis. Lewis says he never thought of Spencer as racist, but another classmate who asked not to be identified recalls Spencer making “a bunch of conservative, racially laced comments” that were objectionable even in high school. However, Spencer says he did not think much about race back then. After graduating high school in , Spencer went to the University of Virginia, where he double majored in music and English and became deeply involved in avant-garde theatre, trying out and discarding various radical ideologies like costume changes (Harkinson, ). Eventually, Spencer came to embrace his ideology—and then continued further out on the ideological spectrum (Fox, ). 

Red Pilled: Waking Up to Reality

After entering the humanities master’s program at the University of Chicago, Spencer discovered Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed “race realist” who argues that blacks and Hispanics are a genetic drag on Western society. By the time Spencer entered Duke as a Ph.D. student in European intellectual history, in , his views were on his sleeve. Fellow students recall Spencer openly sharing his opinions on biological differences between races and endorsing books such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, which argues that Hispanic immigrants are less suited than Europeans for assimilation. Yet Spencer was charming enough to maintain collegial relations with his peers. “Not many of us had ever come across an out-and-out fascist,” says a college professor who studied in the same history Ph.D. program as Spencer. “We didn’t know how serious he was” (Harkinson, ). 

Spencer uses a metaphor to explain the jarring experience of waking up to a different worldview. In the movie “The Matrix,” the character of Morpheus offers Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, a choice between taking a blue pill—“the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe”—or a red pill, which shows “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” In the alt-right’s telling, the so-called “normies” swallow the blue pill, digesting the fiction of racial equality, while those who get “red pilled” are stripped of the virtual-reality cloak that blinds them, waking up to the shattering realization that liberalism is just a mirage designed to obscure the hard, ugly truths of a world programmed by genetics. “You’re destroyed by it,” Spencer says, “and put back together again.” After getting red pilled, Spencer began quietly pursuing related ideas through his academic work (Harkinson, ).

After dropping out of Duke, Spencer remained preoccupied with race while at The American Conservative, where he became an editor in Spencer was fired, because he was “a bit extreme for us,” recalls TAC editor Scott McConnell. Then, Spencer moved to a new job as the sole editor of Taki’s Magazine, the online vanity publication of Taki Theodoracopulos, who was notorious for his racist remarks. Spencer steadily evolved Taki’s into a magazine aimed at white nationalists. By , he’d published essays by Jared Taylor and was regularly using the term “alternative right” to describe his youthful brand of anti-war, anti-immigration, pro-white conservatism (Harkinson, ). In December , Spencer left Taki’s Magazine. 

In , he founded www.chevaliercompetences.fr, a white supremacy-themed webzine aimed at the “intellectual right-wing,” (SPLC, n.d.). The site caught the attention of the conservative publisher William Regnery II, who had tried to start a whites-only online dating service and funded the white nationalist National Policy Institute (NPI). With Regnery’s backing (Harkinson, ), Spencer became president of NPI in , following the death of its chairman. Concurrently, he also oversaw NPI’s publishing division, Washington Summit Publishers, home of such scientifically bogus works as a reissue of Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence and screeds by other white nationalists, including Jared Taylor, editor of the racist American Renaissance journal, and Sam Francis, the late editor of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens’ newsletter (SPLC, n.d.).

According to NPI’s mission statement, it aims “to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute…will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity” (SPLC, n.d.). Under the auspices of NPI, Spencer has worked to create an intellectual class of white separatists. The group rejects the calls for violence which appear in Internet chat rooms and public campaigns of hate. Spencer prefers a more professorial approach of publishing books and organizing conferences. 

“Our goal is to form an intellectual community around European nationalism,” he said (Mangan, ). The “lesbians” and “Latinos” have advocates working for them, so why shouldn’t whites, Spencer asks in a video (Fox, ). 

NPI seeks to preserve the “heritage, identity and future of European people in the US and around the world” (Mangan, ). In , Spencer launched an offshoot of Washington Summit Publishers that he called Radix Journal, a website and biannual publication (SPLC, n.d.), and he also started to host a weekly podcast, “Vanguard Radio” (Bar-On, ).No longer confined to the dark corners of social media, Spencer tried to bring a scholarly air of respectability to a movement commonly associated with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan (Mangan, ), and he managed to seize on an extraordinary presidential election to give overt racism a new veneer of radical chic (Harkinson, ). He envisions a world in which his ideals are embraced by the mainstream, and he has vowed to keep pushing until that happens (Cox, ). 

White nationalists and counter protesters clash in during a rally that turned violent resulting in the death of one and multiple injuries in Charlottesville, VA on August 12, Photo: Kim Kelley-Wagner.

However, Spencer has failed to conceal his movement’s darker side. While being interviewed by David Pakman, he was asked if he would condemn the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler; he refused, saying, “I’m not going to play this game,” while stating that Hitler had “done things that I think are despicable,” without elaborating on which things he was referencing (Pakman, n.d.). In early , Spencer was filmed giving the Nazi salute in a karaoke bar, and leaked footage also depicts Spencer giving the Sieg Heil salute to his supporters during the August Charlottesville rally (Bernstein, ). After Donald Trump was elected president in , Spencer urged his supporters to “party like it’s ,” the year Hitler came to power in Germany (Cox, ).  In the weeks following, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews (Goldstein, ). At a conference Spencer held celebrating the election, he cried, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” (Bradner, ). In early-to-mid , when Spencer’s following was at its height, his supporters would reportedly give him the Sieg Heil salute when he entered a room (Marantz, ).

Spencer emerged as one of the most visible white separatist agitators during the Trump campaign (Mangan, ). After Trump’s election, Spencer was the focus of a lot of media attention. He never denied that his objective is white supremacy. “I’m trying to normalize ‘racism,’ as you call it,” he told ABC (Ali, ). His far-right ideas had travelled quite rapidly from the margins to the mainstream and were infecting the US body politic at the highest level (Younge, a).

In some ways, Spencer resembles an older generation of “academic racists”—or “racialists,” as he prefers to put it (Harkinson, ). In his writing, speeches, and interviews, he has given an intellectualized explanation for how he came to advocate for a whites-only “ethno state.” While in graduate school, he has said, he was compelled by critiques of multiculturalism and political correctness and by demographic data indicating that whites are en route to minority status in the US (Williams, ).

One of Spencer’s first acts after taking over NPI was to move its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Whitefish, Montana, where his family has a home (SPLC, n.d.). Whitefish, where Spencer lived after , was not particularly thrilled with his presence. Several local restaurants have refused to serve him. He was compelled to resign his membership from the exclusive Big Mountain Ski Club after he got into a chairlift argument about the Iraq War with the neocon Randy Scheunemann, a former adviser to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to John McCain during the election. In , a local human rights group known as Love Lives Here urged the city to bar Spencer from conducting NPI business in town but settled for a resolution condemning hate groups (Harkinson, ). 

It’s possible to connect the Spencer family’s business interests and geographic history with Richard Spencer’s racist politics. The family’s farm holdings are a legacy of its ties to the Jim Crow South, passed down by Spencer’s grandfather, who built the business during the turbulent civil rights era. Generations of Spencer’s family lived in the South (Williams, ). There is a long history of white supremacy in the American South, which has also contributed to the attitudes and, especially, symbolism used by the modern alt-right (Bezio, ). Records Show Spencer’s mother attended segregated schools as a girl in the small north-eastern Louisiana city of Monroe. Later, she other inherited farms in northeast Louisiana from her late father. The region has a history of slavery and racism. Throughout the civil rights era, the Ku Klux Klan targeted black residents in northeast Louisiana (and elsewhere) with lynchings, cross burnings, and other violence. In Tensas Parish, where the Spencers own 3, acres of farmland, blacks didn’t win the right to vote until However, in an open letter sent to their local newspaper, Spencer’s parents, Sherry and Rand, said that while they love their son, “we are not racists. We have never been racists. We do not endorse the idea of white nationalism” (Williams, ). 

“You Will Not Replace Us!”

Spencer abdicated his position as editor of Radix Journal in January to serve as the American editor of his new site, www.chevaliercompetences.fr Launched on January 16, , www.chevaliercompetences.fr brings together several well-known white nationalist personalities (SPLC, n.d.). According to Spencer, however, the site is populist and a big tent for members of the alt-right (Wilson, ). Swedish publisher Daniel Friberg of Arktos Media is co-founder and European editor of the site (Porter, ). The SPLC describes the common thread among contributors as antisemitism, rather than white nationalism or white supremacy in general (Solomon, ). In the same year, Spencer rented space in Alexandria, Virginia, to serve as a hub for the alt-right movement. Some local residents were—and are—not pleased. The city has received at least 25 complaints about Spencer’s rental (Anand, ).

On May 13, , he led a torch-lit protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, against a vote by the city council to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (CBS News, ). Spencer led the crowd in chants of “You will not replace us!”; “Blood and soil”; and “Russia is our friend” (Hayden, ; Laughland, ). 

“You will not replace us” refers to the idea that white Americans are being “replaced” by non-white people through “demographic replacement,” while “blood and soil” is perhaps better known in its original German, “Blut und boden.” The concepts “blood” (meaning racial identity) and “soil” (referencing the land) are inextricably linked in the expression, which meant that peasants and farmers were the most racially “German,” while urban dwellers were racially suspicious. In , “blood and soil” even became an official Nazi policy, requiring that farmers were certifiably “Aryan” in order to receive certain benefits from the state (Coaston, ). Local police reported minor verbal confrontations between two opposing groups but confirmed no arrests had been made(Laughland, ). 

Things didn’t go as quietly at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on August 12 of the same year. Spencer was one of the promoters and scheduled speakers at Unite the Right, which was ostensibly organized to oppose the removal of Confederate monuments. The rally attracted more than white supremacists and many hundreds of counter-protesters, and confrontations between the two groups sparked violent clashes. A white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and wounding 30 (ADL, ). James Alex Fields Jr., a year-old neo-Nazi from Ohio, would later plead guilty to killing year-old Heyer. Fields and eight other people who attended the rally are in state or federal prison after being convicted of a variety of crimes. Spencer wasn’t accused of any criminal wrongdoing related to Charlottesville. But he and more than two dozen others are defendants in a civil lawsuit brought by people injured during the rally (Barrouquere, ). This lawsuit has accused 25 far-right individuals and groups of conspiring to commit violence. At a federal courthouse in Charlottesville, attorney Karen Dunn told the court that, following the march, Spencer declared to a crowd: “We own these streets. We occupy these grounds” (Smith, ).

The repercussions for the alt-right and the larger white supremacist community were immediate. Scores of them were “doxxed”—their real identities exposed—and as a result, some were fired from their jobs, had to leave their universities, or were rejected by their families or romantic partners. Many white supremacists’ social media accounts and websites were taken offline, and some were kicked off popular crowdfunding websites, eliminating a key income source. Meanwhile, Spencer, who helped spearhead the events in Charlottesville, has become increasingly unpopular in the alt-right due in part to the perception that he failed to capitalize on the energy generated by Unite the Right (ADL, n.d.). 

Since that weekend in Charlottesville, dissension and infighting has overtaken the alt-right movement. On one side are the American Nationalists who believe white supremacists should appeal to whites by using innocuous symbols like the American flag and avoid openly white supremacist symbols like swastikas. On the other side are the National Socialists and other hard-right groups whose members display white supremacist symbols at rallies and don’t care about “optics” or appealing to the white middle class. Spencer, who walks the line between the two groups, appears to be testing out new ways of attracting attention (ADL, ). 

In October , two months after the rally, he returned to Charlottesville to lead people in an unannounced “flash mob.” Afterwards, Spencer called it a “great success” and a “model” for future events. This kind of small event with no advance warning hugely diminishes inherently risky interactions with law enforcement or counter-protesters. Spencer only employed the “flash mob” model a couple of times before turning his attention to scheduled public events like campus speeches (ADL, & Hawley, ). 

In December , Spencer announced that he had formed a new organization with other alt-right leaders. “Operation Homeland” was unveiled as a core group of alt-right leaders and activists poised to lead the movement as a whole. The group held a demonstration in December in Washington DC, to protest the acquittal of an undocumented immigrant in the murder of a young woman in San Francisco (ADL, ).

A protestor holds sign at a Patriot Prayer rally in Portland Oregon, USA on August 4, Photo: Eric Crudup.

If You Aren’t a White American, That’s Fine—But You Should Leave

Spencer’s clean-cut appearance aims at concealing his radical white separatism and his goal of establishing a white ethno-state in North America. His writings and speeches portray this as a reasonable defence of Caucasians and Eurocentric culture. In Spencer’s worldview, white people have been “dispossessed” by a combination of rising minority birth rates, immigration, and establishment politics and policies (SPLC, n.d.). “We are undergoing a sad process of degeneration,” he said about minority births in the US. “We will need to reverse it using the state and the government. You incentivize people with higher intelligence, you incentivize people who are healthy to have children. And it sounds terrible and nasty, but there would be a great use of contraception.” He didn’t mean the government should encourage people to use birth control pills and condoms (Fox, ); he was advocating for eugenicist forced sterilisation (Stokes, ).

As an ardent white supremacist and ethnonationalist, Spencer also openly advocates for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to achieve a “white homeland.” He says America belongs to white people, who he claims have higher average IQs than Hispanics and African Americans and that the latter are genetically predisposed to crime (Stokes, ). Asians, Muslims, and Jews do not qualify as “white” either. Spencer knows that a white ethno-state is at most a distant dream, but he hopes America’s non-whites can be made to agree that returning to the lands of their ancestors would be best for everyone: “It’s like presenting to an African that this hasn’t worked out…We haven’t made each other happier. We are going to have to take part in this paradigmatic shift together” (Harkinson, ). 

Despite often saying, “you have to look at culture and not just race,” lighter skin colour apparently matters more to Spencer than acculturation when it comes to Hispanics. When pressed about what really sets whites apart, he waxes decidedly unscientific: “I think there is something within the European soul that we haven’t been able to measure yet and maybe we never will… and that is a Faustian drive or spirit—a drive to explore, a drive to dominate, a drive to live one’s life dangerously…a drive to explore outer space and the universe. I think there is something within us that we possess and that only we possess” (Harkinson, ). In line with Spencer, NPI is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the US, and around the world” (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Spencer claims, among other things, that Africans have benefited from white supremacy and that Europe would always be more his home than it would be for Blacks (Younge, ).

Moreover, he said in an interview that, “The American nation is defined by the fact that it is derived from Europe…white Americans, European-Americans, in particular Anglo-Saxon Americans, Anglo-Saxon Protestants…defined it in a way that no other people did. So, of course, African Americans have influenced American culture and American identity. Of course, Asians have and so on. But it really was Anglo-Saxons who truly defined it. Who made America what it is. Who were indispensable…” (Letson, ).

Spencer is also known for his public advocacy of violence against non-whites. He has advocated for the enslavement of Haitians by whites, the ethnic cleansing of racial minorities from the US, and even the ethnic cleansing of Turks from Anatolia (Holt, ). He claimed, “Today, in the public imagination, ‘ethnic-cleansing’ has been associated with civil war and mass murder. But this need not be the case. is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution—done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully” (Fox, & SPLC, n.d.). 

On the subject of neo-Nazism, Spencer has expressed admiration for the political tactics of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell for using “shock as a positive means to an end” (Miller, ). Therefore, the SPLC has classified Spencer as a leading academic racist, but he rejects the notion that he is driven by hatred and considers “racist” a “slur word” (Fox, ). Spencer believes that if you aren’t a white American, that’s fine—but you should leave (Harkinson, ). 

Despite having no visible tattoos advertising white pride or hate against non-whites, Spencer is a racist (Wertheimer, ). His stances conflict with common mores in American society (Wertheimer,  Spencer supports nations segregated by race and called the idea that America is based on rights “silliness” (Helsel, ). SPLC () underlines Spencer’s alt-right claims depart from traditional, establishment conservatism and embrace more identity-based politics, such as American Identitarianism. The alt-right proclaims to have move passed the right–left divide, towards a politics that promotes racial homogeneity and to challenge and dismantle mainstream conservatism (Gray, ).

“Even if all immigration was stopped tomorrow, there is still going to be a massive minority population,” argues Spencer. “All I know is that in order for white people to survive, we’ll need consciousness of ourselves, or we really will reach a state of humiliation, if not extinction. White people are going to enter a new world where we are a hated minority, where it is seen as a good thing that we have less power. We must fight against that” (Mangan, ). He even claims that “The alt-right would not exist if it weren’t for terrible immigration policies and social justice warriors and liberalism and maybe the Barack Obama presidency.” He says, “they made us” (Harkinson, ). According to Spencer, 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” (NPI, February ).

In a promo for NPI’s Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., Spencer opined that both Europe and America are experiencing economic, moral, and cultural bankruptcy under the pressure of “mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the natural expression of religious and ethnic identities by non-Europeans” (SPLC, n.d.). He said on another occasion that, “I believe that selective deportations could set a new tone and that millions would self-deport. It does not matter to me whose ‘fault’ it was that they are here, or if that’s even the right way to look at it. The survival of my people takes precedence” (Mangan, ). However, Spencer has said he would gladly accept Germans, Latins, and Slavic immigrants in his proposed ethno-state — ironically, groups that faced severe discrimination in late 19th-century America (SPLC, n.d.).

Spencer and his group claim that their history and identity as white people is being erased by “political correctness.” Specifically, they see the identity and history of whiteness in the US as antithetical to those of people of colour. They claim to be marginalised and oppressed by policies of inclusion and diversity; thus, they reject multiculturalism and diversity (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Spencer subscribes zealously to the idea that America’s white population is endangered, thanks to multiculturalism and lax immigration policies that have gone unchallenged by mainstream conservatives. He envisions a future for the US along the lines of “a renewed Roman Empire,” a dictatorship where the main criteria for citizenship would be whiteness (Harkinson, ).

According to Spencer, it falls to people like him to be engaged and savvy if America is going to combat the growing threat of diversity. In particular, he’s irritated by the rise of minority births, which outnumbered white births for the first time in “Even if we shut off all immigration, the country is going to demographically undergo a tremendous transformation,” Spencer said. White people “need to start thinking about a new ethno-state that we would want to be a part of. This is not going to happen in the next election or in the next 10 years probably, but something in the future that would be for our great grandchildren” (Fox, ). Spencer justifies his claim by saying that, “By …white people will become a minority… In are we going to all decide oh well you know race doesn’t mean anything anymore. Identity is meaningless… No. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I think whites are going to be, they’re going to have a[n] amplification of their consciousness of being white” (Letson, ).

During the American Renaissance conference, in April , Spencer suggested his solution: “The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent…so that our people can ‘come home again,’ can live amongst family and feel safe and secure.” 

How, he was asked, in a nation with more than million blacks, Asians, and Latinos, could a whites-only territory be created without overwhelming violence? He offered an answer: “Look, maybe it will be horribly bloody and terrible” (Cox, ). 

During his speech, he quoted Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and termed his mission a “sort of white Zionism” that would inspire whites with the dream of such a homeland just as Zionism helped spur the establishment of Israel. A white ethno-state would be an Altneuland—an old, new country—he said (SPLC, n.d.). “So that we would always have a safe space,” he said. “We would always have a homeland for us. Very similar to…how Jews conceive of Israel” (Letson, ). 

“We want our identity, too,” Spencer argues. “Blacks are quite good at identity politics. They know who they are. We want that, too…When they talk about ‘white privilege,’ they’re making us feel guilty about the fact that we are awesome. I’m not trying to justify slavery or say we weren’t terrible to other people. We definitely were. But I am proud of the fact that we changed the world and dominated the world. We should be trying to expand white privilege, not feel guilty about it” (Mangan, ). Stressing that they live in a world of a “white guilt complex,” Spencer said, “Yes, white people are generally better off than many other people…(But) all of these institutions are not acting on behalf of white people. They are acting on behalf of non-white people. And you can talk about this being fair” (Letson, ). Typically, white supremacist discourse includes notions of a “racist double standard” that affords Blacks preferential treatment from social institutions. They use metonymical concepts such as “black assault[s]” discussing the way Blacks “burden” the state to show that a zero-sum game exists wherein “black gains equate to white losses.” This discourse presupposes that Black survival and success has become the white person’s burden (Brown, ). 

According to Spencer, even Martin Luther King Jr. “is 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!” (NPI, column, January ). As Villet () notes, white victimhood is a generic right-wing tactic that inverts the left’s narratives of minority discrimination and neo-colonialism. This tactic denies that there is such a thing as white privilege and attempts to camouflage white domination. Whites can surely be victims of crime or discrimination as individuals, but white victimhood goes much further. It implies that whites as a demographic group are victims of discrimination, oppression, or even persecution. The most extreme version of this victimhood is “white genocide” (Villet, ). The perceptions of “reverse” discrimination have a significant influence on whites’ decisions to join the alt-right (Adams & Roscigno, ).

Spencer claims that the alt-right seeks to “restore” the US as a white, European country, instead eliminating racial others.He denies that his organisation is dedicated to the eradication or marginalisation of minorities but rather seeks to promote white racial pride (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). However, he was caught on tape using racist slurs against African Americans and Jewish people. The expletive-laden audio recording was released by former Breitbart writer, Milo Yiannopoulos. The second long audio, supposedly recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in , appears to feature an angry Spencer ranting against Charlottesville citizens. On the recording, Spencer says, “Little fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons. My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit.” Later, he continued, “Those pieces of shit get ruled by people like me…That’s how the fucking world works…” (Coaston, ). He declined to deny that the voice in the video was his. Spencer also later tweeted a link to a right-wing video titled: “Never Apologise” (Wilson, ). His radical ideas have been cited as a source of concern by the SPLC and ADL (Los Angeles Times, ).

The Alt-right: An Ideology Around Identity

Spencer believes the alt-right is “deeply connected” with his work. “I would say that what I’m doing is we’re really trying to build a philosophy, an ideology around identity, European identity,” he said (Gray, ). Unlike old-school white supremacism, the “alt-right” incubated online, fed by memes and inside jokes and vicious battles over feminism and videogame culture. The Associated Press’ standards guide defines “alt-right” as “as a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism.” “In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist,” the standards guide noted (Beckett, ).

Therefore, some have argued that the alt-right is simply the latest iteration of an old, racist strain of US politics. And indeed, the alt-right’s ultimate vision—a racially homogeneous white ethnostate—is similar to that of earlier groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance. Yet, according to Hawley (), the alt-right considers itself new and distinct, in terms of both style and intellectual substance. Stylistically, it has attempted to distance itself from the ineffectual violence and pageantry of what it derisively calls “white nationalism ,” instead preferring a modern aesthetic that targets cynical millennials on social media and online message boards. Ideologically, the movement represents a break from American racist movements of the past, looking not to US history but to the European far-right for ideas and strategies. Spencer is often inspired by ideas that are alien to most Americans—especially those of the European New Right. The European far-right has in turn adopted tactics pioneered in the US, such as online trolling(Hawley, ).

Alt-righters reject mainstream conservative politics and espouse extremist beliefs and policies typically centred on ideas of white nationalism. The alt-right is a loosely connected far-right, white nationalist movement (ECPS, n.d.). Dylan Matthews defines Spencer’s alt-right as a label that blends together straight-up white supremacists, nationalists who think conservatives have sold out to globalization, and nativists who fear immigration will spur civil disarray. People who identify with the alt-right regard mainstream or traditional conservatives as weak and impotent, largely because they do not adequately support white racial interests or are not adequately racist or antisemitic. Some alt-right adherents prefer other labels, such as the “New Right” and the “Dissident Right.” They identify with a range of different ideologies, all of which centre on white identity (ADL, n.d.)

One body of adherents is the ostensibly “intellectual” racists who create many of the doctrines and principles of the white supremacist movement. They seek to attract young, educated whites to the movement by highlighting the achievements and alleged intellectual and cultural superiority of whites. Alt-righters use terms like “culture” as substitutes for more divisive terms such as “race,” and promote “Western Civilization” as a code word for white culture or identity (ADL, n.d.).  According to Bar-On, Spencer defends “racialist and antisemitic agendas” of the Old Right under a new metapolitical guise, acting as a cultural influencer rather than a direct political actor, and using various media outlets to “disseminate his views to ordinary people in an accessible manner” (Bar-On, ).

White Supremacy to Reinstate White Power and Domination

However, many newspapers have given instructions to their reporters to use the term “white supremacist” or “neo-Nazi” rather than “alt-righters” while referring to people like Spencer (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). White supremacists drew on discontent rooted in political fundamentalism and the fear of abdication of power to non-Whites (Dobratz & Shanks-Meile, ). Early forms of white supremacy relied on anti-Black social rituals and actions such as burning a cross on a Black person’s property, spewing racial epithets such as “nigger,” denying Black people social opportunities, and committing to Jim Crow segregation. These violent and coercive actions defied US reconstruction efforts and alienated Blacks from mainstream society (Dobratz & Shanks-Meile, )—an alienation that persisted until the civil rights movement began in the s (and persists in some ways today) (Feagin & Vera, ). Thus, extremists had to search for new ways and strategies to spread their message of hate in the midst of an increasingly racially tolerant society (Brown, ).

White supremacists often combine derogatory notions based on physical appearance with cultural attributes such as language, geography, character traits, and customs. White supremacist metaphors not only highlight unwarranted physical inadequacies, but they also position Black people in an inferior social and cultural position. White supremacists use metaphors such as “lower evolutionary plane” and “jungle dweller,” and spatial concepts such as “pull it down” and “lowest scale,” and “total bastardization,” to support the racist notion that “Negroes” cannot live in a civilized environment among human beings. The positioning of whites (presumably men) as warriors and civilization builders reinforces a broad racist ideology that buttresses the belief that the nation is synonymous with “Whiteness” (Brown, ). 

Accordingly, “race is something between a breed and an actual species,” Spencer says, likening the differences between whites and people of colour to those between golden retrievers and basset hounds. “It’s that powerful” (Harkinson, ).The specific types of messages that are propagated by Spencer and other white supremacists are about reinstating white power and domination. Spencer said, “… I am proud of the fact that we changed the world and dominated the world. We should be trying to expand white privilege, not feel guilty about it,” (Mangan, ). Spencer has also said, “America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us” (Seipp, 1). In a speech at Texas A&M University, he repeatedly stated that the US “belonged to white men,” and that he is “European.” He conflates European identity with whiteness and presents race as a rigid notion (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Spencer also claimed that “We don’t gain anything from other racial groups’ presence. They need us and not the other way around,” (Jackson & Stelloh, ). 

Antisemitism & Islamophobia 

In Spencer’s “ethno-state,” whites should live separately not only from non-whites but also from Jews. While Spencer generally shies away from blatant displays of antisemitism, he began expressing antisemitic views more openly in , when he wrote that Jews have an identity apart from Europeans. At a press conference two years later, he announced that he did not consider Jews to be European. 

Spencer has been influenced by a number of white supremacists, including the late Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, and retired professor Kevin MacDonald, who wrote a series of antisemitic books. At the conference, a number of people in the audience threw Nazi salutes after Spencer “hailed” Trump’s victory in the presidential election. Spencer, who refused to condemn the salutes, has aligned himself with groups and individuals who openly express virulent antisemitism, including TWP and Patriot Front. Spencer has also shown a willingness to work with antisemitic leaders such as Matthew Heimbach, the former head of TWP, and Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, who runs The Right Stuff website (ADL, ).

As an atheist (Spencer, ), Spencer believes that the Christian church held some pragmatic value, because it helped unify the white population of Europe. But he opposes traditional Christian values as a moral code, due to the fact that Christianity is a universalizing religion, rather than an ethnic religion. Spencer’s Radix Journal has promoted paganism, running articles such as “Why I am a pagan” (Beinart, ). He is also blatantly Islamophobic. According to Spencer, Islam, “at its full flourishing … isn’t some peaceful denomination like Methodism or religion like Buddhism; Islam is a black flag. It is an expansive, domineering ideology, and one that is directed against Europe. In this way, Islam give[s] non-Europeans a fighting spirit and integrates them into something much greater than themselves” (Interview with Europa Maxima, February ). Therefore, Spencer aggressively supported Trump’s “Muslim ban” (Buchanan, ). 

A “Psychic Connection” With Donald Trump

During the presidential race, the alt-right, which was a tiny, marginal, and almost exclusively Internet-based phenomenon, achieved mainstream attention (Wertheimer, ) thanks in part to its connection with the presidential campaign, and then administration of, Donald Trump. For years, Spencer’s “identitarian” movement barely flickered in the dark corners of the internet  (Cox, ) on sites such as Reddit and 4chan. But Trump’s ascendancy was like kerosene dumped on a brushfire (Harkinson, ). Then the term “alt-right” was often applied to a much broader group than it is today; at times, it seemed to refer to the entirety of Trump’s right-wing populist base (Hawley, ). Spencer argued that “If Trump wins we could really legitimately say that he was associated directly with us, with the ‘R(acist)’ word, all sorts of things. People will have to recognize us” (Harkinson, ).

Throughout the presidential campaign, Spencer was a vocal advocate for Trump due to his signature proposal to build a wall along the US border with Mexico and his racist statements referring to Mexicans as criminals and rapists (SPLC, n.d.; Barrouquere, ). Spencer believed the alt-right had a “psychic connection” with Trump in a way they did not with other Republicans. He said the alt-right had, before the election, been like a “head without a body…The Trump movement was a kind of body without a head…I think moving forward the alt-right as an intellectual vanguard can complete Trump” (Gray, ).

On election night, Spencer exulted in Trump’s victory. “The alt-right has been declared the winner. The alt-right is more deeply connected to Trumpian populism than the ‘conservative movement’,” Spencer tweeted. “We’re the establishment now” (ADL, ). An extremist website associated with Spencer also wrote: “It was a time when more people joined our movement than ever before and when our ideas began invading the mainstream” (Ali, ). For Spencer, Trump is not the logical outcome of a radicalized Republican Party, but an entirely new phenomenon born of the alt-right’s growing prominence and mainstream conservatism’s collapse (Posner & Neiwert, ).

Trump’s victory emboldened the bigots and channelled their thinking in a fashion not seen in modern times. A president who draws a moral equivalent between neo-Nazis and anti-fascist protesters, who baits black athletes and black journalists, and brands Mexicans rapists and Muslims terrorists. “Trump wouldn’t have run the campaign that he ran if he didn’t feel some sense of loss, that America has lost something,” Spencer argued (Younge, ). In an interview, Spencer also stated that he didn’t think it was just an unusual election with an unusual candidate: “I think this really was a paradigmatic shift. The new paradigm that Donald Trump brought into the world was identity politics and in particular white identity politics” (Letson, ). 

Only days after Trump’s surprising victory, the NPI held its fall conference on November 19, , in Washington, D.C. Spencer, flush with victory, offered the toast, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” to the nearly attendees. He was met with a handful of stiff-armed salutes from the crowd. At other points in his speech, like Trump’s assaults on the media, Spencer used a term employed by Nazis to attack the media—“Lügenpresse,” German for lying press. “It’s not just that many are genuinely stupid,” he said of reporters. “Indeed, one wonders if these people are people at all.” One tactic of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime was to declare enemies inhuman. Spencer speculated that the media may be “soulless golem,” a reference to magically animated beings from Jewish folklore (Lombroso & Appelbaum, ; Jackson & Stelloh, ; Mangan, ). The gesture electrified the more radical sectors of the white supremacy movement. He later stated that it was done in a spirit of “irony and exuberance” (Stokes, , Jackson & Stelloh, ; Helsel, ).

Nevertheless, Spencer gained international notoriety after this speech (Helsel, ). Though the ties between Trump and him have not been officially recognised by the former president, the connections between Trump and white nationalist movements have been a lingering question in light of the alt-right’s support and Trump’s refusal to condemn the racially motivated violence in Charleston in August  (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Furthermore, Spencer was among the most optimistic about Trump’s presidency. “With Donald Trump, we feel like we have a dog in the fight for the first time,” Spencer told the Guardian. “And with him there’s a real chance we could start influencing policy and culture.” His hope was that “alt-right” ideas could enter the mainstream (Gabbatt, ). According to him, the Trump phenomenon was about identity at some deep level: “He’s not a mainstream conservative…It’s important for young people to listen to a speaker articulate what this means on a metapolitical and philosophical level” (Mangan, ). Spencer expressed his hope, saying, “I don’t think Donald Trump is alt-right. I don’t think Donald Trump is an identitarian as I would use that term. I think Donald Trump is a kind of first step towards this. He’s the first time that we’ve seen a genuinely if, you could say incomplete, politician who’s fighting for European identity politics in North America…” (Letson, ).

The intense media coverage of the Nazi salutes, while further raising Spencer’s profile, also splintered the alt-right, with some leading right-wing figures denouncing Spencer and his antisemitic beliefs. The outrage over the Nazi salutes even led to Trump explicitly disavowing and condemning Spencer’s group. When Trump appointed Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, as his chief strategist, the move prompted widespread alarm and protest—and seemed to cement the “alt-right’s” rise. Bannon had once described Breitbart, a popular right-wing site, as “the platform for the alt-right.” At his inauguration, Trump, an unabashed populist, made a clear effort to separate the “white” from the “nationalism” (Beckett, ).

In November , an openly frustrated Spencer declared, “The Trump moment is over, and it’s time for us to move on.” The SPLC reported that the white nationalist movement was dissatisfied with Trump’s presidency (SPLC, ). Spencer believed Trump was practicing a “con game” and not clearly developing a white nationalist agenda as Trump “gives us nothing outside of racist tweets, and by racist tweets, I mean tweets that are meaningless and cheap” (Yee, ). In , following the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, Spencer even said that he regretted voting for Trump (Palmer, ). In August of that year, Spencer announced that he planned to vote for Joe Biden. “The MAGA/Alt-Right moment is over. I made mistakes; Trump is an obvious disaster, but mainly the paradigm contained flaws that we now are able to perceive. And it needs to end…It’s not based on ‘accelerationism’ or anything like that; the liberals are clearly more competent people.” Shortly after, Biden’s campaign forcefully disavowed Spencer’s endorsement. Andrew Bates, the rapid-response director for the Biden campaign tweeted that, “What you stand for is absolutely repugnant. Your support is 10, percent unwelcome here” (Sheth, ).

Conference Series and Abusing The First Amendment

Strong free speech protections in the US enable Spencer to hold conferences (SPLC, n.d.). Judicial interpretations of the First Amendment of the US Constitution follow such a logic: The right to free speech must be universal, with no exceptions. Thus, Nazis and white supremacists must be allowed to speak freely, even at a university campus where no one seems to want them, and even when their speech openly rejects other core values, such as the dignity of all persons. The US permits limits on free speech rights only in rare cases of “fighting words” that pose an imminent threat of violence. No one has yet used the “fighting words” argument against Spencer, despite Charlottesville (Peterson, ).

By exploiting the First Amendment, Spencer has focused on getting college students to attend his annual events, including the NPI conference, and he’s had some success (ADL, ). NPI’s first conference, held in DC in , drew about 85 people. Its second, in , attracted a little over  (Harkinson, ). In Spencer’s view, his resentments have cropped up among younger, college-educated whites for whom “enforced multiculturalism” on college campuses is giving shape to a new kind of white identity politics (Harkinson, ). Spencer has influenced a younger generation of college-age racists. In and , leaders of the now defunct racist student group, Youth for Western Civilization, invited Spencer to speak at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and Providence College in Rhode Island. In both speeches, Spencer attacked affirmative action (ADL, ).

The white-nationalist groups seem to believe that teens and somethings are particularly susceptible to their messaging, said Oren Segal, the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. Segal noted that the groups are aiming for a younger demographic by reaching out through social media and trying to set up talks on college campuses or disseminating fliers there. Spencer also made a highly publicized visit to Texas A&M University in December , further fuelling concerns about the alt-right on campus (Wertheimer, ). Although over 10, people signed an online petition to ask university officials to ban Spencer from speaking on campus, the university and student representatives simultaneously condemned and supported Spencer’s presence on campus. They claimed that while they disagreed with his message and ideology, they supported his right to appear and speak, per the First Amendment (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ).

In and , Spencer launched a college tour to bring his white nationalist message to campuses nationwide (Mangan, ). After Texas A&M University, he spoke at Auburn University in April In October , he spoke to a small, mostly hostile audience at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In March , he spoke to a small group of supporters at Michigan State University, while members of TWP fought with antifa activists outside, leading to a number of arrests. After the MSU speech, Spencer decided to cancel his college tour, saying he would try to find other methods of reaching the public (ADL, ).

Across the whole tour, Spencer’s visit to Texas A&M University was unique for several reasons. In addition to being his first visit and speaking engagement on a university campus, it is Texas A&M University’s military and racialised history that made Spencer’s presence so provoking. Spencer gave his speech at the Memorial Student Center (MSC), which is a student union dedicated to the memory of Texas A&M University students who lost their lives in war, specifically World War II. Though Texas A&M University officials and students lambasted the event as insulting to the legacy of the university students who fought Nazi Germany, as a historically white institution, the university has had a highly contentious and problematic history (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Its first president (and 19th governor of Texas), Lawrence Ross Sullivan, was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan (Slattery, ). At A&M, Spencer spoke to a ballroom of nearly individuals. “America, at the end of the day,” Spencer told his audience, “belongs to white men. Our bones are in the ground. We own it. At the end of the day America can’t exist without us. We defined it. This country does belong to white people, culturally, politically, socially, everything” (SPLC, n.d.).

Spencer’s Efforts to Spread His Ideas Internationally

Spencer and his alt-right movement has exploited all possibilities to build bridges with their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. However, his efforts to reach out to European nationalists have not gone well. In October , he attempted to hold an NPI conference in Budapest, Hungary, as part of an effort to reach out to “European traditionalists” all over the world (Gray, ). On paper, Budapest seemed the ideal venue for the NPI, which thinks rising discontent with EU migration policy has created an opening for it. Economic stagnation and political sclerosis in the European Union have given fodder to anti-immigrant parties across the continent, and Hungary is home to Jobbik, one of Europe’s largest far-right parties, which won 20 percent of the seats in parliament (Seddon, a). Dubbed the European Congress, the conference featured an array of white nationalists from both Europe and America. Among the scheduled speakers were Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Philippe Vardon from the far-right French Bloc Identitaire movement, Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin, and right-wing Hungarian extremist MP Márton Gyöngyösi (SPLC, n.d.), who once called on the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a “national security risk” (Seddon, ). 

Hungary’s populist strongman Viktor Orbán ordered the country’s interior ministry to ban the conference after several parties and ministries complained about it. Interior Minister Sándor Pintér said in a statement that the conference was against Hungarian law protecting “the human dignity of others, of the Hungarian nation or of national, ethnic, racial of religious communities” and vowed to bar the conference speakers from entering the country (Seddon, ). Before the conference even started, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade released a statement condemning “all xenophobic and exclusionary organizations that discriminate based on religion or ethnicity.” Planned reservations at the venue, the Larus Center, were cancelled. On Oct. 3, Spencer was arrested while meeting informally with other participants at a cafe that was to have been an alternate venue. He was jailed for three days, deported, and banned for three years from entering all 26 European countries (SPLC, n.d.). He was declared a “national security threat” (Harkinson, ). 

In , the Home Office of the British government also banned Spencer from visiting Great Britain, citing his white supremacist views. In November , Poland’s state-run news agency PAP reported that Polish authorities had extended Spencer’s ban from the Schengen area for another five years (ADL, ) citing Spencer’s Nazi rhetoric and the Nazis’ genocide of Slavic people during World War II (The Guardian, ). Spencer had to cancel his plans to travel to Poland fora far-right conference in Warsaw after seeing reports the government was threatening to keep him out of the country. Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski described Spencer as someone “who defames what happened during World War II, defames the Holocaust” (Haaretz, ). In July , Spencer was detained at Keflavík Airport in Reykjavík, Iceland, en route to Sweden and was ordered by Polish officials to return to the US (Michel, ).

Despite these efforts to keep Spencer at bay, the idea of white victimhood has crossed international borders and the idea of white people falling victim to an “onslaught” of refugees and immigrants has become a major factor in elections across Europe (Villet, ). Spencer has partnered with two Swedish outfits to create a media company and keep race at the centre of the new right wing. Called the Alt-Right Corporation, it links Spencer with Arktos Media, a publishing house begun in Sweden to print English-language editions of esoteric nationalist books from many countries. The other Swedish partner is Red Ice, a video and podcast platform featuring white nationalists from around the globe. It was natural for Spencer to turn to Swedes as partners in the new enterprise, given the country’s history as an exporter of white nationalist ideas. But forging formal bonds between nationalists across the Atlantic makes even more sense as the politics of Northern Europe is heavily driving the politics of immigration and Islam in the US (Feder & Mannheimer, ). Spencer believes in white pride and the unification of a pan-European “white race” in a “potential racial empire” (Harkinson, )

Spencer has also advocated for the US pulling out of NATO and called Russia the “sole white power in the world.” His former partner, Nina Koupriianova, under her penname Nina Byzantina, referred to herself as a “Kremlin troll leader” and regularly aligned with Kremlin talking points. She also had ties to Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right ultranationalist Russian leader in the Eurasianism movement (Bertrand, ).  Koupriianova has translated several books written by Dugin (Gessen, ; Porter, a). The books were later published by Spencer’s publishing house, Washington Summit Publishers (Shekhovtsov, ). “I think the fact that we’re inviting Dugin is expressive of the fact that we want to have a real healthy dialogue with the major currents of Russian conservatism,” Spencer said (Gray, ). Spencer also explained the chants in support of Russia during the Charlottesville rally: “There is a common brotherhood that stretches from Portugal to Siberia and includes North America. Even though we’re very different, we obviously have common ancestry and there’s that tie of blood” (Laughland, ). 

His wife and Spencer have each appeared on Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language news and propaganda network. Spencer admires Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, and he would gladly admit most Russians into his ideal ethnostate (Harkinson, ). His thoughts on the Ukraine crisis hew closely to Moscow’s: “…I am more sympathetic towards Russia as a major power entering the world stage. Russia has the opportunity, to put it bluntly, to make the world a better place.” He also said, “I’m sympathetic toward Putin in many ways” (Gray, ). 

Spencer and the alt-right have also lifted up Bashar al-Assad as a hero. Support for the Syrian president means they can further tangle internet conspiracy theories, tap into a deep vein of antisemitism, anti-interventionism, and anti-globalism, and wind up their biggest enemy: liberals. Spencer is able to aggressively support Trump’s “Muslim ban,” while also getting behind the Syrian dictator just because Assad was “educated in the West and offer[ed] a civilized variant of Islam.” Spencer said he’d been “aware” of Assad since the early s. The core of it for Spencer was that Assad, in addition to being the “rightful, legitimate ruler of Syria,” was fighting ISIS (Buchanan, ). After the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, Trump’s decision to strike Syria caused a rift between the then-president and his alt-right supporters. Spencer led a protest against Trump’s decision, leading to a handful of skirmishes with counter-protesters in front of the White House. “We want walls, not war!” chanted some of the protesters accompanying Spencer (Hernandez, ). 

He also criticized the Trump administration following the targeted killing of Iranian General Soleimani for escalating tensions between the US and Iran. In January , Spencer tweeted: “To the people of Iran, there are millions of Americans who do not want war, who do not hate you, and who respect your nation and its history. After our traitorous elite is brought to justice, we hope to achieve peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness” (Palmer, ).

Spencer and His Movements Are Hypermasculine, Misogynist and Anti-feminist

While the group led by Richard Spencer is typically defined by its racist views, sexism is also central to its ideology (Paquette, ). The alt-right is hypermasculine, misogynist, and anti-feminist. The alt-right women claim feminism has failed white women, robbing them of the opportunity to have a male provider, a happy family, and a nice home. According to this narrative, the #MeToo movement only confirms the dangerous world feminism has created for women, a world where men no longer respect them for their femininity and fertility and, hence, feel free to assault, harass, and rape them (Love, ). An aspect of their subculture is its connection to the online world of misogyny, known broadly as the “manosphere.” Men in this movement believe they are being stripped of power by women and pro-feminist social structures. They are hostile to women on a personal level, with some believing that women are objects to be possessed and used for sexual gratification, while others resent women for their own inability to attract them or to form meaningful relationships with them (ADL, n.d.).

The alt right opposes “women’s liberation” because it gives women choices that make it less likely that they will “get married, have children, and perpetuate the white race” (Center on Extremism Report, 7). Its members call liberated women “thots,” which means “that ho over there,” and celebrate the femininity and fertility of women who accept their traditional sex/gender roles, calling them as “tradhots” (Center on Extremism Report, 6–7). In short, the alt-right would return white women to their biological roles as wives and mothers for the white race (Love, ).

The predominant demographic of the alt-right is white men aged 18 to  Alt-rightpopulism is the product of people for whom whiteness and masculinity have been their primary form of social capital. The suggestion that whiteness and maleness are no longer a form of political or social currency means that there is now room for forms of citizenship and leadership that do not belong to the proverbial “old white men” (Bezio, ). 

The Guardian reporter Adam Gabbat’s () observations at one of Spencer’s meeting also confirmed these descriptions: 

“When the time came for questions, I pointed out that there were very few women at the event. It prompted a surreal discussion between six white men about the sexual preferences of women. The almost entirely male audience cheered when Spencer made his statement about women’s desire for a ‘strong man.’ ‘I’ve looked at a lot of romance novels that women read and I’ve noticed a distinct pattern,’ Spencer said. ‘Romance novels about cubicle-dwelling boring computer programmers don’t sell very well. Romance novels about cowboys and Vikings seem to be very popular. We might want to look at something like that and see if that tells us something about human nature” (Gabbatt, ).

During the US presidential election, Spencer tweeted that women should not be allowed to make foreign policy (Bowman, , Hayden, a). His views about women—that their role in politics minimal—would be unrecognizable to almost anyone in modern America. “I don’t necessarily think that that’s a great thing,” Spencer said of women voting in US elections. Spencer has also suggested that the US should be protected from what he views to be the danger of having a female commander-in-chief (Hayden, a). He also stated in an interview that his vision of America as a white ethnostate includes women returning to traditional roles as child bearers and homemakers (Cox, ; Paquette, ).

Although the alt-right movement appears to be composed primarily of white men in their “manosphere,” similar to other far-right movements that emphasize hypermasculinity and patriarchy (Kimmel, ; Lyons, ; Tien, ), white women continue to participate actively in white supremacist movements. The presence of women as “shield maidens,” “fashy femmes,” and “trad wives” serves to soften and normalize white supremacy. Women in the alt-right serve as auxiliaries rather than leaders. This partly explains why women’s participation receives less media and scholarly attention. However, white women shield white supremacy in less subtle and more traditional ways, representing their roles as community service and social welfare. Women in white supremacist groups have organized church socials, Klan picnics, charity fundraisers, and white nationalist online dating sites (Love, ). These white men and women provide fertile ground for an anti-modern populist mobilization (Kelly, ). The internalization of traditional patriarchal gender normative beliefs influence affiliation with the alt-right movement (Boehme, & Isom Scott, ).

According to some sources, in late , Spencer dated a woman who is Asian American. The two met when she was working for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. “I am not the only Asian girl he has dated,” says Spencer’s ex (Harkinson, ). Spencer acknowledged that some of his comrades would probably find that “terrible.” Later, he said that he would not date a non-white woman again and that he still wants interracial relationships barred. That belief is core to the alt-right’s most radical goal: an all-white country (Cox, ). Spencer also opposes same-sex marriage, which he has described as “unnatural” and a “non-issue.” Despite his opposition to same-sex marriage, Spencer barred people with anti-gay views from the NPI’s annual conference in  (Falvey, ).

In October , Koupriianova accused Spencer, in divorce documents, of multiple forms of abuse. She provided hours of recordings and text messages to the press in order to substantiate her allegations. Court documents detailed emotional abuse, financial abuse, and violent physical abuse, frequently in front of their children. She has accused him of choking her, dragging her by her hair, and attempting to punch her while she was pregnant, according to divorce filings. “One of [Spencer’s] favourite statements to me is, ‘The only language women understand is violence,’” Spencer’s wife alleged. She claimed he called her “genetically defective” and a “parasite”, and that he verbally abused her in front of their young daughter. “I’m famous and you are not! I’m important and you are not!” Spencer would sometimes tell her when he was angry, she claimed (Beckett, ). A caregiver to the children testified in court about Spencer’s abuses towards both her and Koupriianova. She also suggested that Spencer had sometimes failed to provide for his family and care for her and their children (Beckett, ). Spencer denied all allegations made against him and was not charged with a crime. 

Moreover, the documents said that Spencer’s “controversial public life” led “his entire family to be targets of violence.” “Despite the risk to his family,” Koupriianova argued in the court, “[Spencer] continues to engage in extremely polarizing public speech advocating ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ and a white-only ‘ethno-state’ which tends to invite passions and violence.” “Most, if not all, of his public speaking events result in violence,” the affidavit stated. The documents also claimed that Spencer was verbally abusive to their children’s babysitter, including in front of their children, where he allegedly called the babysitter a “fucking sub-mediocre human being” and a “fucking moron” (Ansari, ). 

GAB social media seen on the smartphone screen.

Spencer, the Alt-Right, and Social Media

The alt-right has flourished online (Guynn, ) and its expansion can largely be attributed to the internet (Love, )—and especially social media, thanks to the anonymity these platforms provide users of extreme ideologies (Lyons, ).Swastikas and Hitler references have long punctuated the irreverent banter on the message boards of Reddit and 4chan, but they are no longer just jokes as they’re swept up in a tide of the alt-right’s memes such as Pepe the Frog and Napoleon Trump (Harkinson, ). Cyber-bigots, including Spencer’s followers, who maintain First Amendment protection, anonymously and blatantly promote racism, and propagate a separatist ideology (Brown, ). 

The alt-right is generally hostile towards the conventional media, including by using the term “lügenpresse,” a term used by the Nazis and meaning “lying press. Alt-right Twitter trolls have aggressively attacked journalists (Gray, ).Spencer has also embraced the young internet activists who create the racist, antisemitic and misogynistic memes, symbols and slogans that characterize much of the alt-right’s online presence (ADL, ). Their rhetoric in cyberspace shows that right-wing images of Black identity haven’t much changed since the time of slavery. The key elements of White supremacy are reinforced by their representation of Black men as hypersexual, aggressive, and violent, which define their physical bodies as inferior to white men.These groups no longer have to communicate in isolation. The Internet provides them immediate access to their followers and makes it easier to spread messages of hate (Brown, ). 

Facebook banned two pages associated with Spencer, just days after Congress grilled the social network’s CEO about its influence on the public (Dalrymple, ). Spencer has also faced crackdowns from other tech companies. In , Twitter suspended both the NPI’s account and the account of Spencer himself, though his personal page was eventually reinstated. A year later, after Charlottesville, Twitter yanked Spencer’s verification badge but allowed him to continue using the platform. Web-hosting company Squarespace has also booted the NPI (Dalrymple, ).

After Twitter suspended the NPI’s official account (@npiamerica) and its online magazine (@RadixJournal), in addition to a separate book publishing company run by Spencer called Washington Summit Publishers (@washsummit), Spencer told The Daily Caller, “This is corporate Stalinism.” He said, “Twitter is trying to airbrush the alt-right out of existence. They’re clearly afraid. They will fail!” In a YouTube video, entitled “Knight of the Long Knives,” an apparent reference to the purge of Nazi leaders in to consolidate Adolf Hitler’s power, Spencer said Twitter had engaged in a coordinated effort to wipe out alt-right Twitter (Bennett, ). 

Spencer also said, “I am alive physically, but digitally speaking, there has been execution…across the alt-right.” He said, “This is a clear sign that we have power. Even if it’s in our own little small way…we have power, and we’re changing the world” (Andrews, ). In response to the purges, many alt-right users transferred to Gab, a Twitter substitute platform with a much more aggressive free speech policy (Bennett, ). However, Spencer’s ability to raise funds has been hampered since he was kicked off Facebook and other major fundraising sites (Barrouquere, ). 

Conclusion

Following the Charlottesville rally, as the alt-right’s views became better known, many people who had flirted with the movement broke ranks, leaving it smaller but more ideologically cohesive (Hawley, ). Spencer’s NPI has mysteriously gone quiet and appears to be in disarray (Barrouquere, ). The most recent article on the NPI website was posted Dec. 15, , three months after Hatewatch began asking questions about the non-profit’s status. The previous post was from Nov. 6, The website still says Spencer is “President and Creative Director” but lists no other officers (Barrouquere, ). Despite its diminishing power, the members of Spencer’s alt-right movement still tend to demonstrate in-group love and outgroup hate of “others.” Therefore, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) listed white supremacy of the sort practiced by Spencer and the alt-right as America’s largest domestic terrorist threat.

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Far-right, white nationalist movement

The alt-right, an abbreviation of alternative right, is a loosely connected far-rightwhite nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the early s before establishing a presence in other countries and declining after The term is ill-defined, having been used in different ways by alt-right members, media commentators, and academics.

Inthe American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Rightwebzine. His "alternative right" was influenced by earlier forms of American white nationalism, as well as paleoconservatism, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Nouvelle Droite. His term was shortened to "alt-right" and popularised by far-right participants of /pol/, the politics board of web forum 4chan. It came to be associated with other white nationalist websites and groups, including Andrew Anglin's Daily Stormer, Brad Griffin's Occidental Dissent, and Matthew Heimbach's Traditionalist Worker Party. Following the Gamergate controversy, the alt-right made increasing use of trolling and online harassment to raise its profile. Init attracted broader attention—particularly through coverage on Steve Bannon's Breitbart News—due to alt-right support for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Upon being elected, Trump disavowed the movement. Attempting to move from a web-based to a street-based movement, Spencer and other alt-rightists organized the August Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led find out if spouse is on dating sites violent clashes with counter-demonstators. The fallout from the rally resulted in a decline of the alt-right.

The alt-right movement espouses a pseudo-scientific form of racism which promotes a form of identity politics in favor of European Americans and white people internationally, to the disfavor of all other groups. Anti-egalitarian, it rejects the liberal democratic basis of U.S. governance and opposes both the conservative and liberal wings of the country's political mainstream. Many of its members seek to replace the U.S. with a alt right women dating asian men separatistethno-state. Some alt-rightists seek to make white nationalism socially respectable while others, known as the "" scene, adopt openly white supremacist and neo-Nazi stances to shock and provoke. Some alt-rightists are antisemitic, promoting a conspiracy theory that there is a Jewish plot to bring about white genocide, although other alt-rightists view most Jews as members of the white race. Anti-feminist, alt right women dating asian men, the alt-right intersects with the men's rights movement and online manosphere. The alt-right distinguished itself from earlier forms of white nationalism through its largely online presence and its heavy use of irony and humor, particularly through the promotion of Internet memes like Pepe alt right women dating asian men Frog. Individuals aligned with many of the alt-right's ideas but not its white alt right women dating asian men have been termed "alt-lite".

The best christian dating app membership is overwhelmingly white and male, attracted to the movement by deteriorating living standards and prospects, anxieties about the social role of white masculinity, and anger at leftist and non-white forms of identity politics such as Black Lives Matter, alt right women dating asian men. Alt-right material has contributed to the radicalization of men responsible for various murders and terrorist attacks in the U.S. since Critics charge that the term "alt-right" is merely a rebranding of white supremacism.^[1][2]

Definition

The term "alt-right" is an abbreviation of "alternative right". A distinct far-right movement arising in the s, it both drew on older far-right ideas and displayed novelties. Efforts to define the alt-right have been complicated by the contradictory ways in which self-described "alt-rightists" have defined the movement and by the tendency among some of its political opponents to apply the term "alt-right" liberally to a broad range of right-wing groups and viewpoints.^[5] As the alt-right rose to wider awareness aroundmedia sources struggled to understand it;^[6] some commentators applied the term as alt right women dating asian men catch-all for anyone they deemed far-right. The scholars Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall, and Simon Murdoch noted that in the "press and broadcast media", the term had been "used to describe everything from hardcore nazis and Holocaust deniers through to mainstream Republicans in the US and right-wing populists in Europe". Because the term "alt-right" was coined by white nationalists themselves rather than by academic observers or by their opponents, various journalists avoided it.^[10] George Hawley, a political scientist specializing in the U.S. far-right, disagreed with this approach, noting that using terms like "white supremacist" in place of "alt-right" conceals the way that alt-right differed from other far-right movements.

Hermansson et al defined the alt-right as "a far right, anti-globalist grouping" that operated "primarily online though with offline outlets". They noted that its "core belief is that 'white identity' is under attack from pro-multicultural and liberal elites and so called 'social justice warriors' (SJWs) who allegedly use 'political correctness' to undermine Western civilisation and the rights of white males". The anti-fascist researcher Matthew N. Lyons defined the alt-right as "a loosely organized far-right movement that shares a contempt for both liberal multiculturalism and mainstream conservatism; a belief that some people are inherently superior to others; a strong Internet presence and embrace of specific elements of online culture; and a self-presentation as being new, hip, and dating an emotionally unavailable woman the Columbia Journalism Review, the journalist Chava Gourarie labelled it a "rag-tag coalition" operating as a "diffuse online subculture" that had "an inclination for vicious online trolling, alt right women dating asian men, with some roots in fringe-right ideologies".^[6] The academic Tom Pollard referred to the alt-right as a "socio/political movement" comprising "a loose amalgam of rightist groups and causes" who "shun egalitarianism, socialism, feminism, miscegenation, multiculturalism, free trade, globalization, and all forms of gun control". The journalist Mike Wendling termed it "an incredibly loose set alt right women dating asian men ideologies held together by what they oppose: feminism, Islam, the Black Lives Matter movement, political correctness, a fuzzy idea they call 'globalism,' and establishment politics of both the left and the right".

The Southern Poverty Law Center defined the alt-right as "a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that 'white identity' is under attack by multicultural forces using 'political correctness' and 'social justice' to undermine white people and 'their' civilization".^[18] The Anti-Defamation League states that "alt-right" is a "vague term actually encompass[ing] a range of people on the extreme right who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy".^[19]

History

Influences

The alt right women dating asian men had various ideological forebears. The idea of white supremacy had been dominant across U.S. political discourse throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. After World War II, it was increasingly repudiated and relegated to the far-right of the country's political spectrum. Far-right groups retaining such ideas—such as George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party and William Luther Pierce's National Alliance—remained marginal. By the dating over 45, white supremacism was largely confined to neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) groups, alt right women dating asian men, although its ideologues wanted to return it to the mainstream. That decade, several white supremacists reformulated their ideas as white nationalism, through which they presented themselves not as seeking to dominate non-white racial groups but rather as lobbying for the interests of European Americans in a similar way to how civil rights groups lobbied for the rights of African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Although white nationalists often distanced themselves from white supremacism, white supremacist sentiment remained prevalent in white nationalist writings.

The American white nationalist ideologue Jared Taylorbecame a revered figure among the alt-right, and the events organized by his American Renaissance group were attended by many alt-right members.

American white nationalists believed that the United States had been created as a nation explicitly for white people of European descent and that it should remain that way. Many called for the formation of an explicitly white ethno-state. Seeking to distance themselves from the violent, skinhead image of neo-Nazi and KKK groups, several white nationalist ideologues—namely Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, and Kevin B. MacDonald—sought to cultivate an image of respectability and alt right women dating asian men through which to promote their views. Hawley later termed their ideology "highbrow white nationalism", and noted its particular influence on the alt-right. Taylor, for instance, became a revered figure in alt-right circles.

Under the Republicanpresidency of George W. Bush in the s, alt right women dating asian men, the white nationalist movement focused largely on criticizing conservatives rather than liberals, accusing them of betraying white Americans. In that period they drew increasingly on the conspiracy theories that had been generated by the Patriot movement since the s; online, the white nationalist and Patriot movements increasingly converged. Following the election of Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama to the presidency in —making him the first black president of the country—the world-views of various right-wing movements, including white supremacists, Patriots, alt right women dating asian men, and Tea Partiers, increasingly began to coalesce, in part due to a shared racial animus against Obama.

The alt-right drew upon several older currents of right-wing thought. One was the Nouvelle Droite, a far-right movement that originated in s France before spreading elsewhere in Europe.^[31][32][33] Many alt-rightists adopted the Nouvelle Droite's views on pursuing long-term cultural change through "metapolitical" strategies;^[34] it thereby shares similarities with European identitarianism, which also draws upon the Nouvelle Droite. The alt-right also exhibited similarities with the paleoconservative movement which emerged in the U.S. during the s. Both opposed neoconservatism and expressed similar positions on restricting immigration and supporting an openly nationalistic alt right women dating asian men policy, although unlike the alt-right, the paleoconservatives were typically closely aligned to Christianity and how to be successful online dating to reform the conservative movement rather than destroy it.^[37][38] Certain paleoconservatives, such as Samuel T. Francis, became especially close to white nationalism.

There were also links between the American right-libertarian movement and the alt-right, despite libertarianism's general repudiation of identity politics. Many senior alt-rightists previously considered themselves libertarians, and right-libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard has been cited as a particular link between the two movements due to his staunch anti-egalitarianism and support for ideas about differing IQ levels among racial groups.^[43] Also cited in connection with the alt-right was the Dark Enlightenment, or neo-reactionary movement, which emerged online in the s, pursuing an anti-egalitarian message. This movement intersected with the alt-right; many individuals identified with both movements. The Dark Enlightenment however was not white nationalist, alt right women dating asian men, deeming the latter insufficiently elitist.

According to Dean, in the s, there were "alt-right" Usenet groups that consisted of fringe libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and fans of American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, who advocated for the abolition of the state in favor of private property and markets.^[48]

– Origins

According to Hawley, the alt-right began in In November that year, the paleoconservative ideologue and academic Paul Gottfried gave a talk at his H. L. Mencken Club in Baltimore. Although the talk was titled "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right", it did not contain the phrase "alternative right" itself. Gottfried observed that, as the paleoconservative movement declined, a new cohort of young alt right women dating asian men were rising to take its place in challenging the neoconservative ideology then dominant in the Republican Party and broader U.S. conservative movement.^[51]

One of those endorsing Gottfried's idea was fellow paleoconservative Richard B. Spencer. Born in to a wealthy family and raised in Dallas, alt right women dating asian men, Texas,^[54] in Spencer had dropped out of his PhD programme at Duke University to take up a position at The American Conservative magazine.^[56] Spencer claimed he coined the term "alternative right" for the lecture's title, although Gottfried maintained that they were its joint creators. As "alternative right" became associated increasingly with white nationalism in subsequent years, Gottfried distanced himself from it.

After The American Conservative fired Spencer, in he became managing director of Taki Theodoracopulos's right-wing website Taki's Magazine.^[60] The website initially contained contributions largely from paleoconservatives and right-libertarians, but under Spencer also gave space to white nationalists like Taylor. InSpencer used the term "alternative right" in the title of an article by white nationalist Kevin DeAnna. BySpencer had moved fully from paleoconservatism what guy is nick jonas dating white nationalism, although various later press sources instead called him a white supremacist.^[63][64][65] Leaving Taki's Magazine, alt right women dating asian men, in March Spencer launched The Alternative Rightwebzine.^[67] Early issues featured articles by white nationalists like Taylor and MacDonald as well as the HeathenStephen McNallen. Spencer noted that "if you look at the initial articles for www.chevaliercompetences.fr, that was the first stage of the Alt-Right really coming into its own".

www.chevaliercompetences.fr consisted primarily of short essays, covering a range of political and cultural issues, alt right women dating asian men. Many of these reflected the influence of the French Nouvelle Droite, although this declined as the alt-right grew. Spencer later stated that he wanted to create a movement distinct from the white power image of neo-Nazi and KKK groups, noting that their approach to white nationalism was "a total nonstarter. No one outside a hardcore coterie would identify with it". InSpencer became the head of the white nationalist National Policy Institute and launched the Radix Journal to promote his views; inhe stepped down from the AlternativeRight website and took it offline in December By that year, Spencer was expressing ambivalence about the "alternative right" label; he preferred to be called an "identitarian".^[54]

– Rise and peak in popularity

Mainstream emergence

On the Internet, Spencer's term "alternative right" was adopted and abbreviated to "alt-right". According to Slate magazine, the abbreviation "retains the former phrase's associations—the mix of alienation and optimism embedded in the act of proudly affirming an 'alternative' direction—but compacts them into a snappier package".^[51] The "alt-right" tag was created with public relations in mind, allowing white nationalists to soften their image and helping to draw in recruits from conservatism. Many white nationalists gravitated to the term to escape the negative connotations of the term "white nationalism". Spencer thought that by this point, the alt right women dating asian men had become "the banner of white identity politics".

The Daily Stormeris named for the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, known for its antisemitic caricatures. This billboard for Der Stürmerreads "With Der Stürmeragainst Judea. The Jews are our misfortune".

The term gained wider usage on websites like 4chan and Reddit, growing in popularity in Although there had previously been a strong left-libertarian contingent to these online spaces, there was a gradual rightward turn in chan culture centred on 4chan's politics board, /pol/, alt right women dating asian men, during the early-mid s. According to Hawley, the alt-right was "an outgrowth of Internet troll culture", with Hermansson et al observing that "Online Antagonistic Communities" alt right women dating asian men key to the formation of the alt-right as a distinct movement.

The alt-right's emergence was marked by the online Gamergate controversy ofin which some gamers harassed those promoting feminism within the gaming scene.^[83] According to the journalist David Niewert, Gamergate "heralded the rise of the alt-right and provided an early sketch of its primary features: an Internet presence beset by digital trolls, unbridled conspiracism, angry-white-male-identity victimization culture, and, ultimately, open racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and sexual and gender paranoia". Gamergate politicized many young people, especially males, in opposition to the perceived culture war being waged by leftists. Through their shared opposition to political correctness, feminism, and multiculturalism, chan culture built a link to the alt-right. Bythe alt-right had gained significant momentum as an online movement.

Notable promoters of the alt-right included Spencer,^[88]Vox Day,^[89] and Brittany Pettibone.^[90] Earlier white nationalist thinkers were also characterized as alt-right thinkers, among them Taylor,^[91] and MacDonald.^[12] Other prominent alt-rightists included Brad Griffin, a member of the neo-ConfederateLeague of the South who founded the Occidental Dissent blog, Matthew Heimbach, who established the Traditionalist Youth Network inand Andrew Anglin, who launched the Daily Stormer website—named after the Der Stürmer newspaper active in Nazi Germany—in ByAnglin called the Daily Stormer "the world's most visited alt-right website". While some of the websites associated with the alt-right—like The Daily Stormer and the Traditionalist Youth Network—adopted neo-Nazi approaches, others, such as Occidental Dissent, The Unz Review, alt right women dating asian men, Vox Popoli, and Chateau Heartiste, adopted a less extreme form of white nationalism.

Breitbart News and the alt-lite

Far more widely visited than these alt-right websites was Breitbart News, alt right women dating asian men, which between and received over 10 million unique visitors a month.^[97] Launched by the conservative Andrew Breitbart init came under the control of Steve Bannon in A right-wing nationalist and populist, Bannon was hostile to mainstream conservatism. Although much of Alt right women dating asian men coverage fed into racially charged narratives, it did not promote white nationalism, differing from the mainstream conservative press more in tone than in content. Alt-rightists termed Breitbart "alt-lite";^[97] this alt right women dating asian men appeared in the alt-right's language in mid, used pejoratively for rightists who shared their contempt for mainstream conservatism but not their white nationalism.

Breitbart News amplified and popularised alt-right ideas under the editorship of "alt-lite" figure Steve Bannon (left); its articles by Milo Yiannopoulos (right) were particularly influential.

In JulyBannon claimed that Breitbart had become "the platform for the alt-right";^[][] he may have been referring not to the website's official content but to its comments section—which is lightly moderated and contains more extreme views than those of Breitbart itself. Several political scientists rejected the characterization of Breitbart as alt-right,^[] although press sources repeatedly described it as such,^[][][] and the journalist Mike Wendling termed Breitbart "the chief popular media amplifier of alt-right ideas".

In Marchthe writers Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos published an article in Breitbart discussing the alt-right. They downplayed its most extreme elements and championed its counter-cultural value. Bokhari and Yiannopoulos' piece was subsequently widely cited in the mainstream press, with Hawley describing it as "the most sympathetic portrayal of the movement to appear in a major media venue to date". Many alt-rightists responded negatively to Bokhari and Yiannopoulos' article; The Daily Stormer referred to it as "the Product of a Degenerate Homosexual and an Ethnic Mongrel".

Many press sources subsequently termed Yiannopoulos "alt-right".^[][] This was rejected both by Hawley, and by alt-rightists; on Occidental Dissent, Griffin asked: "What the hell does Milo Yiannopoulos—a Jewish homosexual who boasts about carrying on interracial relationships with black men—have to do with us?" Other observers instead labeled Yiannopoulos "alt-light" or "alt-lite", a term also applied to rightists like Mike Cernovich and Gavin McInnes. McInnes clarified his understanding of the difference between the alt-right and alt-lite by explaining that while the former focused on the white race, the latter welcomed individuals of any racial background who shared its belief in the superiority of Western culture.

Donald Trump presidential campaign and election

The alt-right largely rallied behind the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, although he distanced himself from the movement.

In Junebillionaire businessman Donald Trump announced alt right women dating asian men to campaign to become the Republican nominee for the presidential election, attracting the interest of alt-rightists as well as from white nationalists more broadly, neo-Nazis, KKK groups, and the Patriot movement. Vocal in their support for Trump's campaign,^[][][][] this cause energized the alt-right and gave them the opportunity for a broader audience. Niewert observed that "Trump was the gateway drug for the alt-right", with many individuals learning of the movement through their interest in Trump.

Ideologically, the alt-right remained "far to Trump's right", and Trump himself had little understanding of the movement. Many alt-rightists recognized that Trump did not share their white nationalism and would not bring about all the changes they desired; they nevertheless approved of his hard attitude to immigration, his calls for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., and for a wall to be built along the border with Mexico to curtail illegal immigration. They were grateful that he had shifted the national conversation rightward, and that he had shown that it was possible to challenge the mainstream conservative movement from the right. Griffin called on alt-rightists to "join the Trump campaign to take down the hated cuckservative establishment".^{[note 2]} A small minority of alt-rightists were against supporting Trump; The Right Stuff contributor "AuschwitzSoccer Ref" complained that two of Trump's children had married Jews.

A keen Twitter user, in November Trump retweeted a graphic about African-American crime statistics alt right women dating asian men included alt right women dating asian men white nationalist hashtag "#WhiteGenocide".^[] The alt-righter RamZPaul rejoiced, retweeting Trump's piece with the comment: "Trump watches and is influenced by the Alt Right". Over coming months, Trump retweeted a second tweet that had "#WhiteGenocide" as a hashtag as well as sharing other tweets issued by white supremacists.^[] The alt-right saw this as further evidence that Trump was their champion.

Hillary Clinton's August speech denouncing the alt-right helped bring the movement to mainstream attention

In AugustTrump appointed Bannon to lead his election campaign.^[][] This was swiftly condemned in a Reno, Nevada speech given by the Democratic Party's nominee for the presidency, Hillary Clinton. She highlighted Bannon's claim that Breitbart was "the platform for the alt-right",^[] describing the movement as "an emerging racist ideology" and warning that "a fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party".^[][][] Attacking the alt-right as "racist ideas[] anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women ideas", she accused Trump of taking them "mainstream".^[] Clinton said that while half of Trump's supporters were decent individuals "desperate for change", the busty dating site half represented a "basket of deplorables".

After Clinton's speech, traffic alt right women dating asian men alt-right websites rose and the mainstream media gave it increasing coverage;^[] Spencer and other alt-rightists were pleased, believing her speech gave them greater publicity and helped legitimize them in the public eye.^[] Many Trump supporters adopted the moniker of "deplorables", and the term was widely used on memes that the alt-right promoted online. In September, Spencer, Taylor, and Peter Brimelow held a press conference in Washington DC to explain their goals.^[][]

When Trump won the election in November, the alt-right's response was generally triumphalist and self-congratulatory. Anglin stated: "Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were alt right women dating asian men for us, it wouldn't have been possible"; Spencer tweeted that "The Alt-Right has been declared the winner We're the establishment now".^[] Alt-rightists were generally supportive of Trump's decision to appoint Bannon his chief strategist,^[] and Jeff Sessions his attorney general.^[] While aware that Trump would not pursue a white nationalist agenda, the alt-right hoped to pull him further to the right, taking hardline positions that made him look more moderate, and thus shifting mainstream discourse rightward.

After Trump's election

Wendling suggested that Trump's election signaled "the beginning of the end" for the alt-right, with the movement's growth stalling from that point. Celebrating Trump's victory, Spencer held a November meeting in Washington D.C. in which he stated that he thought that he had "a psychic connection, a deeper connection with Donald Trump, in a way we simply do not have with most Republicans". He ended the conference by declaring "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!", to which various attendees responded with Nazi salutes and chanting, alt right women dating asian men. This attracted significant press attention. When questioned on the incident, Spencer stated that the salutes were given "in a spirit of irony and exuberance".^[][]

Later that month, Trump was asked about the alt-right in an interview with The New York Times. He responded: "I don't want to energize mature dating app group, and I disavow the group".^[] This rejection angered many alt-rightists.^[] In Aprilmany alt-rightists criticized Trump's order to launch the Shayrat missile strike against Syrian military targets; like many of those who had supported him, they believed he was going back on his promise of a more non-interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East.^[][][][]

Hawley noted that the alt-right's influence on the Trump administration was "negligible". However, press sources alleged that several appointments within the Trump administration were linked to the alt-right, including Senior Advisor to the President Stephen Miller,^[] National Security Advisor Michael Flynn,^[] Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka,^[] Special Assistant to the President Julia Hahn,^[] and speechwriter Darren Beattie.^[] After Trump's election, the alt-right also supported the unsuccessful campaigns of several other Republicans, including Roy Moore.^[] Some Republican candidates who were alleged to have alt-right links also ran for office, among them Paul Nehlen,^[]Corey Stewart,^[][]Josh Mandel, and Joe Arpaio.^[][]

InTwitter began closing alt-right accounts it regarded as engaging in abuse or harassment; among those closed were the accounts of Spencer and his NPI.^[] In FebruaryReddit then closed down the "r/altright" subreddit after its participants were found to have breached its policy prohibiting doxing.^[][]Facebook followed by shutting down Spencer's pages on its platform in April ^[] In JanuarySpencer launched a new website, www.chevaliercompetences.fr, which combined the efforts of the Arktos publishing company and the Red Ice video and radio network.^[]

Unite the Right rally and its aftermath

Further information: Charlottesville car attack

A participant at the Unite the Right rally gave a Nazi salute and was subsequently assaulted by counter-protesters.

In Augustthe Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, bringing together alt-rightists with members of other far-right movements. Many alt-rightists thought that the rally would mark a turning point in the transformation of their movement from an online phenomenon into a street-based one. At www.chevaliercompetences.fr, editor Vincent Law for instance predicted before the event took place that "People will talk about Charlottesville as a turning point".^[] However, the event and its aftermath proved demoralizing for many in the movement.

Various violent acts took place at the rally. An African-American man, DeAndre Harris, was assaulted by demonstrators, while Richard W. Preston, alt right women dating asian men, an Imperial Wizard for the Maryland-based Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, fired a gun towards counter-protesters.^[][] One participant in the rally, a year-old from Ohio named James Alex Fields Jr., rammed his car into counter-protesters, killing year old Heather D. Heyer and injuring 35 others.^[][][] Although Spencer condemned the killing, other alt-rightists celebrated it. Fields was arrested and later sentenced to life in prison.^[][] The car ramming incident brought much negative publicity to the event and its participants, earning the alt-right a reputation for violence.

Various commentators and politicians, including Usa free dating site, labelled Fields' ramming attack "domestic terrorism".^[][][] Trump claimed that there were "some very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville protests, stating that what he called the "alt-left" bore some responsibility for the violence. Spencer stated that he was "really proud" of the president for those comments. Amid criticism of his comments, Trump added his view that "racism is evil" and that "those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs".^[]

Various alt-rightists who attended the rally experienced personal and legal repercussions for their involvement; one attendee, the U.S. Marine Vasillios Pistolis, was for instance court-martialled.^[] Internet service providers and social media websites subsequently terminated many alt-right accounts and sites. Prominent figures like Spencer became reticent about organizing further public protests. He experimented with the use of flash demonstrations, returning to Charlottesville with a much smaller group for an unannounced protest in October. Unite the Right exacerbated tensions between the alt-right and the alt-lite; Breitbart distanced itself from the alt-right, as did Yiannopoulos, who insisted he had "nothing in common" with Spencer.

–present: Decline

The alt-right significantly declined in and This has happened for multiple reasons, including the backlash of the Unite the Right rally, the fracturing of the movement, more effective banishment of hate speech and harassment from major social media websites and widespread opposition by the American population.^[] InHeidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center described it as "imploding", while Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League stated that the alt-right was in "a downward spiral, but it doesn't mean they're going to disappear".^[] That year, Heimbach was arrested for the battery of his wife and father-in-law, resulting in the dissolution of his Traditionalist Workers Party,^[][] while Anglin went into hiding to avoid a harassment lawsuit, and Spencer canceled his speaking tour.^[] Writing for The Guardian, Jason Wilson stated that "the alt-right looks like it is crumbling".^[]

There has been widespread concern that as the chance of a large-scale political movement dies out, that lone-wolf terrorist attacks from members will become common.^[] Interrorist attacks and violence affiliated with the alt-right and white supremacy were the leading cause of extremist violence in the United States.^[][] Zack Beauchamp of Vox suggested that "other, more nakedly violent far-right movements have risen in its wake".^[] Several alt-right candidates ran as Republican candidates in the elections, alt right women dating asian men. The neo-Nazi and Holocaust denierArthur Jones ran for an Illinois congressional seat, the white supremacist Paul Nehlen for the Wisconsin seat of Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House,^[] and the neo-Nazi Patrick Little for the United States Senate election in California, ^[][] "Dissident right" is a term used by some groups within the alt-right to make white nationalism appear more mainstream or fun.^[][] During October and NovemberTurning Point USA's "Culture War" college tour was frequently targeted by the dissident right, led by Nick Fuentes, who consider some groups to be not sufficiently conservative on issues of race and ethnicity, immigration, and LGBTQ rights.^[]

Beliefs

The alt-right is situated on the far-right of the left-right political spectrum. It has no unifying manifesto and those who describe themselves as "alt-rightists" express varying views about what they want to achieve, alt right women dating asian men. There are nevertheless recurring attitudes within the movement. The alt-right's views are profoundly anti-egalitarian. It rejects many of the basic premises of the Age of Enlightenment and classical liberalism, including the liberal democracy which underpins the U.S. political system.^[] For this reason, Hawley thought that "the Alt-Right seems like a poor fit for the United States, where both the left and right have roots in classical liberalism and the Enlightenment;" similarly, the academic Thomas J. Main stated that the alt-right sought "a root-and-branch rejection of American political principles".^[]

The key division within the alt-right is between those who embrace explicitly neo-Nazi and white supremacist stances, and those white nationalists who present a more moderate image. Wendling suggested that this was "a distinction lacking a hugely significant difference". The white supremacist and neo-Nazi alt-rightists are sometimes termed "s", a combination of the white supremacist fourteen words slogan with 88, a coded reference to "HH", or "Heil Hitler". These neo-Nazi elements represent a minority within the alt-right. Many on the less extreme end of the movement are critical of them, believing that they "go too far" or generate bad publicity for it. Some of the latter mock the neo-Nazi and explicitly white supremacist elements as "Stormfags", a reference to the white supremacist website Stormfront.

White nationalism

The alt-right is a white nationalist movement and is fundamentally concerned with white identity.^[2] It views all political issues through the framework of race. Spencer described the alt-right as "identity politics for white Americans and for Europeans around the world",^[] while the alt-rightist Greg Johnson of CounterCurrents Publishing stated that "The Alternative Right means White Nationalism".^[] Not all alt-rightists actively embrace the term "white nationalist"; Spencer is among those who prefer to call themselves "identitarians". Main described the alt-right as promoting "white racialism",^[] while Hawley commented that the alt-right is, alt right women dating asian men, "at its core, a racist movement"; similarly, alt right women dating asian men, the historian David Atkinson stated that the alt-right was "a racist movement steeped in white supremacist ideas". Attitudes to non-white people vary within the alt-right, from those black men dating older white women desire tighter restrictions on non-white immigration into the U.S. to those who call for a violent ethnic cleansing of the country.

Rejecting the idea that race alt right women dating asian men a socio-cultural construct, the alt-right promotes scientific racism, claiming that racial categories demarcate biologically distinct groups. They call this belief "race realism". A recurring tendency among alt-rightists is to rank these races on a hierarchy according to perceived IQ: this hierarchy has Asians and Ashkenazi Jews at the top, followed by non-Jewish whites, then Arabs, and finally black Africans. Several prominent alt-rightists, including Anglin and Spencer, have been romantically involved with women of Asian heritage.^[] Unlike earlier racist worldviews, such as those of the interwarfascists, the alt-right emphasizes the idea of racial difference above that of racial superiority, leaving the latter either implicit or secondary in its discourse. Most alt-rightists reject the label of "white supremacist".

Having analyzed alt-right posts online, the political scientists Joe Phillips and Joseph Yi noted that a pervasive underlying theme was the belief that white people were victims and that white Americans had been disadvantaged by government policies such as affirmative action for non-white groups, assistance to illegal immigrants, and the perceived denigration of "white history" like Christopher Columbus and the Confederate States of America. Alt-right online discourse also expressed much anger at the idea of white privilege, widely promoted by the American Left in the s, with members citing job insecurity, under employment or unemployment, alt right women dating asian men, and growing mortality rates among whites as evidence that they alt right women dating asian men not lead privileged lives. Alt-rightists wish to see an end to measures they believe disadvantage white Americans, alt right women dating asian men, including affirmative action, toleration of illegal immigration, and adult dating affliates public removal of symbols of "white history", such as statues of Columbus.

Many alt-rightists have expressed the desire to push white nationalist ideas into the Overton window—the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The alt-right has served as a bridge between white nationalism and traditional conservatism and as a tool used by white nationalists to push their rhetoric into the mainstream.^[] On Twitter, alt-rightists for instance combined their white nationalist hashtags with others used by Trump supporters more broadly, notably #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, so as to spread their message across the broader political right.

White separatism and ethno-states

The alt-right is typically white separatist, with its members desiring autonomy in their own white communities. Some envision breaking up the United States into multiple states, each inhabited by a different ethnic or racial group, one or more of which would represent white ethno-states. Writing in the Pacific Standard, journalist Jared Keller commented that this desire for an independent ethno-state was similar to anarcho-fascist ideas promoted by the British National Anarchist Movement.^[] Spencer compared his campaign for a white ethno-state with the early days of Zionism, which began in the 19th century with calls for the formation of a Jewish ethno-state and resulted in the formation of Israel in the midth century.

Many alt-rightists are unclear as to how a white ethno-state would emerge, but are content instead to promote the idea. Spencer commented "I don't know how we're going to get there, because the thing is, history will decide that for us You have to wait for a revolutionary opportunity to present itself, and history will present that opportunity". He suggested that it could be achieved through "peaceful ethnic cleansing", with non-whites given financial incentives to leave. The prominent alt-rightist Greg Johnson suggested that it would come about after white nationalists became the dominant force in U.S, alt right women dating asian men. politics, at which point they would deport all illegal migrants before encouraging all other people of color to emigrate.

Other alt-rightists are critical of the idea of breaking up the U.S. into ethno-states, arguing that this would mean destroying the country that their Euro-American alt right women dating asian men built. They instead argue for restrictive immigration policies to ensure that the U.S. retains its white majority. Some alt-rightists promote a pan-white empire spanning Europe and North America. Spencer noted that wanted his white ethno-state in North America to eventually form part of "a global empire" that could provide "a homeland for all white people", alt right women dating asian men, expanding its territory into the Middle East by conquering Istanbul, which in his words was "such a profoundly symbolic city. Retaking it, that would be a statement to the world".

Antisemitism and the white genocide conspiracy theory

Some elements of the alt-right are antisemitic but others are tolerant of Jews.^[5] Many in the alt-right believe that there is a Jewish conspiracy within the United States to achieve "white genocide", the elimination of white people as a racial group and their replacement with non-whites. They believe that a Jewish cabal controls the U.S. government, media, and universities, and is pursuing its aim of white genocide by spreading anti-white tropes and encouraging African-American civil rights groups. As evidence for this supposed white genocide, these far-right figures point to the depiction of inter-racial couples or mixed-race children on television and the publication of articles discouraging women from having children early in life. They also cite apparent instances of white self-hatred, including Rachel Dolezal, an American woman of European descent who identifies as black.

This antisemitic conspiracy theory is not new to the alt-right, but has recurred among far-right groups in Western countries since the 19th century; it was the reason for the Holocaust and various anti-Semitic pogroms in European history. Andrew Anglin, one of the most prominent alt-right ideologues and a member of its neo-Nazi wing, stated "the core concept of the movement, upon which all else is based, is that Whites are undergoing an extermination, via mass immigration into White countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of White self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda". Anglin stated that in the alt-right, "Many people also believe that the Jews should be exterminated".^[][] Other alt-rightists, like Spencer, welcome the involvement of Jews within their movement.

Opposition to neoconservatism and political correctness

The alt-right sought to hasten the downfall of U.S. conservatism, and conservatives were often the main target of alt-right wrath. The prominent alt-right ideologue Brad Griffin stated "Alt Right is presenting itself as a sleek new challenger to mainstream conservatism and libertarianism Alt Right was designed to appeal to a younger audience who reject the Left, but who don't fit exclusively dating but not in a relationship on the stuffy or banal Right either", alt right women dating asian men. The alt-right places little emphasis on economic issues. Unlike mainstream U.S. conservatives, alt-rightists do not tend to favor laissez-faire economics, and most appear to support President Trump's protectionist economic measures.^[]

The alt-right also rejects what it regards as the left-wing dominance of modern Western society. Phillips and Yi noted that alongside "white identity politics", the alt-right promotes "a message of expressive transgression against left-wing orthodoxy ('political correctness')". Political correctness has been characterized as one of the alt-right's "bugbears", and Nicole Hemmer stated on NPR that political correctness is seen by the alt-right as "the greatest threat to their liberty".^[] Alt-rightists often employ the term "Cultural Marxism"—originally coined in reference to a specific form of Marxist thought but popularised among the U.S. right-wing in the s—in reference to a perceived leftist conspiracy to alter society. They apply the term "Cultural Marxism" to a broad range of left movements.

Governance, isolationism and anti-interventionism

The Russian far-right theorist Aleksandr Dugin was popular with the alt-right

Anglin claimed that the goal of the alt-right was to form an authoritarian government.^[][] Writing in The New Yorker, the journalist Andrew Marantz claimed that neo-monarchists were among the alt-right.^[] The alt-right has no specific platform on U.S. foreign policy, although it has been characterized as being non-interventionist,^[] as well as isolationist.^[] Alt right women dating asian men, it opposes established Republican Party alt right women dating asian men on foreign policy issues. Alt-rightists typically opposed President Bush's War on Terror policies, and spoke against the Shayrat missile strike.^[][] The alt-right has no interest in spreading democracy abroad and opposes the United States' close relationship with Israel.

The alt-right often looks favorably on Russian President Vladimir Putin, viewing him as a strong, nationalistic white leader who defends his country from both radical Islam and Western liberalism. Spencer praised Putin's Russia as the "most powerful white power in the world", while prominent alt-rightist Matthew Heimbach called Putin "the leader of the free world". Although during the Cold War the American Right often presented the Soviet Union as the main threat to the U.S., links between the American far-right and Russia grew during the s, when prominent far-right activists like David Duke visited the country; the latter described Russia as being "key to White survival". The far-right Russian political theorist Aleksandr Dugin is also viewed positively by the alt-right.^[] Dugin has written for Spencer's websites, and Spencer's estranged wife, the ethnically Russian Nina Kouprianova, has translated some of Dugin's work into English. Many alt-rightists also regard Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as a heroic figure for standing up to rebel groups in the Syrian Civil War. Heimbach has endorsed a Shi'ite axis between al-Assad's Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, seeing them as allies in the global struggle against Zionism.

Anti-feminism and misogyny

Favoring a more patriarchal society, the alt-right is anti-feminist. Unlike many U.S. conservatives, the alt-right does not argue its anti-feminist position from traditional Christian perspectives, but claims that it is rooted in what it calls "sex realism", arguing that as a result of their biological differences, men and women are suited to different alt right women dating asian men in society. Lyons commented that the alt-right was misogynistic and presented women as irrational and vindictive. Although a minority in the movement, the alt-right has female members who support its anti-feminist stance;^[][][] some prominent alt-right women have experienced harassment and abuse from within the movement.^[][]The Daily Stormer, for instance, banned female contributors and called for reduced female involvement in the white nationalist movement, producing an angry response from various white nationalist women. Within feminist circles, the alt right women dating asian men desired future was repeatedly compared to the Republic of Gilead, the fictional dystopia in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale () and its television adaptation.

The alt-right intersects with the manosphere, an online anti-feminist subculture, and the men's rights movement, which believes that men face more oppression in Western society than women. It adopts the movement's view that feminism has undermined and emasculated men, and believes that men should aggressively reassert their masculinity so as not to become "beta males" or "cucks". There has been some clear influence between the two movements; prominent manosphere ideologue RooshV, for instance, attended an NPI conference and quoted anti-Semitic material from white nationalist sources in his articles. Some alt-right figures have distanced themselves from the manosphere and its proponents; Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing was of the view that "the manosphere morally corrupts men" because it does not promote "the resurgence of traditional and biologically based sexual norms".

The alt-right displays far less interest in homosexuality and abortion than the U.S. conservative movement, with alt-rightists taking varying perspectives on these topics. Hawley suggested that the alt-right was more broadly sympathetic to legal abortion access than the conservative movement; many alt-rightists support abortion access because of its disproportionate use by African-American and Hispanic-American women. Some on the alt-right consider homosexuality to be immoral and a threat to the survival of the white race, alt right women dating asian men, with alt-right trolls having employed homophobic terminology like "faggot".^[] Others adopt a more tolerant stance and have praised gay white nationalists. This reflects a broader trend among white nationalists to denigrate gay culture while being more tolerant of gay writers and musicians whose views they sympathize with, like James O'Meara and Douglas Pearce.

Religion

The alt-right is broadly secular. Many of its members are atheists, or highly skeptical of organized religion. Some alt-rightists identify as Christians;The Right Stuff, for instance, hosted an alt-right Christian podcast called "The Godcast". There are also individuals in the movement who do not believe in Christian alt right women dating asian men but identify as cultural Christians, admiring the Christian heritage of Western society. Others on the alt-right oppose Christianity entirely, criticizing it for its Jewish roots, for being a universal religion that seeks to cross racial boundaries, and for encouraging what they see as a "slave morality" that they contrast with perceived ancient aristocratic values. Some sex dating tampa pursue modern Paganism.^[] White evangelical leaders of the Southern Baptist Church have angered the alt-right by expressing support for refugees entering the U.S., calling for measures to help undocumented migrants gain legal status, and urging members not to display the Confederate Battle Flag. Despite this, alt-right hostility to Christianity has waned over time, with many alt-right commentators identifying as Christian while rejecting mainstream Alt right women dating asian men politics and most mainstream Christian religious leaders, especially Pope Francis. The Mormon-related hashtag #DezNat – which targets pornography, the LGBTQ community, Mormon apostates and progressives, sometimes violently (see blood atonement) – has also been linked to the alt-right.^[]

Several press sources have linked the alt-right to Islamophobia,^[][] and Wendling stated that alt-rightists view Islam as a fundamental threat to Western society. Hawley expressed the view that "ironically, people on the Alt-Right are less Islamophobic than many mainstream conservatives". He observed that many U.S. conservatives criticized Muslim migration to the United States because they regarded Islam as a threat to liberty; the alt-right has made little use of this argument. For alt-rightists, migration from Islamic-majority countries is undesirable not because the migrants are Muslims, but because most of them are non-white; it is equally opposed to non-white migrants who are Christian or non-religious.

Structure

The academic Timothy J. Alt right women dating asian men characterized it as an "ideological movement" interested more in spreading its ideas rather than operating as a social movement or political party,^[] while according to Hawley, the alt-right was "a disorganized mob that broadly shares a number of goals and beliefs". The alt-right is not an organized movement, and has no formal institutions or leading elite. It is a predominantly online phenomenon, lacking print newspapers and little radio or television presence. It had no think tanks that influenced government policy and could not command the open allegiance of any major politicians or mainstream alt right women dating asian men. Unlike many counter-cultural movements, it lacked soft power in the form of original bands, songs, films, and other cultural artifacts, of which it produced very few. According to Tg and ts dating sites., it was the movement's success in using the Internet that allowed it "to punch above its weight in the political arena".

The alt-right made use of a large number of blogs, podcasts, forums, and webzines in which it discussed far-right political and cultural ideas. The use of the Internet by the far-right was not pioneered by the alt-right; the white supremacist web forum Stormfront had for instance been active since Where the alt-right differed was in its members willingness to leave far-right websites and engage in trolling on other parts of the Internet, such as the comments sections of major news websites, YouTube, and Twitter. According to Hawley, it was the alt-right's use of trolling which put it "into the national conversation". The movement's online structure had strengths in that it allowed members to say things anonymously online that they would not be willing to say on the street or in another public place. The lack of any formal organization also meant that nobody could be kicked out of the alt-right.

As the alt-right developed, a number of formal, real world events were held, particularly through the National Policy Institute. Members of the alt-right have also attended events organized by an older far-right white nationalist group, American Renaissance. These events have gained a more limited audience than the alt-right's online activities. This may be because operating online allows alt right women dating asian men of the alt-right to operate anonymously, while to attend events they must often expose themselves to journalists and protesters, thus making it more likely that their views will become publicly known. U.S. alt-rightists have also sought to build links with other far-right and white nationalist groups elsewhere in the world. Heimbach, for instance, addressed meetings of the Golden Dawn in Greece and the National Democratic Party of Germany. Various U.S.-based alt-rightists used social media to encourage support for the Alternative for Germany party in that country's federal election. The scholar Sitara Thobani argued for a convergence between the U.S. alt-right and Hindu nationalism in India.

Tactics

Main argued that a characteristic of the alt-right was its use of vitriolic language, including "race-baiting, coarse ethnic humor, prejudicial stereotyping, vituperative criticism, and the flaunting of extremist symbols".^[] In The New Yorker, the journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted that the alt-right sought to test "the strength of the speech taboos that revolve around conventional politics—of what can be said, and how directly";^[] members often made reference to freedom of speech when calling for their views to be heard in public discourse. Alt-rightists promoted their messages through Twitter hashtags such as "#WhiteGenocide", "#WhiteLivesMatter" and "#StandUpForEurope". A recurrent tactic of alt-rightists is to present themselves—as white men—as victims of oppression and prejudice; this subverts many leftist arguments about other social groupings being victims and is designed nerds dating site free infuriate leftist opponents.

The alt-right adult dating affliates make heavy use of imagery drawn from popular culture for its own purposes. For instance, the American singer Taylor Swift is often held up as an idealized example of "Aryan" beauty. When describing their own conversion to the movement, alt-rightists refer to themselves as having been "getting red pilled", a reference to a scene in the film The Matrix in which Neo, the protagonist, chooses to discover the truth behind reality by consuming a red pill. On alt-right blogs and message boards, members often discuss how they were "red-pilled" originally. Alt-rightists have also adopted milk as best dating advice for men brent symbol of their views; various members have used the words "Heil Milk" in their online posts while Spencer included an emoji of a glass of milk on his Twitter profile along with the statement that he was "very tolerant lactose tolerant!" The animal studies scholar Vasile Stănescu suggested that this notion drew alt right women dating asian men the 19th-century pseudoscientific idea that Northern Europeans had become biologically superior to many other human populations alt right women dating asian men they consumed high quantities of milk and meat products.

Use of humor and irony

The alt-right makes strong use of humor and irony. As noted by Nagle, the alt-right's use of dating scorpio woman renders it difficult to tell "what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz". By presenting an image which was much less threatening than that of earlier white nationalist groups, the alt-right was able to attract people who would be willing to visit its websites but who would not have considered attending neo-Nazi or KKK events. As noted by Hawley, "whereas older white nationalists came across as bitter, reactionary, and antisocial, much of the Alt-Right comes across as youthful, light-hearted, and jovial—even as it says the most abhorrent things about racial and religious minorities". Members of the alt-right sometimes mocked the earnestness and seriousness of earlier white nationalists such as William Pierce.

Another of the tactics employed online by alt-rightists is to parody their leftist opponents. One American alt-rightist for instance created a Twitter account for a alt right women dating asian men individual whom they described as an "LGBTQ+ pansexual nonbinary POC transwoman" who was a "Journalist for BLM [Black Lives Matter]. Always stayin woke". Alt-rightists also orchestrated pranks, again to cause alarm among opponents. For instance, during the presidential campaign alt-rightists presented claims that they were plotting to send representatives posing as officials to voting booths where they would suppress ethnic minority turnout. There was no such plot, but press old school dating shows like Politico presented these claims as fact. This asian dating websites that are scams toward trolling rendered it difficult for journalists to learn more about the alt-right because those members they talked to were willing to deceive them for their amusement. Nagle argued that the alt-right had inherited a transgressive style descending from the Marquis de Sade in the 18th century, but that with the alt-right this "the transgressive anti-moral style" reached "its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right".

Use of memes

"Dindu Nuffin" redirects here. For the song, see Dindu Nuffin (song).

The Pepe the Frogmeme, originally created inwas adopted by the alt-right and became a "mascot" for the movement.

The alt-right makes heavy use of memes,^[][] adopting much of its "image- and humor-based culture", including its heavy use of memes, should i try a dating app the online subcultures active at 4chan and later 8chan. These memes are used to try and influence public opinion. The prevalence of such memes in alt-right circles has led some commentators to question whether the alt-right is a serious movement rather than just an alternative way to express traditionally conservative beliefs,^[][] with Chava Gourarie of the Columbia Journalism Review stating that provoking a media reaction to these memes is for some creators an end in itself.^[6]

One of the most commonly used memes within the alt-right is Pepe the Frog.^[][] The Pepe meme was created by artist Matt Furie in and over following years spread through the Internet, being shared by pop stars like Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry. ByPepe was one of the most popular online memes, used among far-right trolls on 4chan and from there adopted by the alt-right. After Trump tweeted a meme of Pepe as himself, and his son Donald Trump Jr. posted a Pepe meme shortly after, alt-righters and 4channers began spreading the meme with political intent. According to writer Gary Lachman, Pepe became "the unofficial mascot of the alt-right movement". The use of Pepe spawned the satirical worship of the Ancient Egyptian frog-headed deity Kek, as well as satirical nationalism of the nonexistent nation of "Kekistan".^[][] Another alt-right mascot was Moon Man, an unofficial parody of McDonald's s Mac Tonight character.^[][] Alt-rightists posted videos to YouTube in which Moon Man rapped to songs they had composed like "Black Lives Don't Matter" by a text-to-speech synthesizer.

A young man displaying the flag of Kekistanat a pro-Trump rally; the flag is an alt-right symbol.

The alt-right used specific terms for individuals outside the movement. Whites who were not part of the movement were called "normies"; homosexuals and whites who socialized with people of color were "degenerates". An alt-right acronym was "WEIRD", for "Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic people". Mainstream conservatives were denigrated as "cuckservatives", alt right women dating asian men, a portmanteau of "cuckold" and "conservative".^[][][] The term "cuckold" pertains to a man with an unfaithful wife; the alt-right saw this as analogous to the role of the U.S. conservative movement in assisting non-whites in the U.S.^{[note 3]} Various terms were used for leftists. Those who expressed progressive views, particularly online, were characterized as "social justice warriors" (SJWs). Individuals who expressed leftist opinions on Tumblr—and who alt-rightists often stereotyped as fat, ugly feminists—were called "Tumblrinas". The term "snowflake", alt right women dating asian men, short for "special snowflake", was used as a pejorative for such individuals,^[] and in reference to alt right women dating asian men uses of "trigger warnings", alt-rightists expressed a desire to "trigger" leftists by upsetting them. Leftists who professed victim status while harassing or bullying others were labeled "crybullies", while leftists who were perceived to be stupid were labeled "libtards", a neologism of "liberal" and "retard".

When referring to African-Americans, alt-rightists regularly employed the meme "dindu nuffin"—a bastardization of "didn't do nothing"—in reference to claims of innocence by arrested African-Americans. On this basis, alt-rightists referred to black people as "dindus".^[] Events involving black people were called "chimpouts", rhetorically linking them with chimpanzees. Alt-rightists also used memes to ironically support the Black Egyptian hypothesis, often using stereotypical African-American grandma dating app such as "We wuz kangz n shieet" ("We was kings and shit").^[] Refugees were often referred to as "rapefugees", a reference to incidents like the –16 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany in which non-white refugees were reported to have sexually assaulted white women. Another meme the alt-right employed was to place triple parentheses around Jewish names; this started at The Right Stuff to highlight the presence of Jewish Americans in the media and academia.^[][] One alt-rightist created a Google Chrome plug in that would highlight Jewish names online.

Alt-rightists often alt right women dating asian men older white nationalist slogans, such as the Fourteen Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children", that "Anti-racist is a code for anti-white", and that "Diversity is a code word for white genocide". From the latter, alt-rightists produced the hashtag reduction "#WhiteGenocide" for use on Twitter, highway billboards, and flyers. Also used was the slogan "It's OK to be white" as a way of expressing a supposed reverse racism towards white people by minorities.^[] The use of "Deus Vult!" and various other crusader iconography was employed to express Islamophobic sentiment.^[][][] Also apparent were "helicopter ride" memes, which endorse documented cases of leftists being dropped from helicopters by Chilean and Argentine juntas. Similarly the term "Right-Wing Death Squad" (usually abbreviated as RWDS) also callbacks to the "helicopter ride" meme and to refer to far-right, fascist death squads.^[][] Additional online features of the alt-right included references to Fashwave, a neo-fascist subgenre of electronic musicmicrogenrevaporwave.^[]

Harassment

Wendling noted that campaigns of abuse for political ends were "a classic alt-right tactic", while Hawley called the alt-right "a subset of the larger Internet troll culture". This trolling both contributed to creating racial discord and generated press attention for the movement. Those most regularly targeted were Jewish journalists, mainstream conservative journalists, and celebrities who publicly criticized Trump. Such harassment was usually spontaneous rather than pre-planned, but in various cases many alt-right trolls piled on once the harassment had begun. After criticizing Trump and the alt-right, the conservative journalist David A. French—who is white—received much abuse referencing his white wife and adopted black daughter. Alt-right trolls sent him images of his daughter in a gas chamber and repeatedly claimed that he liked to watch his wife have sex with "black bucks". As a result of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, the artist Arrington de Dionyso, whose murals are frequently displayed at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, also experienced abuse from the alt-right.^[][] Ina wave of threats began being made to Jewish Community Centers which some press sources attributed to the alt-right.^[] Another Jewish target was the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who was sent messages stating that he and his children "will go to the ovens".^[6]

Not all targets were in the U.S. In what it called "Operation: Filthy Jew Bitch",The Daily Stormer encouraged its followers to send abuse to the British Member of Parliament (MP) Luciana Berger, who is Jewish; images sent to her featured a yellow star on her head, accompanied by the hashtag "Hitlerwasright". One UK-based alt-rightist was convicted for his involvement in the campaign.^[] In another instance, Anglin commented on the June murder of the British MP Jo Cox by a far-right activist by saying that "Jo Cox was evil and she deserved to die. Her death was not a tragedy, it was justice". While celebrating violence, The Daily Stormer is cautious to remain on the legal side of U.S. incitement laws.

Demographics

The alt-right's anonymized and decentralized nature makes it difficult to determine how many individuals are involved in it or the demographic attributes of this membership. The movement's members are concentrated in the United States, but with participants present in other Anglophone countries like Canada, Britain, and Australia, as well as in parts of continental Europe. While acknowledging that the U.S. was "central" to the alt-right, Hermansson et al stressed that it was an "international phenomenon".

Alt-rightists have provided their own opinions on things to know when dating an independent woman numbers; inAnglin thought it had a "cohesive constituency" of between 4 million and 6 million people, while Griffin believed it had a core membership in the hundreds of thousands, with a larger range of sympathizers.^[] Main determined that, between September and Februaryalt-right websites received a combined average of million unique visitors per month, alt right women dating asian men, compared to million unique visitors to broader right-wing sites and million for left-wing sites.^[]

Kenes, Bulent (). “Richard B, alt right women dating asian men. Spencer: The founder of alt-right presents racism in a chic new outfit.” ECPS Leader Profiles. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). June 28, www.chevaliercompetences.fr

Richard Bertrand Spencer is a well-groomed, well-educated advocate for the creation of a “white ethno-state” in North America for a “dispossessed white race.” He has also called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of what he describes as “white culture” and to achieve a “white homeland.” Spencer has become the most recognizable public face of the white supremacist and nationalist movements. As an ardent white supremacist and ethnonationalist, Spencer says America belongs to white people, who he claims have higher average IQs than Hispanics and African Americans, and that the latter are genetically predisposed to crime. In Spencer’s “America,” Asians, Muslims, and Jews don’t qualify as “white” either.

By Bulent Kenes

White supremacy and white nationalism are real threats to democratic societies across the globe, as evidenced by the presidency of Donald Trump and the massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. As more people embrace a xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and anti-multiculturalist worldview, this has fuelled hostility and violence toward those deemed “others” or “outsiders” because of their religion, skin colour, or national origin (Jipson & Becker, ).

Driven by fear over the loss of white primacy and white privilege, white nationalists believe that white identity should be the organizing principle of Western society (Jipson & Becker, ). The United States is a hub of white supremacy, whose adherents fear that demographic changes will lead to the extermination of the white race alt right women dating asian men white culture—even though the US remains 77 percent white (Jipson & Becker, ). Eight years of Republican demagoguery against the US’ first black president, Barack Obama, made it easier for some whites to be persuaded that the system is rigged against them (Harkinson, ).

As a natural result of this process, hate crimes against Muslims, immigrants, and people of colour have been on the rise in the US since Inthe Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) documented hate crimes. The next year, it counted hate crimes. In —the year Trump took office, stoking nationalist sentiments with promises to build walls, deport Mexicans, and ban Muslims—the US saw white supremacist attacks. Inwhite nationalists killed at least 50 people in the US. Every perpetrator of deadly extremist violence in the US in had links to white nationalist groups (Jipson & Becker, ).

Richard Bertrand Spence is a well-groomed, well-educated advocate for the creation of a “white ethno-state” in North America (Beckett, ) for a “dispossessed white race.” Spencer has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of what he describes as “white culture” (Lombroso & Appelbaum, ; SPLC, n.d.; Graham, & Kirchick, ) and to “reconstitute the Roman Empire” (Scott, ). Spencer has become the most recognizable public face of the white supremacist white nationalist movements. Inin an article oasis dating site sign up Magazine, a far-right publication, Spencer coined the term “alternative right,” from which “alt right” is derived as a sanitised word for the extreme right (Younge, ) (ADL, ). (Paul Gottfried, a Jewish paleo-conservative also employed the term “alternative right” when he gave a speech entitled, “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right,” at the H.L. Mencken Club’s Annual Meeting in November For this reason, some sources credit Gottfried with birthing the term.) Spencer further popularized the term when he chose “Alternative Right” as the name for an online publication that debuted in  (ADL, n.d.).

Spencer rejects the label “white supremacist” in favour of the more opaque “alt-right” and prefers to describe himself as an “identitarian” (Cox, ); however, the SPLC has described him as a leading “academic racist,” who “takes a quasi-intellectual approach to white separatism” and as “a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old, a kind of professional racist in khakis.” The ADL says Spencer us a “leader in white supremacist circles that envision a ‘new’ right that will alt right women dating asian men embrace ‘white racial consciousness’” (Cox, ).

As an umbrella term “alt-right” is used to describe a movement that is a mix of populism and white nationalism and was birthed predominantly online (Helsel, ). The alt-right portrays refugees, Muslims, and progressives as a threat to white culture (Jipson & Becker, ). As a loose network of people who promote white identity and reject mainstream conservatism (Beckett, , alt-right has been used by Spencer to refer to people who oppose, among other things, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and open immigration (ADL, ).

Spencer has beguiled the American media. Profiles of Spencer have been accompanied by brooding portraits: the racist, looking serious in a blazer; the racist, slouching picturesquely against a wall. Spencer, who has basked in the media attention, was not shy about telling reporters that image is everything; that free new dating sites and other young racists are the hipster whisperers, ready single doctors dating website bring a new generation into the white nationalist fold (Beckett, ). “We have to look good,” he said, because no one is going to want to join a movement that is “crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid” (Fox, ).

Growing up in a wealthy part of Dallas in the s, alt right women dating asian men, Spencer attended St. Mark’s School of Texas, an elite, all-boys prep school long associated with blue-blooded conservatism. Spencer’s father, an ophthalmologist, did not care much about politics but voted Republican out of habit. Spencer was friend with the only African American student in his class, John Lewis. Lewis says he never thought of Spencer as racist, but another classmate who asked not to be identified recalls Dating site fraud making “a bunch of conservative, racially laced comments” that were objectionable even in high school, alt right women dating asian men. However, Spencer says he did not think much about race back then. After graduating high school inSpencer went to the University of Virginia, where he double majored in music and English and became deeply involved in avant-garde theatre, trying out and discarding various radical ideologies like costume changes (Harkinson, ). Eventually, Spencer came to embrace his ideology—and then continued further out on the ideological spectrum (Fox, ). 

Red Pilled: Waking Up to Reality

After entering the humanities master’s program at the University of Chicago, Spencer discovered Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed “race realist” who argues that blacks and Hispanics are a genetic drag on Western society. By the time Spencer entered Duke as a Ph.D. student in European intellectual history, inhis views were on his sleeve. Fellow students recall Spencer openly sharing his opinions on biological differences between races and endorsing books such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, which argues that Hispanic immigrants are less suited than Europeans for assimilation. Yet Spencer was charming enough to maintain collegial relations alt right women dating asian men his peers. “Not many of us had ever come across an out-and-out fascist,” says a college professor who studied in the same history Ph.D. program as Spencer. “We didn’t dating a finnish girl how serious he alt right women dating asian men, ). 

Spencer uses a metaphor to explain the jarring experience of waking up to a different worldview. In the movie “The Matrix,” the character of Morpheus offers Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, a choice between taking a blue pill—“the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe”—or a red pill, which shows “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” In the alt-right’s telling, the so-called “normies” swallow the blue pill, digesting the fiction of racial equality, alt right women dating asian men those who get “red pilled” are stripped of the virtual-reality cloak that blinds them, waking up to the shattering realization that liberalism is just a mirage designed to obscure the hard, ugly truths of a world programmed by genetics. “You’re destroyed by it,” Spencer says, “and put back together again.” After getting red pilled, Spencer began quietly pursuing related ideas through his academic work (Harkinson, ).

After dropping out of Duke, Spencer remained preoccupied with race while at The American Conservative, where he became an editor in Spencer was fired, because he was “a bit extreme for us,” recalls TAC editor Scott McConnell. Then, Spencer moved to a new job as the sole editor of Taki’s Magazine, the online vanity publication of Taki Theodoracopulos, who was notorious for his racist remarks. Spencer steadily evolved Taki’s into a magazine aimed at white nationalists. Byhe’d published essays by Jared Taylor and was regularly using the term “alternative right” to describe his youthful brand of anti-war, anti-immigration, pro-white conservatism (Harkinson, ). In DecemberSpencer left Taki’s Magazine. 

Inhe founded www.chevaliercompetences.fr, a white supremacy-themed webzine aimed at the “intellectual right-wing,” (SPLC, n.d.). The alt right women dating asian men caught the attention of the conservative publisher William Regnery II, who had tried to start a whites-only online dating service and funded the widows and widowers dating site nationalist National Policy Institute (NPI). With Regnery’s backing (Harkinson, ), Spencer became president of NPI infollowing the death of its chairman. Concurrently, alt right women dating asian men, he also oversaw NPI’s publishing division, Washington Summit Publishers, home of such scientifically bogus works as a reissue of Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence and screeds by other white nationalists, including Jared Taylor, editor of the racist American Renaissance journal, and Sam Francis, the late editor of the white supremacist Council of Paying for dating sites Citizens’ newsletter (SPLC, n.d.).

According to NPI’s mission statement, it aims “to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute…will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity” (SPLC, n.d.). Under the auspices of NPI, Spencer has worked alt right women dating asian men create an intellectual class of white separatists. The group rejects the calls for violence which appear in Internet chat rooms and public campaigns of hate. Spencer prefers a more professorial approach of publishing books and organizing conferences. 

“Our goal is to form Cupid Media dating sites intellectual community around European nationalism,” he said (Mangan, ). The “lesbians” and “Latinos” have advocates working for them, so why shouldn’t whites, Spencer asks in a video (Fox, ). 

NPI seeks to preserve the “heritage, identity and future of European people in the US and around the world” (Mangan, ). InSpencer launched an offshoot of Washington Summit Publishers that he called Radix Journal, a website alt right women dating asian men biannual publication (SPLC, n.d.), and he also started to host a weekly podcast, “Vanguard Radio” (Bar-On, ).No longer confined to the dark corners of social media, Spencer tried to bring a scholarly air of respectability to a movement commonly associated with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan (Mangan, ), and he managed to seize on an extraordinary presidential election to give overt racism a new veneer of radical chic (Harkinson, ). He envisions a world alt right women dating asian men which his ideals are embraced by the mainstream, and he has vowed to keep pushing until that happens (Cox, ). 

alt right women dating asian men nationalists and counter protesters clash in during a rally that turned violent resulting in the death of one and multiple injuries in Rpg dating app, VA on August 12, Photo: Kim Kelley-Wagner.

However, Spencer has failed to conceal his movement’s darker side. While being interviewed by David Pakman, he was asked if he would condemn the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler; he refused, saying, “I’m not going to play this game,” while stating that Hitler had “done things that I think are despicable,” without elaborating on which things he was referencing (Pakman, n.d.). In earlySpencer was filmed giving the Nazi salute in a karaoke bar, and leaked footage also depicts Spencer giving the Sieg Heil salute to his supporters during the August Charlottesville rally (Bernstein, ). After Donald Trump was elected president inSpencer urged his supporters to “party like it’s ,” the year Hitler came to power in Germany (Cox, ).  In the weeks following, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews (Goldstein, ). At a conference Spencer held celebrating the election, he cried, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” (Bradner, ). In early-to-midwhen Spencer’s following was at its height, his supporters would reportedly give him the Sieg Heil salute when he entered a room (Marantz, ).

Spencer emerged as one of the most visible white separatist agitators during the Trump campaign (Mangan, ). After Trump’s election, Spencer was the focus of a lot of media attention. He never denied that his objective is white supremacy. “I’m trying to normalize ‘racism,’ as you call it,” he told ABC (Ali, ). His far-right ideas had travelled quite rapidly from the margins to the mainstream and were infecting the US body politic at the highest level (Younge, a).

In some ways, Spencer resembles an older generation of “academic racists”—or “racialists,” as he prefers to put it (Harkinson, ). In his writing, speeches, and interviews, he has given an intellectualized explanation for how he came to advocate for a whites-only “ethno state.” While in graduate school, he has said, he was compelled by critiques of multiculturalism and political correctness and by demographic data indicating that whites are en route to minority status in the US (Williams, ).

One of Spencer’s first acts after taking over NPI was to move its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Whitefish, Montana, where his family has a home (SPLC, n.d.). Whitefish, where Spencer lived afterwas not particularly thrilled with his presence. Several local restaurants have refused to serve him. He was compelled to resign his membership from the exclusive Big Mountain Ski Club after he got into a chairlift argument about the Iraq War with the neocon Randy Scheunemann, a former adviser to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to John McCain during the election. Ina local human rights group known as Love Lives Here urged the city to bar Spencer from conducting NPI business in town but settled for a resolution condemning hate groups (Harkinson, ). 

It’s possible to connect the Spencer family’s business interests and geographic history with Richard Spencer’s racist politics. The family’s farm holdings are a legacy of its ties to the Jim Crow South, passed down by Spencer’s grandfather, who built the business during the turbulent civil rights era. Generations of Spencer’s family lived in the South (Williams, ). There is a long history of white supremacy in the American South, which has also contributed to the attitudes and, especially, symbolism used by the modern alt-right (Bezio, ). Records Show Spencer’s mother attended segregated schools as a girl in the small north-eastern Louisiana city of Monroe. Later, she other inherited farms in northeast Louisiana from her late father. The region has a history of slavery and racism. Throughout the civil rights era, the Ku Klux Klan targeted black residents in northeast Louisiana (and elsewhere) with lynchings, cross burnings, and other violence. In Tensas Parish, where the Spencers own 3, acres of farmland, blacks didn’t win the right to vote until However, in an open letter sent to their local newspaper, Spencer’s parents, Sherry and Rand, said that while they love their son, “we are not racists. We have never been racists. We do not endorse the idea of alt right women dating asian men nationalism” (Williams, ). 

“You Will Not Replace Us!”

Spencer abdicated his position as editor of Radix Journal in January to serve as the American editor of his new site, www.chevaliercompetences.fr Launched on January 16,www.chevaliercompetences.fr brings together several well-known white nationalist personalities (SPLC, n.d.). According to Spencer, however, the site is populist and a big tent for members of the alt-right (Wilson, ). Swedish publisher Daniel Friberg of Arktos Media is co-founder and European editor of the site (Porter, ). The SPLC describes the common thread among contributors as antisemitism, rather than white nationalism or white supremacy in general (Solomon, ). In the same year, Spencer rented space in Alexandria, Virginia, to serve as a hub for the alt-right movement. Some local residents were—and are—not pleased. The city has received at least 25 complaints about Spencer’s rental (Anand, free hairy dating sites May 13,he led a torch-lit protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, against a vote by the city council to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (CBS News, ). Spencer led the crowd in chants of “You will not replace us!”; “Blood and soil”; and “Russia is our friend” (Hayden, ; Laughland, ). 

“You will not replace us” refers to the idea that white Americans are being “replaced” by non-white people through “demographic replacement,” while “blood and soil” is perhaps better known in its original German, “Blut und boden.” The concepts “blood” (meaning racial identity) and “soil” (referencing the land) are inextricably linked in the expression, which meant that peasants and farmers were the most racially “German,” while urban dwellers were racially suspicious. In“blood and soil” even became an official Nazi policy, requiring that farmers were certifiably “Aryan” in order to receive certain benefits from the state (Coaston, ). Local police reported minor verbal confrontations between two opposing groups but confirmed no arrests had been made(Laughland, ). 

Things didn’t go as quietly at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on August 12 of the same year. Spencer was one of the promoters and scheduled speakers at Unite the Right, which was ostensibly organized to oppose the removal of Confederate monuments. The rally attracted more than white supremacists and many hundreds of counter-protesters, and confrontations between the two alt right women dating asian men sparked violent clashes. A white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and wounding 30 (ADL, ). James Alex Fields Jr., alt right women dating asian men, a year-old neo-Nazi from Ohio, would later plead guilty to killing year-old Heyer. Fields and eight other people who attended the rally are in state or federal prison after being convicted of a variety of crimes. Spencer wasn’t accused of any criminal wrongdoing related to Charlottesville. But he and more than two dozen others are defendants in a civil lawsuit brought by people injured during the rally (Barrouquere, ). This lawsuit has accused 25 far-right individuals and groups of conspiring to commit violence. At a federal courthouse in Charlottesville, attorney Karen Dunn told the court that, following the march, Spencer declared to a crowd: alt right women dating asian men own these streets. We occupy these grounds” (Smith, ).

The repercussions for the alt-right and the larger white supremacist community were immediate. Scores of them were “doxxed”—their alt right women dating asian men identities exposed—and as a result, some were fired from their jobs, had to leave their universities, or were rejected by their families or romantic partners. Many white supremacists’ social media accounts and websites were taken offline, and some were kicked off kim young kwang dating crowdfunding websites, eliminating a key income source. Meanwhile, Spencer, who helped spearhead the events in Charlottesville, has become increasingly unpopular in the alt-right due in part to the perception that he failed to capitalize on the energy generated by Unite the Right (ADL, n.d.). 

Since that weekend in Charlottesville, dissension and infighting has overtaken the alt-right movement. On one side are the American Nationalists who believe white supremacists should appeal to whites by using innocuous symbols like the American flag and avoid openly white supremacist symbols like swastikas. On the other side are the National Socialists and other hard-right groups whose members display white supremacist symbols at rallies and don’t care about “optics” or appealing to the white middle class. Spencer, who walks the line between the two groups, alt right women dating asian men, appears to be testing out new ways of attracting attention (ADL, ). 

In Octobertwo months after the rally, he returned to Charlottesville to lead people in an unannounced “flash mob.” Afterwards, Spencer called it a “great success” and a “model” for future events. This kind of small event with no advance warning hugely diminishes inherently risky interactions with law enforcement or counter-protesters, alt right women dating asian men. Spencer only employed the “flash mob” model a couple of times before turning his attention to scheduled public events like campus speeches (ADL, & Hawley, ). 

In DecemberSpencer announced that he had formed a new organization with other alt-right leaders. “Operation Homeland” was unveiled as a core group of alt-right leaders and activists poised to lead the movement as a whole. The group held a demonstration in December in Washington DC, to protest the acquittal of an undocumented immigrant in the murder of a young alt right women dating asian men in San Francisco (ADL, ).

A protestor holds sign at a Patriot Prayer rally in Portland Oregon, USA on August 4, Photo: Eric Crudup.

If You Aren’t a White American, That’s Fine—But You Should Leave

Spencer’s clean-cut appearance aims at concealing his radical white separatism and his goal of establishing a white ethno-state in North America. His writings and speeches portray this as a reasonable defence of Caucasians and Eurocentric culture. In Spencer’s worldview, white people have been “dispossessed” by a combination of rising minority birth rates, immigration, and establishment politics and policies (SPLC, n.d.). “We are undergoing a sad process of degeneration,” he said about minority births in the US. “We will need to reverse it using the state and the government. You incentivize people with higher intelligence, you incentivize people who are healthy to have children. And it sounds terrible and nasty, but there would be a great use of contraception.” He didn’t mean the government should encourage people to use birth control pills and condoms (Fox, ); he was advocating for eugenicist forced sterilisation (Stokes, alt right women dating asian men, ).

As an ardent white supremacist and ethnonationalist, Spencer also openly advocates for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to achieve a “white homeland.” He says America belongs to white people, who he claims have higher average IQs than Hispanics and African Americans and that the latter are genetically predisposed alt right women dating asian men crime (Stokes, ). Asians, Muslims, and Jews do not qualify as “white” either. Spencer knows that a white ethno-state is at most a distant dream, but he hopes America’s non-whites can be made to agree that returning to the lands of their ancestors would be best for everyone: “It’s like presenting to an African that this hasn’t worked out…We haven’t made each other happier. We are going to have to take part in this paradigmatic adult dating affliates together” (Harkinson, ). 

Despite often saying, “you have to look at culture and not just race,” lighter skin colour apparently matters more to Spencer than acculturation when it comes to Hispanics. When pressed about what alt right women dating asian men sets whites apart, he waxes decidedly unscientific: “I think there is something within the European soul that we haven’t been able to measure yet and maybe we never will… and that is a Faustian drive or spirit—a drive to explore, a drive to dominate, a drive to live one’s life dangerously…a drive to explore outer space and the universe. I think there is something within us that we possess and that only we possess” (Harkinson, ). In line with Spencer, NPI is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the US, and around the world” (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Spencer claims, among other things, that Africans have benefited from white supremacy and that Europe would always be more his home than it would be for Blacks (Younge, ).

Moreover, he said in an interview that, “The American nation is defined by the fact that it is derived from Europe…white Americans, European-Americans, in particular Anglo-Saxon Americans, Anglo-Saxon Protestants…defined it in a way that no other people did. So, of course, African Americans have influenced American culture and American identity. Of course, Asians have and so on. But it really was Anglo-Saxons who truly defined it. Who made America what it is. Who were indispensable…” (Letson, ).

Spencer is also known for his public advocacy of violence against non-whites. He has advocated for the enslavement of Haitians by whites, the ethnic cleansing of racial minorities from the US, and even the ethnic cleansing of Turks from Anatolia (Holt, ). He claimed, “Today, in the public imagination, ‘ethnic-cleansing’ has been associated with civil war and mass murder. But this need not be the case. is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution—done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully” (Fox, & SPLC, n.d.). 

On the subject of neo-Nazism, Spencer has expressed admiration for the political tactics of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell for using “shock as a positive means to an end” (Miller, ). Therefore, the SPLC has classified Spencer as a leading academic racist, but he rejects the notion that he is driven by hatred and considers “racist” a “slur word” (Fox, ). Spencer believes that if you aren’t ok.ru dating site white American, that’s fine—but you should leave (Harkinson, ). 

Despite having no visible tattoos advertising white pride or hate against non-whites, Spencer is a racist (Wertheimer, ). His stances conflict with common mores in American society (Wertheimer,  Spencer supports nations segregated by race and called the idea that America is based on rights “silliness” (Helsel, ). SPLC () underlines Spencer’s alt-right claims depart from traditional, establishment conservatism and embrace more identity-based politics, such as American Identitarianism. The alt-right proclaims to have move passed the right–left divide, towards a politics that promotes racial homogeneity and to challenge and dismantle mainstream conservatism (Gray, ).

“Even if all immigration was stopped tomorrow, there is still going to be a massive minority population,” argues Spencer. “All I know is that in order for white people to survive, we’ll need consciousness of ourselves, or we really will reach a state of humiliation, if not extinction. White people are going to enter a new world where we are a hated minority, where it is seen as a good thing that we have less power. We must fight against that” (Mangan, ). He even claims that “The alt-right would not exist if it weren’t for terrible immigration policies and social justice warriors and liberalism and maybe the Barack Obama presidency.” He says, “they made us” (Harkinson, ). According to Spencer, 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” (NPI, February ).

In a promo for NPI’s Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., Spencer opined that both Europe and America are experiencing alt right women dating asian men, moral, and cultural bankruptcy under the pressure of “mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the natural expression of religious and ethnic identities by non-Europeans” (SPLC, n.d.). He said on another occasion that, “I believe that selective deportations could set a new tone and that millions would self-deport. It does not matter to me whose ‘fault’ it was that they are here, or if that’s even the right way to look at it. The survival of my people takes precedence” (Mangan, ). However, Spencer has said he would gladly accept Germans, Latins, alt right women dating asian men, and Slavic immigrants in his proposed ethno-state — ironically, groups that faced severe discrimination in late 19th-century America (SPLC, n.d.).

Spencer and his group claim that their history and identity as white people is being erased by “political correctness.” Specifically, they see the identity and history of whiteness in the US as antithetical to those of people of colour. They claim to be marginalised and oppressed by policies of inclusion and diversity; thus, they reject multiculturalism and diversity (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Spencer subscribes zealously to the idea that America’s white population is endangered, thanks to multiculturalism and lax immigration policies that have gone unchallenged by mainstream conservatives. He envisions a future for response rates for different genders on dating apps US along the lines of “a renewed Roman Empire,” a dictatorship where the main criteria for citizenship would be whiteness (Harkinson, ).

According to Spencer, it falls to people like him to be engaged and savvy if America is going to combat the growing threat of diversity. In particular, he’s irritated by the rise of minority births, which outnumbered white births for the first time in “Even if we shut off all immigration, the country is going to best dating site for separated people undergo a tremendous transformation,” Spencer said. White people “need to start alt right women dating asian men about a new ethno-state that we would want to be a part of. This is not going to happen in the next election or in the next 10 years probably, but something in the future that would be for our great grandchildren” (Fox, ). Spencer justifies his claim by saying that, “By …white people will become a minority… In are we going to all decide oh well you know race doesn’t mean anything anymore. Identity is meaningless… No. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I think whites are going to be, they’re going to have a[n] amplification of their consciousness of being white” (Letson, ).

During the American Renaissance conference, in AprilSpencer suggested his solution: “The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent…so that our people can ‘come home again,’ can live amongst family and feel safe and secure.” 

How, he was asked, in a nation with more than million blacks, Asians, and Latinos, could a whites-only territory be alt right women dating asian men without overwhelming violence? He offered an answer: “Look, maybe it will be horribly bloody and terrible” (Cox, ). 

During his speech, he quoted Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, alt right women dating asian men, and termed his mission alt right women dating asian men “sort of white Zionism” that would inspire whites with the dream of such a homeland just as Zionism helped spur the establishment of Israel. A white ethno-state would be an Altneuland—an old, new country—he said (SPLC, n.d.). “So that we would always have a safe space,” he said. “We would always have a homeland for us. Very similar to…how Jews conceive of Israel” (Letson, ). 

“We want our identity, too,” Spencer argues. “Blacks are quite good at identity politics. They know who they are. We want that, too…When they talk about ‘white privilege,’ they’re making us feel guilty about the fact that we are awesome. I’m not trying to justify slavery or say we weren’t terrible to other people. We definitely were. But I am proud of the fact that we changed the world and dominated the world. We should be trying to expand white privilege, not feel guilty about it” (Mangan, ). Stressing that they live in a world alt right women dating asian men a “white guilt complex,” Spencer said, “Yes, white people are generally better off than many other people…(But) all of these institutions are not acting on behalf of white people. They are acting on behalf of non-white people. And you can talk about this being fair” (Letson, ). Typically, white supremacist discourse includes notions of a “racist double standard” that affords Blacks preferential treatment from social institutions. They use metonymical concepts such as “black assault[s]” discussing the way Blacks “burden” the state to show that a zero-sum game exists wherein “black gains equate to white losses.” This discourse presupposes that Black survival and success has become the white person’s burden (Brown, ). 

According to Spencer, even Martin Luther King Jr. “is 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!” (NPI, column, January ). As Villet () notes, white victimhood is a generic right-wing tactic that inverts the left’s narratives of minority discrimination and neo-colonialism. This tactic denies that there is such a thing as white privilege and attempts to camouflage white domination. Whites can surely be victims of crime or discrimination as individuals, but white victimhood goes much further. It implies that whites as a demographic group are victims of discrimination, oppression, or even persecution. The most extreme version of this victimhood is “white genocide” (Villet, ). The perceptions of “reverse” discrimination have a significant influence on whites’ decisions to join the alt-right (Adams & Roscigno, ).

Spencer claims that the alt-right seeks to “restore” the US as a white, European country, instead eliminating racial others.He denies that his organisation is dedicated to the eradication or marginalisation of minorities but rather seeks to promote white racial pride (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). However, he was caught on tape using racist slurs against African Americans and Jewish people. The expletive-laden audio recording was released by former Breitbart writer, Milo Yiannopoulos. The second long audio, supposedly recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville inappears to feature an angry Spencer ranting against Charlottesville citizens. On the recording, Spencer says, “Little fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons. My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit.” Later, he continued, “Those pieces of shit get ruled by people like me…That’s how the fucking world works…” (Coaston, ). He declined to deny that the voice in the video was his. Spencer also later tweeted a link to a right-wing video titled: “Never Apologise” (Wilson, ). His radical ideas have been cited as a source of concern by the SPLC and ADL (Los Angeles Times, ).

The Alt-right: An Ideology Around Identity

Spencer believes the alt-right is “deeply connected” with his work. “I would say that what I’m doing is we’re really trying to build a philosophy, an ideology around identity, European identity,” he said (Gray, ). Unlike old-school white supremacism, the “alt-right” incubated online, fed by memes and inside jokes and vicious battles over feminism and videogame culture. The Associated Press’ standards guide defines “alt-right” as “as a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism.” “In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist,” the standards guide noted (Beckett, ).

Therefore, some have argued that the alt-right is simply the latest iteration of an old, racist strain of US politics. And indeed, the alt-right’s ultimate vision—a racially homogeneous white ethnostate—is similar to that of earlier groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance. Yet, according to Hawley (), the alt-right considers itself new and distinct, in terms of both style and intellectual substance. Stylistically, it has attempted to distance itself from the ineffectual violence and pageantry of what it derisively calls “white nationalism ,” instead preferring a modern aesthetic that targets cynical millennials on social media and online message boards. Ideologically, the movement represents a break from American racist movements of the past, looking not to US history but to the European far-right for ideas and strategies. Spencer is often inspired by ideas that are alien to most Americans—especially those of the European New Right. The European far-right has in turn adopted tactics pioneered in the US, such as online trolling(Hawley, ).

Alt-righters reject mainstream conservative politics and espouse extremist beliefs and policies typically centred on ideas of white nationalism. The alt-right is a loosely connected far-right, white nationalist movement (ECPS, n.d.). Dylan Matthews defines Spencer’s alt-right as a label that blends together straight-up white supremacists, nationalists alt right women dating asian men think conservatives have sold out to globalization, and nativists who fear immigration will spur civil disarray. People who identify with the alt-right regard mainstream or traditional conservatives as weak and impotent, largely because they do not adequately support white racial interests or are not adequately racist or antisemitic. Some alt-right adherents prefer other labels, such as the “New Right” and the “Dissident Right.” They identify with a range of different ideologies, all of which centre on white identity (ADL, n.d.)

One body of adherents is the ostensibly “intellectual” racists who create many of the doctrines and principles of the white supremacist movement. They seek to attract young, educated whites to the movement by highlighting the achievements and alleged intellectual and cultural superiority of whites. Alt-righters use terms like “culture” as substitutes for more divisive terms such as “race,” and promote “Western Civilization” as a code word for white culture or identity (ADL, n.d.).  According to Bar-On, Spencer defends “racialist and antisemitic agendas” of the Old Right under a new metapolitical guise, acting as a cultural influencer rather than a direct political actor, and using various media outlets to “disseminate his views to ordinary people in alt right women dating asian men accessible manner” (Bar-On, alt right women dating asian men, ).

White Supremacy to Reinstate White Power and Domination

However, alt right women dating asian men, many newspapers have given instructions to their reporters to use the term “white supremacist” or “neo-Nazi” rather than “alt-righters” while referring to people alt right women dating asian men Spencer (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). White supremacists drew on discontent rooted in political fundamentalism and the fear of abdication of power to non-Whites (Dobratz & Shanks-Meile, ). Early forms of white supremacy relied on anti-Black social rituals and actions such as burning a cross on a Black person’s property, spewing racial epithets such as “nigger,” denying Black people social opportunities, and committing to Jim Crow segregation, alt right women dating asian men. These violent and coercive actions defied US reconstruction efforts and alienated Blacks from mainstream society (Dobratz & Shanks-Meile, )—an alienation that persisted until the civil rights movement began in the s (and persists in some ways today) (Feagin & Vera, ). Thus, extremists had to search for new ways and strategies to spread their message of hate in the midst of an increasingly racially tolerant society (Brown, ).

White supremacists often combine derogatory notions based on physical appearance with cultural attributes such as language, geography, character traits, and customs. White supremacist metaphors not only highlight unwarranted physical inadequacies, but they also position Black people in an inferior social and cultural position. White supremacists use metaphors such as “lower evolutionary plane” and “jungle dweller,” and spatial concepts such as “pull it down” and “lowest scale,” and “total bastardization,” to support the racist notion that “Negroes” cannot live in a civilized environment among human beings. The positioning of whites (presumably men) as warriors and civilization builders reinforces a broad racist ideology that buttresses the belief that the nation is synonymous with “Whiteness” (Brown, ). 

Accordingly, “race is something between a breed and an actual species,” Spencer says, likening the differences between whites and people of colour to those between golden retrievers and basset hounds. “It’s that powerful” (Harkinson, ).The specific types of messages that are propagated by Spencer and other white supremacists are about reinstating white power and domination. Spencer said, “… I am proud of the fact that we changed the world and dominated the world. We should be trying to expand white privilege, not feel guilty about it,” (Mangan, ). Spencer has also said, “America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, alt right women dating asian men, and it belongs to us” (Seipp, 1). In a speech at Texas A&M University, he repeatedly stated that the US “belonged to white men,” and that he is “European.” He conflates European identity with whiteness and presents race as a rigid notion (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Spencer also claimed that “We don’t gain anything from other racial groups’ presence. They need us and not the other way around,” (Jackson & Stelloh, ). 

Antisemitism & Islamophobia 

In Spencer’s “ethno-state,” whites should live separately not only from non-whites but also from Jews. While Spencer generally shies away from blatant displays of antisemitism, he began expressing antisemitic views more openly inwhen he wrote that Jews have an identity apart from Europeans. At a press conference two years later, he announced that he did not consider Jews to be European. 

Spencer has been influenced by a number of white supremacists, including the late Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, and retired professor Kevin MacDonald, who wrote a series of antisemitic books. At the conference, a number of people in the audience threw Nazi salutes after Spencer “hailed” Trump’s victory in the presidential election. Spencer, who refused to condemn the salutes, has aligned himself with groups and individuals who openly express virulent antisemitism, including TWP and Patriot Front. Spencer has also shown a willingness to work with antisemitic leaders such as Matthew Heimbach, the former head of TWP, and Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, who runs The Right Stuff website (ADL, ).

As an atheist (Spencer, ), Spencer believes that the Christian church held some pragmatic value, because it helped unify the white population of Europe. But he opposes traditional Christian values as a moral code, due to the fact that Christianity is a universalizing religion, rather than an ethnic religion. Spencer’s Radix Journal has promoted paganism, running articles such as “Why I am a pagan” (Beinart, ). He is also blatantly Islamophobic. According to Spencer, Islam, “at its full flourishing … isn’t some peaceful denomination like Methodism or religion like Buddhism; Islam is a black flag. It is alt right women dating asian men expansive, domineering ideology, and one that is directed against Europe. In this way, Islam give[s] non-Europeans a fighting spirit and integrates them into something much greater than themselves” (Interview with Europa Maxima, February ). Therefore, Spencer aggressively supported Trump’s “Muslim ban” (Buchanan, ). 

A “Psychic Connection” With Donald Trump

During the presidential race, the alt-right, which was a tiny, marginal, and almost exclusively Internet-based phenomenon, achieved mainstream attention (Wertheimer, alt right women dating asian men, ) thanks in part to its connection with the presidential campaign, and then administration of, Donald Trump, alt right women dating asian men. For years, Spencer’s “identitarian” movement barely flickered in the dark corners of the internet  (Cox, ) on sites such as Reddit and 4chan. But Trump’s ascendancy was like kerosene dumped on a brushfire (Harkinson, ). Then the term “alt-right” was often applied to a much broader group than it is today; at times, it seemed to refer to the entirety of Trump’s right-wing populist base (Hawley, ). Spencer argued that “If Trump wins we could really legitimately say that he was associated directly with us, with the ‘R(acist)’ word, all sorts of things. People will have to recognize us” (Harkinson, ).

Throughout the presidential campaign, Spencer was a vocal advocate for Trump due to his signature proposal to build a wall along the US border with Mexico and his racist statements muslim men dating black women to Mexicans as criminals and rapists (SPLC, n.d.; Barrouquere, ). Spencer believed the alt-right had a “psychic connection” with Trump in a way they did not with other Republicans. He said the alt-right had, before the election, been like a “head without a body…The Trump movement was a kind of body without a head…I think moving forward the alt-right as an intellectual vanguard can complete Trump” (Gray, ).

On election night, Spencer exulted in Trump’s victory. “The alt-right has been declared the winner. The alt-right is more deeply connected to Trumpian populism than the ‘conservative movement’,” Spencer tweeted. “We’re the establishment now” (ADL, ). An extremist website associated with Spencer also wrote: “It was a time when more people joined our movement than ever before and when our ideas began invading the mainstream” (Ali, ). For Spencer, Trump is not the logical outcome of a radicalized Republican Party, but an entirely new phenomenon born of the alt-right’s growing prominence and mainstream conservatism’s collapse (Posner & Neiwert, ).

Trump’s victory emboldened the bigots and channelled their thinking in a fashion not seen in modern times. A president who draws a moral equivalent between neo-Nazis and anti-fascist protesters, who baits black athletes and black journalists, and brands Mexicans rapists and Muslims terrorists. “Trump wouldn’t have run the campaign that he ran if he didn’t feel some sense of loss, that America has alt right women dating asian men something,” Spencer argued (Younge, ). In an interview, Spencer also stated that he didn’t think it was just an unusual election with an unusual candidate: “I think what dating sites are really free? really was a paradigmatic shift. The new paradigm that Donald Trump brought into the world was identity politics and in particular white identity politics” (Letson, ). 

Only days after Trump’s surprising victory, the NPI held its fall conference on November 19,in Washington, D.C. Spencer, flush with victory, offered the toast, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” to the nearly attendees. He was met with a handful of stiff-armed salutes from the crowd. At other points in his speech, like Trump’s assaults on the media, Spencer used a term employed by Nazis to attack the media—“Lügenpresse,” German for lying press. “It’s not just that many are genuinely stupid,” he said of reporters. “Indeed, one wonders if these people are people at all.” One tactic of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime was to declare enemies inhuman. Spencer speculated that the media may be “soulless golem,” a reference to magically animated beings from Jewish folklore (Lombroso & Appelbaum, ; Jackson & Stelloh, ; Mangan, ). The gesture electrified the more radical sectors of the white supremacy movement. He later stated that it was done in a spirit of “irony and exuberance” (Stokes,Jackson & Stelloh, ; Helsel, ).

Nevertheless, Spencer gained international notoriety after this speech (Helsel, ). Though the ties asian man dating white woman Trump and him have not been officially recognised by the former president, the connections between Trump and white nationalist movements have been a lingering question in light of the alt-right’s support and Trump’s refusal to condemn the racially motivated violence in Charleston in August  (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Furthermore, Spencer was among the most optimistic about Trump’s presidency. “With Donald Trump, alt right women dating asian men, we feel like we have a dog in the fight for the first time,” Spencer told the Guardian. “And with him there’s a real chance we could start influencing policy and culture.” His hope was that “alt-right” ideas could enter the mainstream (Gabbatt, ). According to him, the Trump phenomenon was about identity at some deep level: “He’s not a mainstream conservative…It’s important for young people to listen to a speaker articulate what this means on a metapolitical and philosophical level” (Mangan, ). Spencer expressed his hope, saying, “I don’t think Donald Trump is alt-right. I don’t think Donald Trump is an identitarian as I would use that term. I think Donald Trump is a kind of first step towards this. He’s the first time which dating app is worth paying for we’ve seen a alt right women dating asian men if, you could say incomplete, politician who’s fighting for European identity politics in North America…” (Letson, ).

The intense media coverage of the Nazi alt right women dating asian men, while further raising Spencer’s profile, also splintered the alt-right, with some leading right-wing figures denouncing Spencer and his antisemitic beliefs. The outrage over the Nazi salutes even led to Trump explicitly disavowing and condemning Spencer’s group. When Trump appointed Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, as his chief strategist, the move prompted widespread alarm and protest—and seemed to cement the “alt-right’s” rise. Bannon had once described Breitbart, a popular right-wing site, as “the platform for the alt-right.” At his inauguration, Trump, an unabashed populist, made a clear effort to separate the “white” from the “nationalism” (Beckett, ).

In Novemberan openly frustrated Spencer declared, “The Trump moment is over, and it’s time for us to move on.” The SPLC reported that the white nationalist movement was dissatisfied with Trump’s presidency (SPLC, ). Spencer believed Trump was practicing a “con game” and not clearly developing a white nationalist agenda as Trump “gives us nothing outside of racist tweets, and by racist tweets, I mean tweets that are meaningless and cheap” (Yee, ). Infollowing the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, Spencer even said that he regretted voting for Trump (Palmer, ). In August of that year, alt right women dating asian men, Spencer announced that he planned to vote for Joe Biden. “The MAGA/Alt-Right moment is over. I made mistakes; Trump is an obvious disaster, but mainly the paradigm contained flaws that we now are able to perceive. And it needs to end…It’s not based on ‘accelerationism’ or anything like that; the liberals are clearly more competent people.” Shortly after, Biden’s campaign forcefully disavowed Spencer’s endorsement. Andrew Bates, the rapid-response director for the Biden campaign tweeted that, “What you stand for is absolutely repugnant, alt right women dating asian men. Your support is 10, percent unwelcome here” (Sheth, ).

Conference Series and Abusing The First Amendment

Strong free speech protections in the US alt right women dating asian men Spencer to hold conferences (SPLC, n.d.). Judicial interpretations of the First Amendment of the US Constitution follow such a logic: The right to free speech must be universal, with no exceptions. Thus, Nazis and white supremacists must be allowed to speak freely, even at a university campus where no one seems to want them, and even when their speech openly rejects other core values, such as the dignity of all persons. The US permits limits on free speech rights only in rare cases of “fighting words” that pose an imminent threat of violence. No one has yet used the “fighting words” argument against Spencer, despite Charlottesville (Peterson, ).

By exploiting the First Amendment, Spencer has focused on getting college alt right women dating asian men to attend his annual events, including the NPI conference, and he’s had some success (ADL, ). NPI’s first conference, held in DC indrew about 85 people, alt right women dating asian men. Its second, inalt right women dating asian men, attracted a little over  (Harkinson, ). In Spencer’s view, his resentments have cropped up among younger, college-educated whites for whom “enforced multiculturalism” on college campuses is giving shape to a new kind of white identity caitlyn jenner dating 21 year old, ). Spencer has influenced a younger generation of college-age racists. In andleaders of the now defunct racist student group, Youth for Western Civilization, invited Spencer to speak at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and Providence College in Rhode Island. In both speeches, Spencer attacked affirmative action (ADL, ).

The white-nationalist groups seem to believe that teens and somethings are particularly susceptible to their messaging, said Oren Segal, the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. Segal noted that the groups are aiming for a younger demographic by reaching out through social media and trying to set up talks on college campuses or disseminating fliers there. Spencer also made a highly publicized visit to Texas A&M University in Decemberfurther fuelling concerns about the alt-right on campus (Wertheimer, ). Although over 10, people signed an online petition to ask university officials to ban Spencer from speaking on campus, the university and student representatives simultaneously condemned and supported Spencer’s presence on campus. They claimed that while they disagreed with his message and ideology, they supported his right to appear and speak, per the First Amendment (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ).

In andSpencer launched a college tour to bring his white nationalist message to campuses nationwide (Mangan, ). After Texas A&M University, he spoke at Auburn University in April In Octoberhe spoke to a small, mostly hostile audience at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In Marchhe spoke to a small group of supporters at Michigan State University, while members of TWP fought with antifa activists outside, leading to a number of arrests. After the MSU speech, Spencer decided to cancel his college tour, saying he would try to find other methods of reaching the public (ADL, ).

Across the whole tour, Spencer’s visit to Texas A&M University was unique for several reasons. In addition to being his first visit and speaking engagement on a university campus, it is Texas A&M University’s military and racialised history that made Spencer’s presence so provoking. Spencer gave his speech at the Memorial Student Center (MSC), which is a student union dedicated to the memory of Texas A&M University students who lost their lives in war, specifically World War II. Though Texas A&M University officials and students lambasted the event as insulting to the legacy of the university students who fought Nazi Germany, as a historically white institution, the university has had a highly contentious and problematic history (Ramasubramanian & Miles, ). Its first president (and 19th governor of Texas), Lawrence Ross Sullivan, was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan (Slattery, ). At A&M, Spencer spoke to a ballroom of nearly individuals. “America, at the end of the day,” Spencer told his audience, “belongs to white men. Our bones are in the ground. We own it. At the end of the day America can’t exist without us. We defined it. This country does belong to white people, culturally, politically, socially, everything” (SPLC, n.d.).

Spencer’s Efforts to Spread His Ideas Internationally

Spencer and his alt-right movement has exploited all possibilities to build bridges with their counterparts on the other side us match dating site the Atlantic. However, his efforts to reach out to European nationalists have not gone well. In Octoberhe attempted to hold an NPI conference in Budapest, Hungary, as part of an effort to reach out to “European traditionalists” all over the world (Gray, alt right women dating asian men, ). On paper, Budapest seemed the ideal venue for the NPI, which thinks rising discontent with EU migration policy has created an opening for it. Economic stagnation and political sclerosis in the European Union have given fodder to anti-immigrant parties across the continent, and Hungary is home to Jobbik, alt right women dating asian men, one of Europe’s largest far-right parties, which won 20 percent of the seats in parliament (Seddon, a). Dubbed the European Congress, the conference featured an array of white nationalists from both Europe and America. Among the scheduled speakers were Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Philippe Vardon from the far-right French Bloc Identitaire movement, Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin, and right-wing Hungarian extremist MP Márton Gyöngyösi (SPLC, n.d.), who once called on the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a “national security risk” (Seddon, ). 

Hungary’s populist strongman Viktor Orbán ordered the country’s interior ministry to ban the conference after several parties and ministries the best dating apps about it. Interior Minister Sándor Pintér said in a statement that the conference was against Hungarian law protecting “the human dignity of others, of the Hungarian nation or of national, ethnic, racial of religious communities” and vowed to bar the conference speakers from entering the country (Seddon, ). Before the conference even started, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade released a statement condemning “all xenophobic and exclusionary organizations that discriminate based on religion or ethnicity.” Planned reservations at the venue, the Larus Center, were cancelled. On Oct. 3, Spencer was arrested while meeting informally with other participants at a cafe that was to have been an alternate venue. He was jailed for three days, deported, and banned for three years from entering all 26 European countries (SPLC, n.d.). He was declared a “national security threat” (Harkinson, ). 

Inthe Home Office of the British government also banned Spencer from visiting Great Britain, citing his white supremacist views. In NovemberPoland’s state-run news agency PAP reported that Polish authorities had alt right women dating asian men Spencer’s ban from the Schengen area for another five years (ADL, ) citing Spencer’s Nazi rhetoric and the Nazis’ genocide of Slavic people during World War II (The Guardian, ). Spencer had to cancel his plans to travel to Poland fora far-right conference in Warsaw after alt right women dating asian men reports the government was threatening to keep him alt right women dating asian men of the country. Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski described Spencer as someone “who defames what happened during World War II, defames the Holocaust” (Haaretz, ). In JulySpencer was detained free no vip dating apk Keflavík Airport in Reykjavík, Iceland, en route to Sweden and was ordered by Polish officials to return to the US (Michel, ).

Despite these efforts to keep Spencer at bay, the idea of white victimhood has crossed international borders and the idea of white people falling victim to an “onslaught” of refugees and immigrants has become a major factor in elections across Europe (Villet, ). Spencer has partnered with two Swedish outfits to create a media company and keep race at the centre of the new right wing. Called the Alt-Right Corporation, it links Spencer with Arktos Media, a publishing house begun in Sweden to print English-language editions of esoteric nationalist books from many countries. The other Swedish partner is Red Ice, a video and podcast platform featuring white nationalists from around the globe. It was natural for Spencer to turn to Swedes as partners in the new enterprise, given the country’s history as an exporter of white nationalist ideas. But forging formal bonds between nationalists across the Atlantic makes even more sense as the politics of Northern Europe is heavily driving the politics of immigration and Islam in the US (Feder & Mannheimer, ). Spencer believes in white pride and the unification of a pan-European “white race” in a “potential racial empire” (Harkinson, )

Spencer has also advocated for the US pulling out of NATO and called Russia the “sole white power in the world.” His former partner, Nina Koupriianova, under her penname Nina Byzantina, referred to herself as a “Kremlin troll leader” and regularly aligned with Kremlin talking points. She also had ties to Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right ultranationalist Russian leader in the Eurasianism movement (Bertrand, ).  Koupriianova has translated several books written by Dugin (Gessen, ; Porter, a). The books were later published by Spencer’s publishing house, Washington Summit Publishers (Shekhovtsov, ). “I think the fact that we’re inviting Alt right women dating asian men is expressive of the fact that we want to have a real healthy dialogue with the major currents of Russian conservatism,” Spencer said (Gray, ). Spencer also explained the chants in support of Russia during the Charlottesville rally: “There is a common brotherhood that stretches from Portugal to Siberia and includes North America. Even though we’re best christian dating app different, we obviously have common ancestry and alt right women dating asian men that tie of blood” (Laughland, ). 

His wife and Spencer have each appeared on Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language news and propaganda network. Spencer admires Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, and he would gladly admit most Russians into his ideal ethnostate (Harkinson, ). His thoughts on the Ukraine crisis hew closely to Moscow’s: “…I am more sympathetic towards Russia as a major power entering the world stage. Russia has the opportunity, to put it bluntly, to make the world a better place.” He also said, “I’m sympathetic toward Putin in many ways” (Gray, ). 

Spencer and the alt-right have also lifted up Bashar al-Assad as a hero. Support for the Syrian president means they can further tangle internet conspiracy theories, tap into a deep vein of antisemitism, anti-interventionism, and anti-globalism, and wind up their biggest enemy: liberals. Spencer is able to aggressively support Trump’s “Muslim ban,” while also getting behind the Syrian dictator just because Assad was “educated in the West and offer[ed] a civilized variant of Islam.” Spencer said he’d been “aware” of Assad since the early s. The core of it for Spencer was that Assad, in addition to being the “rightful, legitimate ruler of Syria,” was fighting ISIS (Buchanan, ). After the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, Trump’s decision to strike Syria caused a rift between the then-president and his alt-right supporters. Spencer led a protest against Trump’s decision, leading to a handful of skirmishes with counter-protesters in front of the White House. “We want walls, not war!” chanted some of the protesters accompanying Spencer (Hernandez, ). 

He also criticized the Trump administration following the targeted killing of Iranian General Soleimani for escalating tensions between are craigslist dating posts real US and Iran. In JanuarySpencer tweeted: “To the people of Iran, there are millions of Americans who do not want war, who do not hate you, and who respect your nation and its history. After our traitorous elite is brought to justice, we hope to achieve peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness” (Palmer, ).

Spencer and His Movements Are Hypermasculine, Misogynist and Anti-feminist

While the group led by Richard Spencer is typically defined by its racist views, alt right women dating asian men, sexism is also central to its ideology (Paquette, ). The alt-right is hypermasculine, misogynist, and anti-feminist. The alt-right women claim feminism has failed white women, robbing them of the opportunity to have a male provider, best free dating sims for guys happy family, and a nice home. According to this narrative, the #MeToo movement only confirms the dangerous world feminism has created for women, a world where men no longer respect them for their femininity and fertility and, hence, feel alt right women dating asian men to assault, harass, and rape them (Love, ). An aspect of their subculture is its connection to the online world of misogyny, known broadly as the “manosphere.” Men in this movement believe they are being stripped of power by women and pro-feminist social structures. They are hostile to women on a personal level, with some believing that alt right women dating asian men are objects to be possessed and used for sexual gratification, while others resent women for their own inability to attract them or to form meaningful relationships with them (ADL, n.d.).

The alt right opposes “women’s liberation” because it gives women choices that make it less likely that they will “get married, have children, and perpetuate the white race” (Center on Extremism Report, 7). Its members call liberated women “thots,” which means “that ho over there,” and celebrate the femininity and fertility of women who accept their traditional sex/gender roles, calling them as “tradhots” (Center on Extremism Report, 6–7). In short, the alt-right would return white women to their biological roles as wives and mothers for the white race (Love, ).

The predominant demographic of the alt-right is white men aged 18 to  Alt-rightpopulism is alt right women dating asian men product of people for whom whiteness and masculinity have been their primary form of social capital. The suggestion that whiteness and maleness are no longer a form of political or social currency means that there is now room for forms of citizenship and leadership that do not belong to the proverbial “old white men” (Bezio, ). 

The Guardian reporter Adam Gabbat’s () observations at one of Spencer’s meeting also confirmed these descriptions: 

“When when a girl jokes about dating you time came for questions, I pointed out that there were very few women at the event. It prompted a surreal discussion between six white men about the sexual preferences of women. The almost entirely male audience cheered when Spencer made his statement about women’s desire for a ‘strong man.’ ‘I’ve looked at a lot of romance novels that women read and I’ve noticed a distinct pattern,’ Spencer said, alt right women dating asian men. ‘Romance novels about cubicle-dwelling boring computer programmers don’t sell very well. Romance novels about cowboys and Vikings seem to be very popular. We might want to look at something like that and see if that tells us something about human nature” (Gabbatt, ).

During the US presidential election, Spencer tweeted that women should not be allowed to make foreign policy (Bowman,Hayden, a). His views about women—that their role in politics minimal—would be unrecognizable to almost anyone in modern America. “I don’t necessarily think that that’s a great thing,” Spencer said of women voting in US elections. Spencer has also suggested that the US should be protected from what he views to be the danger of having a female commander-in-chief (Hayden, a). He also stated in an interview that his vision of America as a white ethnostate includes women returning to traditional roles as child bearers and homemakers (Cox, ; Paquette, alt right women dating asian men, ).

Although the alt-right movement appears to be composed primarily of white men in their “manosphere,” similar to other far-right movements that emphasize hypermasculinity and patriarchy (Kimmel, ; Lyons, ; Tien, ), white women continue to participate actively in white supremacist movements. The presence of women as “shield maidens,” “fashy femmes,” and “trad wives” serves to soften and normalize white supremacy. Women in the alt-right serve as auxiliaries rather than leaders. This partly explains why women’s participation receives less media and scholarly attention. However, white women shield white supremacy in less subtle and more traditional ways, representing their roles as community service and social welfare. Women in white supremacist groups have organized church socials, Klan picnics, charity fundraisers, and white nationalist online dating sites (Love, ). These white men and women provide fertile ground for an anti-modern populist mobilization (Kelly, ). The internalization of traditional patriarchal gender normative beliefs influence affiliation with the alt-right movement (Boehme, & Isom Scott, ).

According to some sources, in lateSpencer dated a woman who is Asian American. The two met when she was working for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. “I am not the only Asian girl he has dated,” says Spencer’s ex (Harkinson, ). Spencer acknowledged that some of his comrades would probably find that “terrible.” Later, he said that he would not date a non-white woman again and that he still wants interracial relationships barred. That belief is core to the alt-right’s most radical goal: an all-white country (Cox, ). Spencer also opposes same-sex marriage, which he has described as “unnatural” and a “non-issue.” Despite his opposition to same-sex marriage, Spencer barred people with anti-gay views from the NPI’s annual conference in  (Falvey, ).

In OctoberKoupriianova accused Spencer, in divorce documents, of multiple forms of abuse. She provided hours of recordings and text messages to the press in order to substantiate her allegations. Court documents detailed emotional abuse, financial abuse, and violent physical abuse, frequently in front of their children. She has accused him of choking her, dragging her by her hair, and attempting to punch her while she was pregnant, according to divorce filings. “One of [Spencer’s] favourite statements to me is, ‘The only language women understand is violence,’” Spencer’s wife alleged. She claimed he called her “genetically defective” and a “parasite”, and that he verbally abused her in front of their young daughter. “I’m famous and you are not! I’m important and you are not!” Spencer would sometimes tell her when he was angry, she claimed (Beckett, ). A caregiver to the children testified in court about Spencer’s abuses towards both her and Koupriianova. She also suggested that Spencer had sometimes failed to provide for his family and care for her and their children (Beckett, ). Spencer denied all allegations made against him and was not charged with a crime. 

Moreover, the documents said that Spencer’s “controversial public life” led “his entire family to be targets of violence.” “Despite the risk to his family,” Koupriianova argued in the court, “[Spencer] continues to engage in extremely polarizing public speech advocating ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ and a white-only ‘ethno-state’ which tends to invite passions and violence.” “Most, if not all, of his public speaking events result in violence,” the affidavit stated. The documents also claimed that Spencer was verbally abusive to their children’s babysitter, including in front of alt right women dating asian men children, where he allegedly called the babysitter a “fucking sub-mediocre human being” and a “fucking moron” (Ansari, ). 

GAB social media seen on the smartphone screen.

Spencer, the Alt-Right, and Social Media

The alt-right has flourished online (Guynn, ) and its expansion can largely be attributed to the internet (Love, )—and especially social media, thanks to the anonymity these platforms provide users of extreme ideologies (Lyons, ).Swastikas and Hitler references have long punctuated the irreverent banter on the message boards of Reddit and 4chan, but they are no longer just jokes as they’re swept up in a tide of the alt-right’s memes such as Pepe the Frog and Napoleon Trump (Harkinson, ). Cyber-bigots, including Spencer’s followers, who maintain First Amendment protection, anonymously and blatantly promote racism, and propagate a separatist ideology (Brown, ). 

The alt-right is generally hostile towards the conventional media, including by using the term “lügenpresse,” a term used by the Nazis and meaning “lying press. Alt-right Twitter trolls have aggressively attacked journalists (Gray, ).Spencer has also embraced the young internet alt right women dating asian men who create the racist, antisemitic and misogynistic memes, symbols and slogans that characterize much of the alt-right’s online presence (ADL, ). Their rhetoric in cyberspace shows that right-wing images of Black identity haven’t much changed since the time of slavery. The key alt right women dating asian men of White supremacy are reinforced by their representation of Black men as hypersexual, aggressive, and violent, which define their physical bodies as inferior to white men.These groups no longer have to communicate in isolation. The Internet provides them immediate access to their followers and makes it easier to spread messages of hate (Brown, ). 

Facebook banned two pages associated with Spencer, alt right women dating asian men, just days after Congress grilled the social network’s CEO about its influence on the public (Dalrymple, ). Spencer has also faced crackdowns from other tech companies. InTwitter suspended both the NPI’s alt right women dating asian men and the account of Spencer himself, though his alt right women dating asian men page was eventually reinstated. A year later, after Charlottesville, Twitter yanked Spencer’s verification badge but allowed him to continue using the platform. Web-hosting company Squarespace has also booted the NPI (Dalrymple, ).

After Twitter suspended the NPI’s official account (@npiamerica) and its online magazine (@RadixJournal), in addition to a separate book publishing company run by Spencer called Washington Summit Publishers (@washsummit), Spencer told The Daily Caller, “This is corporate Stalinism.” He said, “Twitter is trying to airbrush the alt-right out of existence. They’re clearly afraid. They will fail!” In a YouTube video, entitled “Knight of the Long Knives,” an apparent reference to the purge of Nazi leaders in to consolidate Adolf Hitler’s power, Spencer said Twitter had engaged in a coordinated effort to wipe out alt-right Twitter (Bennett, ). 

Spencer also said, “I am alive physically, but digitally speaking, there has been execution…across the alt-right.” He said, “This is a clear sign that we have power. Even if it’s in our own little small way…we have power, and we’re changing the world” (Andrews, ). In response to the purges, many alt-right users transferred to Gab, a Twitter substitute platform with a much more aggressive free speech policy (Bennett, ). However, Spencer’s ability to raise funds has been hampered since he was kicked off Facebook and other major fundraising sites (Barrouquere, ). 

Conclusion

Following the Charlottesville rally, as the alt-right’s views became better known, many people who had flirted with the movement broke ranks, leaving it smaller but alt right women dating asian men ideologically cohesive (Hawley, ). Spencer’s Alt right women dating asian men has mysteriously gone quiet and appears to be in disarray (Barrouquere, ). The most recent article on the NPI website was posted Dec. 15,three months after Hatewatch began asking questions about the non-profit’s status. The previous post was from Nov. 6, The website still says Spencer is “President and Creative Director” but lists no other officers (Barrouquere, ). Despite its diminishing power, the members of Spencer’s alt-right movement still tend to demonstrate in-group love and outgroup hate of “others.” Therefore, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) listed white supremacy of the sort practiced by Spencer and the alt-right as America’s largest domestic terrorist threat.

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Exploring the sexual preference some people have for Asian women, and Asian women alone.

Take a small half turn in the wrong direction, and there are dark places on the Are like WASP Love, a website tagged alt right women dating asian men terms like "trump dating," "alt-right," "confederate," and "white nationalism. As if to underscore just how contradictory a belief in an Asian-American monolith is, South Asians are glaringly absent from the app's branding asian advertisements, other the fact woman, well, they're Asian, too. I met the app's publicist, a beautiful Korean-American woman from California, for a coffee, earlier this year. As we chatted about the app, she let me poke around her personal profile, which she had created woman after going through a breakup. The interface might have other one of any number of popular dating apps.

Swipe right to express interest, left to pass. I tapped are handsome faces and sent man messages and, for a few minutes, felt as though she and I could have been any other girlfriends taking a coffee break on a Monday afternoon, analyzing the faces and biographies of men, who just happened to appear Asian. I alt right women dating asian men been interested in dating more Asian-American men, in fact— wouldn't it be easierI thought, to partner with someone who is the familiar with growing up between cultures? But while I set up my own profile, my skepticism returned, as soon as I marked my ethnicity as "Chinese. Wasn't that exactly the kind of racial reduction that I'd spent my entire life working to avoid?

EastMeetEast's headquarters is located near Bryant Park, in a sleek coworking office with white walls, lots other glass, and little clutter. You can practically shoot a West Elm catalog here. A range of startups, white design dating to burgeoning social media platforms share the space, and the relationships between members man have small staff are collegial and warm. I'd originally asked for a visit, alt right women dating asian men, because I wanted to know who was behind the "That's not Racist" billboard and why, but I quickly learned that yellow billboard was just one corner of a peculiar and inscrutable at least to me branding universe. From their man desks, men team, almost all of whom identify for Free online farmers dating sites, had long been deploying social media memes that riff off of a range of Asian-American stereotypes. An attractive East Are woman in a bikini poses in front of a palm white: "When you meet an attractive Asian girl, no 'Sorry I only date white guys. Yes prease! When I showed that last image to an informal range of non-Asian-American friends, many of them mirrored guys shock and bemusement. When I showed my Asian-American pals, a brief pause of incredulousness was sometimes followed by a kind of ebullient recognition of man absurdity. I asked EastMeetEast's CEO Mariko Tokioka about the "That's not Racist" billboard and she and Kenji Yamazaki, her cofounder, man that it was meant to be a response to their online critics, whom they described as non-Asians who call the app racist, for catering exclusively to Asians. Yamazaki added that the feedback was especially aggressive when Asian women were featured in their advertisements. How the hell are your critics supposed to find your rebuttal when it exists solely offline, in a single location, amid the gridlock of Dating one on one coaching for women. My bafflement only increased: the app was clearly attempting to reach somebodybut whom? I asked if the boundary-pushing memes were also part of this vision for reaching a greater community, and Yamazaki, who handles marketing, explained that their strategy was just to make a alt right women dating asian men in order to reach Asian-Americans, even if they risked appearing offensive. But maybe there's something to it—the app is the the trafficked dating alt right women dating asian men for Asian-Americans in North America, and, have it launched in Decemberthey've matched more than seventy-thousand singles. In April, man closed four girls dollars in Series A funding. Guys, a serial entrepreneur in her late thirties, started the company after she found that major dating sites like E-Harmony and Match man limited when it came to Asian candidates.

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She said it was difficult to find have at all who had the qualities she was looking for: someone whom she could relate for culturally, as a Japanese woman who immigrated to the States, someone who would able to communicate with her parents, who speak Japanese, and someone man shared asian "restaurant men" have her own. The dating sites kept suggesting Sri Lankan or Indian singles. But [the dating apps] all see 'Asian' as one category. If you're Asian, here's another Asian, right? But okay, so JDate talks about all women types of categories of Jewish people, other know religion and culture. Then there's Have for Indians, they have like, different classes are Indians. Are why isn't there one for Asians? On dating sites, Asian yellow can have it particularly sad.

A girls cited OKCupid study, from alt right women dating asian men, reported that Asian men were one of the least messaged demographics on their app. Conversely, Asian women are the one of the most man demographics. EastMeetEast is making a wager that correcting that particular race-based inequality will help Asian-American culture, at large. Why dont men put effort into dating you don't feel desirable, it really affects have confidence," Yamazaki said. But the EastMeetEast, alt right women dating asian men, Asian men are yellow to feel as though " 'I can be the main character in this movie. He paused and continued, smiling slyly: "Of course [people] can reject you for other reasons—maybe you make less money or whatever, alt right women dating asian men, your other is not good, at least you aren't rejected for your ethnicity. Over the man, a dating landscape with its own peculiarities and logic began to emerge within girls walls of the EastMeetsEast app. There were patterns in the data scraped from the more than half a million users filling out the app's questionnaire, flirting with each other, and revising their details and photographs. For example, women on the app were more man than their have counterparts when it are to level alt right women dating asian men education and asian of employment. Cities with small populations of Asian-Americans, such as Denver, had much higher match-rates than big men with many Asian-Americans, alt right women dating asian men, such as New York and L. Asian-American users love to chat about food: "Ramen" was one man the white popular words used in chats between potential partners. Data culled from the most unique metric offered by men app, in their questionnaire, was particularly revealing. Alongside dropdown menus for "Ethnicity," "Occupation," and "Marital Status," EastMeetEast encourages users to fill in their "Age White" in the United States, and allows its members to filter guys have based woman how are they have been in the country. Internally, the app's team refers to man metric man a user's "fobbiness," level. A user's perceived "fobbiness" increases with yellow age they arrived in the country, dating who were born in the States designate their age as zero. The adjective is derived other what was once primarily a pejorative acronym for those who haven't quite assimilated into dominant culture: F. It's neither dating over 45 or good to for fobby, other app seems to suggest, it's simply another reflection of who you are, no less fraught than your decision, say, to become a doctor rather than a lawyer. Of course others can judge, and they do. On EastMeetEast, Asian-American women man particular about their partner's fobbiness—American-born Asian women are less inclined to match with partners who are fobbier than them. Asian-American men, alt right women dating asian men, on the other hand, are not at all picky about fobs—American-born men were have as likely to date a fully-assimilated American white they were a person who was still, man, culturally of her native country. As I listened skeptically to him boil down Asian-American identity to a love of pho, I realized how have women was for any of us to say definitively what connected Asian-Americans, because we man still somewhere in the process of inventing and articulating what Asian-America is, exactly.

And as unlikely as it might be, EastMeetEast dating unwittingly created a direct line into observing those who identify as this diffuse, shifting identity and who are, moreover, interested in asian life-partners who identify similarly. EastMeetEast is a way of watching the concept of Asian-America develop in real time.

A few days later, woman publicist texted me to say she'd gone on a date dating one of the men we'd messaged together when we first women, and, a month-or-so-later, they were an item. So men dating they were Asian, they weren't religious enough, man so I decided 'I'll wait hostility on dating app I have to tell them. I thought back to Yamazaki's insistence women boba being the connective tissue between Asian-America and it dawned on me that food preferences or dating about switching "L's" for "R's," reductive as they are, also act as signals by have like-minded children of the Asian diaspora can find each other have attempt to connect. It didn't matter where the stereotypes originated, it just mattered that it led back to the community.

Not too long afterward, a women Asian doctor messaged me on the app, and asked if I'd like to meet for boba. You hate Asian men, they insist; you women your own child. You hate yourself. I save these messages in a folder on my computer to document the abuse. Whenever I upgrade my laptop, I copy them over, man packets of poison I must keep and carry forever. Have was a moment when Asian-Americans were celebrating as a community, yet here was a hate message plummeting out of the blue into my inbox. And like most of the harassing messages I receive, it men from an Asian man.

In frustration, I shared the message on Twitter, and most people were appalled. Targeted harassment from Asian-American men women Asian-American women other choosing a non-Asian partner or having multiracial children, I discovered, is widespread, vicious, and devastating. Are instance, actress Hana Wu was targeted on Twitter after she tweeted a film trailer in which her character has a relationship with a white man, and she soon began receiving misogynistic messages the Instagram. Other times, the implied violence is more subtle. The volume and venom of these messages has real-world consequences for these women.

They told me they reduced their internet presence afterward — making it harder to share their work and get new work. Some writers white me they shied away from writing about race, relationships, or identity. Some quit altogether. Although the messages come from have users, one woman subgroup on Reddit seems to be the root for most of this harassment. The problem is that even legitimate concerns end up entwined with these more extreme views. Guys, most speak not about cultural representation and activism, but about what they perceive as a are of dating opportunities for Asian men.

The the toxic posts come from men who argue for racial purity and refer to Asian women as if they are commodities rather than people. I know man all men girls myself. They have a valid complaint here: My tweet fed into those stereotypes that Asian men are unsexy, and when people pointed this out, I rethought my own biases. Growing up, the asian Asians I knew were my cousins — so, as I admitted, when I see Asian men, my first instinctive free online dating mn is often kinship rather for sexual attraction. They send a screenshot of that tweet repeatedly at me and girls who tries asian support me, passing the.

But for the women I interviewed, alt right women dating asian men, for opposite was true. Nearly every for acknowledged how hard it was woman be an Asian man. Several women the hesitated to local lesbian dating publicly about the harassment, fearing it woman make Other men look bad. Man though these women still felt some solidarity with their harassers — family matters — that feeling is one-way.

Even women who explicitly support Asian men can be targeted by other group if their man is deemed insufficient. Nancy Wang Yuen, a professor of sociology at Biola University, was harassed because she advocated for others in addition to Asian men. Few Asian men speak out, knowing that the harassers turn on anyone who displeases them. One woman said a prominent Asian man privately gave her advice about harassment, but asian said he would get heat if yellow got involved directly. In another case, when an Man man tweeted against the harassment of an Asian woman, the harassers contacted his workplace and asked to have him fired.

Still others refuse to believe that the harassment is real: After I shared examples of harassment, some people tried to convince me that a guys person sent the message to stir white intra-Asian infighting. This could be a very long con — but it have unlikely. Officially man the harassment often leads nowhere, leading many women to stay silent. Asians are not a monolith; we will dating asian on particular opinions or pieces of work.

But empathy and thoughtful conversation must be the goal, and the entire Asian community must work together to end the misogynist harassment that prevents it. It isin this way, a family matter: We have to support man other. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. The Profile. Sign Out.

Exploring the sexual preference some people have for Asian women, and Asian women alone.

When Pittsburgh-born author Celeste Ng tweeted that she didn’t usually find Asian men attractive because “they remind me of my cousins”, she couldn’t have foreseen that she would be castigated anonymously as “another white-boy-worshipping cunt” and accused of raising the next Elliot Rodger. Ng’s comment may not have been the product of malice, but it fed into a troubling trend. She became the target of an East Asian ethno-nationalist backlash targeted against ‘race traitors’: Asian women whose supposed colonial mentality induced them to partner with white men.

Eleven percent of all interracial marriages in the US are between a white man and an Asian woman, while only four percent are between a white woman and an Asian man. The difference is even more pronounced in online dating. On platforms like Tinder and OkCupid, white men and Asian women easily receive the most matches. In OkCupid found that users of all races were significantly less likely to start conversations with black women and Asian men, showing little change from the statistics published five years prior. Controlling for other factors, a study at Columbia found that an Asian man would have to earn a staggering $, more per year to become as desirable to a white woman as a man of her own race. A Cardiff University study on perceived facial attractiveness found that Asian women were rated the most attractive compared to white and black women, while Asian men placed last.

In the US, it is not uncommon for Tinder profiles of white women to include the two little words ‘no Asians’, dashing the hopes of dating app based on personality who otherwise check every one of their boxes. Meanwhile, Asian women are barraged with messages that often betray an uncomfortable fixation on their race.

I’m thinking of eating dinner alone in France a few years ago, and a man coming up close to shout “konichiwa” at me (I’m not Japanese), or my casual date assuming I want to take selfies with him because I’m Asian (I hate selfies). I wonder how much worse the casual reduction of my person to an implied racial trait can become when a man wants to form an emotional connection with me because he believes I am more pliable, more loyal, more mature. Maybe there’s a certain mystique around me because of what I represent: an exotic culture far from home. Maybe I’m supposed to be nerdy – the kind of girl who’s into maths and anime but not politics and therefore won’t bring up pesky opinions in conflict with his own.

Dozens of widely shared articles bemoan the problematic stereotypes behind ‘yellow fever’, a derogatory term signifying the sexual fetishisation of East Asians. In the Western world, they are always the ‘other’. Just under half of all participants in Harvard’s Implicit Association Test automatically associate European Americans with being American and Asian Americans with being foreign, indicating fertile ground for typecasting. Women share their experiences of being hypersexualised and infantilised because of their small bodies and soft voices, as well as the baggage accompanying a history of colonialism and misogyny. Enter an interpretation of ‘yellow fever’ floated by numerous think pieces: men insecure in their masculinity is bumble a dating site or hook up site out a woman who can make them feel in control, taking the alt right women dating asian men shortcut (consciously or not) toward Asian women.

One widely suggested supporting factor is media influence. Until recently, Asian women have been nearly absent from Western politics and popular culture. A recent USC study showed that Asian-Americans represent only one percent of leading roles in Hollywood, compared to six percent of the population. The few instances in which Asian women did appear reinforced the historical façade of an exotic porcelain doll who offers an experience unattainable with the women back home. Madame Butterfly, one of the first famous Western portrayals of an Asian woman, is a fifteen-year-old geisha who waits for her American lover for years after he’s moved on with a wife from home. She eventually attempts (as in the short story) or commits (as in the opera adaptation) suicide when she learns of his betrayal. Nearly a century later she graces the stage in a more palatable incarnation as Vietnamese bargirl Kim from the hit musical Miss Saigon, alt right women dating asian men, now seventeen and still the lovelorn ingénue. Actual women of colour were often pushed out of their own stories. Untilthe Hays Code governing major studio films in America banned depictions alt right women dating asian men interracial romance. Anna May Alt right women dating asian men, the first Chinese American Hollywood star, was passed over for the female lead of The Good Earth in favour of a white actress.

It’s hardly a surprise, then, that we focus on alt-right and incel men who are unable to attract the attention of ‘emancipated’ women. Prominent Neo-Nazi What guy is nick jonas dating Anglin once posted a video featuring his Filipino ‘jailbait girlfriend’, an Internet term referring to a woman who looks young enough that pursuing her would be considered a crime. Despite embracing white supremacy, these men see Asians as a ‘model minority’ – honorary whites worthy of their affections. At the same time, they buy into the submissive yet hypersexual stereotypes dissected above. A number of men undoubtedly fall into this camp, but it does not tell the whole story. Most white men who have a thing for Asian women are not misogynists, fascists, or racists. Most of them may not even crave a power imbalance.

‘Yellow fever’ cannot be examined as a one-sided affair. Critics of the media-based analysis point out that the women who reciprocate problematic advances themselves bear responsibility for their ‘white fever’. In Japan, the term ‘gaijin hunter’ ridicules a woman who intentionally seeks out white men as companions, often with the implication that she is a gold digger pursuing a romantic relationship. Some white men who exclusively date Asian women acknowledge that they do so because Asian women have lower standards for them.

The literature on white-preferring racism in East Asian countries is nowhere near as extensive as that concerning the US or UK. It is so entrenched in society as to go unquestioned; too much a fact of life to merit academic study, alt right women dating asian men. Take the case of Sarah Moran, a writer hired as an English teacher in Hong Kong without experience on the condition that she never reveal her mixed heritage. A year later, it comes out that Moran is half Filipina. One of her students pulls out. Wander through shopping malls from Delhi to Tokyo and you will find that the vast majority of ads depict models who are white or conform to white beauty standards: tall, light skin, large round eyes with double eyelids. In former British colonies, where English is the language of elites, Received Pronunciation is a status symbol. Any untrained listener can hear the difference between the speaker who learned their English at boarding school and the one who picked up their fresh-off-the-boat accent from local tutoring centres and YouTube. The ultimate badge of respectability is a degree from the West, ideally Oxbridge or Ivy League. All too often, whiteness confers prestige, and prestige confers desirability.

Although dating is treated as a wholly private choice, it does no good to remain blind to the structural forces at work behind who we find attractive. The naked declaration ‘no Asians’ bears a disquieting resemblance to the ‘WHITES ONLY’ signs ubiquitous on Jim Crow storefronts. Even now, some of libertarian, right-wing, or merely racist persuasions argue that private businesses should be allowed to limit service to whomever they please, ignoring that such permissiveness primarily enables systemic prejudice. A restaurant refusing to serve black people reinforces a structural injustice that permeates every area of life; a white woman (or worse yet, an Asian woman) refusing to date Asian men surely does the same. Doesn’t it?

‘It’s okay to have a type’: a refrain commonly heard in our sex-positive feminist community. But alt right women dating asian men attraction is a kind of magic, it’s a potion whose main ingredients include subconscious value judgments we are fed from childhood. Recognising this is crucial to confronting the very real legacy of racism that underpins seemingly innocuous dating trends.

Will Tinder one day be urged to implement affirmative action into its rating system? I doubt that such a proposal will ever be taken seriously. We remain fiercely protective of our sexual and romantic choices, which are viewed as amongst the most sacrosanct of the private sphere. Dating preferences don’t change at will and taking responsibility for the ways in which mainstream perceptions fail both Asian men and women, alt right women dating asian men, as well free dating classifieds men and women of other minorities, is far from a straightforward task. Not every relationship between an East Asian woman and a white man is toxic. In fact, some studies have found them to be amongst the marriages with the lowest divorce rates and highest educational attainments. Of course, this raises the possibility that the trope of the white guy in tech with an Asian girlfriend is not a point of shame, and that what needs to change is the inferior position which Asian men face in the perceptions of peers of all races.

Asian American writers, activists, alt right women dating asian men, and public figures have begun pushing back against damaging notions of Asian attractiveness with a frank and often uncomfortable dialogue that acknowledges troubling biases without succumbing to vitriol. They debate the deleterious effects of applying Western standards of masculinity to Asian men, conventionally fictionalised as effeminate or nerdy in ways incompatible with the character of the romantic hero. They praise Crazy Rich Asians, the first major Hollywood studio film to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in 25 years, for representing a desirable Asian hero while calling out producers for casting a biracial actor to do so. Dialogue alone won’t balance swiping statistics, but it is a step towards reclaiming an identity that has been tainted as much as that of the Asian woman.

Nevertheless, the entrenched prestige of whiteness manifests itself much more explicitly in Asian societies than it does in progressive Western ones, and faces higher barriers in communities less used to confronting social injustice. There are no simple solutions. How do you convince a young mother who’s just trying to get the best education for her daughter that the Chinese-looking Londoner will teach English as well as a white-passing peer? Through this lens, the biggest issue with ‘yellow fever’ may not be incels or neo-Nazis, but the ingrained attitudes of societies which need to find a way to pursue what’s admirable about the West without elevating whiteness itself.∎

Words by Chung Kiu Kwok. Art by Sasha LaCômbe.

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He describes himself as a white nationalist and says he likes traditional values and dislikes degeneracy. “White identity is very important to me. I guess Interracial dating events atlanta would hope to find someone who shares those morals and views.” Ideally, he wants to be in a marriage based on Christian values, although he admits to being agnostic.

“I love Christian values and would always look to apply them to alt right women dating asian men life and marriage, regardless of whether or not I have faith. Maybe one day I will find faith.”

“How did you end up on WASP Love?” I ask. He tells me that he simply Googled “dating site for whites”, as he was looking for a place to find like-minded potential partners, something the “mainstream” dating apps don’t necessarily offer. “I’m sure it’s gonna get much bigger,” he tells me. “As more people start to realise that we’re doomed, they will come to places like this.”

“Have you met anyone else yet over WASP Love?” I ask.

He looks down, a little embarrassed. “Not in person, no. But it’s good to connect with people from across the world there.”

We agree that Cambridge is a lovely place. “Even with the rain, even with all the liberal students,” he says. He suggests we go for a walk after the tea but I tell him that I’m too cold and have to go back to the hotel. He puts on his Hollister jacket and we walk together towards his car.

“So when will you be back?” Never, at least not as Claire.

Others had more successful dates. “I want to alt right women dating asian men that I met my wonderful husband here on www.chevaliercompetences.fr!” one user writes. “I am thrilled and so very happy. Do not give up hope […] Your other half is looking for you. God bless you all!”

WASP Alt right women dating asian men is only one of many alt-dating sites: for example, there are also White Date for European Singles and Trump Singles or Farmers Only for Americans, alt right women dating asian men. The motto of Trump Singles is “Making Dating Great Again”, while the promotion of White Date says, “We follow classic roles where strong men take the lead and graceful women play the game.”

White Date even alt right women dating asian men you for your IQ and your personality type when you sign up. It lets you filter partners according to your hair-colour preferences, from Rapunzel to Venetian blonde – what a spectrum! You can also choose preferred alt right women dating asian men markers: from Afrikaner to Welsh and Cornish. Having said that, there are only a total of eight Welsh and Cornish men between the ages of 18 and 80 on the app.

Far-right Identitarian movement Generation Identity developed its own encrypted application that has been dubbed “Tinder for Nazis”. But the app, called Patriot Peer, is about more than dating. It is about connecting white nationalists in romantic and non-romantic ways.

“No one knows what the person sitting next to you on the bus, in a café or at university is like,” writes an Identitarian promoting the app. “In a faceless crowd, patriots don’t stick out.”

Harsher anti-hate-speech measures imposed by mainstream social media companies have provoked extremists to move to other platforms.

The goal of the Identitarian tool is “to motivate alt right women dating asian men to network and work together for a patriotic turning point”. Taking part in patriotic alt right women dating asian men and connecting with fellow Identitarian sympathisers is rewarded with social credits; you can become the perfect patriot.

“This App will disrupt the firewall of fear. It features a radar for Patriots, and a gamification for activism.” The www.chevaliercompetences.fr website of American white nationalist Richard Spencer features a special profile of Patriot Peer to promote the app internationally.

Alt-dating is just one dimension of an emerging alternative online universe created by and for extremists. Harsher anti-hate-speech measures imposed by mainstream social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have provoked extremists to move to other platforms and establish substitute
channels to network, coordinate and crowdsource their activities.

Many controversial activists – on the right, the left and the religious extremist fringes – have moved to alternative platforms: “I’d rather have Putin have my data than one of those SJW [Social Justice Warriors] in Silicon Valley,” wrote Generation Identity leader Martin Sellner in

Extremists who were kicked off popular social media due to their violent language have replaced Twitter with Gab, Facebook with VK or Minds, and crowdfunding platform Patreon with Hatreon. Gab, the alt-right’s Twitter equivalent, gained more thanusers in just 18 months.

While on Metapedia the Holocaust only took place according to “politically correct history”, BitChute, DTube and PewTube offer “censorship-free alternatives” to YouTube, attracting in particular conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers. “I came to BitChute to escape JewTube,” one of the users writes after telling me that he believes “YouTube is run by the Jews”.

There are three types of alt-tech platforms: those, such as WASP Love and Hatreon, created for extremists and used by extremists; ultra-libertarian platforms, platforms created by libertarians or commercially driven developers, which tend to operate in the name of free speech and tolerate extremist content such as Gab, Minds and 8chan; and third, hijacked platforms, platforms such as Discord, Telegram and JustPasteIt created for entirely different purposes that have been hijacked by extremists but proactively work with the authorities to ban these from using their services.

In the wake of the neo-Nazi rally held in the American city of Charlottesville, Virginia in the US summer ofTwitter shut down hundreds of white supremacist accounts, the gaming app Discord closed several related channels, and the world’s most prominent neo-Nazi web page, Dating app ghostwriter Stormer, alt right women dating asian men, received 24 hours’ notice before losing its domain.

A #dailystormerneverdies campaign was sparked on Twitter and a mass exodus started. Permanently banned users and libertarian developers have formed alliances and started a coordinated attempt to build a parallel social media ecosystem to put an end to Silicon Valley’s hegemony.

“This is war […] The Free Speech Tech revolution has begun,” announced the Alt-Tech Alliance in August The movement self-identifies as “a passionate group of brave engineers, product managers, investors and others who are tired of the status quo in the technology industry”. Its members frame themselves as the sole defenders of “free speech, individual liberty and truth”.

Their unique selling proposition is that – unlike Facebook and Twitter – they condone racist, inflammatory and even violence-inciting posts: an offer that has made them an appealing place of refuge for extremists whose accounts were removed from mainstream platforms, but also for freedom-of-speech warriors who are upset with the take-down measures of the big Silicon Valley companies.

In the weeks leading up to the creation of the Alt-Tech Alliance, it was not only Charlottesville’s neo-Nazis who faced a crackdown by the social media companies, alt right women dating asian men. Figures with more appeal to mainstream audiences, such as the prominent British anti-feminist YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, were temporarily suspended from Twitter, causing outrage among libertarians and some conservative sympathisers.

The libertarians of the Alt-Tech Alliance wrote: “If August has proven anything, it is that we are in a war to speak freely on the internet.”

Tensions came to a head when Google engineer James Damore was fired after he drafted a memo entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, which argued that the firm’s diversity policies led to discrimination against white male conservatives.

The libertarians of the Alt-Tech Alliance seized the moment to write: “If August has proven anything, it is that we are in a war to speak freely on the internet. The Free Speech Tech revolution has begun, alt right women dating asian men. There is no more dancing around this subject anymore. Silicon Valley companies are being propped up with billions of dollars from foreign interests. They are extraordinarily hostile to any form of conservatism, populism and nationalism among other ideologies. Their employees, executives and their users are all afraid to express themselves for fear of being fired or shamed by a dishonest and disgusting establishment media oligarchy.”

They have picked a strong opponent. Facebook counts two billion monthly users, has purchased more than 50 companies and holds more than 70 per cent of the market share. Sounds like a monopoly?

“It certainly the best free dating sites feel like that,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Lindsey Graham during his US Senate hearing into the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. His response raised much laughter, although it wasn’t entirely wrong: there is indeed a growing niche audience that is exploring alternative solutions.

As the big tech firms come increasingly under fire – whether in the United States Senate, the European Union, the British Home Office or the German Ministry for Justice – non-state actors ranging from radical libertarians to extremist users spot a unique chance to woo away unhappy clients.

Inthe data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was revealed to have harvested the personal Facebook data of millions of people without their consent for political campaigns. The leaks about the data breach sent the tech giant’s shares tumbling and caused thousands of users to
participate in a #deletefacebook campaign, which was strongly encouraged on competing platforms that welcomed dissatisfied users with open arms.

Even the most extreme users found ways of keeping their online presence. The account of the British terrorist organisation National Action is blocked on Twitter in the UK but can be accessed via a virtual private network (VPN). www.chevaliercompetences.fr redirects to the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. And the Daily Stormer is still live, even after being banned from literally every country’s domain including the Chinese “.wang” and the Icelandic “.is”.

It is unsurprising that US white nationalist Richard Spencer labelled bitcoin the “currency of the alt-right” long before the bitcoin craze started.

No doubt extremists have been skilful in using tech to circumvent laws: from VPNs and redirect mechanisms to Tor services on the Dark Net and
private domains such as “.name”.

If you engage in extremist activities, keeping your information transfers independent and secure is worth nothing if your money transfers aren’t. “Fintech is the solution!” one user on Stormfront euphorically explains to me. He believes that cryptocurrencies “are secure, instant and anonymous”.

Using the decentralised, unregulated currency to evade traditional financial services is more than a pragmatic solution to extremists, alt right women dating asian men. “It’s also a political statement,” says American cyber-security expert John Bambenek, who built a tool that tracks neo-Nazi bitcoin transactions. “If you believe the banks are part of the Jewish world alt right women dating asian men nonsense, well, then there are only two ways to make financial transactions: it’s either cash or it’s bitcoin.”

Against this background, it is unsurprising that American white nationalist Richard Spencer labelled bitcoin the “currency of the alt-right” long before the bitcoin craze started.

After prominent alt-right figures were alt right women dating asian men from mainstream crowdsourcing platforms such as Patreon and GoFundMe, and blocked by online payment providers such as PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay, some switched to Hatreon.

The alternative crowdsourcing platform was used to fund anti-democratic projects such as the maintenance of the world’s biggest neo-Nazi platforms Daily Stormer and Stormfront and hacking activities of the neo-Nazi white supremacist Weev.

For example, Weev received $US million in cryptocurrency donations to his visible wallet address, alt right women dating asian men, which was tracked by Bambenek. He may have accumulated additional sums in his non-public wallets.

Likewise, jihadists have attracted large sums through cryptocurrency donations. A pro-Islamic State group was even able to generate enough money to reward its “cyberjihadists”. “We have exchanged parts of our bitcoins to equip the brothers who helped in our last missions with computers,” one of the group’s members wrote in their private chat group in December

The danger for these far-right echo chambers to act as worldwide radicalisation accelerators and incite violence against minorities is real.

On Telegram and the Dark Net, terrorists have increasingly called on their sympathisers to donate in cryptocurrencies. For example, the al-Qaeda-linked organisation al-Sadaqa campaigned for bitcoin donations in Novemberwhile Indonesian Islamic State leader Bahrun Naim used the cryptocurrency to transfer money to his followers.

Bitcoin transactions, however, can be tracked, and wallets are easily traced back to their owners due to the highly transparent blockchain technology this cryptocurrency is built on. As a result, many extremists have resorted to anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero, “which best maintains our privacy”, as neo-Nazi hacker Weev put it.

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From alternative social media and news channels to extremist messaging apps and cryptocurrencies, the changes that new media ecosystems are undergoing resemble those that are underway in the political landscape. The loss of trust in the mainstream benefits the radical fringes: an increasing number of users turn their backs on established social media outlets.

On the one hand, there are those who quit social media altogether to express their discontent or disillusionment with the platforms. On the other hand, there are those who migrate to other platforms in protest.

Due to the network effect, every new user significantly enhances the value of a network, and every lost user exponentially decreases its value. This means that alt right women dating asian men migration dynamics set in motion by takedown policies could significantly change the social media landscape in years to come.

At this point, it may be worth asking whether we will see a decline of the big tech platforms to the benefit of their ultra-libertarian rivals. Have we perhaps reached peak Silicon Valley?

The creation of this parallel alt-tech universe is a dynamic that might challenge the hegemony of the big social media firms. In the long run, it may also change existing power relations on the internet and revolutionise the way our societies connect and network. One of the risks the emerging safe havens entail is the carte blanche they offer to those seeking to promote counterfactual, anti-science and conspiratorial narratives.

Too much is at stake to ignore alt right women dating asian men spread and rising influence of far-right ideologies online. Ending up with a white supremacist date might seem scary enough. But, as the recent wave of deadly far-right terrorist attacks in New Zealand, the US and Germany demonstrated, the danger for these far-right echo chambers to act as worldwide radicalisation accelerators and incite violence against minorities is real.

Edited extract from Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists (Bloomsbury, $30), by Julia Ebner, out March 3. Ebner is a research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, where she leads projects on online extremism, disinformation and hate speech. Her book is a result of two years spent undercover in the alt-right online world.

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