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Alt-right

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Prominent alt-rightists were instrumental in organising the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. Here, rally participants carry Confederate battle flags, Gadsden flags and a Nazi flag.

The alt-right is a loosely-connected and somewhat ill-defined segment of far right-wing political ideologies. Though there is no official ideology associated with the alt-right, the alt-right has been linked with right-wing populism, nativism, identitarianism, and the neoreactionary movement. Various sources have connected the alt-right to racism, white supremacism, and antisemitism.

Quotes

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  • Avoid using the term generically and without definition, because it is not well-known globally and the term may exist primarily as a public relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience. In AP stories discussing what the movement says about itself, the term “alt-right” (quotation marks, hyphen and lowercase) may be used in quotes or modified as in the self-described “alt-right” or so-called alt-right.
  • The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the "Alt-Right." A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party. ... No one should have any illusions about what’s really going on here. The names may have changed… Racists now call themselves "racialists." White supremacists now call themselves "white nationalists." The paranoid fringe now calls itself "alt-right." But the hate burns just as bright. And now Trump is trying to rebrand himself as well.
  • At AP, we have taken the position that the term “alt-right” should be avoided because it is meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims. So use it only when quoting someone or when describing what the movement says about itself. Enclose the term “alt-right” in quotation marks or use phrasing such as the so-called alt-right (no quote marks when using the term so-called) or the self-described “alt-right.”
  • Fascism is able to attract the masses because it makes a demagogic appeal to their most urgent needs and demands. Fascism not only inflames their prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses, but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice, and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions.
    • Georgi Dimitrov, Working Class Against Fascism (July 1935).
  • Explicit white nationalism is surely the most aggressively marginalized ideology discussed here. As we have seen, advocating racism is perhaps the fastest way for a politician, pundit, or public intellectual to find himself or herself a social pariah. That being the case, there is little chance that transparent white racism will again become a major political force in the United States in the immediate future. However, the fact that antiracists on the right and left are extraordinarily vigilant in their effort to drive racists from public discourse can be viewed as evidence that they believe such views could once again have a large constituency, should racists ever again be allowed to reenter the mainstream public debate. Whether their fears in this regard are justified is impossible to determine at this time. What we should remember, however, is that the marginalization of the racist right in America was largely possible thanks to cooperation from the mainstream conservative movement, which has frequently jettisoned people from its ranks for openly expressing racist views. If the mainstream conservative movement loses its status as the gatekeeper on the right, white nationalism may be among the greatest beneficiaries, though even in this case it will face serious challenges.
    • George Hawtley, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism (p. 291), University Press of Kansas, 2016
  • There's no small amount of projection going on here. It's a staple of far-right ideology that liberals play the victim and make up imaginary oppressions, but in reality it's the alt-right that is creating conspiracy theories and spreading lies about how liberals are committing or enabling "white genocide." Sometimes it seems like these folks spend their lives fighting against fictional threats that they themselves invented.
  • What's remarkable is how ridiculously confident these men became, in a relatively short time, in their unique philosopher-king-like possession of objective truth and superior analysis... all while copying their arguments from an echo-chamber of poorly cited webcam videos and anonymous internet comments.
  • Repeat after me: calling something logic doesn’t make it so. Calling someone rational doesn’t make it so. Opinions from Youtube men are not facts. Getting mad about philosophers you haven’t read isn’t reason. Insulting your girlfriend because she questions your sudden political shift isn’t logic. For a group of people who claim to hate the supposed redefinition of words when it comes to gender and race; for a group of people who are very mad about the postmodern tendency to say nothing means anything (or at least this is an aspect of postmodernism they seem to have gleaned from their favorite subreddits), the new young reactionaries are remarkably devil-may-care about certain words when they seem to lend credibility and strength to their opinions.

See also

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  • Encyclopedic article on Alt-right on Wikipedia
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