In the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign taking the forefront of the political media’s attention, a new group has come into the light. After becoming well known enough to call on the attention of Hillary Clinton, this group is finally catching the eye of the nation. They call themselves the Alt-Right, and while it’s easy to brush them off as nothing more than a radical fringe group, their racist, xenophobic message is one that’s not going to disappear on its own.
A spin-off of the White Nationalist movement, the Alternative Right is the flame Donald Trump has been fanning this whole time. Though Trump doesn’t define himself with the group, many of their messages and goals seem very similar. As defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alternative Right is “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”. In a recent ABC News article, Mark Potok of the Souther Poverty Law Center hit the nail on the head when he described the Alt-Right as “more presentable white supremacists.” More or less, they are the KKK without the hood and the Nazis without the arm bands.
The term “Alternative Right” was first coined by Richard Bertrand Spencer, an advocate for an Aryan homeland. Spencer founded the Alt-Right for all those who believe in “American identitarianism”, based on a similar term used in the late 1960s in France. In short, this ideology calls for individual countries to serve as centers of racial homogeneity. In the case of America, Alt-Right supporters believe it is meant to be the strong hold for “white culture”, and any other race is simply a threat to that culture. Composed of mostly middle-aged white men and young people coming together on Reddit, the Alt-Right is far from traditional conservatism. In fact, they invented a term for any other conservative who supports immigration: “Cuckservative”, a term used to equate letting immigrants into America to letting another person sleep with your partner. Finding their power on social media, members of the Alt-Right run blogs, publications and take to twitter to start hashtags such as #WhiteGenocide and #ISaluteWhitePeople. A few of their members are known to us, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, recently banned from twitter for harassment of actress Leslie Jones.
To members of the Alt-Right, Trump is the answer to their prayers. With his call for a ban on Muslims and dismissal of the Black Lives Matter movement, he is the closest to Alt-Right as any candidate has come. Under the amplified bigotry of Trump, the Alt-Right has been allowed to grow and gain popularity. As Clinton said in her speech on Thursday, “[Trump] is taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party.” Though Trump continues to adamantly deny claims that he is a racist, after gaining support from David Duke, former leader of the KKK, and now the Alt-Right, it’s becoming harder and harder for Trump to distance himself from the people his message speaks most to: white supremacists.
Though as both mainstream conservatives and liberals it’s easy to dismiss the Alt-Right as nothing more than a racist group of radicals, the Alt-Right is more dangerous than many think. As pointed out in a recent campaign video posted to Twitter by Clinton, that shows white supremacists praising Trump, “If Trump wins, they could be running the country.” While Trump himself might not be directly involved with them, he provides the Alt-Right with a dangerous voice, one that if allowed to grow, will only continue to fear monger and spread hate.
For members of every political party, the Alt-Right is dangerous. They are, above all, a hate group. If they are ignored or viewed as not a serious threat, just as Trump was at the beginning of his campaign, they will only grow. Following the lead of Clinton and Speaker Paul Ryan, a democrat and republican who both denounced the Alt-Right, every voice must be united in union against the hateful rhetoric this group employs. It is up to us, those who believe a nation thrives when it is equal and diverse, to denounce the Alt-Right and the racist ideologies they stand for.
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