Time magazine — yes, Time magazine — has a profile of the Alt-Right, vis-à-vis Richard Spencer’s recent conference on Trump and White Identity. The article is currently only accessible with subscription (lol), but Radix Journal has some excerpts.
“Trump has energized us,” says Richard Spencer, president of NPI. For the first time since George Wallace in 1968, far-right activists in the U.S. are migrating toward mainstream electoral politics, stepping out of the shadows to attend rallies, offer endorsements and serve as volunteers. “It’s bound to happen,” Spencer says of white nationalists’ running for office one day. “Not as conservatives but as Trump Republicans.”…
A billionaire mogul from multicultural Manhattan makes an unlikely tribune for a white-grievance movement. But in more than a dozen interviews, extremists described why they feel galvanized by Trump’s candidacy. They love his calls for walling of the southern border and barring Muslim immigration. They find his salvos against political correctness refreshing. And they interpret his laments of national decline as a dog whistle about demographic change.
Now they’re hoping a powerful and ubiquitous messenger can spread their ideas. “It used to be that nobody would say these things,” says Richard, a Maryland resident in his 20s wearing a wispy beard and a black knit tie. “Trump has opened the door to nationalism in this country—not American nationalism but the white race. Once that door has fully swung open, you can’t close it.”
Trump’s ascendancy comes at a moment of reinvention for the far right. A new generation of leaders like NPI’s Spencer are trying to recast white nationalism as a 21st century movement steeped in social media. The NPI meeting was dominated by young men under 30, many of whom said they were part of an online network known as the Alt (for Alternative) Right. Originally rooted in antipathy to mainstream conservatism, the Alt Right has morphed over the past year into a virtual pro-Trump army. It’s a loose collection of furies who range from provocative Twitter trolls to white-rights activists, garden-variety anti-Semites, proto-fascists and overt neo-Nazis…
Though they often disagree on tone and tactics, members of the Alt Right are bound by a few core beliefs. They regard most Republican politicians as Zionist puppets, captive to corporations seeking cheap labor. They tend to be protectionist on trade, isolationist on foreign policy and unmoved by cornerstone conservative issues like free markets or the Constitution. They reject the benefits of diversity and view demographic trends as an existential threat.