Alt-right

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Prominent alt-rightists during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pictured are rally participants carrying Confederate battle flags, Gadsden flags, and a Nazi flag.

An alt-right supporter at the 2017 March 4 Trump rally in Saint Paul, Minnesota; a depiction of Pepe the Frog has been digitally removed from the lower left corner of the man's sign due to copyright issues.^{[note 1]}

The alt-right (abbreviated from alternative right) is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s, and has been declining since 2017.^{[citation needed]} The term is ill-defined and has been used in different ways by academics, journalists, media commentators, and alt-right members themselves.

In 2010, the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Right webzine. 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 popularized by far-right participants of /pol/, the politics board of the 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 2014 Gamergate controversy, the alt-right made increasing use of trolling and online harassment to raise its profile. It attracted broader attention in 2015, 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 transform itself from an online-based movement to a physical one, Spencer and other alt-right figures organized the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to violent clashes with counter-demonstrators and resulted in one death when an alt-right member drove his car through the crowd of counter-demonstrators. The fallout from the rally resulted in a decline of the alt-right.

The alt-right movement espouses the pseudoscientific idea of biological racism and promotes a form of identity politics in favor of European Americans and white people internationally. Anti-egalitarian in nature, 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 separatist ethnostate. Some alt-rightists seek to make white nationalism socially respectable, while others (known as the "1488" 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. The alt-right is anti-feminist and intersects with the online manosphere. Most adherents to the alt-right are also Islamophobic. The movement 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 memes like Pepe the Frog. Individuals who are aligned with many of the alt-right's ideas without espousing 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 left-wing and non-white forms of identity politics such as feminism and 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 2014. Critics charge that the term "alt-right" is merely a rebranding of white supremacism.^[1][2][3][4]

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