One of the contributions of George Hawley’s new book, Making Sense of the Alt Right, is his point that so far the Alt Right has not been violent.
Similarly, although there is a connection between the Alt-Right and earlier white-nationalist and white-supremacist groups, and some of those groups and their supporters have engaged in violence and terrorism, I am not implying that the Alt-Right is a terrorist movement. At the time of this writing, I am aware of no acts of physical violence directly connected to the Alt-Right… This is not to say that racist violence is not a real threat in contemporary America. We have, as just one example, the chilling case of Dylann Roof, who murdered nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Yet Roof’s manifesto suggests he was more influenced by older white-nationalist writers and organizations, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens (the offspring of the Citizens Councils that once flourished in the South during and following the civil-rights era) and Harold Covington’s Northwest Front, than by the Alt-Right.
1 It is possible that the Alt-Right will morph into something more dangerous and tangible in the real world,2 and for that reason vigilance is necessary. But for now, the Alt-Right’s activities are mostly limited to the Internet.
