In the light of Breitbart’s big essay on the Alt-Right, here is my list of the most important people of the Alt-Right in rough order of importance:
* Steve Sailer
* Jared Taylor
* Kevin MacDonald
* Richard Spencer
* F. Roger Devlin
* Greg Johnson
* William Johnson
* Tom Sunic
* David Duke
* Daily Stormer
* Heartiste
* Gregory Hood
* Stefan Molyneaux
* Don Black
Honorary Associates:
* Richard Lynn
* Paul Gottfried
The alt-right (sometimes referred to as alt-conservatism) is an umbrella term for the designation of right-wing ideologies in the United States presented as an alternative to mainstream conservatism in its national politics.[1][2][3] The alt-right has been described as a movement unified by support for Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump,[1][4][5] opposition to multiculturalism and immigration, opposition to feminism, and rejection of egalitarianism.[1][6] Although there is no official ideology associated with the alt-right, some have said the alt-right includes beliefs such as neoreaction, monarchism, nativism, populism, business nationalism, and identitarianism.[1][2][7]
Since 2010 the term was been popularized by Richard Spencer’s website Alternative Right; critics identified it as a movement in 2015, and it was criticized by Republican strategist Rick Wilson in January 2016 on MSNBC, during a discussion of his opposition to candidate Donald Trump.[1][4][8] In this period of time, the membership of the alt-right is demographically younger than mainstream conservatism.
The term “alternative right” or “alt-right” was used sporadically in 2008.[9] and 2009[10][11] It has been used more frequently since self-described “identitarian” Richard B. Spencer founded Alternative Right in 2010, a journal described by neoconservative Tim Mak as “sexist and racist”,[12] and by the Southern Poverty Law Center as far right and racially focused.[13] Jeet Heer of The New Republic identifies the alt-right as having ideological origins among paleoconservatives.
The alt-right includes beliefs such as neoreaction, monarchism, nativism, populism, national capitalism, identitarianism, white nationalism, antisemitism, racialism, white supremacism and American secessionism.[1][2] Commonalities shared across the otherwise loosely defined alt-right include disdain for mainstream politics, strong support for the Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016, and anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist views.[5][15][16] Adherents view mainstream conservatives with ridicule and have been credited for originating and using the term “cuckservative”,[1][2] a neologistic epithet described by some as racist.[17] Sources such as Newsday and the Cornell Review note the alt-right’s strong opposition to both legal and illegal immigration, and their hardline stance on the European migrant crisis of 2015–2016.[5][7] Ethan Chiel, writing for Fusion, has described members of the alt-right as “identity-obsessed”.[18] Members of the alt-right use social media and the internet to organize and share their beliefs, particularly on the /pol/ of image boards such as 4chan and 8chan.
In 2010, Greg Johnson, then-editor of The Occidental Quarterly, wrote a positive review related to Spencer’s launch of Alternative Right, explaining why he believed it filled a gap in mainstream conservatism:
“I hope that Alternative Right will attract the brightest young conservatives and libertarians and expose them to far broader intellectual horizons, including race realism, White Nationalism, the European New Right, the Conservative Revolution, Traditionalism, neo-paganism, agrarianism, Third Positionism, anti-feminism, and right-wing anti-capitalists, ecologists, bioregionalists, and small-is-beautiful types.”[20]
In a 2015 article in Buzzfeed, reporter Rosie Gray describes the alt-right as “white supremacy perfectly tailored for our times”, sayiing that it uses “aggressive rhetoric and outright racial and anti-Semitic slurs”, and notes that it has “more in common with European far-right movements than American ones.” Gray notes that the alt-right is largely based online, and supports Donald Trump’s candidacy while benefiting from his coattails. Gray quotes a prominent alt-right figure, 52-year-old vlogger Paul Ramsey, as saying that the alt-right are not neo-Nazis. But some hold similar beliefs, such as Holocaust denial, which they also identify as historical revisionism.[1] Proponents are said to use culture jamming and memes to promote their ideas. Some adherents refer to themselves as identitarian, and criticize National Review and William F. Buckley for not openly supporting white nationalism or similar ideologies.[21] Professor George Hawley of the University of Alabama noted that the alt-right may pose a greater threat to progressivism than the mainstream conservative movement.[22]
The alt-right has been praised by Benjamin Welton of The Weekly Standard, who described the group as a “highly heterogeneous force” that refuses to “concede the moral high ground to the left”.[2] Although some conservatives have welcomed the alt-right, others on the mainstream right and left[7] have attacked the movement as racist or hateful, particularly given the alt-right’s overt hostility towards mainstream conservatism and the Republican party in general.[1][2] National Review, for example, attacked the alt-right as “wanna-be fascists … tweeting from their mom’s basement” and bemoaned their entry into the national political conversation.[19] Another National Review writer, Jay Nordlinger, attacked the alt-right for their use of gallows humor, social Darwinism, artistic homoeroticism, and accused them of embracing Nietzscheanism in place of Christian values.[23] Some sources have connected the alt-right and Gamergate, such as through Milo Yiannopoulos.[2][24][25]
Michael Dougherty writing in The Week describes the alt-right as radical working-class white people who are dismayed by globalization and contemptuous of “permanent members of the political class”.[26] However, Rick Wilson, an opponent of Donald Trump, rejected this distinction, calling the alt-right “crazy … childless single men who masturbate to anime,” and who have “plenty of Hitler iconography in their Twitter icons.”[27][28] Similarly, Cathy Young writing in Newsday called the alt-right “a nest of anti-Semitism” inhabited by “white supremacists” who regularly use “repulsive bigotry”.[7] Likewise, Chris Hayes on All In with Chris Hayes described the “alt right” as a euphemistic term for “essentially modern day white supremacy.
There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence. Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred. The alternative right are a much smarter group of people — which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.
The origins of the alternative right can be found in thinkers as diverse as Oswald Spengler, H.L Mencken, Julius Evola, Sam Francis, and the paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan. The French New Right also serve as a source of inspiration for many leaders of the alt-right.
The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.
Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism.
Steve Sailer, meanwhile, helped spark the “human biodiversity” movement, a group of bloggers and researchers who strode eagerly into the minefield of scientific race differences — in a much less measured tone than former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade.
Isolationists, pro-Russians and ex-Ron Paul supporters frustrated with continued neoconservative domination of the Republican party were also drawn to the alt-right, who are almost as likely as the anti-war left to object to overseas entanglements.
Elsewhere on the internet, another fearsomely intelligent group of thinkers prepared to assault the secular religions of the establishment: the neoreactionaries, also known as #NRx.
Neoreactionaries appeared quite by accident, growing from debates on LessWrong.com, a community blog set up by Silicon Valley machine intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. The purpose of the blog was to explore ways to apply the latest research on cognitive science to overcome human bias, including bias in political thought and philosophy.
LessWrong urged its community members to think like machines rather than humans. Contributors were encouraged to strip away self-censorship, concern for one’s social standing, concern for other people’s feelings, and any other inhibitors to rational thought. It’s not hard to see how a group of heretical, piety-destroying thinkers emerged from this environment — nor how their rational approach might clash with the feelings-first mentality of much contemporary journalism and even academic writing.
Led by philosopher Nick Land and computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, this group began a gleeful demolition of the age-old biases of western political discourse. Liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism were all put under the microscope of the neoreactionaries, who found them wanting.
Liberal democracy, they argued, had no better a historical track record than monarchy, while egalitarianism flew in the face of every piece of research on hereditary intelligence. Asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology.
While they can certainly be accused of being overly-eager to bridge the gap between fact and value (the truth of tribal psychology doesn’t necessarily mean we should embrace or encourage it), these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology — one that many were waiting for…
For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters. The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting.
Needless to say, natural conservatives’ concern with the flourishing of their own culture comes up against an intractable nemesis in the regressive left, which is currently intent on tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria in the UK, and erasing the name of Woodrow Wilson from Princeton in the U.S. These attempts to scrub western history of its great figures are particularly galling to the alt-right, who in addition to the preservation of western culture, care deeply about heroes and heroic virtues.
This follows decades in which left-wingers on campus sought to remove the study of “dead white males” from the focus of western history and literature curricula. An establishment conservative might be mildly irked by such behaviour as they switch between the State of the Union and the business channels, but to a natural conservative, such cultural vandalism may just be their highest priority.
In fairness, many establishment conservatives aren’t keen on this stuff either — but the alt-right would argue that they’re too afraid of being called “racist” to seriously fight against it. Which is why they haven’t. Certainly, the rise of Donald Trump, perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan, suggests grassroots appetite for more robust protection of the western European and American way of life.
Alt-righters describe establishment conservatives who care more about the free market than preserving western culture, and who are happy to endanger the latter with mass immigration where it serves the purposes of big business, as “cuckservatives.”
Halting, or drastically slowing, immigration is a major priority for the alt-right. While eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration.
The alt-right do not hold a utopian view of the human condition: just as they are inclined to prioritise the interests of their tribe, they recognise that other groups – Mexicans, African-Americans or Muslims – are likely to do the same. As communities become comprised of different peoples, the culture and politics of those communities become an expression of their constituent peoples.
You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to blows. In short, they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful in the “kumbaya” sense. Border walls are a much safer option.
The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved. A Mosque next to an English street full of houses bearing the flag of St. George, according to alt-righters, is neither an English street nor a Muslim street — separation is necessary for distinctiveness.
Some alt-righters make a more subtle argument. They say that when different groups are brought together, the common culture starts to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Instead of mosques or English houses, you get atheism and stucco.
Ironically, it’s a position that has much in common with leftist opposition to so-called “cultural appropriation,” a similarity openly acknowledged by the alt-right.
It’s arguable that natural conservatives haven’t had real political representation for decades. Since the 1980s, establishment Republicans have obsessed over economics and foreign policy, fiercely defending the Reagan-Thatcher economic consensus at home and neoconservative interventionism abroad. In matters of culture and morality, the issues that natural conservatives really care about, all territory has been ceded to the Left, which now controls the academy, the entertainment industry and the press.
For those who believe in the late Andrew Breitbart’s dictum that politics is downstream from culture, the number of writers, political candidates and media personalities who actually believe that culture is the most important battleground can be dispiriting. (Though Milo is trying his best.)
Natural liberals, who instinctively enjoy diversity and are happy with radical social change – so long as it’s in an egalitarian direction – are now represented by both sides of the political establishment. Natural conservatives, meanwhile, have been slowly abandoned by Republicans — and other conservative parties in other countries. Having lost faith in their former representatives, they now turn to new ones — Donald Trump and the alternative right.
