WASHINGTON
Donald Trump was propelled to America's highest office thanks in part to a nascent but powerful group that had largely stayed out of the public spotlight until his campaign gained national traction.
The “alt-right” movement, or “alternative-right”, is a loosely defined group comprised mainly, though not solely, of white nationalists.
Its members espouse white supremacy ideology: the belief that whites, by the sheer nature of their race, are superior. And some are distinctly of the neo-Nazi variety.
"The alt-right is basically white supremacy re-branded to make the position more politically viable," Ryan Lenz, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Blog, told Anadolu Agency.
"It's an old idea with a new label," he added.
That old idea gained new traction with Trump's Oval Office candidacy.
“Suddenly there is a presidential candidate who is talking about putting 11 million Mexicans on trains,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, the chair of the University of California’s Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.
“And then he doubles down on Muslims,” he said, “and suddenly this fringe is looking, and saying, ‘Oh, my lord, at the level of presidential politics, somebody is talking our language.’”
Video of one of the group’s recent conferences in the nation’s capital shows attendees throwing up their arms in the Nazi salute after Richard Spencer, an avowed white nationalist who is the president of the alt-right National Policy Institute, proclaimed “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!”
Earlier in his speech, Spencer told the apparently all-white crowd that no one “mourns the great crimes committed against us. It is conquer or die”.
For Spencer and his supporters the narrative is one of victimization, though not of a minority group, racial or otherwise.
For them, whites in America have been marginalized in a country where they account for 62 percent of the population, and hold a disproportionate lead in the wealth gap – more than $140,000 per family on average compared to $13,000 for Hispanics and $11,000 for blacks, according to federal data.
“We won. And we got to define what America means,” Spencer said during a later speech in Texas, referring to Trump’s victory.
“America, at the end of the day, belongs to white men,” he added.
With Trump’s victory, the alt-right has been given an unprecedented foothold in the country’s most powerful office.
The president-elect has selected the former chief of online news website Breitbart, Stephen Bannon, to be his chief strategist.
Bannon has been a principal figure behind the movement, and called his website “the platform for the alt-right”.
In appointing Bannon, Trump “institutionalized” the hitherto little-known movement, Rosenthal said.
“They have made this extraordinary leap from the fringes to which they had been consigned since the 1920s, and in a matter of months, they have gone from those fringes into the White House,” he said.
In its explanation of the alt-right movement, Breitbart suggested the differences between established racist movements and the previously “obscure subculture” had less to do with ideology, and more to do with alleged intelligence.
“Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred,” the website wrote. “The alternative right is a much smarter group of people — which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.”The website went on to distinguish the alt-right from “real racists and bigots,” which it termed “1488rs”, by saying the latter group is “less concerned with the welfare of their own tribe than their fantasies of destroying others”.
The term “1488” is commonly used by white supremacists. It refers to the 14 words of the following mantra: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”, and the eighth letter of the alphabet ‘h’, referenced twice for “Heil Hitler”.
Groups like the alt-right are not new. They have existed in one form or another for decades.
Previously, however, they were relegated to shadowy back rooms, and the dark pseudonymous corners of the Internet.
But with the advent of the worldwide network, the alt-right, like the rest of the world, have been given a powerful tool to organize and spread its message, including on hitherto unseen platforms like Breitbart.
“Suddenly people with white nationalist views could find themselves on websites where they got to talk to other people who had the same views,” Rosenthal said.
It is unclear whether Trump shares the same values as the alt-right, or is merely capitalizing on their disaffection, according to Rosenthal.
“He found that anger -- whether he believes in it, doesn’t believe in it, it’s very hard to tell,” he said.
In either event, at a time when a self-described white nationalist who is on trial for slaughtering nine black parishioners at a Bible study in South Carolina espouses many of the same values as the alt-right, the movement should face heightened scrutiny.
Dylann Roof confessed to federal authorities that he carried out the massacre at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015 because “somebody had to do something”.
“Black people are killing white people every day on the streets,” he told investigators in a video recorded confession, occasionally laughing about his crimes. “They rape white women, a hundred white women a day.
“What I did is so minuscule compared to what they are doing to white people every day,” he added.
Roof now faces 33 federal hate crimes charges, as well as separate charges in a state-level trial.
And while his case has rightly garnered national attention, there has been a lesser-known, but dramatic, increase in hate incidents since the election.
The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 867 cases of hateful harassment since the Nov. 8 polls.
Lenz, the center's editor, said "without a doubt" the incidents are linked to the alt-right.
"With the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of the alt-right there seems to be a feeling of legitimization for these sentiments," he said.
