Organization or Publication
Al Jazeera
The alt-right is a loosely knit coalition of far-right groups that includes populists, white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis. Many alt-rightists promote various forms of white supremacy, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
The term “alt-right” was first coined by US white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2008 to provide an alternative to the neoconservative politics that dominated the Republican Party establishment in recent decades…. The movement promotes what it calls “white identitarianism”, a worldview that advocates European racial and cultural hegemony. Alt-rightists often cite racial science as vindication for their views.
Researchers and experts note that sexism is as integral to the alt-right as racism, pointing out that there are few females among the cadres of the movement….
Among the groups involved in the movement are: Spencer’s think tank, the National Policy Institute; the National Socialist Movement; the neo-Confederate League of the South; Identity Evropa, the white supremacist group and, among others, the neo-Nazi organisation Vanguard America.
Online organising made the alt-right’s success possible.
The key websites are: AltRight.com; the Occidental Dissent blog; the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website; Radix Journal; the Counter-Currents website and the Right Stuff blog, among others.
The alt-right has many connections to groups in Europe, many of which predate the movement.
Some prominent figures within the alt-right are: Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin; the Right Stuff’s Mike Peinovich; Identity Evropa’s Nathan Damigo; former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; Traditional Worker Party’s Matthew Heimbach and Swedish businessman Daniel Friberg.
Source Title: “Explained: Alt-right, alt-light and militias in the US”
Link / DOI / ISBN: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/10/13/explained-alt-right-alt-light-and-militias-in-the-us
Document Type: Article
Country: Qatar
Year: 2017
Tags: Educational | Media
American Renaissance
What is the Alt Right? It is a broad, dissident movement that rejects egalitarian orthodoxies. These orthodoxies require us to believe that the sexes are equivalent, that race is meaningless, that all cultures and religions are equally valuable, and that any erotic orientation or identification is healthy. These things we deny. The Alt Right is also skeptical of mass democracy. It opposes foreign aid and foreign intervention–especially for “nation building.”
Given the loose nature of the movement, there are people who consider themselves “Alt Right” but who disagree on one or more of these points–except one. The entire Alt Right is united in contempt for the idea that race is only a “social construct.” This is an idea that is so wrong and stupid that only very intelligent people can convince themselves it is true.
Individual Author(s): Taylor, Jared
Source Title: “What is the Alt Right?”
Link / DOI / ISBN: https://www.amren.com/news/2016/10/what-is-the-alt-right-jared-taylor/
Document Type: Web article
Country: USA
Year: 2016
Tags: Media
Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
Alt right, short for “alternative right,” is a repackaging of white supremacy by extremists seeking to mainstream their ideology
The term emerged in 2010 and started to gain widespread traction in 2016.
People who identify with the alt right regard mainstream or traditional conservatives as weak and impotent, largely because they do not adequately support white racial interests, or are not adequately racist or antisemitic.
Some alt right adherents prefer other labels, such as the “New Right” and the “Dissident Right.”
The alt right label explicitly avoids racial or racist language, and instead brings to mind rebellion or anti-establishment thinking – concepts that help attract young, new followers.
Link / DOI / ISBN: https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/alt-right-primer-new-white-supremacy
Document Type: Web article
Country: USA
Year: 2020
Tags: Educational | Advocacy | Nonprofit
Associated Press (AP)
The “alt-right” or “alternative right” is a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States in addition to, or over, other traditional conservative positions such as limited government, low taxes and strict law-and-order.
The movement has been described as a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism.
Although many adherents backed President-elect Donald Trump in the recent election, Trump last week said he disavows and condemns the “alt-right.”
The movement criticizes “multiculturalism” and more rights for non-whites, women, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities. Its members reject the American democratic ideal that all should have equality under the law regardless of creed, gender, ethnic origin or race.
Individual Author(s):Meir, Nicole
Source Title: “Writing about the ‘alt-right’”
Link / DOI / ISBN: https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/writing-about-the-alt-right/
Document Type: Web article
Tags: Educational | Media
Country: Global
Year: 2016
Britannica Online
[A] far-right white supremacist political and social movement active in the United States in the 2010s. The alt-right was a loose association of relatively young white nationalists, extreme libertarians, and neo-Nazis. Mostly active online, members employed websites and social media to effectively spread their message and harass their opponents, particularly from 2014 into 2017. After an alt-right protest turned deadly in the summer of 2017, the movement fractured and dissipated.
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://www.britannica.com/topic/alt-right
Source type: Reference
Country: USA
Year: 2025
Tags: Educational
Data and Society Research Institute
The term “alt-right” was coined by Richard Spencer in 2008 to describe right-wing political views at odds with the conservative establishment…. The term “alt-right,” however, fulfilled several other goals. As a neologism, it allowed ideas long seen as unacceptable to mainstream media to seep into public discourse.35 In political punditry, this is called “opening the Overton window,” or expanding the range of what is politically acceptable. By re-branding “white nationalism” or “white supremacy” as “the alt-right,” these groups played on the media’s fascination with novelty to give their ideas mass exposure. The anti-Semitic blog The Daily Stormer pioneered a number of the alt-right’s aesthetic elements, many of which cribbed directly from chan culture: memes, 80s sci-fi, Italo-disco/ synthpop music, and, as founder Andrew Anglin puts it, “Non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism.” Thus, white nationalism was re-engineered to appeal to millennials.
The term “alt-right” is accommodatingly imprecise. On one hand, it describes an aggressive trolling culture present in /b/ and /pol/ that loathes establishment liberalism and conservatism, embraces irony and in-jokes, and uses extreme speech to provoke anger in others. On the other, it denotes a loosely affiliated aggregation of blogs, forums, podcasts, and Twitter personalities united by a hatred of liberalism, feminism, and multiculturalism. Per Poe’s Law, attempting to determine which of these people are “serious” and which are “ironic” is impossible. Even among those who do seem ideologically committed—people generating thousands of words of blog posts per week discussing, for instance, the impact of immigration on Europe—the group is diverse in its beliefs and marked by constant infighting and squabbling. People who the mainstream media views as “leaders” of the altright, like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopolous, are by no means universally embraced or even accepted. Similarly, some alt-right media (like the Daily Stormer or Fash the Nation) are explicit in their promotion of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, while others condemn it. Attempting to form coherence out of this loose aggregate is very difficult. Ambiguity is, itself, a strategy; it allows participants to dissociate themselves with particularly unappetizing elements while still promoting the overall movement.
Overall, the alt-right is characterized by a deeply ironic, self-referential culture in which anti-Semitism, occult ties, and Nazi imagery can be explained either as entirely sincere or completely tongue-in-cheek. Many alt-right advocates vociferously argue against labels of racism or Neo-Nazism. Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopolous explained, “Are [8chan/pol users] actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.” This perspective holds that, for 8chan participants, defending Hitler is simply a strategic move to annoy people and deter outsiders from taking part. However, this description is disingenuous. While these spaces are diverse, white nationalism (if not white supremacy) is a consistent subcurrent in alt-right communities. Many alt-right actions—propagating Nazi symbols, using racial epithets, or spreading anti-immigrant ideology—support white nationalist ideologies. Whether undertaken sincerely or ironically, the outcome is the same. There seems to be a coherent willingness to act in support of white nationalism, even in the parts of the alt-right that do not explicitly adopt or claim it as an ideological commitment. (pp. 11-13)
Individual Author(s): Marwick, Alice, and Rebecca Lewis
Source Title: Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online
DOI / ISBN / Link: https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf
Source type: Report
Country: USA
Year: 2017
Tags: Scholarly | Advocacy | Nonprofit
Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education
The alt-right, short for alternative right, is a constellation of right-wing forces loosely united by a critique of traditional conservatism animated by political commitments to white nationalism or ultranationalism, authoritarianism and rejection of democracy, gender traditionalism, hatred of the left and liberalism, and antisemitism. The alt-right is an amorphous term that encompasses a spectrum of far-right actors that includes white nationalists, “race realists,” neo-Nazis, far-right academics, esoteric antimodernists, and the misogynist “manosphere.” This diversity is reflected in the division between alt-right—who openly embrace white nationalism, fascism, or Nazism—and the “alt-lite,” who advocate civic, rather than white, nationalism and welcome participation by Jews, gays, and people of color. They are united by the belief that “all men are created unequal” (Spencer, 2020). Human inequality is at the core of the alt-right, understood as an inherent and inescapable fact of life that manifests between races, nations, culture, sexes, and sexualities. Straight white western men are situated at the apex of this civilizational hierarchy. (15)
Individual Author(s): Taylor, Blair
DOI / ISBN / Link: doi:10.1017/S0003055424000777
Source type: Book chapter
Country: USA
Year: 2020
Tags: Scholarly
Find it at UCLA: https://search.library.ucla.edu/permalink/01UCS_LAL/192ecse/cdi_proquest_ebookcentral_EBC6423285
Merriam-Webster
A right-wing, primarily online political movement or grouping based in the U.S. whose members reject mainstream conservative politics and espouse extremist beliefs and policies typically centered on ideas of white nationalism.
Link / DOI / ISBN: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alt-right
Source Type: Reference
Tags: Educational
Country: USA
Year: 2025
The Rise of the Alt-Right
Alt-Rightism is in essence a political ideology rather than a movement, constituency, or interest group…. The book’s main thesis is that the Alt-Right represents the first new philosophical competitor in the West to democratic liberalism, broadly defined, since the fall of communism. The main challenges to democratic liberalism now come not from the radical left, as was the case in the latter half of the twentieth century, but from the radical right. The distinctive features of Alt- Right thought can be summed up as the following:
- A rejection of liberal democracy. The Alt- Right holds, in essence, that all men are not created equal and concludes that liberal political principles, broadly understood, are obsolete.
- White racialism. A polity can be decent only if the white race is politically dominant.
- Anti- Americanism. As racial equality has displaced white dominance, the United States of America has declined and no longer merits the allegiance of its white citizens; they should transfer their loyalty to the white race.
- Vitriolic rhetoric. The propensity for intemperate language often found at the ends of the political spectrum is taken by the Alt- Right to lengths previously seen only among fringe elements. The movement rejects the standard ethics of controversy and indulges in race- baiting, coarse ethnic humor, prejudicial stereotyping, vituperative criticism, and the flaunting of extremist symbols. (pp. 7-8)
Individual Author(s): Main, Thomas
Link / DOI / ISBN: 978-0815732907
Page Number:
Document Type: Book
Tags: Scholarly | Educational
Country: USA
Year: 2018
Find it at UCLA: https://search.library.ucla.edu/permalink/01UCS_LAL/17p22dp/alma9912286542006531
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
The Alternative Right, commonly known as the “alt-right,” was a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief was that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. The movement adopted the “alt-right” label to strategically soft-pedal their racist and antisemitic beliefs.
Link / DOI / ISBN: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/alt-right/
Document Type: Web article
Tags: Educational | Advocacy | Nonprofit
Country: USA
Year: 2025
Initiative to Study Hate
1500 Public Affairs Building
337 Charles E Young Dr E
Los Angeles, CA 90095