When Donald Trump hired Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of the right-wing media site Breitbart, to head his campaign last week, Breitbart’s former editor Ben Shapiro declared, ‘The Breitbart alt-right just took over the GOP.’ Yet most of Trump’s supporters probably don’t even know what the alt-right is. It’s entirely plausible that Trump himself doesn’t know what it is. So what is the alt-right, and has it really taken over the GOP?
Shapiro’s worry might be overstated but it’s not unwarranted. For at least a year, a small army of online right-wing trolls – who refer to themselves as the ‘alt-right’ – has attacked anyone who dared challenge Trump. They use some of the most racist and anti-Semitic language imaginable. N-words (directed at blacks), K-words (directed at Jews) and Holocaust and gas chamber ‘jokes’ are commonplace. So are grand declarations about defending the ‘White race’ – and White is almost always capitalised in the alt-right world. And they’re not just anti-minority, but anti-feminist, anti-egalitarian and anti-democracy.
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