'Radically Mainstream': Why the Alt-Right Is Celebrating Trump's Win
"We've been legitimized by this election," says movement leader Richard Spencer
Inside the Ronald Reagan Building a few blocks from the White House, and a block from President-elect Donald Trump's new Washington, D.C., hotel, a 26-year-old woman named Emily is praising National Socialism. "I mean, I think it's worked in certain countries," she says. "It is really funny how brainwashed people are, to think an economic system means that you're going to kill people."
We're at a conference hosted for the past six years by Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute, a small think tank that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a leading promoter of "academic racism." In recent years, Spencer has also become one of the most identifiable leaders of the so-called Alt-Right movement – a loose consortium of white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, men's rights activists and social media denizens who believe white people are under threat from immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness.
At nearly 300 attendees, this year's gathering – taking place less than two weeks after Trump's upset victory – is his largest to date. Spencer often speaks of his followers' youth, and he'd offered discount tickets for this event to millennials; when I asked him to introduce me to a few, he sent me to Emily, who would only share her first name, and to Lana Lokteff. (Most conference participants refused to disclose their last names, in keeping with an Alt-Right culture of anonymity, with some wearing dark sunglasses throughout the day. Many on the Alt-Right contend that they have been forced into hiding by political correctness.)
Emily says she came to the Alt-Right just this year through 4chan – which is credited with popularizing such racist memes as Pepe the Frog. She found its message board /pol/, or politically incorrect, revelatory. "These are scary ideas," Emily says. While she sometimes wonders why she spends all her time "obsessing over" things like Internet forums, she sees her time spent online as urgent: "We're trying to get the laws of truth."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-the-alt-right-is-celebrating-trumps-win-w452493?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=112816_16
= new reply since forum marked as read
