Not two weeks after Trump’s historic victory, which should have emboldened the alt-right, does pettiness, virtue signaling, and ego threaten to tear it apart.
It all began with some Roman salutes at an NPI conference, which got picked up by major media outlets like Huffington Post and The Atlantic.
And then began the in-fighting. Info Wars’ Paul Joseph Watson put out a widely-watched video Is The Alt-Right Dead distancing himself and Info Wars from Spencer and the alt-right, and a few others followed suit.
So now the alt-right is divided between Spencer and the ‘moderates’. Judging by comments on PJW’s YouTube video, the majority (probably 70%) side with Spencer, seeing Info War’s about-face as a sign of perfidy, and rightfully so. It would seem Info Wars was only in it for the money, riding the alt-right momentum for as long as they could profit from it and then exiting after it became ‘too extreme’ as to render further support ‘bad for bushiness’. Despite supporting Spencer, the majority also agree Nazi-larping should be avoided. The alt-Right is not Neo-Nazism, never was, nor should aspire to be. The alt-right is more about promoting nationalism and white identity, as well as raising awareness about important issues (such as immigration), than white supremacy. Others define the alt-right as any version of ‘the right’ that isn’t mainstream.
But it really doesn’t matter anyway…all of this will blow over in a few weeks. All of these sites cater to different niches, with different audiences and ideologies. Alex Jones and Info Wars will never be like Raddix, which will never be like Vox Day or Danger and Play, and so on. It’s unrealistic to expect such a diverse collection of people to agree on everything.
And however you define it, the alt-right is here to stay.
Another problem may be the tendency to ‘nitpick’ and ‘concern’ among the ‘right’, whereas on the ‘left’ there is more group-think. This is probably symptomatic of the greater intelligence, independent-mindedness, and critical thinking ability of the right compared to the conformist, low-information left. If you read comments on alt-right blogs, they are imbued with history and philosophy, as well as criticism and dissent, but left-wing comments tend to not be arguments but rather are incantations or affirmative chants such as ‘spread the wealth’, and so on [1]. Your typical berntard is way more conformist than the average alt-righter. But sometimes it can get out of hand, as I poke fun at in the post I can tolerate anything except factual inaccuracies.
Although this may be changing, slightly, as I explain in The rise of ‘concern liberalism’ and the decline of ‘identity liberalism, although thoughtful liberals on Reddit are NOT indicative of all liberals, who tend to be low-information.