Right it's like, the alt right 100% originated in white supremacist circles a la Stormfront and Gateway Pundit, but then filtered out into much more mainstream, reactionary audience. Cernovich had a part in it. So did Breitbart. So did Gamergate, along with a bunch of other sources that knowingly or unknowingly passed it along from hardcore fascist areas.
Like, I saw reactionary people I know parrot lines that were watered down versions of things you'd see on Stormfront years earlier. George Soros is a perfect example. He was largely unknown to nearly everyone. I was aware of him only as "that guy who almost bankrupted the UK with currency trading". Then along came the Syrian refugee crisis. Soros made some comments about how Europe needs to accept more refugees and he donated some money to that cause. The global white supremacist movement absolutely lost their shit over this, I mean completely lost it. This gave them real energy. The white supremacists found a fair number of sympathizers in Europe over this. Combined with white supremacists in the US who were angry over GOP inaction on undocumented workers pre-Trump, and now Soros is a name every person to the right of Romney is familiar with.
Personally, I think the thing that supercharged the growth of the alt right was the response of white supremacists to the concurrent immigration issues going on in Europe (EU accepting Syrian refugees) and in America (lots of conservatives wanting the GOP to "solve" immigration but the party mostly doing nothing).
It's a bit more complex than that, with Neoreaction splitting out of the right/libertarian wing of the Transhumanists and New Atheists of the 1990's-2000's and providing a wonky theoretical core that allowed Stormfront ideologies to infect edgy /b/ teens.
That in turn had economic roots in the death of the long 90s in 2008. It pretty much crushed the Libertarian/techno-progressive/bright-green alliance as they realised you can't capitalism your way into utopia via a kind of centrist-accelerationism.
Right it's like, the alt right 100% originated in white supremacist circles a la Stormfront and Gateway Pundit, but then filtered out into much more mainstream, reactionary audience. Cernovich had a part in it. So did Breitbart. So did Gamergate, along with a bunch of other sources that knowingly or unknowingly passed it along from hardcore fascist areas.
Like, I saw reactionary people I know parrot lines that were watered down versions of things you'd see on Stormfront years earlier. George Soros is a perfect example. He was largely unknown to nearly everyone. I was aware of him only as "that guy who almost bankrupted the UK with currency trading". Then along came the Syrian refugee crisis. Soros made some comments about how Europe needs to accept more refugees and he donated some money to that cause. The global white supremacist movement absolutely lost their shit over this, I mean completely lost it. This gave them real energy. The white supremacists found a fair number of sympathizers in Europe over this. Combined with white supremacists in the US who were angry over GOP inaction on undocumented workers pre-Trump, and now Soros is a name every person to the right of Romney is familiar with.
Personally, I think the thing that supercharged the growth of the alt right was the response of white supremacists to the concurrent immigration issues going on in Europe (EU accepting Syrian refugees) and in America (lots of conservatives wanting the GOP to "solve" immigration but the party mostly doing nothing).
Among our generation(s), maybe. But just for the record, Soros has been a right-wing boogeyman for a long time, at least as far back as the 90s.
It's a bit more complex than that, with Neoreaction splitting out of the right/libertarian wing of the Transhumanists and New Atheists of the 1990's-2000's and providing a wonky theoretical core that allowed Stormfront ideologies to infect edgy /b/ teens.
That in turn had economic roots in the death of the long 90s in 2008. It pretty much crushed the Libertarian/techno-progressive/bright-green alliance as they realised you can't capitalism your way into utopia via a kind of centrist-accelerationism.