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In recent years, adherents to the alt-right, a radically nationalist and xenophobic faction of the American right wing, have increasingly made their presenceknown, both in the digital sphere and in the streets. But while the term alt-right may evoke images of its most prominent partisans white supremacists and neo-Nazis in practice, it is a much more dangerously complex spectrum of political views.

Despite this, most discussions of online radicalization focus largely around the descent into these extremist groups, and not the subtle ways in which the echo chambers and deliberate isolation of the alt-rights indoctrination networks operate. These networks, collectively known as the alt-right pipeline, are especially dangerous to young men, but a narrow discussion of the pipelines threat means that the full scope of the issue is rarely addressed. From the violent extremes to the tamer, but much broader, wing of the alt-lite (a faction dominated by popular conservative commentators and public firebrands), the same tactics are used to exploit and radicalize the rising generation. I speak from personal experience when I say that failing to address the alt-right pipeline as a complex and multidimensional issue only serves to make it stronger.

The conventional wisdom is that the alt-right pipeline targets white men who are angry at the world, a group that originally self-identified as involuntarily celibate, birthing the abbreviation incel. These observers rightfully point out the pervasive misogyny of the alt-right, and treat it as a vehicle and prerequisite for radicalization. While this interpretation of the alt-right, one that emphasizes the pipelines exploitation of latent misogyny and sexual frustration through male bonding gone horribly awry, is accurate in many cases, it cannot be applied to every case of alt-right internet radicalization. I, for example, was only thirteen when my fall down the pipeline began. My fatal element was not male rage but self-doubt.

For most of my childhood, I was incredibly susceptible to peer pressure. I developed a personal identity, but my public identity was often whatever I thought would fit in best. The problem was only exacerbated when I hit puberty. I was an atheist when my predominantly Catholic friends were bonding over teaching religious education classes at their churches, a progressive but only beginning to understand the importance of what that meant, and starting to come to terms with what I now know to be my bisexuality. At the time, I was unsure of who I was supposed to be, or even who I was.

This was around the same time that YouTube began to play a larger role in my life, and there, I found my gateway drug to the alt-right: Dave Rubin. In Rubin, I saw a vision of myself; he was an openly gay atheist man who called himself a classical liberal. I began watching the Rubin Report on YouTube religiously, and slowly but surely bought into his message: the modern lefts obsession with identity politics went too far. The assertion was straightforward enough for me to understand, and having next to no frame of reference with which to refute it, I did the only thing I thought epistemically sound: accept it as true.

I was working my way through Rubins content when I found his multi-part interview with alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, during which Yiannopoulos half-heartedly described African-Americans as being the last oppressed group in the United States. I had no experience with the nuance of condemnable views in American politics, so even Yiannaopouloss begrudging admission of any form of systemic racism was enough to convince me that he was worth more attention than I previously thought. With Yiannopouloss points going unchallenged, I was led to believe that his rhetoric held a legitimate place in the political spectrum. Once again, with no frame of reference to do otherwise, I accepted that I must have been wrong about him, and considered myself responsible for learning more about his perspective.

I gradually cycled through the videos that my new, extremely skewed frame of reference deemed acceptable, avoiding only the most flagrant content. By then, however, YouTube had worked its magic and determined what would appeal to me most moving forward. Videos recommended through the YouTube algorithm account for 70 percent of time spent on the site. Without thinking, I let the up next timer run down, and I was directed to the next video then the next, each more aggressive than the last.

And so began a months-long tumble down the alt-right pipeline, but I was never able to acknowledge that I was trapped. I still considered myself a progressive; in my mind, I was not buying into the alt-rights rhetoric, I was learning their arguments to make my progressivism stronger. But I was more easily persuaded than I knew, and even if my intentions were sound, Ben Shapiro spoke too quickly and Steven Crowder too aggressively for me to be able to process what I was hearing beyond a superficial level. My teenage mind could not keep up, and without any conscious understanding, I was cheering along with Jordan Peterson as he destroyed feminism and as SJWs were owned with facts and logic. Before I could think through what I had watched, I was onto the next video, and my internal understanding of the world became echoes of Louder with Crowder, the Daily Wire, and PragerU.Assuming I was merely developing a more nuanced understanding of the world, the true weight of what I was watching never set in with me. I began referring to myself as a social conservative, but never publicly. I figured discussing it with my friends was a non-starter; after all, in my mind, they had fallen victim to the machinations of the radical left. I was the enlightened one.

But even as I tumbled headfirst down the alt-right pipeline, I never fell far enough to seal myself into a true echo chamber. In fact, what I broadly defined as my social conservatism rarely left YouTube. The outside world continued around me unaffected; the only impact was in how I saw it. I certainly never shared these hateful views with anyone, because on some subconscious level, I still knew that they were unacceptable for a reason.

I resigned myself to the fact that I would forever be misunderstood, because the alt-right only knows, and therefore only teaches, two emotions: anger and fear. Both of these are generalized and are used to target, broadly, the unknown; anything the alt-right does not understand, like, or benefit from, it views as inherently dangerous. In my time, the prime example of this was the concept of intersectionality. I never learned the true definition of intersectionality, that racial, ethnic, and class identities intersect with one another and should be included in progressive movements. Instead, I learned Ben Shapiros definition, that according to current leftist orthodoxy, your opinion only matters relative to your identity.

I began to see the world the way those commentators saw it. I felt threatened where there was no threat, attacked where there was no attacker, and defensive of this new identity I had been given, an identity I had never wanted to have. The world I experienced and the world I saw were fundamentally disconnected. Overwhelmed, I sank into a depression. Their anger and fear had broken me, but it had not made me angry or afraid. It had just made me sad.

In the end, that disconnect was what saved me from sinking into the fascism and white supremacy of the alt-rights public persona. Real life is not as rapid-fire or one-sided as alt-right YouTube, and when I found my peers discussing the ideas that I had been indoctrinated to believe, I realized that the people I respected had clear and concise refutations to each of those ideas. The pipeline had given me definitions of things like intersectionality, social justice, and even feminism that were dangerously inaccurate, and when I actually began challenging the views pressed upon me, they fell like dominoes.

During my time in the alt-right pipeline, I found myself echoing reactionary talking points because I had been told to see conflict where none was necessary. I was inexperienced, and that made me the alt-rights perfect target.

If we as a society are to genuinely address the root causes of the alt-right pipeline, we must come to terms with what it actually is. While it often capitalizes on the worst of human impulses, it also capitalizes on naivete and ignorant innocence, regardless of age or circumstance. It looks different for everyone, from the veteran told to fear racial replacement by Tucker Carlson to the teenager who lingered too long on a promoted Will Witt video on Facebook. For those who know no better, the alt-right is a comprehensive and comprehensible way of understanding the world.

Refutations and rebuttals of alt-right talking points must also be adapted to the digital sphere. Right-wing pundits and commentators have the most popular podcasts, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels, meaning that they are often the first thing a person genuinely looking for political discourse will find. The alt-right has already adapted to the internet and is using their head-start to indoctrinate a generation. To combat this, viable alternatives to the alt-rights demagogic rhetoric must be available to discourage people from internalizing its narrative.

Lastly, the alt-right pipeline must be addressed as a public health issue. I was never happier when I found my identity in the alt-right than I had been before or than I am now. Caught in the alt-right spiral, I told myself the world misunderstood me, when in reality, I had just cut myself off from it. My mental health only recovered when I escaped the pipeline.

Falling down the alt-right pipeline is an intensely personal process, and it must be addressed as a personal issue. But more importantly, it must be acknowledged that the alt-right pipeline doesnt lead anywhere: It just keeps descending. And while that means it will become harder and harder to address with time, it also means no one is ever too far gone.

Returning from the alt-right pipeline was without question the greatest triumph of my adolescent life. Only then was I able to fully appreciate the rich diversity of our world and understand the nuances necessary to make genuine progress. More than ever before, too, I was able to understand myself, and fully embrace who I truly was, not the person the alt-right told me I should be.

The internet is still largely in its infancy, but the alt-right and its intermediaries have already been able to establish a funnel to create new acolytes. To combat it, we must first understand it, in all of its complexity.

Image by Ales Nesetril is licensed under the Unsplash License.

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The Dangerous Subtlety of the Alt-Right Pipeline

As alternative right-wing ideas have crept into mainstream American politics, its imperative to understand why. Where exactly did the alt-right come from? If this racist ideology is an alternative, what are its leaders rebelling against? Alt-right is an alternative to what?

Saif Shahin, an American University School of Communication professor, has expertise in global media and politics, critical data studies, and digital discourses. He researched the digital interactions of alt-right leaders to better ascertain how their influence proliferated.

We tracked the diffusion of the alt-right ideology on Twitter between 2009 and 2016 on a year-by-year basis. And we got some very interesting results, says Shahin, an assistant professor of communication studies and a faculty fellow with the Internet Governance Lab.

Shahin co-authored the paper on alt-right Twitter with Margaret Ng, a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Theyll present the paper at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in January, and it will be published in the conference proceedings.

The origin of the alt-right movement can be traced to a live speech in late 2008, just after Barack Obama was elected president. Paul Gottfried, a self-described paleoconservative, gave the address at the H.L. Mencken Club titled The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.

Gottfried asserted that neoconservative figures who had become prominent during the George W. Bush administration had failed. As Shahin interprets the speech, Gottfried was questioning how mainstream conservatives couldnt prevent the election of the nations first black president.

The alt-right movement basically started as a reaction to Obamas election in 2008. Not that these tendencies havent been there for much longer, Shahin says. But the idea they proposed was that the conservative movement needed to return to its roots. Hence, the need for an alternative right.

Shahin and Ng looked at the Twitter activity of 18 accounts previously identified as white nationalist by George Washington Universitys Program on Extremism. Some represent racist hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, and Neo-Confederates, and others are more cult-like independent figures. The two researchers measured how frequently alt-right leaders original tweets were retweeted, and they did a year-by-year social network analysis of who was retweeting whom. What they found was a movement that spread exponentially from 2009 through 2016.

Obamas early period in office was relatively quiet for the emerging alt-right, even as the so-called Tea Party was making waves in established political circles. In 2009, most of these white nationalist accounts were not even operational. We only saw 59 retweets that year, he says. By 2012, there were up to 6,265 retweets.

That year, Obama was up for re-election, which kickstarted a flurry of alt-right online activity. 2012 was a pivotal moment for white nationalism, Shahin says. The second coming of Obama was its big fear.

Another critical event in 2012 was the death of Trayvon Martin, an African American high school student shot by George Zimmerman. When Zimmerman was controversially acquittedhe claimed self-defenseit helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement online. But according to Shahins research, it also caused a spike in anti-black racist vitriol and retweets by alt-right leaders.

Alt-right retweets grew steadily from 2012 through 2014, and then Shahin and Ng saw a big jump in 2015. What happened during that time? Donald Trump arrived on the scene and announced his run for the presidency.

Then in 2016, it just exploded, he says. Even in 2015, we found around 27,000 retweets. By the next year, we were looking at more than 258,000 retweets.

This research does not exploreand takes no position onwhether Trump is using white nationalist rhetoric. It also doesnt analyze Trumps tweets or whos retweeting him. But Shahin and Ng do argue that alt-right leaders took inspiration from Trumps presidential campaign. Crucially, Shahin explains, Trump became a cause for alt-right Twitter to unite around.

Initially, with Nazis or Neo-Confederates, there was not a lot of retweeting across these groups. So even as they were growing, they were kind of growing on their own, Shahin says. In 2016, we see that these groups shed their differences and closed ranks around Trumps leadership. A fragmented movement thus came together and became a blowhorn for Trump on Twitter.

Another interesting finding is the centrality of David Duke, a former KKK Grand Wizard, to white-nationalist online unification and growth. While some media outlets portray the alt-right as a phenomenon of young, angry white menwho happen to be internet-savvyDuke is in his late 60s and has been steeped in white hate activism for decades. (Duke is depicted in Spike Lees film BlacKkKlansman, which is set in the early 1970s.)

While some observers characterize online hate as just hot air or trolling, Shahin notes that upswings of Twitter racismwhich happened in 2012 and 2016coincide with violence against minorities in physical spaces.

Offline, during these periods, you see increasing numbers of attacks on black youth by the police and vigilantes. Following Trayvon Martin, you see a whole series of shootings in different parts of the country, he says. Digital politics is very closely related to real-world politics. If white shooters get acquitted, it encourages more white people to think that, this is legitimate. This is acceptable. That leads them to go online and post more racist tweets or retweet other white nationalists. The online vitriol, in turn, feeds offline angst in day-to-day interactions between whites and non-whites.

As they monitored a steady increase of alt-right retweets from 2009 to 2016, Twitter itself expanded substantially. But Shahin says thats part of the story, too.

Twitter grew because it started being adopted by more and more constituencies, and they used social media to spread their message, he says. One part of that story is the so-called Black Twitter, which other scholars have studied. Another part, which not many have paid attention to, is what we call White Twitter.

As a platform, Twitter can be used for widely supported charitable causes or nefarious purposes. But its role as a meeting place for like-minded individuals is a 21st century reality.

It enabled the formation of these networks where people could practice and reaffirm their own identitiesby connecting with others like them.

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How the Alt-Right Happened | American University, Washington, DC

Lana Lokteff, pictured, runs an alt-right media company to promote her white nationalist ideologies. But critics say that kind of outspokenness from a growing number of female allies is at odds with how men in the movement view women's roles. Courtesy of Lana Lokteff hide caption

Lana Lokteff, pictured, runs an alt-right media company to promote her white nationalist ideologies. But critics say that kind of outspokenness from a growing number of female allies is at odds with how men in the movement view women's roles.

Last weekend, when white nationalists descended on Charlottesville to protest, it was clear that almost exclusively white, young males comprised the so-called alt-right movement there were women, but very few.

So where were the white women who weren't out protesting in the streets?

For the most part, journalist Seyward Darby discovered, they're online.

"It wasn't easy" seeking out the women of the alt-right, Darby tells NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro. "I spent a lot of time in the underbelly of the Internet Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, 4chan, places like that digging up contact information."

In the Harper's Magazine September issue, journalist Seyward Darby digs into the aims of the alt-right's women allies. Courtesy of Harpers hide caption

Darby dives into the motivations behind the alt-right female alliance in her cover story for the latest issue of Harper's Magazine, "Rise of the Valkyries." She began her reporting around the time anti-Trump activists were organizing January's Women's March, when she wondered: What do the women who aren't in the resistance think about what's happening?

Many of these women came into the alt-right initially as anti-feminists.

"They were people who felt that the feminist progressive agenda was not serving them in some cases they felt like it was actively disregarding them because they wanted more traditional things: home, family, etc.," she says. "And they came into the movement through that channel and then ultimately adopted more pro-white and white nationalist views."

One of those women was Lana Lokteff, a Russian-American from Oregon who co-runs Red Ice, an alt-right media company, with her Swedish husband, Henrik Palmgren.

The couple decided to make this their cause around 2012, Darby says, when they say they saw a lot of "anti-white sentiment." Around the time of several high-profile police shootings of young, black men, Lokteff "felt that Black Lives Matter and these other reactive forces were being unfair to white people and that then sort of spun into a conspiracy about how the establishment, so to speak, is out to oppress, minimize and silence white people."

Lokteff, who promotes alt-right ideologies on the couple's YouTube channel, has been persistently trolled by the men of the movement. Darby wanted to understand what attracts women to a movement that is often hostile to them.

In her piece, she quotes Andrew Anglin, who runs the (now blacklisted) neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer as saying the white woman's womb "belongs to the males of society." And alt-right pioneer Richard Spencer, who acknowledges that women make up a small percentage of the movement, believes women are not suited for some roles in government, reports Mother Jones: "Women should never be allowed to make foreign policy," he tweeted during the first presidential debate. "It's not that they're 'weak.' To the contrary, their vindictiveness knows no bounds."

The thing they are most interested in is promoting the white race and they see [President Trump] as an opportunity someone whose coattails they can ride.

Seyward Darby, on whether alt-right members support Trump

According to Lokteff and other alt-right women allies she spoke to, Darby says, "It's not that men who support the alt-right don't like women, it's that they see women as fundamentally different than men," with equally important roles, which are "to perpetuate white bloodlines, to nurture family units, to inculcate those families with pro-white beliefs."

But the growing contradiction, as Darby points out, "is that people like Lana Lockteff and other women that I spoke to are outspoken."

She adds, "They sort of see themselves as straddling a line between the male and female norms, because they think that at this point in their movement, the more people they can bring in, the more people they can convince that they are on the right side of history, the better, and that includes appealing to more women."

To recruit women to the movement, Darby says, the key is to stoke fear.

Asked how she would pitch the alt-right to conservative white women who voted for Trump, but are also wary of being labeled a white supremacist, Lokteff told her, "we have a joke in the alt-right: How do you red-pill someone? ("Red-pill" is their word for converting someone to the cause.) And the punch line was: Have them live in a diverse neighborhood for a while," Darby says. "She also said that when she is talking to women she reminds them that white women are under threat from black men, brown men, emigrants, and really uses this concept of a rape scourge to bring them in."

And while there are schisms in the aims of alt-right activists, and how best to get there, she adds, "There are some people Lana Lokteff being one of them, Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute who are really trying to find some semblance of civic legitimacy."

On how she understands the term "alt-right"

The answer seems to be different depending on who you ask. ... It's not a formal, structured group. It is more a new term for people who believe in white nationalism, who do not like political correctness, who do not like feminists, who do not like Jewish people, and who generally think that liberalism and diversity have led to the decline of Western civilization. So, I would hesitate to call the alt-right a hate group for instance, but the alt-right does include hate groups.

On being struck by parallels she saw, between the 1920s KKK and Nazi Germany versus today, in how white supremacists saw the role of women

In the 1920s, which is one of the heydays of the KKK, a woman named Elizabeth Tyler became the head of the group's national propagation department, which is essentially sending people out to recruit more members. And she managed to boost the membership by something like 85,000 people. She also founded the first women's wing of the movement. She was considered a seminal figure in the KKK. She was ultimately pushed out, in part, because the men in the movement were threatened by her strength and her power.

On what women bring to these movements

On a very basic level numbers. I think that the people who run these extremist groups, however loose or organized they are, recognized that there is strength in numbers. And to be a truly robust movement women are a large portion of the population. ...

Whether we're talking about white nationalism in the [19]20s, in Nazi Germany, today so much of the ideology is about the importance of family, the importance of protecting the white race, which involves making sure women are there to have children.

On how the language of feminism is being used to recruit women

They do sort of occupy an almost feminist-seeming space in the movement or some of them do, I should say. The ones who are more outspoken, the ones who are trying to bring more people into the movement. But of course, they would never say that. They would never want to be compared to feminists. ... They think that feminists have corrupted what women see as their core desires.

On how women act as a camouflage, to appeal to others they might want to recruit on a more personal level

There's a wonderful scholar named Kathleen Blee at the University of Pittsburgh and she has written a few books about women in right-wing extremism. One of the things she talks about is the role that women play in projecting this image of happy families, communities that are proud of their heritage that it's not so different from your community. And it's a particularly insidious aspect of the propaganda. It's certainly something I encountered and was told repeatedly in my interviews.

On what the alt-right women want

[Lokteff] mentioned to me, people moving to Washington, D.C., getting involved in government. And, speaking to scholars of right-wing extremism, they said to me this is very unusual, usually these groups ... they're very anti-government. And so I think there is definitely a cohort that sees this moment, thanks to Trump's election, as an opportunity to assert themselves on that level.

And I think there are others who want to fight a race war in a much more, I guess, literal way. This is one of the things that's going to be interesting moving forward with the alt-right, is seeing it's a motley crew of people who found each other on the internet and are really starting to, as we saw in Charlottesville, get out into the world and take action. ... And I think that we'll be seeing those fractures widen over the next couple of months and years.

On how these women view the protest in Charlottesville and President Trump's reaction

On the whole I think that they are pleased that they got this attention that they are stoking peoples' frustrations, that they are showing themselves to be a force.

The president's reaction, they're happy with I think. I asked [Lokteff] specifically, I said what do you think about Donald Trump? And she said, "Let's be honest, he's not one of our guys. We've never thought that he's one of our guys." The thing they are most interested in is promoting the white race and they see him as an opportunity someone whose coattails they can ride. The more that he does not disavow the things that they believe in, and either tacitly or directly supports them, the better.

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The Women Behind The 'Alt-Right' : NPR - NPR.org

Kanye West joined alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his InfoWars talk show on Thursday (Dec. 1), where he shockingly admitted that he likes Adolf Hitler.

When discussing backlash for the rappers previous antisemitic statements, Jones initially empathized with him, noting that hes not Hitler or a Nazi, and he doesnt deserve to be called that and demonized. In response, Ye said, Well, I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone, and Jewish people are not going to tell me, You can love us and you can love what were doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what were pushing with the pornography. But this guy that invented highways and invented the very microphone I use as a musician, you cant say out loud that this person ever did anything good and Im done with that. Im done with the classifications.

He added, Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler. How about that one?

The Yeezy designer doubled down on his thoughts later, when Jones noted that he didnt like Nazis. When the camera started panning away to a commercial break, Ye is heard saying into the microphone, I like Hitler.

Elsewhere in the interview, even Jones began to disagree with Yes statements, with the radio host saying that he thinks most Jews are great people, even though he agrees that theres a Jewish mafia. Jones then told Ye that he has a bit of a Hitler fetish going on, to which the rapper replied, Its not a fetish. I just like information.

I dont like the word evil next to Nazis, Ye later said, undeterred by Jones discomfort. I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis. Later in the interview, Ye reiterated that its time to promote love by declaring, I do love Hitler. I do love the Zionists.

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Kanye West Praises Adolf Hitler in Alex Jones Interview Billboard

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin was fired by the Young Americas Foundation (YAF), according to a new report, after she supported a Holocaust-denying, far-right activist who has been trying to revive the alt-right as an influential part of the conservative movement.

In recent months, white nationalist, anti-Semitic internet personality Nick Fuentes has drawn attention for leading a group of supporters to disrupt YAF, Turning Point USA, and other conservative events on college campuses. Most recently, Donald Trump Jr. and TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk were heckled off stage at an event where the presidents son was promoting his new book.

The Hill describes Fuentes group, known as Groypers, as a loose collection of people who believe people like Kirk are insufficiently right-wing, so the Groypers barge into their events in order to push bigoted sociopolitical positions. While a plethora of mainstream conservatives have condemned them, The Daily Beast reports that Malkin has lauded Fuentes as one of the New Right leaders,bashed his critics, and parroted his talking points.

Malkin has years of history with the YAF speakers bureau, but that came to an end this week. The group sent a statement to the Beast saying, Michelle Malkin in no longer part of YAFs campus lecture program. They also released this tweet which seems to be directed at Fuentes crowd.

Fuentes has recently achieved somewhat viral status on Twitter thanks to videos in which he denies the Holocaust; defends racial segregation; calls for CNN journalists to be hanged.

Malkin responded to this by reaffirming her support for Fuentes and criticizing YAF as the Keepers of the Gate.

While Malkin has doubled down on her views, conservatives have condemned them.

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Michelle Malkin Fired After Defending Nick Fuentes - Mediaite