White nationalists love president-elect Donald Trump. White nationalists were also thrilled about Donald Trump's choice for his Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor, Steve Bannon. Bannon, an anti-Semitic, misogynistic, Islamophobic white nationalist, used to run the inflammatory right-wing website Breitbart, which even Bannon described as "the platform for the alt-right."
Just this weekend, white nationalists quoted Nazi propaganda and raised Nazi salutes in honor of Donald Trump at a conference in Washington D.C. The leader of the conference, Richard Spencer (in the video above), coined the term "alt-right," which is a euphemism for the white nationalist, racist, anti-Semitic, fascist far-right movement. The media is accepting the euphemistic "alt-right," which has contributed to the normalization of white nationalism—and Twitter isn't happy about it.
For some, it seems like the media is almost trying to avoid calling the "alt-right" what they actually are:
Others pointed out the double standards:
Multiple people made Nazi jokes:
Mocking the euphemism, some Twitter users suggested some "alt" euphemisms of their own:
On the other hand, BuzzFeed News editor Miriam Elder thinks we should keep calling the movement the "alt-right," since it's a new movement of its own, and their rhetoric and actions speak for themselves:
Similarly, Kriston Capps, a writer for The Atlantic's CityLab, pointed out on Facebook that there are good reasons to use "alt-right" without normalizing what the movement represents. Given "the wide range of people under the white-ethnostate umbrella," Capps thinks it can still be "worthwhile to distinguish these new fascist and ethnostate advocates from the American Nazi Party or the KKK." He noted in the post: "GamerGate is alt-right, not neo-Nazi. Men's rights activists are alt-right, not neo-Nazi. The KKK is neither neo-Nazi nor alt-right." That doesn't mean the "alt-right" is acceptable, just that it's different from other racist movements.
In fact, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, even alt-right leaders have found themselves in conflict. Milo Yiannopoulos was attacked as a "Jewish homosexual" who "seeks to undermine right-wing movements for Jewish purposes," by Andrew Anglin, who runs the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.
Of course, some people had their own ideas about what we should call the "alt-right."
So whether you want to call them "4Chan Nazis," "neo-Nazis," "white nationalists," "white supremacists," "racists," or simply "assholes," please stop calling them the "alt-right."
