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Alt-Right Is Fractured, Violent Headed Into Trump's Second Year
From Newsweek [newsweek.com]:
One year after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic alt-right movement, which grew emboldened by the president’s hard-right populist campaign and racially tinged remarks, is floundering, falling well short of its ambition to achieve mainstream acceptance. The coalition that appeared at the so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August—one that looked to many Americans like some massive army of white supremacists—is now fractured.
And, a bit more:
Antifascist activists, meanwhile, argue that the recent failure of alt-right events is evidence of their success in opposing them. Mark Bray, an activist and academic who is the author of Antifa, The Anti-Fascist Handbook, told Newsweek in December that Trump’s first year left him feeling “optimistic” that white supremacists could no longer organize effectively in public. He said Charlottesville and the lackluster and aborted rallies that followed it showed that the alt-right can’t “occupy a public space without it being a moment of crisis,” meaning that these events inevitably lead to arrests, backlash and infighting. Hill seemed to concur with Bray, saying 2017 had shown that the alt-right “can’t control the scene” at its own events.
Wow, this is a really long article!
Regardless of whether the alt-right movement continues to struggle in making public appearances, activists and rights groups that monitor extremists say Trump—the president the movement helped elect—is giving life back to its members. The alt-right was energized, for example, after the president said there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville rally, though he did receive loud public backlash for the comment. The alt-right was buoyed again this month when the president allegedly referred to a number of countries in the developing world as “shitholes.” Anglin of Daily Stormer called the remark “encouraging and refreshing.”
And, the "take-away":
“We scared the Nazis off the streets,” O’Connell said of the current political climate. “But we still have to deal with the politicians they helped to elect.”
