Donald Trump and the alt-right were intertwined throughout the election of 2016, one example being a chart Trump used at a campaign rally in August 2016 that was repurposed from David Duke’s tweet from a month earlier. Duke is a known neo-Nazi and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The graphic featured a list of countries that donated to Hillary’s campaign and a dollar bill with Clinton’s face and a Jewish star. The version Trump brought to the rally was virtually the same; however, the star had been replaced with a circle. Nathaniel Meyersohn, a reporter for CNN Business, pointed out the uncanniness of the two charts in this tweet.
A month earlier, Trump made the mistake of tweeting a similar meme of Hillary with the phrase, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” inside a Jewish star. Soon after, he deleted the tweet and replaced the star with the circle. Struggling to cover up Trump’s mistake on Twitter, Trump and his representatives claim the star was a “sheriff’s star.”
The alt-right officially entered the White House when Trump won the presidential election in 2016. The chief executive officer of his campaign, Steve Bannon, founded Breitbart News in 2007, which he’s called “the platform of the alt-right.” Soon after his election, Trump appointed Bannon as his chief strategist. Many prominent white supremacists, such as David Duke, a former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, celebrated Trump’s decision. Duke is also a neo-Nazi, Klan leader and spokesperson for Holocaust denial. In August 2018, Bannon was fired from his position in the White House and he returned to Breitbart as executive chairman. Five months later, however, he stepped down after Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury was published. Trump chastised Bannon for statements about Trump and the Trump Organization. Bannon supposedly called the Trump Organization a “criminal entity” and believed that “investigations into the president’s finances will lead to his political downfall.”
The alt-right can also thank Milo Yiannopoulos for his contributions to the alt-right’s emergence onto the national stage. Yiannopoulos is “the person who propelled the alt-right movement into the mainstream,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. After dropping out of two universities, working at the Telegraph, and starting the website the Kernal, Yiannopoulos became the figurehead of Gamergate, which Guardian writer Dorian Lynskey calls “an online movement that claimed to campaign for ethics in videogame journalism while subjecting women in the industry to brutal harassment.” Yiannopolous’s aggression and hatred stopped at no one and nothing, although he claimed that “all I care about is free speech and free expression… I want people to be able to be, do, and say anything.” By 2016, he had been permanently banned from Twitter for his racist attacks on actress Leslie Jones. A year later, protesters at UC Berkeley threw smoke bombs and flares, preventing Yiannopoulos from speaking at the university as part of his book tour – and President Trump noticed. Tweeting in his regular fashion, Trump wrote, “If UC Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Yiannopoulos, a known leader of the alt-right, had officially made his way into mainstream politics.
It wasn’t long before Yiannopoulos fell from his newfound popularity, for he finally pushed the boundaries too far. In 2017, in a video stream, he promoted sexual ‘coming of age’ relationships between young boys and older men. Within hours, he had lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster and Threshold Editions, as well as his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He resigned from his position as editor at Breitbart, and without a Twitter account, he largely lost his platform in the mainstream media.
Aside from its invasion of mainstream politics, the alt-right has entered American popular culture through its creation and spreading of mainstream memes and its claiming of well-known celebrities and icons. In some cases, their claiming of phrases and memes are less harmful and offensive; however, in others they have reached new levels of abhorrence. On the less harmful level is their claim to New Balance sneakers after the CEO endorsed Donald Trump before the 2016 election, with the Daily Stormer calling the sneaker “the official shoe of white people.” Another icon the alt-right has claimed is Pepe the Frog, a cartoon frog that has “become the official mascot of far-right extremism in the US and parts of Europe.” The comic artist, Matt Furie, never intended for his cartoon to be picked up and used in thousands of memes by extremist groups across the world. They’ve even claimed things as innocent-seeming as a snowflake, which has now come to represent coddled millennials, both within the alt-right and, now, across mainstream media.
The alt-right does not stop at sneakers, cartoons, and snowflakes – it has claimed people, as well. In a nightmare for pop star Taylor Swift, members of the alt-right claimed that she was an “Aryan goddess” and icon of the alt-right in 2016. It started on Pinterest with a young girl making memes with Hitler quotes being attributed to Swift. While her lawyer urged Pinterest to remove the user, the memes were not removed. The articles, Facebook groups, and memes took off from there. The Daily Stormer has written 24 articles about Swift as a Nazi and a racist. Milo Yiannopoulos, a well-known member of the alt-right, has written that the proof in Swift being an icon for the alt-right is that she “keeps politics out of her public identity.”
Because Swift did not come out as against the alt-right and its use of her, many took her silence as a “a tacit endorsement of Donald Trump.” Swift’s disappearance from the media came at a perfect time for the alt-right, for then it was able to hold onto the chance that she might be a closeted neo-Nazi. It wasn’t until 2018 that she came out in support of two Democrats, Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper. Users of 4chan were devastated, with some threatening violence towards Swift, claiming, “they took her from us and turned her into one of their brain-dead zombies.”
A main way that these claims and rumors become mainstream theories, and then woven into public discourse, is the rapid spread of information on the internet, the internet’s inability to stop the spread of false or misinterpreted data, and social media’s slow response to remove hate speech and other false information. Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have tried to adapt, although they have often made changes only after significant damage has been done. In 2018, Reddit announced that a post will be removed if it “encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people.” Due to the immensity of the internet, however, it would be impossible to moderate everything. For now, the alt-right is able to survive on the internet because users will continue to find and move to spaces where their opinions can be freely shared, because those places will always exist on the internet.