The Alternative Right
The Alternative Right set the stage for MAGA populism and the Trump presidencies.
A very good discussion of the alternative right is presented in the Breitbart article: An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right, by Allum Bokhari & Milo Yiannopoulos, March 30, 2016. The authors describe the alt-right as an amorphous movement, young, and eager to commit secular heresies - the public enemy of beltway conservatives. The alternative right appeared on the scene in 2015 and speaks in youthful, taboo-jarring rhetoric.
Excerpts from the article follow, in which the authors reveal what the members of the alt-right stand for.
The Intellectuals
There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads... The alternative right are a much smarter group of people - which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright...
The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2012, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.
Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism...
Steve Sailer, meanwhile, helped sparked the “human biodiversity” movement, a group of bloggers and researchers who strode eagerly into the minefield of scientific race differences — in a much less measured tone than former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade...
...[LessWrong.com] began a gleeful demolition of the age-old biases of western political discourse. Liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism were all put under the microscope of the neoreactionaries, who found them wanting.
Liberal democracy, they argued, had no better a historical track record than monarchy, while egalitarianism flew in the face of every piece of research on hereditary intelligence...
Of course, it should be noted that accusation of racism is a form of an ad hominem attack - a formal debating tactic of attacking your opponent's character as opposed to answering their argument. It is a de facto admission of the inability to win the debate on the merits of one's argument alone.
Natural Conservatives
Natural conservatives can broadly be described as the group that the intellectuals above were writing for. They are mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.
In their politics, these new conservatives are only following their natural instincts — the same instincts that motivate conservatives across the globe. These motivations have been painstakingly researched by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and an instinct keenly felt by a huge swathe of the political population: the conservative instinct.
Acclaimed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described the conservative instinct in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind.
The conservative instinct, as described by Haidt, includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism...
For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters. The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting...
...they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful in the “kumbaya” sense. Border walls are a much safer option...
It’s arguable that natural conservatives haven’t had real political representation for decades. Since the 1980s, establishment Republicans have obsessed over economics and foreign policy, fiercely defending the Reagan-Thatcher economic consensus at home and neoconservative interventionism abroad. In matters of culture and morality, the issues that natural conservatives really care about, all territory has been ceded to the Left, which now controls the academy, the entertainment industry and the press...
For decades, the concerns of those who cherish western culture have been openly ridiculed and dismissed as racist. The alt-right is the inevitable result. No matter how silly, irrational, tribal or even hateful the Establishment may think the alt-right’s concerns are, they can’t be ignored, because they aren’t going anywhere. As Haidt reminds us, their politics is a reflection of their natural inclinations.
In other words, the Left can’t language-police and name-call them away, which have for the last twenty years been the only progressive responses to dissent, and the Right can’t snobbishly dissociate itself from them and hope they go away either...
Millennials aren’t old enough to remember the Second World War or the horrors of the Holocaust... Racism, for them, is a monster under the bed... Millennials have trouble believing it’s actually real...
For decades – since the 1960s, in fact – the media and political establishment have held a consensus over what’s acceptable and unacceptable to discuss in polite society. The politics of identity, when it comes from women, LGBT people, blacks and other non-white, non-straight, non-male demographics is seen as acceptable — even when it descends into outright hatred.
Any discussion of white identity, or white interests, is seen as a heretical offence...
The pressure to self-censor must be almost overwhelming for straight white men - and, for most of them, it appears to be, which explains why so much of the alt-right operates anonymously...
The article points out that the alternative right is not going away and that we can no longer pretend that differences on free trade and health care represent the full gamut of the political spectrum.
A more recent article is The History of the Most Significant Social Movement in the Age of Trump, by Morris van de Camp, Counter-Currents, 28 July 2026. The article reviews the book, Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America, by Scott Greer. The article presents an excellent overview of the alternative right. Here are excerpts:
... Whitepill... will be the definitive primary source history of the social movement that set the tone for the Age of Trump...
Obama deliberately exacerbated racial tensions. It was as though he couldn’t help himself...
The Black Lives Matter took place alongside other violent uproars. Terrorists from the Arab World started to direct their violence towards non-Middle Eastern people on airplanes or other places in the late 1960s, but then the political motivations of the terrorism were Leftist—inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution. By the early 1990s, the people carrying out terrorism and their tactics were mostly the same, but the ideology was Islamic.
This Islamic violence saturated Obama’s second term...
The most significant movement within the Online Right was the Alt-Right. It emerged when the Paleoconservative Paul Gottfried called for an alternative Right to the then-dominant neoconservative Right in a moment of frustration...
Donald Trump’s ideas intersected with many on the Alt-Right, but it was not a perfect match. Trump’s ideas were closer to Pat Buchanan’s in 1992 than any Alt-Right influencer...
Trump also directly addressed the problems of post-"civil rights" which the Online Right was starting to articulate...
The Online Right, and especially the Alt-Right, attracted highly intelligent and underemployed white men...
The Online Right didn’t vanish during Biden’s presidency. It continuously critiqued the senile President and the "civil rights" order which he represented. The Online Right also provided support for Donald Trump’s return to office in 2024...
Additional reading