Astral Codex Ten

alt-right

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alt-right

Article

alt-right is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between April 19, 2021 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “a protest that included alt-right figures”; “Richard Spencer, who invented the term ‘alt-right’”; “one event from this period does stand out as unusually internet-based: the rise of the alt-right”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Twitter, Russia.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: April 19, 2021
  • Last seen: July 26, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
In practice, the main post-election comment everyone holds up as Trump Explicitly Saying Nazis Are Good was his post-Charlottesville comment, where he said that there were "good people on both sides" of a protest that included alt-right figures. What actually happened: Trump said that "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence." Later he said of the protesters that "You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides". When asked to clarify he said "I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."
Inline links: said
Racist supporters: Around the 2016 election, there were a lot of stories about the KKK marching for Trump, about how arch-alt-rightist Richard Spencer was leading white nationalists in Nazi salutes for Trump, et cetera. We were promised an age of renewed white supremacist activity, supported by or maybe actively merging with the government.
Inline links: leading white nationalists in Nazi salutes for Trump
Further, white supremacists generally stopped being interested in Donald Trump, and have mostly abandoned him. In 2018, Southern Poverty Law Center wrote Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump? - by now, the answer is clearly yes. From VOA News: Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote. Richard Spencer, who invented the term "alt-right" and whose Trump salute helped spark the panic, disavowed Trump in early 2020 and announced he was supporting Biden in the election. White supremacists are irrelevant and you should not care what they think, but if for some reason you insist on caring what they think, they are no longer particularly pro-Trump.
Inline links: Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump?, Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote, announced he was supporting Biden in the election
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
Still, one event from this period does stand out as unusually internet-based: the rise of the alt-right.
The alt-right started completely separate from any of this. The name was invented by Richard Spencer, a very serious movement white supremacist more on the "hold scary rallies full of skinheads" side of things than the "gripe about SJWs on Reddit" side. Although there have been white supremacists on the Internet forever - Stormfront was founded in 1996 - they didn't interact much with the early anti-SJW movement, who (again) were mostly liberal Democrat nerds who found geek feminists annoying.
The term rose to prominence on August 26, 2016, when Hillary Clinton gave a major speech declaring the online alt-right to be a growing threat. This was obviously a ploy to link her opponent, Donald Trump, to a growing threat, but the ploy worked, and everyone agreed they were threatening.
Highlights From The Comments On Missing School
August 26, 2021 · Original source
…sorry for getting so animated here, but this topic is my hobbyhorse. On another level, I 100% get where this stuff is coming from. I don’t have kids yet, but even now I’m scared that my future kid might be an Internet addict. Or wander into the wrong part of social media and become alt-right, or dirtbag left, or one of those people who quote-tweet Vox articles with the comment “This”. I laughed at my parents for having these kinds of fears, and my parents’ fears ended up completely wrong, and now I have those same dumb fears in turn. I don’t plan to fully unschool my children. I do plan to make them “try new things”, maybe even including Finnish hobbyhorsing. If they seem too relaxed all the time, I will have the usual parental worries that they’re getting soft and flabby and will not survive the winter. We just know so little about child-rearing that any deviation from the norm is scary, and there does seem to be a norm of “make sure your kids have some really tough experiences”. I’ve written about this before here. This kind of parent-child conflict is inevitable. Maybe the best I can do is try to avoid the very specific problems that traumatized me personally.
Inline links: here
A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures
August 10, 2022 · Original source
Google’s first employee became their Director of Technology and made $900 million. Jesus’s first follower became the Bishop of Rome; one in every thousand people alive is named after him. The first few people to make websites in 1995, blogs in 2005, or YouTube channels in 2015 got outsized followings that they were able to leverage into higher status later on. The first few people to get on board the New Atheist, woke, alt-right, dirtbag left, and intellectual dark web movements all had easy opportunities to become famous; the next few thousand at least had the chance to be well-connected veterans.
Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
31: Sinfest was a standard apolitical webcomic from 2000 - 2011, when it suddenly pivoted to promoting a radical feminist message (the author is male). Then in 2019 it made another sudden pivot to alt-right and pro-Trump themes. “Fans” (there are few left who don’t need the quotation marks) speculate on its unusual journey.
Inline links: Sinfest, speculate on its unusual journey
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.
1. Church attendance rates lower in 2023 than 2018: 90% 2. At least one US politician, Congressman or above, explicitly identifies as alt-right (in more than just one off-the-cuff comment) and refuses to back down or qualify: 10% 3. …is overtly racist (says eg “America should be for white people” or “White people are superior” and means it, as a major plank of their platform), refuses to back down or qualify: 10% 4. Gay marriage support rate is higher on 1/1/2023 than 1/1/2018: 95% 5. Percent transgender is higher on 1/1/2023 than 1/1/2018: 95% 6. Social justice movement appear less powerful/important in 2023 than currently: 60%
Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality
May 11, 2023 · Original source
Separately in both men and women, weird-but-not-woke political groups (libertarians, Marxists, alt-right, neoreactionary) were less likely than the average person to report Long COVID, and less likely than mainstream conservatives. I find libertarians and Marxists, who I would expect to be less interested in the right-wing project of minimizing COVID than conservatives, sort of interesting. But I won’t claim to have fully debunked this concern.
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
December 07, 2023 · Original source
What really happened was the opposite. In 2016, we got Trump, a populist demagogue. All of a sudden, the essence of conservatism seemed to be about supporting ordinary working-class people against the elites and so-called experts. Neoreaction, which was trying to found a new conservative movement based on the opposite premise, was left flat-footed - and disintegrated. 2) The alt-right won the niche of “conservatism, but for edgy young people”, leaving neoreaction without a constituency The problem in 2013 was that conservatism was a movement for maximally uncool old people - the Mitch McConnells of the world. Lots of young people were tired of wokeness and looking for somewhere to run, but they needed some sub-form of conservatism that could credibly claim to be younger and edgier than McConnell-ism.
The alt-right was originally a bunch of Stormfront type people who were not cool at all. But in 2016, Hillary Clinton gave a speech against them that sort of made them sound cool, and lumped them together with 4Chan in order to inflate their numbers. 4Chan was kind of cool, so the alt-right went from a handful of weirdos in jackboots to an umbrella term for any kind of weird edgy conservatism full of exciting young people. Also, they had the funny frogs.
Some individual neoreactionaries saw which way the wind was blowing and re-identified as alt-right in time to maintain some influence, but the two movements were philosophically and culturally incompatible. The alt-right was ironic, populist, communicated in tweets and greentexts, and - when it had any intellectual aspirations at all - leaned towards a grandiose Continental style. Neoreaction was dead serious, communicated in 10,000 word essays with lots of statistics, and thought Mark Zuckerberg was cool. Instead of any kind of merger, the alt-right just won, and neoreaction just lost.
Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
24: How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. Useful as a look into what strategies the alt-right thought they were using. I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working. The only exception is that this guy thought progressives who conflated ordinary Trumpists with the alt-right were serving alt-right interests (ie it was counterproductive for the progressives doing it).
Inline links: How The Alt-Right Won
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The graph above shows the output of these two approaches. This is a really weird result, which defies easy explanation. Toxicity goes down over the whole SSC era, then starts ticking back up again from the ACX era. If you allow for a bit more variability in the simpler measure, the fancy neural network closely tracks the number of times we call each other ‘retards’ or ‘dumbasses’, which you would expect to track overall toxicity quite closely. This suggests the neural network is keying in on actual toxicity, rather than polite discussions which happen to involve contested or sensitive concepts. One caveat is that the ACX Commentariat is not very toxic to begin with, so the ‘toxicity’ metric may not be sensitive enough to capture the sort of politeness which the Commentariat values. In 2013, at peak toxicity, the toxicity score maxed out at 0.04 (the spike in October 2013 seems to be related to attracting some external neo-reactionaries (very roughly the precursor ideology to the modern alt-right) to comment on this post. In 2021, the lowest toxicity ever was reached at around 0.01. This means that a typical comment would be around 4% likely to be perceived as toxic by a human reader in 2013, but by 2021 this has fallen to 1%. Here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 1% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by John Schilling: The purpose of war is, roughly speaking, to settle the question of whose police get to enforce which laws in a region, and since Catalonia isn’t going to do anything more than say, “We’re going to make you look like Evil Meanies on TV and Youtube if you don’t pull back your policemen and let us have our own”, that point is moot. [Link] By contrast, if you promise to draw your fainting couch nearby, here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 4% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by Maximum Limelihood: Being fired means nothing about the speed you’re learning at. It means that the employer overestimated how much you *already* knew. …. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great you’ll be at coding in a year when you’re costing me time and training effort today [Link] The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’ (link, no further comment…). More prosaically, this is a great example of what I was discussing earlier – the comment section is usually so civilised that a single individual turning up and acting out of the Commentariat norms is enough to make it the most toxic discussion which has ever taken place. Of Scott’s classic posts, the most toxic the comment section has ever become was on Radicalising the Romanceless. The least toxic the comments section has ever been are the posts on Scott’s conworld, Raikoth (technically the Raikoth post on history and religion specifically, but the whole series is so good I’ve linked to the index). Complexity of thought
Inline links: post, Link, Link, Gupta on Enlightenment, link, link, Radicalising the Romanceless, Raikoth
Looking at the data for related terms makes it clear that a massive shift in discourse occurred around the time of Trump’s election – terms which were somewhat common before (like SJW) died out basically overnight, whereas terms which arose in the alt-right ecosystem spring up basically at the same time. Also of importance, there is no clear term that replaces ‘SJW’ until early 2017 (with ‘antifa’), and no equivalent term that sticks until ‘woke’ enters common parlance.