The alt-right was an online movement centred on white identity. Its name has two dates behind it, and the difference matters.
Richard Spencer coined “alternative right” in an August 2008 article in Taki’s Magazine; Paul
Gottfried used the phrase the same year in a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, and some accounts
credit him with it. The term entered general use as the name of an online publication Spencer
launched in 2010 — the date recorded in this page’s founded field — and reached wide public use
during 2016. The Anti-Defamation League, which is the source for this history, describes the label
as a repackaging of white supremacy intended to avoid explicitly racial language.
Unite the Right and the civil verdict
The clearest documentary record of the movement’s organizing is a court one.
Nine Charlottesville residents sued about two dozen organizers and organizations over the August 2017 Unite the Right rally, alleging a conspiracy to commit violence. On November 23, 2021 a federal jury in Virginia found the defendants — among them Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell — liable for conspiracy under Virginia law and awarded more than $25 million in damages. The jury did not reach a verdict on the two federal conspiracy counts brought under the Ku Klux Klan Act. Nearly half the damages were assessed against James Fields Jr., who drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, and who is serving a life sentence for murder.
A civil verdict rests on the preponderance of the evidence rather than proof beyond reasonable doubt, which is the standard that applied here and is worth stating alongside the result.
Status and what is not claimed
Recorded as transformed. The movement’s public organizing did not continue in the form it took
in 2016 and 2017, and the Charlottesville litigation was expressly intended by the plaintiffs’
backers to make that organizing financially unsustainable. No source cited here dates a
fragmentation precisely, so this page does not.
An earlier version asserted a four-phase chronology and a list of digital “impacts” — that the movement popularized political meme culture, influenced platform moderation policy and created alternative platform ecosystems. None of it was sourced, and it has been removed. The recorded connection to GamerGate is likewise an association made elsewhere in commentary; nothing cited on this page establishes it, and the connection note now says so.
Sources
- 01.
Anti-Defamation League. Alt Right: A Primer on the New White Supremacy. Source for the term's history: coined by Richard Spencer in August 2008 in Taki's Magazine, used the same year by Paul Gottfried in a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, adopted in 2010 as the name of Spencer's online publication, and in wide use from 2016. ADL is an advocacy organization with a stated position on this subject; its characterizations are attributed to it here rather than asserted.
- 02.
Doubek, J. (2021). Jury finds rally organizers liable for the violence that broke out in Charlottesville. NPR. Published November 23, 2021. Source for the Sines v. Kessler verdict: liability for conspiracy under Virginia law, more than $25 million in damages to nine plaintiffs, and a jury unable to reach a verdict on the two federal KKK Act conspiracy counts.
- 03.
Hawley, G. (2017). Making Sense of the Alt-Right. Columbia University Press. The standard scholarly monograph on the movement, published the year of the Charlottesville rally. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.