> He would be offline for a month and would need other mods to cover for him. To ask for help, he had to out himself as a kid. I wonder to what extent the alt-right actually is a young teen movement, with adults mixed in (being the ones who show in person). Is there any at least semi-reliable data on this?
I've watched the so-called alt-right develop online over the past 2-3 decades. Usenet, Live Journal, Encyclopedia Dramatica, the chans, etc. At least at the start, it was mostly about trolling and lulz. The anger of TFWNG. But somehow it's been captured by the actual right wing. That's frightening. There's a lotta young male angst out there.
I still remember 5+ years ago having periodic exposure to the term alt-right and having it more or less exclusively refer to relatively languid writings like Mencius Moldbug and NRx[1], in sharp contrast to the rowdier, meme-ier aesthetic it has today (eg /r/The_donald, from what little I've seen of it). I didn't see it come to refer to white-supremacy and other more well-known forms of the far-right until Hillary Clinton made the term a household name. After that point of course, it was a self-fulfilling Schelling point that coalesced around what she said it was: white supremacists et al flocked to it, and everyone not willing to be associated with them had to stop associating with the term, now that "everyone knew" what it referred to. Fascinating dynamic.
(Not that I'm suggesting that she created the movement, but rather that from my skewed sample, it seems that she made the _term_ well-defined, by bringing it into the limelight).
OTOH, this may have been a consequence of the fact that I had little exposure to chan or white supremacist subcultures et al and lots of exposure to often-iconoclastic longform blogs talking about every random topic, including politics. It's entirely possible that my sample of encounters with the term describes my filter more than it does the term.
It's a fascinating window into language, to see a term become widely-known, and by doing so, change its meaning. It's particularly interesting that it's difficult to know how close to how far off you were in your role as one of the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Thanks for sharing your data point!
[1] I'm referring to the aesthetic and energy here, not the content, which wasn't quite "languid..".