transgenderer replied to your post “IMO: the term “alt-right” does not refer to a single coherent set of…”

but theres a need to discuss the ideology? like milo y. and friends are meaningfully distinct from other reactionaries in their methods and like. being able to discus them is useful. and i dont think any term for them wont act as a conveyor belt because the *point* of people like milo is being a conveyor belt. so if you refer to them you serve their purposes but you cant just. not refer to them

Yeah, it may be an impossible trap to get out of.

I guess the substantial upshot of this idea, for me, is that I find myself wanting to make as many distinctions between “alt-right” figures as possible, since I want to make white supremacy, Nazism, etc. seem as marginal and “obviously beyond the pale” as they ought to be.  Like, the amount of free press these extremists are getting from left and liberal sources would have been startling 10 or even 5 years ago, I think?  Some of that is due to real change – the fact that Steve Bannon is a a major player in the federal government is a new thing that is worthy of discussion, say.  But some of it seems like the left and right are (in effect, if not intentionally) collaborating to make right-wing extremism seem more normal and palatable, by pushing it into the public eye and compressing the distance between it and relatively milquetoast right-wing attitudes.

Like, I’m just scared that we’re entering a world where every young person with an internet connection and some vague dissatisfactions with the left is going to slide all the way to /pol/’s politics, because now apparently the only two options are “left” and “/pol/” (which is something both the “left” and “/pol/” groups seem to agree on!)

And, of course, as the milquetoast right loses more people to extremism, that extremism will become more actually-prominent and more necessary to talk about – and the more the milquetoast right and the extremists are mentioned in the same breath and tarred with the same brush, the easier it will be for the former to lose people to the latter.  Like I said, it’s a hard, perhaps impossible problem and I don’t know the answer.  But I really want to arrest this exponential growth however possible.