MYTH NO. 2
2. The alt-right is a bunch of juvenile pranksters.

A frequent theme among the movement is its insistence on needling the mainstream for giggles. “The alt-right are just adolescent trolls who spout garbage for shock value,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld told his audience in late August. Meanwhile, NPR described members of the alt-right as those who, “for fun and notoriety . . . like to troll, prank and provoke.”

But there’s more here than cheeky irreverence. The alt-right’s swift ascent occurred in part because its members bombarded journalists, particularly Jewish or nonwhite ones, with racist and anti-Semitic messages and imagery on social media, especially Twitter . There, they praised Hitler with a twinge of irony, the way hipsters drink PBR, and they corrupted the harmless meme Pepe the Frog by dressing him up as a Wehrmacht soldier. They told adversaries they’d be heading to the ovens . It was a real riot.

The alt-right also exists offline. After Trump’s win, reports of bias-based crimes have ticked up , and pro-Nazi, racist graffiti has begun appearing across the United States. Meanwhile, one of the movement’s purveyors now has the president-elect’s ear and will get his own dignified perch in the White House: Until recently, Steve Bannon was the chairman of Breitbart News, which he once proudly called “the platform of the alt-right.”