It’s easy to laugh at this weekend’s Unite the Right rally. It was pathetic. Media outnumbered white supremacists, and counterprotesters outnumbered the media. If that’s the alt-right in 2018, then public white supremacy in the United States is reverting back to its pre-2015 norm — when you could always find a couple dozen neo-Nazis to march somewhere, but you’d rarely see the kind of numbers we watched in Charlottesville. But as the alt-right fades (for now), let’s not forget its legacy. And let’s not turn our heads from its malignant influence. Consider what happened between 2015 and yesterday’s pitiful march.
Online troll armies launched truly unprecedented campaigns of harassment and intimidation against Donald Trump’s critics, with particular focus on conservative critics like Ben Shapiro, my colleague Jonah Goldberg, Erick Erickson, and others (including my family).
Breitbart, one of the most-trafficked sites in conservatism, became — according to Steve Bannon — the “platform for the alt-right.”
Bannon was for a time one of President Trump’s closest advisers.
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