Report documents the rise and the violent reach of the “alt-right”
On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and killed two students before taking his own life. The online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, ties him to a violent subculture and political movement developed on Internet forums and designed to perpetuate the dual oppressions of White Supremacy and Patriarchy: the vicious “alt-right.”
But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of an alt-right killer. In 2014, then 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six in Isla Vista, California, after posting a manifesto filled with hatred toward women and interracial couples. Atchison admired Rodger, even adopting his name as an online alias that he used to celebrate the “supreme gentleman.” This twisted, paternalist, misogynist archetype was something Rodger had written about extensively, was a title he had bestowed upon himself, and has since become a meme among the alt-right community.
This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report entitled “The Alt-Right is Killing People,” which examines the deadliness of the alt-right movement and its spread from underground Internet culture to mainstream exposure, where it has reached recruits like White Supremacist killer Dylann Roof.
According to the report, there have been at least 13 fatal episodes that can be tied to the alt-right, including the murderous rampages of Atchison, Rodger and Roof. These incidents have left a total of 43 people dead and more than 60 injured. Nine of the 12 incidents occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year to date for the movement.
The report reveals some key statistics:
More than 100 people killed or injured in at least 13 fatal episodes related to the alt-right;
2017 was the most violent year of the alt-right movement;
The perpetrators were all male and all are American with the exception of one Canadian;
The average age of these alt-right killers is 26 with the youngest being 17, and all but three were under the age of 30 at the time they are alleged to have killed;
While some certainly displayed signs of mental illness, all share a history of consuming and/or participating in the type of far-right ecosystem that defines the alt-right.
Two formative moments helped to activate this young generation of far-right extremists who were raised on the Internet: the murder of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin and “Gamergate,” a controversy in which female game developers and journalists were systematically threatened with rape and death by young male gamers. These events—filtered through forums and message boards like 4chan and Reddit—magnified the deeply ironic alt-right rallying cry that “white identity” is somehow under attack by multiculturalism and political correctness.
“Gamergate” also launched the career of alt-right troll Milo Yiannopolous, who later used his position at Breitbart News to push the movement further into the mainstream (former senior adviser to President Donald Trump and Breitbart executive editor Stephen Bannon called the site “the platform for the alt-right”).
According to Moonshot CVE, a London-based group that counters online radicalization, the audience available to alt-right propaganda remains “phenomenally larger” than that available to ISIS-type recruiters. This accessibility makes it easy to spread the movement’s propaganda and indoctrinate new recruits (at increasingly young ages, the report notes). This is clearly evident on every single major social media platform, where tech companies ignored warning signs that their platforms were contributing to the radicalization of far-right extremists for years. The fact that so much violence in such a short amount of time can be traced back to a specific subculture like the alt-right shows just how critical these platforms have been to the growth of the movement.
Read the report here.
