How Big Is the Alt Right? Inside My Futile Quest to Count | WIRED: HOW MANY WHITE nationalists live in the United States? It’s a question I’ve been trying to answer on and off for years. In particular, I’ve tried to quantify the group’s web-based wing—the slippery, meme-slinging trolls who call themselves the alt-right. I’ve worked a lot of angles: totaling the populations of subreddits, counting up the unique visitors to various websites, comparing the number of times Twitter users invoked alt-right hashtags to the times they had more wholesome things to tweet about. (For the record, #dogs beat out #cuck and #whitegenocide every time.) I have squinted at blurry aerial photos of far-right rallies, trying to separate protestor from counterprotester.
None of this produced satisfying answers.
But as we approach the anniversary of the far-right protest that introduced this group to the national conversation, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to the death of anti-racist counterprotester Heather Heyer, it’s again become a question worth asking. This weekend, Washington, DC, will host a second Unite the Right rally, this one nominally in protest of the alleged abuses suffered by far-right activists in Charlottesville. The organizers can call it whatever they like, but in reality this anniversary rally is one thing only: a public exhibition of the state of the movement.
None of this produced satisfying answers.
But as we approach the anniversary of the far-right protest that introduced this group to the national conversation, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to the death of anti-racist counterprotester Heather Heyer, it’s again become a question worth asking. This weekend, Washington, DC, will host a second Unite the Right rally, this one nominally in protest of the alleged abuses suffered by far-right activists in Charlottesville. The organizers can call it whatever they like, but in reality this anniversary rally is one thing only: a public exhibition of the state of the movement.