Has the Republican Party really been taken over by the white-nationalist 'Alt-Right'?

A political movement most Americans have never heard of is suddenly in the spotlight, thanks to Donald Trump — who has hired one of its leading spokesmen to run his campaign — and Hillary Clinton, whose speech planned for Thursday afternoon is expected to denounce it.

It’s the “alt-right,” a loose aggregation of bloggers, radio hosts, think tanks and activists that emerged from the “white nationalist” movement of the 1980s and 1990s. It occupies positions on the far right of American politics, but it is not primarily about the issues that motivate mainstream conservatives, such as taxes or government spending. Instead, it postulates that the culture of white America is under attack, and sees itself as its defender.

Trump has for much of his campaign flirted with “alt-right” themes, mostly through retweets, some of which he later disavowed. When former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke — a major figure in the “alt-right” world — urged his supporters to back Trump, the candidate maintained, implausibly, he didn’t know anything about Duke before grudgingly disavowing the support.

But with the hiring of Breitbart Media chairman Steve Bannon as CEO of his campaign, Trump has embraced someone at the heart of the movement, who boasted of turning Breitbart.com into “the platform of the alt-right.” Duke himself celebrated the hiring with the boast: “We’ve taken over the Republican Party,” although presumably the party’s mainstream leadership would disagree.

There are, of course, many strains of thinking under the “alt-right” umbrella. Some factions are preoccupied with a return to “traditional values,” while others espouse a philosophy called “Human Biodiversity”: the belief that there are significant biological differences between people of different races, which justifies treating them differently. (The other name for this is “scientific racism.”) Anti-Semitism is common, in various forms, ranging from Holocaust denial to full-bore denunciations of Jews as agents of the collapse of white Christian society. Bannon, personally, has not been accused of anti-Semitism, however.

The common thread, however, that connects members of these different factions is a shared desire to protect Western civilization from what many refer to as “white genocide.” This manifests in opposition to things like immigration and multiculturalism, as well as a steadfast aversion to political correctness and to establishment politics of all kinds, including Republican.