No, seriously: This happened. Rosie Gray, at Buzzfeed:
The white nationalist alt-right movement, once the very definition of fringe politics, is facing a truly unexpected scenario: Their preferred candidate is about to be in the White House.
To capitalize on this turn of events, alt-right leaders held a press conference on Saturday at the gathering of the National Policy Institute, the white nationalist think tank headed by Richard Spencer. The event was held in the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington, and attracted vigorous protests outside.
Spencer appeared onstage with VDare’s Peter Brimelow, anti-Semitic writer Kevin MacDonald, Arktos editor Jason Jorjani, and American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor. More than two dozen reporters were in attendance, a stark shift from previous alt-right gatherings that attracted fewer. Behind the press conference, the rest of the NPI attendees gathered to watch, at times booing and jeering the reporters when they asked questions. The audience was nearly all young, white, and male, with some sporting Make America Great Again hats and many displaying the “fashy” cropped-sides haircut common to the movement….
[N.B.: That’s ‘fashy’ for ‘facist’. They’re proud of who they are.]
The alt-right, Spencer said, had before the election been like a “head without a body,” trapped in internal conversations and debates.
“The Trump movement was a kind of body without a head,” Spencer said, saying that Trump’s campaign had been “half-baked” on policy despite having the right instincts on foreign policy and immigration. “I think moving forward the alt-right as an intellectual vanguard can complete Trump.” Spencer, who can take credit for coining the name of the movement, believes the alt-right has a “psychic connection” with Trump in a way they do not with other Republicans. Indeed, the very name of the alt-right indicates its wish to disassociate itself from the wider right: An important part of its project is to challenge and dismantle the conservative movement.
Spencer and the others are careful not to identify Trump himself as alt-right, nor his campaign CEO and soon-to-be White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. The alt-right leaders are aware of their political radioactivity and seek to not harm Trump by linking arms too firmly with him. “I don’t think Steve Bannon is alt-right as I would define the term,” Spencer said, saying Bannon has no direct connection to the movement but that “I think a few of us have shaken his hand” and that there is “common ground” between the beliefs of Bannon and those of the alt-right…
So much common ground, that the two Venn diagram circles are locked in close embrace.
Translation: State support for white babymakers, old-school racists in charge of the judiciary, college education once again reserved for white Christian men, and license for the NRA to run wild in national parks.
… There were panel discussions on “Trump and the new white voter,” and “Trump and being a man.” There was a presser where Spencer (who was a staunch Trump fan, worked in college-campus activism with one of the Trump campaign’s senior advisers, and works hard to try to mainstream extreme immigration and racial policies such as “peaceful ethnic cleansing” for a “white homeland”) got to chuckle and take questions from all-serious, thoroughly cucked political reporters. Cocktails, free coffee, and mediocre catered chicken were served, and Trump swag and Harambe shirts were sold.
And Tila Tequila, the Hitler-sympathizing, Trump-loving, Singapore-born former MTV personality, was there to support her friend Richard Spencer…
Tequila, a “politically incorrect” one-time reality-TV star (much like our next president!) and model, has dabbled in casual anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi declarations over the years, to the point where she has been condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. “This is clearly a person who is desperate for publicity at all costs,” an ADL spokesman told me in December 2013, shortly after Tequila posted a Facebook image of herself in sexy-Nazi garb…
“The Alt-Right has been declared the winner [of this presidential election],” Spencer said on the night Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. “The Alt-Right is more deeply connected to Trumpian populism than the ‘conservative movement.’”
“We’re the establishment now,” he concluded.
It’s all fun and memes, until they start rounding up the Untermenschen. Even the adamantly BothSides NYTimes was alarmed to the point of taking the group seriously — “Alt-Right Exults in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’”:
By the time Richard B. Spencer, the leading ideologue of the alt-right movement and the final speaker of the night, rose to address a gathering of his followers on Saturday, the crowd was restless.
In 11 hours of speeches and panel discussions in a federal building named after Ronald Reagan a few blocks from the White House, a succession of speakers had laid out a harsh vision for the future, but had denounced violence and said that Hispanic citizens and black Americans had nothing to fear. Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.
But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”
As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back…
At the conference on Saturday, Mr. Spencer, who said he had coined the term, defined the alt-right as a movement with white identity as its core idea.
“We’ve crossed the Rubicon in terms of recognition,” Mr. Spencer said at the conference, which was sponsored by his organization, the National Policy Institute….
The United States today, Mr. Spencer said, had been turned into “a sick, corrupted society.” But it was not supposed to be that way.
“America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”…
“Trump and Steve Bannon are not alt-right people,” Mr. Brimelow [of VDare] said, adding that they had opportunistically seized on two issues that the alt-right cares most about — stopping immigration and fighting political correctness — and used them to mobilize white voters.
Mr. Spencer said that while he did not think the president-elect should be considered alt-right, “I do think we have a psychic connection, or you can say a deeper connection, with Donald Trump in a way that we simply do not have with most Republicans.”
White identity, he said, is at the core of both the alt-right movement and the Trump movement, even if most voters for Mr. Trump “aren’t willing to articulate it as such.”…
THIS IS ON YOU, REPUBLICANS. Even if you claim that you, personally, don’t agree with the ‘alt-right’ neo-Nazis, you voted to install a man known to be sympathetic to the neo-Nazis — because you felt that winning took priority over your principles. You voted clan over conscience.