Coup d’état: On the rise of the alt-right

I belong to the 92%.

That is, the 92% of Black women that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 national election.

And I … I have a theory. And the white cisgender man remains at the center of it.

Nov. 4, 2008: former President Barack Obama wins the election. And he is very Black. And perhaps, to much of the white working class, aggressively so. 

His “Americanness” remains contested. Conversely, he has never been and will never be one of them in this pervasively white country. His Black wife and Black children and his Black body and his Black rhythms marked a shift in racial consciousness, even if symbolically. And when whiteness feels threatened, it retaliates.

The Obama years see a rise in Tea Party extremism, a resurgence of racist dog whistles and a new language of white victimhood. By the time President Donald Trump descends the golden escalator in 2015, the stage has already been set. 

The backlash to progression was always inevitable. 

And the oppressors, that is, those that wish to maintain the unequal racial balance, wage war in this fascist country. 

Fascist: adj. Far right, authoritarian and ultra-nationalist.

This country is and has always been bleeding; the blood of my ancestors resides within the groundwater. First, they came for us. 

***

On Nov. 5, 2024, Trump wins his bid for the presidential election for the second time, inheriting this carcass that we call a nation. 

Simultaneously, the Generation-Z man has become increasingly conservative.

I suppose I can posit some theory of “left behind-ness,” of the mobilization of the young white working class man, and the white man in general, to conserve tradition. 

I can see his ilk on my Tik Tok For You Page periodically, a man with a microphone accosting a woman, or perhaps speaking to the ways in which he is villainized and victimized for speaking the doctrine of truth: that unattached women are whores who will die alone or that Black people remain morally bankrupt by virtue of our “violent” culture and innate biology. 

The Gen-Z man, and the white male specifically, has been abandoned. Not in the ways they claim, the ways wept about within the broader sphere of the cultural zeitgeist, but abandoned nonetheless. They were promised something — power, status, an inheritance of supremacy. And now, because of women in the public sphere or perhaps the ever-present minority, they feel that they have been swindled.

The status quo has spoon-fed a narrative, pervasive since the great Southern strategy of the Nixon campaign: that whiteness remains a destiny and entitlement, that the Black body has always and will always be below.

As the minority becomes increasingly visible, the identity of white exceptionalism is lost and the people are left floundering. There is identity to be found in belonging, and the Gen Z man has lost his. 

Something is owed to him. And it has been taken away. And he, he is gasping.

I can imagine that he sees his face mirrored in the Ben Shapiros and Charlie Kirks of the world. Through the alt-right he may take what he believes he is owed: a woman at his foot and a minority at his service. To the would-be oppressor, the language of grievance and resentment is seductive.

The pipeline is everywhere, present and insidious. It is in YouTube algorithms, in Reddit threads, in the memes that disguise fascist ideology as humor. A teenager watches a seemingly harmless video about the struggles of the modern man and then, the recommendations might lead him to anti-feminist rhetoric, then to overt white nationalism. By the time he arrives at the doorstep of the alt-right, he believes he has found the truth, the answer to his unease. This is the means of liberation for the angry white man.

To understand the alt-right is to understand its appeal. The movement does not need to make logical sense; it only needs to feel right to those who have already been primed to seek its validation. And if we are to dismantle it, we must recognize that it does not thrive on ideology alone — it thrives on despair, on fear, on a desperate longing to matter. 

And the white left, desperate in the face of the imperial boomerang, makes the plea: Who is our Joe Rogan? Who will be allocated respect by virtue of their whiteness and maleness? Who will reach across the aisle? Who will insert themselves into right-wing spaces as their identities protect them so that these angry white men may see themselves reflected back at them and in doing so, be swayed toward justice?

Will Harry Sisson in all his whiteness save us? Do Parker or Hassan Piker hold the keys to our Democracy, to a community of so-called alienated, victimized white men?

Should I appeal to his whiteness so that he may believe that I am whole?

I, I do not believe the country to be in unprecedented times. Trump and his regime are predictable, uninspired. It is a natural resistance that a concession to the status quo be met with vicious right-wing extremism. 

They are floundering. 

We are witnessing the last gasp. The death rattle of white supremacy. 

The rattle is a warning. The last breaths of something gasping to sustain itself do not mean its end is guaranteed — only that it is desperate enough to lash out hard, hard, harder. White supremacy does not die quietly; it morphs, evolves, finds new disguises. It understands that its longevity depends on its ability to infiltrate the mainstream, to shift culture, to make itself palatable to those who would otherwise reject it.

And so, we must ask: What happens after the rattle? After the gasp? The pipeline does not dry up because one figure fades or one movement falters. It does not disappear because we name it. It simply finds another door, another algorithm, another young man searching for identity in a world that has failed him in ways he does not fully understand. In a young man that seethes, it persists because it thrives on disillusionment, on anger without direction, on a culture that has been built to fear progression beyond hierarchy.

This is not a matter of electoral cycles. Not a matter of one man, one party or even one movement. As we battle for the American consciousness itself, we must recognize that it has never existed beyond violence wreaked against the unacknowledged us — Black labor and the feminine body. The question has never been whether the alt-right will fade but rather what has been and what it will become. 

And I … I do not wish to go back.

Statement Columnist Allana Smith can be reached at allanans@umich.edu.

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