Cosmo is really blurring the lines here and effectively is just portraying the Alt-Right as anyone seeking to preserve traditional power dynamics. This is of course silly. I think it's safe to say that the NBC article, the AP press article, and the Wikipedia article and all the sources it referenced are far more reliable than Cosmo. There are a few bits worth remarking on though:
...white supremacists who, for the most part, want America or large swaths of it to be dominated by white people...
This is essentially Cosmo's spin on defining the Alt-Right. By phrasing it this way they conjure images of White folk holding societal sway over other races. This bolsters their agenda of identifying anyone who is "racist" with the Alt-Right. But as we saw above, the Alt-Right isn't White supremacist in this sense, it is actually White
separatist. It wants all non-Whites to stop coming in and then it wants those who are already here to go somewhere else. Often this is expressed in ideas of dividing up the USA into a few different race-states.
In other words, the movement champions white people at the expense of people of color and immigrants...
More spin. While this is technically true, it would suggest that just about any White person who is racist, even implicitly, is effectively an Alt-Righter. Which actually looking at it under a lens of logic like that, it is plain silly. Most other sources concur that holding to White nationalist ideology is fundamental to defining the Alt-Right.
"They've tried to broaden the definition so they can suck people into believing they’re alt-right, and then make themselves seem indispensable by saying, ‘Look at all these alt-right people,’” Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor-at-large,
told Slate.
Here's the first insightful thing said in the article, and lo and behold, it was from a Right-wing Jew. Mr. Shapiro certainly had considerable interaction with the Alt-Right and its sympathizers over the course of 2016, and he got this point of the movement's history spot on. The obfuscation of the clear definition of the Alt-Right was actually a strategy of the Alt-Right itself. Outwardly many of its adherents were presenting a more toned down version in hopes of getting a broader base of (mostly young) people interested.
However, this plan mostly backfired, and the product of it was the "Alt-Lite", an even larger group of Right-leaning individuals (exs: Paul Joseph Watson, Tomi Lahren, Gavin McGinnes, Lauren Southern) who held to the critiques of multiculturalism, globalism, feminism, Islam, and immigration, but who didn't jump on the White nationalism train and treated it coolly or ignored it. And interesting bit about this divide is it's actually the Alt-lite that has had the most ardent support for President Trump all throughout, whereas reaction to his presidency from the Alt-Right have become more and more tepid since the election.
The side effect of all this is what we have observed across these articles. Much of the press became confused as to what fundamentally the Alt-Right is about. It seemingly wasn't until after the election that some of the media started finding clarity. By now, as you can see, there is a core of the MSM that understands that the Alt-Right was really that White nationalist core all along. Apparently more fringe Leftist sources are continuing to take advantage of the former confusion.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alt-right-analysis-20161121-story.html
And tracking back to the main point, from that LA Times article again on the AP qualifying the definition of the Alt-Right:
On Monday, the Associated Press issued an addition to its style guide, counseling caution on the use of alt-right and urging reporters to “avoid using the term generically and without definition.” It added, “In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist.” In a
memo issued to its staff after the election, NPR said, “‘White nationalist’ is the most concise description.”
Back to Cosmo:
Yiannopoulos, who is openly gay, is loved by the "alt-right,"
That's either a lazy mistake or a lie. Mr. Yiannopoulos is actually loathed by the Alt-Right. That would be clear if one wandered and checked on any of their core online communities.
white nationalism is "the belief that national identity should be built around white ethnicity, and that white people should therefore maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of the nation's culture and public life."
Except that, as I mentioned before, the Alt-Right is by and large separatist. Cosmo even touches on this later on without realizing the logical consequences of doing so:
Spencer, the man who invented the term "alt-right," has, for instance, called for "peaceful ethnic cleansing,"
Precisely. Alt-Righters want non-Whites gone. They don't want them hanging around for some sadistic domination fantasy.
But the "alt-right" is more than just white nationalists. There is, for instance, a group within the "alt-right" that believe democracy is a failure and advocate for a monarchy. “Well, not monarchy specifically, but some kind of nondemocratic system with rule-driven succession,”
according to Vox.com. This group calls itself "non-reactionaries."
Ugh. What an awful typo. The word is Neo-Reactionary, not Non-Reactionary. Lolz
For another thing... NRx was founded by Curtis Yarvin in 2007 before anyone had even thought of the Alt-Right. And the primary concerns of Neo-Reactionaries are very different from White nationalists.
Pepe the Frog is a mascot of the "alt-right."
Yes, however the Alt-Right does not have a monopoly on Pepe and the meme is used across the young online anti-SJW/anti-Left crowd.
Now I know (part of) why I've avoided going through your lists of links in the past.
