Everything ‘alt’ is new again: Watchdogs see a mainstreaming of far-right extremism
From Nazi salutes to anti-immigrant conspiracies, ideas once on the fringes are at the beating heart of the political discourse
Straight-arm gestures were recently flashed by, counter-clockwise from lower right, White House special adviser Elon Musk, far-right podcaster Steve Bannon, Michigan Anglican priest Calvin Robinson, and the CEO of an Idaho-based construction company. (Images via YouTube)
By Andrew Silow-Carroll March 2, 2025
(JTA) — Remember the “alt-right”? Way back in the two-thousand-and-teens, the loose coalition of white nationalists, neo-Nazi pranksters and anti-immigrant extremists was more likely to be found in obscure corners of the internet than on mainstream conservative outlets like Fox News.
Groups that monitor extremism say that has changed, and that the extremes have become mainstream.
They point to White House rhetoric echoing the “great replacement theory” (an anti-immigrant conspiracy theory that puts Jews at its center), the prominence of politicians and administration appointees who have played nice with white supremacists, President Trump’s pardon of violent Jan. 6 rioters, and recent debates about whether White House advisor Elon Musk and far-right provocateur Steve Bannon flashed Nazi salutes in public.
Groups that monitor extremism see signs that the far right is no longer “alt,” but at the beating heart of American politics.
“Whether we’re talking about the ‘great replacement conspiracy theory,’ which is basically a white supremacist idea that’s now very widespread among elected officials on the right, or we’re talking about the recent spate of ‘sieg Heils,’ or the demonization of migrants in a way that just wasn’t the case in the past— like saying, immigrants ‘poison the blood of our people,’ as Trump said — these are all things that would have been way outside the mainstream, and now are not,” said Heidi Beirich, chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
“I’ve been screaming into the void about this,” agreed Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Before heading the JCPA, which coordinates advocacy among local Jewish community relations councils in dozens of communities, she spearheaded a successful multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. ”This has been my personal thesis for five, six years now.”
It’s not just Nazi salutes and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Vice President J.D. Vance and White House advisor Elon Musk alarmed activists here and in Europe with their support of Germany’s far-right AfD party, whose members have downplayed the Holocaust and promoted their own version of the great replacement theory. In his confirmation hearing, meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signalled that he would halt a Biden-era effort to root out extremism in the military, calling it “too political.”
President Trump’s blanket pardon for all those convicted in the Jan. 6 riot at the capital was especially concerning to watchdogs, who saw it as a presidential endorsement of political violence.
“Among most of our political leaders there has been a hesitancy to name the fact that these ideas that were relegated to the fringes less than a decade ago have now moved squarely into the mainstream of our political discourse,” said Spitalnick. “And that’s true of leaders across the political spectrum who are afraid to name it — Republicans, because in many cases, it’s Republican officials who are espousing and embracing these ideas, and Democrats have, in a number of cases, been too squeamish to name it for what it is.”
One exception has been Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. The Jewish Democrat has denounced the White House rhetoric about immigrants and warned about a constitutional crisis should Trump ignore court orders surrounding his executive actions — while noting how quickly the Nazis were able to “dismantle a constitutional republic.”
“I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now,” Pritzker said at his annual combined State of the State and Budget address on Feb. 19. “The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. I just have one question: What comes next?”
For many tracking extremism on the right, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville represented a turning point. It saw a graphic expression of the “great replacement theory,” when white supremacists carrying torches chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” The theory holds that liberals, led by Jews, are encouraging an “invasion” of people of color to western countries in order to boost the electoral chances of Democrats and other parties on the left. The shooter in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in 2018 seemed to have been inspired by the conspiracy theory, and targeted the congregation for its support of a pro-immigrant Shabbat.
Trump also echoed the core idea of the theory in the September 2024 presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, when he said, referring to Democrats, that “these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them into our country.”
“Invasion and replacement rhetoric is now used by people in the highest levels of our politics,” said Spitalnick. “It’s underpinning a number of the policies, including the executive orders that have been signed over the last month.”
On Feb. 18, JCPA and dozens of other civil rights and anti-extremism groups wrote a letter to Congress highlighting the use of replacement rhetoric in advancing the administration’s immigration policies. It cites two of Trump’s executive orders whose titles refer to the surge of immigration at the southern border as an “invasion.”
Groups that monitor extremism are also concerned about the message sent when Trump appoints officials who have dabbled in conspiracy theories or who appeared alongside white nationalists. Among those convicted and pardoned in the Jan. 6 riot were leaders and members of extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, who have been flaunting their pardons as a victory for their ideas.
“When we think of accountability and the importance of accountability in extremism, we hope that that acts as a disincentive for more extremism and violence,” Oren Segal, senior vice president of Counter-Extremism and Intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, said on a recent episode of the group’s “Extremely” podcast. “The question is, what message do these pardons send? And that’s one of the things we’re looking at closely: How are the extremists going to respond if they feel that perhaps they’ve been let off the hook?”
Shana Gadarian, a professor of political science at Syracuse University who studies political communication, says taboos break down when the mainstream fails to set limits.
“One of the things that we have seen over the course of the last decade or so is that norms that we saw were unbreakable were really quite fragile,” said Gadarian. “I think the fact that Donald Trump and others in the party keep opening up the doors to extremists and then not being punished electorally, not being told by other members of their party that this isn’t what we stand for, opens up this permission structure for other people to say, ‘well, maybe I don’t endorse those views, but maybe it’s okay because we need this kind of winning coalition.’”
Beirich said Trump bears much of the responsibility for inviting extreme voices into the mainstream, but that the Republican Party dropped what had been a “cordon sanitaire” — a firewall — against individuals who espoused white supremacy or neo-Nazi views. “What was really important in pushing back far-right extremism was Republicans policing their own ranks,” she said. “And that has disappeared.”
Beirich is also alarmed by the removal of content moderation on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, and on Facebook, whose Jewish owner Mark Zuckerberg said in January, “Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.”
“It’s like we’re returning to something that I thought we had put behind us,” said Beirich, who said that unmoderated social media was one of the main factors in the dissemination of extremist ideas and an important tool for far-right groups in organizing and raising money.
The mainstreaming of extremism has so far set off few alarm bells at many of the top Jewish organizations, at least publicly. Much of their focus of the past 16 months has been on the fallout from the Israel-Hamas war, and the harsh anti-Israel and often antisemitic rhetoric and activity it has inspired.
Jewish outrage over the extremism has also been leavened by the seemingly unconditional support for Israel for Israel among Trump, Musk and others in the president’s circle, along with Trump’s pledge to punish anti-Israel protesters on college campuses.
Extremism watchdogs who condemned Musk’s straight-arm gesture howled when the ADL concluded — without citing Musk’s voluminous online record of amplifying voices on the antisemitic far right — that Musk made an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”
Gadarian was among those disappointed in the ADL’s response to Musk’s gesture.
“If we’re going to ourselves not push back, then what is the expectation about people outside of the community to see the threats there?” she said.
(The ADL was less forgiving of Bannon after his stiff-arm salute at CPAC, calling out his “long and disturbing history of stoking antisemitism and hate, threatening violence, and empowering extremists.”)
Figures on the right, meanwhile, accuse Pritzker and other critics of Trump on the right of calling out far-right extremism and ignoring far-left antisemitism.
“At this moment, serious discussions of Trump 47 are in hilariously short supply because his critics have mostly descended into a state of near madness,” John Podhoretz wrote recently in the Jewish magazine Commentary. “They are declaring everything he does and says and thinks and believes the act of a psychotic, delusional, wild, crazy Hitler wannabe — that is, when they are not assigning these adjectives to Elon Musk rather than to Trump himself.”
In another recent Commentary piece, Noah Rothman wrote the left has glamorized “lawless” behavior like the pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses and Black Lives Matter marches that occasionally turned violent, and in so doing “made increasingly more likely the kind of social-political violence that is despoiling American public life.”
The monitors point to statistics: A recent report by the ADL’s Center on Extremism found that “[a]ll the extremist-related murders in 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds, with eight of the 13 killings involving white supremacists and the remaining five having connections to far-right anti-government extremists.”
The ADL noted that this three-year monopoly was only interrupted by the deadly vehicular attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025, allegedly carried out by an American citizen who pledged himself to ISIS.
Spitalnick acknowledges the spike in antisemitism on the pro-Palestinian left, but says her colleagues should be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
“We need to be able to grapple with the post-Oct. 7 spike in antisemitism on campus and in progressive spaces, and not lose sight of the dire, deadly threat of right-wing extremism that directly has directly led to the mass murder of Jews and others in America, and we need the ability to do both,” she said.
Gadarian said the threat of extremism isn’t about any one group, but a worldview that threatens the safety of every group deemed “outsiders.”
“The mainstreaming of these gestures opens up the potential for the next step, which is attacks on communities, both Jewish communities and minority communities more generally,” she said. “Once it is acceptable to make a gesture of Nazi ideology, then it’s acceptable to say some people are less worthy and less deserving and shouldn’t be in politics and shouldn’t exist.”
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