Darkness Visible

They have always been there of course: The overt racists with mainstream aspirations for their fervid journals and websites, full of theories about Jewish power and race science. And the trolls have always been there too, dark geniuses (and idiots) of 4chan and Reddit and their predecessors.

But in 2015, they began to come together, the nostalgic old Confederates and the young trolls, and their parallel political and ideological and intellectual streams ran together and spilled their banks into the political mainstream.

Long before Hillary Clinton denounced the alt-right in a speech this week, BuzzFeed News reporters tracked its astonishing development through 2015 and this mad year. Rosie Gray reported on the alt-right’s birth and attachment to the Trump campaign; and Joe Bernstein became the real-time intellectual historian of the movement, and of cultural tendrils that stretch deep into the corporate media.

We have collected some of their essential work here. It’s worth a read.