Inside the white supremacist alt-right's terrifying election celebration
"GAS THE KIKES, WITH NO SURVIVORS."
"Take back Europe and expel the Jews."
This is the sound of the alternative right achieving an unprecedented political victory. On Wednesday morning, the emergent community of white nationalists and right-wing internet trolls learned their "god-emperor," Donald Trump, had won the presidential election. They took to their old stomping grounds to celebrate, hurling Nazi memes and racial slurs like gobs of shit.
For the alt-right, the victory was a long time coming. Over the past year, on popular hangouts like 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, a group of young, internet-savvy Trump supporters have coordinated to popularize coded racial slurs, manipulate the election, attack Jewish journalists with violent Nazi imagery, smear rape victims and spread anti-Semitic conspiracies.
Trump has never publicly acknowledged, let alone denounced, the alt-right, but he's certainly aware of it — he retweets their blatantly anti-Semitic memes and falsified data to justify his racist beliefs, and he uses loaded phrases like "global special interests" that dog-whistle a devoted horde of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists into a frenzy.
Any Jewish writer with a Twitter account can tell you how this type of bigotry has become a ubiquitous tool of harassment — and it's not going away. As BuzzFeed's Doree Shafrir put it, "Anti-Semitism has emerged from the shadows, and it's not going back."
Indeed, the alt-right isn't so alternative anymore. Their philosophy of memes, political incorrectness and white nationalism has entered the mainstream, validated and emboldened by Trump's rise to power.
And so, as the champion of white male anger was declared president Wednesday morning — the anniversary of Kristallnacht — the anti-Semitic alt-right was beside itself with glee.
How the alt-right celebrated Trump's win
On Reddit's /r/The_Donald, "centipedes" declared victory over Hillary Clinton, feminists and politically correct "social-justice warriors."
"We should all receive a Reddit trophy, like 'Winner of the First Meme War,'" a fan wrote on pro-Donald Trump forum /r/The_Donald.
On 4chan's right-wing /pol/ board, users plotted what was next for the movement — and their next targets.
"Now we memed trump to presidency, what's our next step?" pondered one user.
The responses:
/pol/ users revealed a lot in this thread. One user, overwhelmed by how Trump's victory brought them "actual power yielded into reality," talked openly about removing "all kike DNA from the entirety of existence." Jews, black people and Arabic people would be "subjugated under white power," they said.
On 8chan's /pol/, an even more hardcore right-wing forum, users plotted a fake social media campaign to get Clinton voters to take their own lives, BuzzFeed reported.
Of course, this shouldn't be surprising. The mainstream channels of racism and anti-Semitism have almost unanimously supported Trump — and they're overjoyed. Why wouldn't they be? The great hope of white supremacists is now the most powerful leader in the world.
It's not just memes and tweets — it's in the real world, too. Just hours after Trump declared victory, Philadelphia and Wellsville, New York, residents started reporting some curious graffiti: swastikas, the Nazi cry "Sieg Heil" and the phrase "Make America White Again."
