The question was posed in two threads posted during the last week of March on the white nationalist forum The Right Stuff (TRS), leading 74 individual users to describe their radicalization narratives.

Respondents recount a transformation that takes place almost entirely online. Led either by their own curiosity or an algorithm, the content they consumed became increasingly extreme, fostering their radicalization and guiding them eventually to TRS. Their responses reveal a pipeline between the alt-lite and racist “alt-right,” with many users explaining that alt-lite figures like Gavin McInnes were the first to introduce them to hardcore, veteran white nationalists.

The two threads, titled “WHAT BROUGHT YOU INTO THE MOVEMENT?” and “Path here beginning from Gavin,” asked posters to reflect on their own “red pill” narratives and provide tips for converting others. “Here’s the challenge,” a user identified as The Somalisher wrote. “Create a list of succession from the Alt-Light to us. I have friends who like Gavin…But I can’t exactly throw [Andrew] Anglin at them.”

The user continued, “It sometimes requires softer steps to ‘radical’ perspectives.”

The two threads refer specifically to bringing people into the fold of TRS and the Daily Stormer, which together serve as the core of neo-Nazism online. TRS, the brainchild of Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, started as a political blog in 2012 and has since transformed into one of the largest alt-right media platforms. It hosts a lively message board called the 504um and dozens of podcasts, the most popular of which are “The Daily Shoah” and news-oriented “Fash the Nation.” The Daily Stormer operates in the same orbit, consciously using humor to indoctrinate its readers.

Together, the two sites have become the preeminent propaganda machines for the alt-right. They’re also some of the most effective spaces for organizing real-world, local groups, called “book clubs” by the Stormer and “pool parties” on TRS.

The alt-right is a motley movement, drawing in people from a number of venues and subcultures. The 107 individuals and platforms mentioned by posters in the TRS threads have been labeled according to their ideology, which include alt-right, legacy white nationalist, alt-lite, mainstream, libertarian, skeptic, men’s rights activist, and conspiracy, in addition to a random category for those not easily classified. This heterogeneity is a boon to the movement, creating a number of avenues for individuals of different taste and predilections to fall within its clutches.

Though both the alt-lite and alt-right reject “establishment” conservatism, the former claims to adhere to civic nationalism — a poorly defined catch-all term for those who embrace nativism but shy away from more radical racist rhetoric — while the latter is explicitly white nationalist. Legacy white nationalists include those like Jared Taylor, Patrick Buchanan and Paul Kersey who, although they might be popular within the alt-right, were part of the white nationalist movement before that label emerged.

The number of times each individual or platform was mentioned as an influence was tallied, and those mentioned by three or more posters are listed in the chart below. Disconnected as they might seem, the most cited influences — the “politically incorrect” 4chan board /pol/ and the American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor — hint at two common paths to the alt-right: either through participation in the rampantly racist and misogynistic online trolling culture of 4chan and its offshoots, or through exposure to Taylor’s variety of pseudo-academic “race realism” that couches timeworn racist tropes in the language of science.

Within alt-right spaces like TRS, these two fibers of the movement are woven together — resulting in an ironic, meme-ified version of old-school race science — and embellished with antisemitism.

TRS and the Daily Stormer both argue that, with the right optics and messaging, they can attract a critical mass of followers to the cause and eventually shift what lies within the respectable terms of political debate. The respondents in these threads show how the current media landscape — replete with podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs that contain tempered bits of white nationalist propaganda under the guise of patriotism, “Western chauvinism,” science or hard truths — can aid that agenda, coaxing the “normies” down the path to white nationalism.