What do you think of when you hear alt-right? What 2-D image is conjured? Me, I think of one real 3-D human being, my best childhood friend.

When we were children, perhaps eight or nine, the guy I'll call Rob was a friend to me when no one else would be, when I was bullied and ostracized and alone. He was easygoing, loyal and a good listener — qualities I needed at the time. Even years later, when I found many more friends at school, he retained a special status among them.

After many an evening spent at his place, we would take the long way back through the neighbourhood in the dark, walking and talking about games and cartoons, and later, philosophy and current events. He loved to pontificate about the Western canon, Russian and Roman history, the workings of empires and economies.

The two of us grew up in stable, Protestant, nuclear families in a quiet suburb of Toronto. By any objective measure, we wanted for nothing. Our hometown was not a showcase of cultural diversity, by any means, but immigrants made up about a quarter of the population, slightly higher than the national average.

We lost touch in the late 2000s when we moved away for university. Rob took political science; I took journalism. Finally, a few years ago, we found the time to reconnect.

My heart sinks when I remember that day. I was confused but not alarmed when he told me he'd converted to Catholicism, much to his parents' dismay. But gradually, over the course of our fumbling conversations, he confided more of his core beliefs to me. They left me dumbfounded. Back then I thought this particular brand of deviance was unique to him, a childish exercise in contrarianism, but in time I learned it belonged to the banner of the alt-right.

The movement's tenets are vague, with some members spouting the kind of neo-Nazi and white-supremacist dreck that even Rob would reject, but his own views fall well within the limits of the alt-right label. As he describes it, the core of the philosophy is an acknowledgment that people are not the same. Individuals, he said, are born with inherent strengths and weaknesses. Men and women have physical and mental differences that make them more suited for certain roles in life.

"Men have a creative and destructive spiritual nature," he says, "whereas women have a nurturing, maintaining nature ... Denying it makes women unhappy, it makes men unhappy." Only the morally corrupt (feminists, for instance, or LGBTQ people) would subvert these roles.

Races, due to natural selection, differ in qualities such as strength, speed, average IQ and predilection to violence. Cultures of origin also leave a permanent mark. Intermingling leads to discord at best and cultural genocide at worst, and for that reason immigration and miscegenation are self-destructive.

"Diversity, generally speaking, makes people miserable," he says.

In this regard, Canada is perhaps the planet's greatest failure.

I was aghast. I stumbled through the obvious counters to his arguments — his faulty logic based on bad science and fake news — but my mind was reeling, trying to reconcile this stranger with the kid I grew up with.

I haven't seen Rob since that day.

He's out of sight, but not out of mind. I lack the nerve and to some extent the will to talk to him again, but it feels wrong to try to forget him. For more than a decade, we went through life's firsts together. He was familiar, a constant among change. This is the guy I thought would be my best man someday. Now he's gone, and it was my choice to cast him aside.

After a time, curiosity and nostalgia led me to his YouTube channel, which he'd mentioned ages before but I'd never explored. It's now my sole, clandestine connection. Rediscovering these online musings was at once comforting, illuminating and repulsive. Among the same movie reviews he used to share on our moonlit walks are hateful diatribes and snide 20-second clips of black or gay people misbehaving. Under a pseudonym he rails against all manner of "dildos" and "degenerates."

"Hillary Clinton and her ilk funded ISIS, the most evil organization in human history, they do stuff like telling six-year-old kids they need to get a gender transplant, in Europe they're trying to extend euthanasia to minors, they're banning the words mother and father. These people are undermining all the things that have created these beautiful, functional societies that we live in. By any metric, secular or religious, they are an objective evil."

The more I watched, the more I realized how little I knew the man I thought I understood top-to-bottom. I learned that, unbeknownst to me, he entered university already aligned against diversity, against gay marriage, though he still considered himself a leftist in many ways. However, he claims that the classmates he met on the left had no interest in equality or economic socialism. He says they admonished him for criticizing the worst abusers of human rights in Islamic and African nations, calling him a racist and a xenophobe.

"They didn't believe any of the things they claimed to believe in," he says in one video. "They weren't interested in the poor, they weren't interested in the working class, they were only interested in their navel-gazing and signalling how virtuous they are."

It's a sentiment I think many millennials can relate to. I myself was accused of ulterior, racist motives for attending a university seminar on Tamil issues. It was a harsh lesson on how costly it can be to engage with people assured of their moral and intellectual high ground. I imagine that's the reason why University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson became such a hero to the alt-right when he not only refused to use gender-neutral pronouns but also openly defied the students and administration ready to pillory him for it. It's sad irony to see Rob fall victim to a conservative version of the same delusions of self-righteousness.

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After finishing our studies, Rob and I both struggled to find work. He had it much harder — Rob has bipolar disorder and a learning disability affecting his writing and spatial perception — and I imagine many employers were blinded to his erudition. (His disability, he says, is just another example of how people are born for certain roles in life and not for others.) But while I grew despondent over my poor fortune, Rob nursed his bitterness. I found monologue after monologue about why job-application forms were a farce, how the system was rigged.

"Most of us are young white males who are experiencing financial trouble because of the recession," he says in a video on alt-right doctrine that ignores so many historical instances of cultures coming together. "We're kind of the first generation to experience the effects of diversity."

Today, I get the occasional update about where he is and what he's doing — even if that information is submerged in bile. I often wonder whether Rob would be so vitriolic if he knew I was listening. Imagine my surprise when, during a screed on liberalism, he mentioned me: A lifelong friend who was all too quick to abandon him when he spoke his mind. Another typical liberal, unwilling to debate or challenge their own dogma.

While I imbibe quite the cocktail of sorrows when I listen to these videos, first among them is guilt. I have this feeling of paternalistic responsibility to "save" him from his madness, as though he isn't a perfectly intelligent adult capable of independent thought. It's the kind of condescension he would revile.

The urge is there, but I'm not convinced this is the type of battle than can be won through argument. If neither of us enter that arena willing to change our minds, then there's nothing to gain. I'm tempted to say it's fine for us to accept our incompatibility and say our goodbyes — I shudder to imagine how he might respond to my Tamil girlfriend — but is that not the same logic of "difference requires division" he's espousing?

Since the election of Donald Trump, I've heard a parade of politicians, pundits and talk-show hosts blame the surprising result on a culture of snap liberal condemnation.

"The left is responsible for this," says a video rant, viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube, by the satirical lefty character Jonathan Pie. "Because the left has now decided that any other opinion, any other way of looking at the world is unacceptable. We don't debate anymore because the left won the cultural war. So if you're on the right you're a freak, you're racist, you're evil, you're stupid, you are a basket of deplorables ... That's why people wait until they're in the voting booth. No one's watching anymore. There's no blame or shame, and you can finally say what you really think."

So, the argument goes, if we would only break bread with our estranged cousins, no matter how repulsive their views might be to us, we could hash it out and the West would not be in such turmoil.

It's a comforting thought, that the only thing preventing us from healing our rifts is pride. That harmony is within our grasp, if we have the will to take it. Then I think of every politician, from Barack Obama to Justin Trudeau to a hundred others, elected on a promise to bridge the partisan divide. Clearly, it's not so simple.

It's true, what Edmonton-based advocate Matt Edmonds said last month as he went about defacing alt-right posters: "Silence is just a form of agreement." But, as hard as it is for a writer to admit, words hold no power over deaf ears and hardened hearts.

I see my own story, my own hand-wringing reflected in the collective crisis of conscience brought on by Trump's victory and the alt-right's day in the sun. There's an omnipresent exasperation that seems to pervade all political dialogue.

It remains to be seen whether we can find the secret and the courage to reconcile our irreconcilable differences with our neighbours, coworkers and, indeed, friends. In my case, the answer was no. I can only hope our society at large can do better.