Well that didn’t take long. After establishment loyalists of the Democratic party spent months trying to make the extremely forced pejorative “alt-left” stick to anyone left of the let’s-start-a-war-with-Russia center, the phrase has been given the “fake news” treatment by Trump and his online Pepe patrol. The label is now theirs to do with as they please.

The daily news churn makes this easy to forget, but there was a time not long ago when you could read the term “fake news” without hearing it in Trump’s voice. The phrase was actually created out of thin air by Democratic party loyalists after the November elections last year to spin a narrative about why Clinton lost, and ended up being used as a broad-brush smear against all alternative media that promoted WikiLeaks during the election cycle.

All that changed when Trump said “You’re fake news” to CNN’s Jim Acosta at a press conference in January. The president’s online support base found this endlessly delightful and began applying the pejorative to everyone who disagrees with Trump, and did it so consistently and effectively that we soon had CNN’s Chris Cuomo crying that accusing people like him of being fake news was the same as calling a black person the n-word. The virulently pro-establishment Washington Post openly conceded the death of the phrase it had helped create in an editorial titled “It’s time to retire the tainted term ‘fake news’”, and days later the unwatchable Clintonist spankerchief Seth Meyers was indoctrinating his empty-headed audience with those same words verbatim on NBC:

We’re seeing a repeat of this phenomenon in the wake of the president’s press conference at Trump Tower in which he used the phrase “alt-left” to describe the counter-protesters in Charlottesville. Enthusiastic Trump supporters are now gleefully applying this pejorative to literally everything they oppose, from Antifa to Huffington Post writers to CNN to John McCain. Because of this memetic hijacking, “alt-left” will quickly become a meaningless phrase in need of retirement just like “fake news” did.

Which is sure to be immensely frustrating to the neoconservative Democratic party pundits who worked so hard trying to create and promote it like Joy Reid, Neera Tanden and Sally Albright.

Sorry, kids. It was fun while it lasted, but “alt-left” is officially over. Kiss it goodbye and find a new way to left-punch.

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