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The GOP's response: I know you are but what am I. Yep, apparently they're going to start calling what they view as more extreme Democrats the “alt-left.”

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The term isn't brand new, but it has just now gradually worked its way into the mainstream. It started with alt-right websites like World Net Daily and has graduated to the airwaves of Fox News and Sean Hannity, who has been using it for a couple of weeks now. And Trump, who has distanced himself from the alt-right term, may have played a major role in pushing it into the conservative lexicon.

“Nobody even knows what [alt-right] is,” Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper in August when asked about Bannon's comments tying Breitbart to the alt-right. “This is a term that was just given that — frankly, there's no alt-right or alt-left. All I'm embracing is common sense.”

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Previously, the term had appeared intermittently on sites like WND and CNS News and even in a syndicated column in Canadian newspapers hitting the media's coverage of Trump. But Trump's mention seemed to bring it to the attention of more mainstream conservatives.

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The same night Trump used it, Lou Dobbs dropped a reference on his Fox Business Network show. A couple days later, the Washington Times' Kerry Riddell appeared on Fox News's “Media Buzz” and took issue with the media trying to label Trump's supporters as bigoted and racist: “If they're going to do that, do it with her or do it with her alt-left supporters.”

By Sept. 11, conservative activist Gary Bauer used the term on Jake Tapper's CNN show. “It's not alt-right, it's not alt-left; it's alt-delete. It's get the bums out,” he said of the election. Dobbs said it again on Oct. 4.

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After Trump won the election, Anthony Scaramucci, a member of his transition team, dropped the term again on Hannity's show Nov. 14. “And so what's interesting about the alt-left — just to add this to it — they're not focused on [the forgotten people]. They think these people are misogynists and misanthropes and negative people.”

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At the end of the same show, Hannity used the “alt-left” in his question of the day: “Since the mainstream liberal, alt-left media, radical media, their coverage was so biased against President-elect Trump, do you think they owe him an apology?”

Since then, it has been a mainstay. A week later, Hannity and BuzzFeed's Rosie Gray debated whether there is an “alt-radical left.”

The Hannity-Gray debate is well worth a watch, and it crystallizes why conservatives like Hannity have seized upon “alt-left.” The host basically seems to take exception to the idea that there exists racism and bigotry in the conservative movement and feels the “alt-right” label is being unfairly tied to the whole GOP, suggesting the entire party is extreme.

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The use of the term “alt-left,” then, would seem to be a way to point out that there are also extremists on the left — a fact that these conservatives believe is being ignored.

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That's undoubtedly true; these things are a matter of degree, after all. But the difference between alt-right and alt-left is that one of them was coined by the people who comprise the movement and whose movement is clearly ascendant; the other was coined by its opponents and doesn't actually have any subscribers.

“Alt-right” was a term first used by white nationalist Richard Spencer, who recently appeared at a Washington alt-right gathering and yelled “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” while some in the crowd made Nazi salutes. The alt-right has long used the term to identify itself. And Bannon himself previously embraced the term, saying this summer that Breitbart served as a “platform for the alt-right.”

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