A few weeks ago, Colton Merwin, a nineteen-year-old from Maryland who recently dropped out of college, decided to organize a rally on the National Mall. “I got all the permits and stuff myself,” he said. “It was pretty easy, actually.” He called his event the Rally for Free Speech. It was intended as a kind of rebuttal to a series of events that took place in Berkeley, California, earlier this year. In February, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, a violent group of left-wing protesters prevented the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking; in April, anarchists and “anti-Fascists” interrupted a right-wing event in a Berkeley park, sparking a day of street clashes that came to be known as the Battle of Berkeley. “I got tired of seeing the far left smashing people instead of letting them speak,” Merwin said. “My idea was that everyone’s voice deserves to be heard.”

He didn’t invite “everyone” to speak at his rally. Instead, via Facebook message, he invited some of his favorite right-wing Internet personalities. Most were young and new to politics; most were critics of mainstream conservatism, often on libertarian or nationalist grounds; most had gained attention during last year’s Presidential campaign, primarily through social media or alternative media; many had espoused anti-Muslim or anti-feminist views while accusing the left of incivility. In other words, they embodied a new wave of political protest and social commentary that is often called—by the outside world, if not by the commentators themselves—the alt-right.

On June 16th, nine days before the rally, Merwin announced a surprise addition to his lineup: the white nationalist and anti-Semite Richard Spencer. Spencer believes that white Americans need their own homeland—“a sort of white Zionism,” he calls it. For years, he had been a marginal figure on the far right; last year, when the alt-right became an object of popular fascination, Spencer used the notoriety to his advantage. After the election, he experienced two moments of viral fame: one shortly after Trump’s victory, when Spencer cried “Hail Trump” during a speech and appeared to lead a crowd in a Nazi-esque salute; and the other on Inauguration Day, when a masked stranger punched him in the face. Spencer is a deliberately divisive figure, and, during the past few months, many on the right have worked to distance themselves from him and his views. Lucian Wintrich, of the pro-Trump tabloid the Gateway Pundit, told me that, last year, the term alt-right “was adopted by libertarians, anti-globalists, classical conservatives, and pretty much everyone else who was sick of what had become of establishment conservatism.” Wintrich counted himself among that group. “Then Richard Spencer came along, throwing up Nazi salutes and claiming that he was the leader of the alt-right,” Wintrich went on. “He effectively made the term toxic and then claimed it for himself. We all abandoned using it in droves.”

As soon as Spencer was announced as a participant in the Rally for Free Speech, Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer, two advocate-journalists who were also scheduled to speak, backed out. “It’s pretty simple,” Loomer, who is Jewish, told me at the time. “I’m not sharing the stage with an anti-Semite.” The next day, Posobiec announced that he would host a competing event, the Rally Against Political Violence, in front of the White House. This rally would feature a new slate of speakers, including Wintrich; Cassandra Fairbanks, of the pro-Trump Web site Big League Politics; the political consultant and Periscope pundit Ali Akbar; and the social-media star and InfoWars contributor Mike Cernovich. The events would be held at the same time, to draw a clear distinction between people who would stand with Spencer and those who would not. In effect, the Rally for Free Speech became an alt-right event, and the Rally Against Political Violence became a right-wing event organized in opposition to the alt-right. The two factions spent the intervening week talking trash, on Twitter and YouTube, about which rally would draw a bigger crowd. To the outside world, the schism might have seemed sudden, even inexplicable. In fact, it had been developing for months.

The phrase “alternative right” has been critiqued on several grounds: that it’s too vague; that it obscures the extent to which the movement is coterminous with the rest of the Republican base; that it’s a euphemism for white supremacy. The definition has shifted over time, both inside and outside the movement, such that, for a while, it was impossible to tell whether any two people who referred to the alt-right were referring to the same thing. During the Presidential campaign, the term came to denote several intersecting phenomena: anti-feminism, opposition to political correctness, online abuse, belligerent nihilism, conspiracy theories, inflammatory Internet memes. Some pro-Trump activists adopted this big-tent definition, allowing any youthful, “edgy” critique of establishment conservatism to be considered alt-right. But a core within the movement always insisted on a narrower conception of the alt-right, one that was inextricably linked with white separatism, and with Spencer specifically.

Now the boundaries are set. Spencer and his allies have won the branding war. They own the alt-right label; their right-wing opponents are aligning themselves against it, working to establish a parallel brand. It has become increasingly clear that this is not a mere rhetorical ploy but a distinction with a difference.

As far as anyone can tell, the phrase “alternative right” was invented in 2008. That November, Paul Gottfried, a cantankerous intellectual who calls himself a “paleoconservative,” gave a speech at the first annual meeting of the H. L. Mencken Club, a “society for the independent Right.” “We have attracted, beside old-timers like me . . . well-educated young professionals, who consider themselves to be on the right, but not of the current conservative movement,” he said. Gottfried did not utter the phrase “alternative right” in the speech—he used the term “post-paleo” instead—but his remarks were later published on the Web site Taki’s Magazine, under the headline “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.” The headline was written by Spencer, who was then an acolyte of Gottfried’s and an editor at Taki’s. (Gottfried later told the journalist Jacob Siegel that he and Spencer “co-created” the phrase.) In 2010, Spencer registered alternativeright.com, which now redirects to altright.com, and he has since endeavored to position himself as the face of the movement.

When I profiled Mike Cernovich, in October of last year, I wrote that Cernovich “prefers to call himself an ‘American nationalist,’ but he often uses ‘we’ when discussing the alt-right movement.” This was during the Presidential campaign, when the definition of “alt-right” was still in flux, and when the various pro-Trump factions were united against a common enemy. (It was also prior to Spencer’s “Hail Trump” debacle, in November*.) Two months earlier, Cernovich had written a blog post in which he explained that, although he differed with the alt-right on ethno-nationalism and other issues, he refused to disavow the movement. “I have my disagreements with the alt-right, but let’s get a win for the right in America before hashing it all out,” Cernovich wrote. “Once the right has some actual power, then it will be time to have an ideological civil war.” A few months later, Republicans won the White House and both houses of Congress, and the civil war emerged into the open. “What does Richard do other than sit in a home his mom pays for and send out press releases?” Cernovich said recently, in a text message to me. “He fancies himself an outlaw intellectual when he's a soft-faced fame whore who’d be performing in off-Broadway shows if he had the musical talent.” (Spencer, for his part, has called Cernovich and his cohort “liars and freaks.”)

By the beginning of 2017, the divisions were becoming clear, at least to those within the pro-Trump movement. In January, when I met Gavin McInnes, the founder of a “pro-Western fraternal organization” called the Proud Boys, I asked whether I should refer to him as alt-right. “Nope,” he said, swigging from a can of Budweiser. “They care about the white race. We care about Western values.” This is a view that has come to be known as “civic nationalism,” as opposed to white nationalism—or “alt-light,” as opposed to alt-right. In April, when I interviewed Lucian Wintrich on The New Yorker Radio Hour, the producers asked me whether he should be identified as a member of alt-right in the introduction. I said no, in part because Wintrich has Jewish ancestry and a Latino boyfriend, and in part because I’d been with him during the weekend of the Inauguration, when he shared Spencer-gets-punched memes with as much glee as any slap-happy liberal. Neither McInnes nor Wintrich would be mistaken for old-school conservatives; and yet they, along with many of their peers, have made a clean break with the alt-right.