Milo Yiannopoulos, as a Breitbart columnist, was the most recognizable face of the alt-right’s ugliness-as-provocation, though he never fully embraced the term. Now he’s become a poster child for its struggles, after remarks emerged suggesting he condoned pedophilia (Yiannopoulous apologized for the tone of his comments, reiterated that he abhors sexual abuse, and subsequently resigned from the site). Yiannopoulos gives the Bannon interview similar weight in the history of the movement, though characteristically, he blames the media for what transpired. “What I think he meant by that, was ‘alt-right’ defined broadly, as the movement that propelled Trump to power, and that Breitbart was one of the places that they come to read news that is not completely opposed to their point of view,” Yiannopoulos said. “Calling it the platform for the alt-right, and defining the alt-right as white supremacy, is a journalistic trick, designed to pretend that what Bannon was saying was, if you’re a white supremacist, come to Breitbart for your news.”

Milo Yiannopoulos at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. Photograph by Justin Bishop.

Before his exile from Breitbart, Yiannopoulos had identified himself as a “fellow traveler” of the movement, implying an overlap on some issues, and a rejection on others. When I spoke to him, however, he had scrambled even further away. “Now the term alt-right has come to mean something else, and therefore, that’s what it means now,” he said. “Whereas I may have considered myself previously a fellow traveler on some issues with the alt-right, the alt-right as the word is used today . . . I have nothing to do with it, and no fondness for it, and no interest in being associated with it.”

If a lawmaker campaigns in poetry and governs in prose, the alt-right, whatever it is these days, is trying to pivot from campaigning in bathroom graffiti to governing in the foreign language of diplomatic tact and deliberate restraint. A movement that spent years on the attack now has to learn to defend.

The term “alt-right,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, was created in 2008 by Richard Spencer to describe a strain of white nationalism that rejected every mainstream conservative view and pushed to preserve Western civilization from, in his words, a “left-right dialectic...”

It was Yiannopoulos, along with fellow Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, who tried to stitch together a bigger tent for the movement. In their essay, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” the self-proclaimed “Jewish gay” and a “mixed-race Breitbart reporter” laid out the four groups they believed made up the amorphous blob of a movement fueling Trump’s rise: identity politics-loathing intellectuals, migrant-wary “natural conservatives,” the twentysomething-year-old-white-man “meme team,” and, of course, the militaristic, white-supremacist “1488ers.” While Yiannopoulos and Bakhari attempted to push the 1488ers away from the rest of the group and patted the memelords on the head, they still placed them under the same tent as the normal populist-nationalists. “There are a myriad of agreements between its supporters over what they should build,” they wrote, “but virtual unity over what they should destroy.”

But no one sees the alt-right as four groups; they see it as one group. “To my mind, ‘alt-right’ always carries with it self-conscious racialist politics,” said David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a harsh critic of Trump and the Republican Party’s racialist embrace. “I would not use it to describe people who oafishly, and often without self-awareness, engage in racial dog-whistling. I’d say that what the alt-right people do is take the unconscious and make it conscious.”

Ever since last summer, almost everyone in the movement has been trying, and mostly failing, to get out from under the tent. Of all the trolls profiled by Politico in January, only Spencer would wear the label. Yiannopoulos, who had yet to fall, had pushed himself away from the term, but it did little good. “The press did such a good job at defining it as white supremacy, that the only people who embrace it are the white supremacists,” he said.