Christian Picciolini, a former white nationalist, explains that white nationalists recognized that they had to distance themselves from the terms racist and white supremacy to gain broader appeal. He describes the “alt-right” and white nationalist movements as the culmination of a thirty-year effort to massage the white supremacist message: “We recognized back then that we were turning away the average American white racists and that we needed to look and speak more like our neighbors. The idea we had was to blend in, normalize, make the message more palatable.”
