Oh the times, they are a-changin’.

Sings the bard of yesterday’s “revolution.” But The Current Year has seen an explosion of activity for what has come to be known as the “alt-right.” From Conservatism, Inc. to the hipsters over at Vice, it seems we can’t go a month without some new cross-examination of who we are.

The latest journey into our previously subterreanean world comes from Buzzfeed reporter Rosie Gray. The article is refreshingly neutral and quotes alt-right thinkers from Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Jack Donovan, and RamZPaul. All of this publicity makes one wonder exactly just how much “alt-right” ideas function as a sort of intellectual pornography for many throughout the Cathedral (or Synagogue if you prefer). At the very least, it’s a good indicator of our “hot click” factor.

We get this kind of publicity because we are on the edge of thought. Another recent Buzzfeed article referred to the alt-right as a counterculture which has been birthed from the Internet. Really, we are the outcome of a deracinated and bland society which finds its greatest expressions through consumer identities whether through the market place or Facebook’s 50+ gender options.

We’ve moved beyond the tired “conservatism” of the Beltway because it has failed to conserve anything meaningful. For many of our younger members, the alt-right is a journey to discover exactly who they are as a people. The Heritage Foundation and National Review could care less about this, as long as the donations flow and marginal tax rates are kept (somewhat) low.

Radix editor (and coiner of the term alternative right), Richard Spencer made the case more succinctly:

“We don’t have a starting point with William F. Buckley, we don’t have the same starting point as Richard Lowry and Jonah Goldberg and National Review…radically different from George W. Bush, the conservative movement, etc. It really was a notion of an alternative.”

Buzzfeed considers this a break with the “intellectual conservatism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.” Rightly so, only we would quibble with just how “intellectual” a movement which regularly set up its more original thinkers for sacrifice before the chimeric idol of respectability really was. Even Buckley, beyond his mid-Atlantic accent, was more of a dilettante and “gate-keeper” than an intellectual.

So much for America’s “vast right wing conspiracy.”

This brings us to today’s real “conservatives.” Those who screech about the “right side of history” and how it is (insert year here) are some of the most reactionary figures on our landscape. They are constantly searching for heretics from the newly-established orthodoxies of race, sex, and gender that many young people have gone mountains in debt to “learn.” Before any movie or work of art is considered for mass consumption, it must first pass the test of our new inquisitors or face the wrath of Diversity, Inc.

For many, that is what makes the “alt-right” so refreshing. We don’t bow to mass culture and we don’t play its inverted morality game. We invite young people to discover who they are and who they can become, not who they can know and how they can become an establishment functionary. Naturally, our newfound burst of creativity intrigues and inspires our brothers and sisters. There is a palpable energy throughout the alt-right that is unnervingly (for them) lacking in our enemies’ camps. We’re the next big thing, and they’re the flailing old guard. What fun!

The National Policy Institute was able to attract well over 100 people (most below 30) to its annual Washington D.C. conference. Donald Trump continues to push the Overton window with his candidacy, while in Europe the migrant crises has moved alt right and identitarian ideas closer to public consciousness. There is a growing backlash to the summer of campus protests, and it seems as if there are hundreds of new “converts” to the alt-right every week.

Yes, much of this constitutes crude beginnings. But what serious counterculture was neat? We are the “avant-garde,” the first wave of a new future. What we are seeing is not the last gasp of a dying species, but the first breaths of an awakened people!