It seems you are correct. I know of no one here who has ever heard of this before , and yet the media seems to think it is the equivalent of the KKK. I might add which is a Dem group throughout history,.
The Alt Right has been around for years. It is kind of like FR, only the people are younger, less intellectually attached to conservatism as an intellectual school of thought, and perhaps more viscerally hateful toward liberals.
Most conservatives haven’t heard of FR, though it is obviously something they should know about. Likewise, many Freepers haven’t heard of the alt-right, though like Fr, it is quite a force, and has done a lot of good. I would guess the alt-right is about twenty times as big as FR in readership, though it could be ten times bigger than that, though more loosely aligned.
It’s size is mainly due to the fact that the alt-right is a loose knit conglomeration of many sites devoted to rightist attitudes in different subjects including Science Fiction writing, video games, Anti-immigration, prepping, hacking, economics, news, politics, anti-diversity, pro-military, science blogs on genetics, evolution, pick-up artists, psychology, and so on. The blogs and site periodically link to each other’s stories of leftist outrages, and it has all sort of joined into a big counter culture, which only the people who follow those sites know about. Each site has its followers, but they know about all the others, and will work together on twitter to do things, like the Gamergate scandal activism that actually did a lot of damage to leftist networks running businesses.
If this were a Civil War, Freepers would be marching in orderly fashion toward DC to imprison the politicians, while Alt-Righters would be looking up liberals in the phone book, firebombing their houses at night, and killing them and their children as they ran out. There is a lot of enthusiasm.
The alt-right is a little less wedded to any specific ideology except the idea liberals can’t be lived with. So you get a lot of people living in diversified neighborhoods who think diversity sucks. You get anti-corruption people, small government people, preppers who think government is doomed, Video game programmers who hate feminists for ruining video games with transgender love stories, anti-immigration people, and so on. A motley crew united by hatred for the left. There are even gays who just hate liberals for ruining America.
Some of us have had a foot in each side, so to us this is nothing new.