Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election.

My name's Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Edger of The Spectator. Today we're going to be talking about the alt-right and Donald Trump.

Until Hillary Clinton mentioned Donald Trump's connection to the alt-right, most Americans,

let alone Europeans, had no idea what it was.

But this is a largely web-based phenomenon that seems to be playing an important, albeit mostly

subterranean role in the 2016 presidential election.

So what is the alt-right and does it actually matter? I'm joined by

Jay Arthur Bloom, who is managing editor of Front Porch Republic and founder of the Mitreux's

newsletter, and James Poulos, who is contributing editor in National Affairs and author of The Art

of Being Free, which comes out next year. Arthur, to you first, could you explain to us to an English audience

what the alt-right is really and how important it actually is and the effect it has or hasn't had

on this presidential election? It depends on who you ask, whether it's a movement or it's

just people saying terrible things on the internet. But the biggest sort of moment where it seems to have impacted the presidential election was in late August

when Hillary Clinton actually mentioned it in his speech.

And I'll quote the little bit from it.

She said, this is not the conservatism as we've known it.

This is not republicanism as we've known it.

These are race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas,

anti-woman, all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right. Now,

alt-right is short for alternative right. So she doesn't really elaborate any more than that,

but there's been, you know, lots of journalists have elaborated more about, you know,

who these people are, where they come from. And the agreement seems to be

...