Is there really 'an alt-left'?
It's a "made-up term" used by people on the right to "suggest there is a similar movement on the left," Segal said.

But there's no equivalent with the anti-Semitic and bigoted groups that call themselves "alt-right", he said.

George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, said the "alt-left" term has been most aggressively pushed by Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity, but it's not a label anyone or group has adopted for themselves.

"There is no such movement as the alt-left. Obviously, there are left-wing extremists but there is no congruence between the far-left and the alt-right."

Antifa, which is short for anti-fascist, is a controversial opposition group formed by a broad group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform. Members are known for causing damage to property during protests and some employ radical or militant tactics to get their message across.

"There is violence on the left. The anti-fascists engage with those they oppose through physical confrontation. And that is a problem. That is an extremists tactic. There is also bigotry on the left," Segal said.

One reason could be that left groups are not trying to repackage themselves to go mainstream as the far right has, he said.

"Do not get me wrong; there are extremists on the left, including very problematic ones. But the "alt left" is not a thing. It's just an insult," wrote Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL center, on Twitter.

The term “alt-left” was probably simultaneously invented hundreds or thousands of times, always bearing a slightly different meaning depending on its inventor. But up until now, the people who most forcefully pushed the idea of an alt-left weren’t Nazis or 4chan posters or anyone else in the orbit of Trump and pro-Trump Republicans trying to invent a mythical opposite to the alt-right. The alt-left is, first and foremost, a figment of centrist Democrats.

Something like “alt-left” was always going to happen; it’s a product of whatever it is in our brains that conditions them to think in terms of opposites. As soon as everyone starts talking about the “alt-right”—that inchoate and incoherent grouping of Nazis, Klansmen, resentful failsons sweating from video games and chicken fingers, cynical media wannabes, bloviating internet commenters who think they’re Ignatius J. Reilly, and others who think they’re the Joker—that word seems to sit on one side of a seesaw, across from a silence waiting to be filled. If there’s an alt-right, there must, somewhere, somehow, be something called an alt-left, otherwise the universe is unbalanced. And while the universe is unbalanced—everywhere, from the points of terrifying heat scattered haphazardly across a lonely void, to the murder and oppression that break out constantly across the world and are never met with justice—for a lot of mediocre intellects, good judgment basically consists of pretending that everything balances out somehow, and all the ledgers are even. Something like the alt-right sticks out, a lexical blasphemy: to put the world in order, you have to invent something equivalent on the left.

Even as the Nazis and the Klan assembled in Virginia, some liberals were continuing to insist that the murderous far-right and the socialist left were essentially the same, or at the very least balanced each other out. One Twitter user captioned a picture of torch-wielding fascists with the words “when you critique Bernie Sanders.” Clinton insider Neera Tanden used the march as an opportunity to once again conjure up the fantasy that there are some on “the alt left who want to join with the fascists.” Mieke Eoyang, a director at the centrist Third Way think tank, mockingly proclaimed, “if the Bernie Bros wanted to make a show of force on behalf of progressive values, Saturday in Charlottesville would be a good time.” But as it happens, the people out in force in Virginia to oppose the far-right were not, for the most part, Clinton Democrats. They were socialists and communists: the Democratic Socialists on America, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Workers World Party and Black Lives Matter, among others. They were the alt-left.

Now that Trump has added “alt-left” to his armory of insults, many of these same centrist constituencies are appalled that anyone could ever draw a moral equivalence between fascists and those opposing them. But this is exactly what they did, and what they’ve been doing for over a year.

Alt-Left

Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the “alt-left.” Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and “anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like.”

Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term.

“It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network,” Mr. Pitcavage said in an email. “It’s just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they don’t like ‘fake news.’”

John Daniszewski, editor at large for standards for the Associated Press, said that unlike “alt-right,” the “alt-left” also “doesn’t seem to be something that anyone calls themselves,” and that the wire service would soon issue guidelines that describe “alt-left” as a “recently claimed term for far-left factions.”

“It seems to have just been created as an opposite to ‘alt right,’” he added, “so in some ways it’s a term that is meant to be pejorative, and a label to slap onto people you don’t agree with.”