In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s historic failure to assume the throne as Queen of the Free World, her media collaborators sought for whom to blame, as she did. Perhaps unable to present the rogue gallery she offered without embarrassment, i.e., unwilling to blame Vladimir Putin or FBI director James Comey for her failure to secure even more cemeteries and illegal aliens as constituents, Hillary’s media cirque-d’follie decided instead to dredge up an obscure phrase from the past to name what they called a surprising new phenomenon: The Rise of the Alt-Right.

If you didn’t know what the hell they meant, you’re not alone. Let’s begin with the second epithet in the binomial: the Right.

Right up front, I’ll tell you what I think, then dissect the usage. I think Hillary wasn’t defeated by the right, or the disaffected left, but by people who no longer try to squeeze their views into the binary categories of the left-right paradigm. It certainly didn’t help that Hillary engaged in very public election fraud all during the primary season against her only real opponent Bernie Sanders, who won primary or caucus after primary or caucus, but always came up short on the delegate-count. Because Hillary had rigged the entire process with the collusion of the DNC to create dedicated “super-delegates.” Super-delegates dedicated to her. So she had that going against her, her public flaunting of the democratic process.

While Hillary was trying to paint Trump supporters as deplorable conspiracy theorists, a few us recalled her words in defense of her rapist husband Bill Clinton when he was brought to account for his actions by Congress: “A vast right-wing conspiracy” was at work against her man, she said very publicly.

Lingering memories of her enabling of a rapist were probably why her complaints when the race was on with Trump didn’t resonate. Clinton the wife said future historians would look back on the 2016 presidential election as a case-study in sexism. For eight years Obama had been able to use the race card in the media to call his critics racists, but Hillary’s attempt to paint her opponents as sexist didn’t work even in the captive main-stream media which were very intent on handing her a victory. Of course it didn’t help her prospects that she appeared to be conceding to Trump just weeks into the actual campaign, looking to a future where she would be treated as a casualty rather than the victor.

Eight years of Obama, who began by a staunch defense of Wall Street as the core industry of America, and Hillary’s famous words about banks which were “too big to fail,” had blurred the lines of the traditional right and left in the US. Traditionally republicans had defended interests of the financial markets. And Clinton the woman and Obama made an incursion into another traditional domain of American republicans, out-hawking the hawks and invading and ruining a number of countries and countless lives around the world. Hillary Clinton neither renounced nor embraced Obama’s policies, and voters couldn’t tell what she wanted to do. To continue the Obama “legacy?” To offer new futile hope and futile change? To all appearances Clinton the woman stood for the status quo. In Obama’s America that meant dictating from the White House that primary schools should offer a third toilet for trans-gender children, and subvert immigration laws to allow more illegal aliens into the country.

So the usage of “right” is already suspect, and since September 11, 2001, Americans have steadily woken up to the fact they’ve been duped by their own elected representatives. Americans less and less place themselves on either side of the alleged “left-right divide.”

What does “alt” mean? Well, if you’re old enough to remember way back to the second half of the 1980s, there was a thing called Usenet. It was mainly implemented through bulletin board systems, which passed the posts along telephone or other communications channels at intervals. There were discussion groups and it was pretty much a free-for-all. At some point the inner policemen stepped up to the plate and demanded weird discussions be moved into a separate branch of the tree. Initially it was proposed to start a talk. prefix, but this became alt., for alternative. One of the more enduring groups on the alt. branch was alt.binaries., where people shared computer applications. alt.conspiracy. contained a lot of information about clandestine operations and black-world funding well into the Bill Clinton administration, and BCCI and Nugan Hand Bank in Australia still come up when you put “alt.conspiracy” into a search engine.

Remember, back in 1992 or 1993 Clinton’s vice president Al Gore, of humble farming origins in Tennessee (where his father apparently made his fortune cultivating zinc in strip mines), began claiming he had invented the “information superhighway,” more commonly referred to now as the internet (small i, no longer capitalized). The Clinton administration’s detractors were quite active on the fledgling information superhighway and the president and his aides warned of “full-blown cults” emerging from the darkness of the internet. Hillary Clinton’s words about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” probably stemmed at least partially out of the Usenet communities where there was fevered discussion of a number of the Clintons’ crimes, from smuggling cocaine through the Mena, Arkansas airfield to Hillary’s alleged sale of America’s nuclear codes to Israel (allegedly the code was eight zeroes at that time, so the Israelis might have felt cheated). Ruby Ridge, then Waco, Chinese espionage, the Clinton body count–all of it was discussed openly, if more or less anonymously.

Someone has a long memory, and a real sense of revenge for comments made over two decades ago. That’s the alt in “alt-right,” which is properly spelled “alt.right.*,” of course. Add Putin and Comey to the “vast right-wing conspiracy” and Clinton the female’s bid to take her entitlement as Queen of the World becomes a strange and tortured plot in a bad graphic novel, or a cheap soap opera.