Updated

Hillary Clinton is set to launch a full-fledged attack Thursday on a newly evolving group that's embracing the Trump candidacy: the so-called "alt right."

What is the alt right?

In the words of National Review's  Washington Editor Eliana Johnson, like so many other creations of the digital age, it's "an amorphous internet movement." Its members are indistinguishable from other Trump supporters -- mostly white, male, blue collar, rural or red state, and enthused about Trump’s immigration reform and his promise to bring jobs back to America.

But unlike other Trump supporters, the alt right followers have rejected the philosophy of the traditional GOP with unusual vehemence -- even coining a new phrase, "Cucks," to label traditional, inside-the-Beltway Republicans. It means conservatives who are emasculated or neutered by globalist/progressive forces.

Critics on both the left and the right have found a villain in the alt right, labeling its followers as uneducated racists and sexists who are energized by Trump’s rejection of political correctness.

Clinton's campaign describes the alt right as "embracing extremism and presenting a divisive and dystopian view of America which should concern all Americans, regardless of party."

But the alt right movement is marked by a diversity not so easily categorized. Among its members -- Jared Taylor, editor of  the non-profit American Renaissance. Asked if he is a white supremacist, as many critics contend, Taylor told Fox News, "Absolutely not. I don't even know what that term means."

He described what drives his long-held beliefs and his new association with the alt right. "The idea that America is just a nation up for grabs, that whoever can get here owns the place. No. We think that the United States has an identity and that the people who are extended from the founding stock have a right to resist dispossession."

Also identifying with the alt right -- Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopolis. A flamboyant, openly gay conservative, he is embarked on what he describes as his intentionally offensive "Dangerous Faggot Tour" of college campuses.

In a recent interview, Yiannapolis described his mission. "If people rise up now and say this social justice thing, this language policing, this political correctness, safe space, trigger warnings, micro aggressions, this stuff is horseshit ... and if enough people smash its stranglehold on the public square, it will never recover."

Some Jewish conservatives who have criticized Trump -- Fox News contributor and National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg among them -- have been targeted by the alt right with hate mail and tweets that use holocaust imagery.

Conservative writer and pundit Ann Coulter, author of the new book, "In Trump We Stand," believes the alt right is a predictable outgrowth of multiculturalism, as presently manifested in California, perhaps the most diverse state in the union.

"When you have a multicultural society, you don't have political parties anymore," she says. "You have people voting their ethnic group and that's what you see in California. It’s not like the Nancy Pelosi Democrats against the Chuck Schumer Democrats, it's the Asian Democrats voting against the Hispanic Democrats."

National Review's Johnson says, "Whatever you say they are, they tend to say they are not -- whether it's anti-semitic, racist, countercultural or anti-establishment. They've become very difficult for people to nail down and define as a political movement."

History has shown that whenever cultures undergo economic hardship and technological upheaval, ethnic groups often blame one another for their difficulties. The present political season may be no exception.