I think it's more like this: for a lot of alt-righters, it's just a childish phase, like a Hipster or Emo phase. It's a personality substitute meant to make them feel cool and get clout. Once they encounter true-believers in White Nationalism, etc. (online or IRL) their bluff is called and they shrink away.
The best example I can think of are the groypers, who the second they are held to their claimed beliefs, go "Nazis are cringe cringe cringe! We're not racist! It's just irony! Please love us normies!" to get approval from mainstream America and ultimately Daddy Trump. They're schoolkids pretending to be naughty to get the teacher to notice them, because otherwise nobody would care.
He was though. T777's poasting career spans to the early 2000s before /pol/ or the "alt-right" label was a thing, and you had to wade through gallons of shit on dinosaur 1.0 forums like Stormfront, VNN, and the Phora to get kernels of good discussion. One could argue T777 was the first proper "alt-right" writer/thinker (on the meta level, in that he was an anonymous digital native) worth reading.
Check him out here:
The Gospel According to Thomas777